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Kaspersky does very well at detecting new virus-like threats. It's a good choice for someone who is paranoid about viruses. Generally I recommend NOD32 for those willing to pay money for something. Among the free products, I generally prefer Avast to Avira. They both have their drawbacks, but...

Vista and 7 use a different boot loader than earlier versions of Windows. If it's screwed up it can be a total PITA to fix. Microsoft makes a poorly documented command line tool called bcdedit to do it, but by far the easiest way to put things back the way they were is to use EasyBCD.

There's an application called EasyBCD that can probably fix that for you, LM.

If you're gaming at 1920x1080, how much AA do you actually need?

Usually Sapphire or Powercolor. I really don't think it matters. In what way could a 5870 possibly be inferior to a 296GTX?

I'm rather ambivalent about babies, but if it makes you happy then I'm happy for you, A.D.

At the moment, I'm going with "These are out of warranty and not worth fixing 'cause they use retarded/obscure parts that I'm not willing to track down." Anyway, I've been trying to get a couple Radeon 5850s for a couple months now. They sell out instantly at Newegg every time they're in stock...

And apostrophes. Bob the Angry Flower has some important information for you. Anyway, as many people have continually and repeatedly told you, the magic of SSDs has more to do with latency than data transfer rates. The magic of having a faster computer also has pretty much everything to do...

Maybe they altered a board to line up with the serial number you sent in for warranty tracking purposes? I have to admit I've never checked or really even cared what they send back before, as long as it has the same north bridge.

I think if you turn off security and use WDS mode you end up with a wireless bridge. There was something funny with the security settings and WDS, anyway, but that's what WDS is for.

Smart cars are small enough to park perpendicular to the road in a parallel parking space. If you live someplace like the north side of Chicago, I can see how that would be a real advantage. On the other hand, there's some dipshit in my apartment building who drives one of those six-wheeled...

.1ms access times are slow all of a sudden?

That, and they want to be able to say that the adoption rate is through the roof as a marketing/sales thing. It was X% better than Vista so buy our stock or suchlike. Overall I'd say Vista was a huge black eye and they'd really like everyone to forget about it.

Wait. I've gotten those to work before. I think I have one of those in my office. Don't you just have to tell it the network it should be propagating and type in the security info? timwhit, your building may be all steel construction that just messes with 2.4GHz signals. Seems like you just...

Were they Dells with BTX power supplies?

Apparently Dell BTX-based systems have an expiration date, and that date is December 1st, 2009. I have five of them that people have brought me in the last week. I don't think I had been inside five BTX systems in my life before this week. Also, it should be illegal to sell computers that don't...

These machines have 2GB. I upgraded them myself. Also, in what can only be a facepalm moment, the way these things came into that client's office has absolutely everything to do with the fact that HP makes them available with a pink chassis.

I haven't had to deal with HP's business support in years. HP Business Computer products in the USA actually cost more than Dell or Lenovo and based on my limited knowledge their support isn't as great, but I do know another IT guy who swears they're most bulletproof things out there. Which at...

I'd like to see an HP do this.

HP Mini 1000, 90 minutes is what my users are telling me. I have four samples. One says 60 minutes, one says "maybe a couple hours." The screens don't seem unusually bright and the HP netbook doesn't have any distinguishing characteristics besides asstacular battery life.

I still don't think of 2GB RAM as a limitation, either. The only time I get close to that amount on my machines is when I'm running a high-end game plus Firefox with 100 open tabs.

I've tried it. I wasn't too impressed by it as a tool for end users. It's decent if you just want zipped up copies of files someplace and you're comfortable with the concepts of making backups yourself, but overall it's not all that different from something I could whip together with a set of...

1.5.x won't update past a certain point. If you have 1.6.x, it'll offer to update to 1.6.2 for you, but if you have 1.5.something, it just updates to the last set of updates for 1.5.

I dealt with a system on Friday where the printer drivers had to be installed in a particular order or the Print Spooler service would fail to start. The system had five local printers, including two parallel port printers (Oki ML320 and a Zebra label printer) and one serial printer (barcode...

Big problem with HP Netbooks: The batteries are abysmal. I'm talking 90 minutes of battery life, here, on something with an Atom CPU.

I see no reason to recommend HP over Lenovo. I think discrete graphics are a big waste in most notebooks. They're a source for waste heat, they drain batteries and they're another point of failure. Aero works on 945. You get something called "Aero Basic" if you have a GPU that doesn't fully...

Every printer where I have seen that issue, I've been able to resolve it by moving to Postscript drivers. Just sayin'.

I worked all weekend.

You get XP in whatever way you already have XP. There's a phone number you can call and they provide you with a valid key (OEM for OEM etc). I think the presumption is that a Microsoft shop will already have discs floating around someplace.

I won't buy anything with SecuROM unless I can kill it somehow, and I won't buy anything on Steam. If I could uninstall Steam and still run a game I purchased, I might feel differently about it, but I'd rather give up gaming than accept the BS that these companies want to force on PC gamers.

The day I can download a game and utterly divorce it from Steam once I have it, I'll reconsider their offerings. As it stands, it's only about a half step above malware in my opinion.

Not if it comes with Steam, it's not.

The only boards I've RMA'd recently have been Intel's. Intel's RMA process is a PITA, but the turn-around on getting product back is only about four business days.

My first SCSI hard drive was a 1760MB Micropolis SCSI-2 drive. It $1200. I believe it was 3600rpm. It was full height and could (but probably didn't) transfer data at 10MB/sec. Three years later I could buy a 2GB IDE drive for $100. My first 17" Monitor was around $1000. Three years later that...

Reconfigure the array. Reload from backup.

I have a more general hatred of printers. It's not like I specifically hate HP. That's Tannin's job.

Be lucky they took it at all. I've never successfully RMA'd anything through Asus.

Speaking of screen savers, I did just find that if I stick the 3Dpipes.scr file in my system32 folder, it runs just fine, even on versions of Windows that don't come with 3dpipes. This made me happy.

Then you're learning.

Has there ever been a pile of demand for super large drives?

Early adopter's premium. That would've been 72 pin Fast Page RAM. By 1996, the market had moved on to EDO, though 1996 was also a year when RAM prices dipped in a big way, anyway. We've been through those cycles before, but the dawn of the age of the internet was something that sold a LOT of...

That's not your fault. It's the fault of the manufacturers for not being willing to make a worthwhile product. Even when you buy a $400 printer or $800 DVD player (coughSonyEScough), you may not be getting anything that would qualify as non-disposable.

The year before that we went from 250GB drives to 500GB drives. I'm sure they'll get even bigger in the near future, but magnetic disks have kind of stagnated generally. We only went from 1.5TB to 2TB in the desktop world this year, too.

Craigslist, Freecycle, Ebay etc. Look for an HP Laserjet that's old enough to drive. Either that, or buy the cheapest POS you can find and just replace it when you've used all the ink.

My Server 2008 R2 machines both have screensavers and were updated this week.

HP OfficeJet 6000: "IT Professional" Drivers: 11MB. "Full" Drivers: 204MB. And the total time to install (from a local file) on a 2.2GHz C2D is about 20 minutes. For a fucking Printer.

If you could get a decent ITX board in there you could probably resell that setup as a Windows Home Server or NAS.

Tannin hates all things HP. Or Santillia and Maxtor. Or me and Western Digital. Or me and S*ny. Or me and nVidia.

Software RAID requires only a functional operating system and normal disk controllers. You need those things regardless. It's very useful to be able to build an array of arbitrary size from the collection of controllers on a modern system. At times I've had a single array spanned from Intel...

Thinking about what my customers have, all the HP printers are either more than 10 years old (lots of 4500Ns and Laserjet 3s and 4s), or they were bought, used and scrapped. I've been advising my customers to look at workcenter-type copy machines from Canon or Kyocera or Minolta if they have...