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  1. Mercutio

    How to tell 7K1000's from 7K1000.B's

    I'm about to buy 10 of those Samsung 1.5GB units. I'll see how I do. :)
  2. Mercutio

    Computer stocks, or, how to loose 100 grand, quickly...

    "Loose" is the opposite of tight. "Lose" is the opposite of win.
  3. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    You know that's not how MBTF works, right?
  4. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    Not unless you want it to be. I'm just saying that there's a problem with Acer notebooks.
  5. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    Relative to the number of notebooks that I fix, and relative to the number of Acer notebooks I have ever worked on, Acer notebooks are by far the most likely to have an issue that requires replacing either the display or the inverter. I've done 11 in the last two years. The reason that's a big...
  6. Mercutio

    My new quad core Phenom II 3GHz cost me 92$

    Once, yeah. The server's hardware management told me it had stopped working right, anyway. All the fans and crap were OK so I'm not sure what happened there.
  7. Mercutio

    My new quad core Phenom II 3GHz cost me 92$

    I bought at least two that wouldn't even hit 333MHz. :P
  8. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    One thing I've found in my life as a tech is that everything with an Acer badge (I don't know who makes their stuff) on it has a REALLY delicate screen. Also, Acer's support site is really bad. I'm sure that thing is pretty nice other than that.
  9. Mercutio

    My new quad core Phenom II 3GHz cost me 92$

    It's a BIOS option in recent Gigabyte motherboards. There's nothing really secret about it.
  10. Mercutio

    Windows 7 is available

    Why is it so fucking hard for Microsoft to write an operating system that is capable of copying files in an expedient fashion? 6.36GB from an internal SATA drive to an internal X25-M on my Thinkpad. Total time remaining (after 10 minutes): "About 40 minutes" WHY?
  11. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    The specs for what's allowed in a netbook are mostly set by Microsoft and its desire to not supply Windows XP to anything with actually decent hardware. So Netbooks have Atom CPUs instead of Celerons, support for at most 2GB RAM and use older graphics chipsets. $350 will buy a 1.6GHz Atom + 1GB...
  12. Mercutio

    Wrong Drive

    Probably spinrite, honestly.
  13. Mercutio

    Something Random

    It is good that both Coug and Lunar are with us. And that Buck apparently still stops by, too.
  14. Mercutio

    >500GB Drives

    That's what she said! Thank you! I'll be here all week. Try the chicken.
  15. Mercutio

    HTPC and HD and 1080 system requirements?

    You should be installing a new version of flash every time you're prompted to anyway, since the semen-gargling morons at Adobe have a standing record of zero-day exploits in every new, patched version of Flash.
  16. Mercutio

    Converted to Linux

    Learn to love prompts. They're for your own good anyway. :)
  17. Mercutio

    Onkyo TX-SR607 $371 free shipping

    I don't particularly feel like giving up my Integra receiver yet but that is an awfully tempting price for HDMI.
  18. Mercutio

    Go Dell Go!

    The Lenovo way: I call Lenovo support. I press 1 for Desktops or Notebooks I press 1 for Thinkpads George in Atlanta picks up the phone after at most two rings. I tell George my problem. George makes it better, usually in the form of a box from DHL that arrives the next business day.
  19. Mercutio

    Converted to Linux

    On my home machines I just disable SELinux. For functional servers I leave it on and work around it like I'm supposed to, but at home I'm not particularly worried. re: Video players. I switch between (s)MPlayer and VLC. I don't like VLC's GUI very much but it tends to work on things that...
  20. Mercutio

    HTPC and HD and 1080 system requirements?

    I have no idea what CBS is using for its video but it's probably h.264 in a .FLV container. The Geforce 9600 may or may not support hardware decode of h.264. If it didn't, that would certainly explain your CPU utilization. Updated nVidia drivers might also be helpful. Also I have no idea why...
  21. Mercutio

    Windows 7 is available

    It's fine as is, a modest step up from Vista. I've got it running on a Thinkpad T61. I did a clean install onto a 7200.4. I have the same issue as in the release candidate, with it preferring to associate with a 2.4GHz WLAN despite a stronger 5.8GHZ signal being present, and it's already crashed...
  22. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    Today at Chicago Comic Con, I had the opportunity to meet and briefly speak to Edward James "Admiral Adama" Olmos and Michael "Colonel Tigh" Hogan. They were contractually not allowed to pose for photos outside of an expensive meet and greet session but they were both amazingly personable and...
  23. Mercutio

    Go Dell Go!

    Makes sense to me. Also: ouch.
  24. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    For what it's worth the "Not the..." and "This Ain't..." series that are coming from Hustler video really do manage to be damned funny and reminiscent of the TV shows they're based on. Some of them are closer than others, but they do manage to succeed as comedies even if the actual porn parts...
  25. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    As a rule I like the longer format of television better than movies. You can have more complex plots and character development. There are some television shows where you just aren't going to get the full impact without multiple viewings and watching the episodes back to back. That type of...
  26. Mercutio

    Windows 7 is available

    If you have an MSDN sub you can get Windows 7 now.
  27. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    Since DVDs became widely available. For $20 - $100, you can buy ten or fifteen times the amount of video entertainment as is available for a typical $15 movie. For $200, I can indulge my science fiction fandom with complete series runs of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or BSG (sorry, no opinion on...
  28. Mercutio

    Affordable graphics cards

    I really, really think you need to step away from that crackpipe.
  29. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    I remember being thrilled to have a 1.768GB Micropolis SCSI-2 drive on an EISA Adaptec card, back when the largest obtainable IDE drives were 320MB models. That same machine had a dual 486Dx/33 SMP setup, 16MB RAM (in 30-pin SIMMs!) and a 4MB ET4000 video card. It was the sweetest computer...
  30. Mercutio

    Hitachi 2TB, 5 platters :P

    The Samsung model is probably 6 months away and won't be affordable for a year. The 1.5TB Seagates are getting there. I don't particularly trust them, but I know they aren't going to get super-hot like that 5-platter Hitachi.
  31. Mercutio

    Affordable graphics cards

    If you'll notice, those are all workstation-type cards. They're probably still actually manufactured by Sapphire, though. Anyway, I'd just like to point out that most of my systems are running on Intel integrated graphics. They're good enough for about 95% of what I use a computer to do.
  32. Mercutio

    Affordable graphics cards

    I refuse to believe that anyone with an nvidia card is actually happy. nvidia packages sorrow directly into semiconductors.
  33. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    Her. Microsoft certiftication stuff. And Indiana is pretty damned bad, especially once thw women hit 22 or so and have pumped out two three kids apiece.
  34. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    I'm teaching one right now. She's still transitioning. She has a job as a stripper at the biggest gay/drag club in Indiana. She's basically passing and probably more attractive than 85% of the women in this godawful state.
  35. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    I'm so smooth I'm like a Promise RAID5 of Quantum Bigfoots.
  36. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    Have YOU ever gotten tired of looking at tits? Anyway, True Blood doesn't really have any of those other things. The books are awful, too. Or at least the couple of them that I read.
  37. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    Yup. Them're some high definition boobies alright. Is there some other reason to watch True Blood? Babylon 5 tried too hard to be epic. In the end I'll say that it made it, but it was definitely forced. The subplots involving G'Kar and Molari are the only thing, in my mind, that keep B5 from...
  38. Mercutio

    Affordable graphics cards

    I think you're better off for the extra $20 to go with the 4770.
  39. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    I have it NOW. I would have paid full retail for it.
  40. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    I need to sit down and do a side by side comparison between the HDDVDs and the BDs. I still see some bad compression artifacts but I'm not entirely sure at this point that those aren't there on purpose as part of the overall documentary-style cinematography they used. Anyway, yes. There's a lot...
  41. Mercutio

    Flash exploit

    Says you.
  42. Mercutio

    Flash exploit

    Fushigi, it's not too late for divorce.
  43. Mercutio

    Flash exploit

    Why use IE to begin with?
  44. Mercutio

    Hard Disk for Thinkpad R51

    Trueimage is your friend!
  45. Mercutio

    Favourite TV series

    Got my Battlestar Galactica BDs yesterday morning. Have not gone to bed yet.
  46. Mercutio

    BSOD stop error 124

    I have my own procedure that I do every time someone starts claiming Malware.
  47. Mercutio

    Hard Disk for Thinkpad R51

    I hate Windows so damned much sometimes.
  48. Mercutio

    Hard Disk for Thinkpad R51

    I might make a suggestion of wiping the drive and installing TinyXP. It ditches a lot of things that 90% of home Windows users don't need on their machines, while maintaining full driver and application compatibility with XP. A full, default install will run on Windows 95-vintage hardware with...
  49. Mercutio

    WD ships first 2.5" 1TB hard drive

    For the longest time, WD shipped "5400rpm" drives that actually spun at ~6000rpm, which often meant their 5400rpm drives were competitive with slow 7200rpm models that were maybe a generation older. I was a big fan of those drives for a while, until they all decided to die on me over a three or...
  50. Mercutio

    WD ships first 2.5" 1TB hard drive

    That's because they cheat rotational velocities. And it also means their dies more often.
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