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Generally what I'm talking about is just finding out what radio frequencies are in use nearby. If you're in an apartment building. Most of the time the manufacturer provided wireless client will tell you that, along with which signals are the strongest. The three major points of interest are...

Do you have any way to do a site survey? Netstumbler, even?

Yes. I have one sitting here in my office right now. They're acceptable. The bigger problem you're probably having in your building is probably interference. It may not matter how much you boost your AP's signal; you're just making the spectrum more crowded. In my apartment I use 5GHz 802.11n...

Here's an article for working with Avast. In particular, it goes over installation and REGISTRATION, and how to start a boot scan. I also found out that there are other skins available for it, and not all of them suck as much as the default one.

That's what it appears to come down to. There's about 50 places in the registry on this PC that seem to refer to "gamma" or "brightness." In many cases I don't know if they're official windows settings or settings for some program or others. I'm not going through all of them.

It's not ATI. If I bump the standard vga driver to 32 bit color it does the same thing.

All those things are functions of graphics driver software and can be supplanted by any number of color correction apps. In this case, there's got to be a registry setting someplace that's overriding everything I've tried to do. I'll admit that I have almost no experience with display...

I hate to admit this, but I like the DLink wireless print server a lot better. Mostly because it supports four printers but also because the setup is actually easy enough that users can handle it themselves.

I eventually found the .ICM files located under \windows\system32\spool\drivers\color and uninstalled those. The list on the problem PC was quite a bit longer than on any of the XP machines I have access to. Fixed nothing. The color profile being referenced according to the Color Control panel...

It makes my systems faster. It doesn't help me much for gaming, since I primarily play an MMO that depends on on my internet connection for loading. Most of my content is on network servers, so it's not being used for that, either. Program loads are super-fast unless I'm loading 50 or 60 tabs...

I have a notebook here that is somehow re-setting a gamma value someplace in Windows to an eye-searing level. I don't know what's causing it, I just want it to go away. I've tried changing values in the Adobe Gamma Control, set different .icc files up in the Windows Color applet Power Tool, and...

The T400 and T500 are much newer than that. I bought a T61 from Lenovo in late November of last year. I think they refreshed the lineup in January or thereabouts.

Who cares about 92MB/sec? We don't buy 15krpm drive for STR but for access time. I'm up to three X25-Ms now. I've got one in my gaming PC and one in a Thinkpad. Not sure what I'm going to do with the third one yet. Maybe RAID0 in the game machine. :D Apropos of nothing, I found this post on...

I could have sworn I saw a press release about OLED tech in upcoming Thinkpads. I read a lot of Engadget. Maybe it all ran together.

On the other hand, acknowledging that reality DOES have a liberal bias is somewhat appealing in its own way...

Don't blame me, I voted "Serenity" in that election.

I've never gotten the styrofoam for anything less than five drives. If you've gotten it for three I think that makes me jealous. Speaking of crappy packaging: I got an Atheros 5008 mini PCI card today that was in a static back and dropped in a USPS plastic bag type mailer. I am SHOCKED that...

You have to realize that the claimed speeds are usually about 1/2 practical, just from 802.11 overhead, too. If I really needed to transfer stuff to that PC over that sort of connection I'd be unspooling a long ethernet cable or dumping it all on a USB drive.

I've been doing homeplug in places that are 802.11-hostile for a while. One place where I work is using homeplug to run $75,000 Polycom teleconferencing systems in rooms that weren't wired for Ethernet in a building that is primarily steel construction (i.e. it eats radio signals). Data transfer...

The problem with using a notebook with a 1920x1200 screen is that it's going to be a large screen, and therefore both very heavy and with a short battery life. The new 17" Macbook Pros have 1080p screens. Apple says they have a seven hour battery but review web sites say it's more like 3 hours...

Acer Aspire and Gateway notebooks tend to have very bright screens, at a cost of battery life. Latitude and Thinkpad notebooks have screens that tend to be much less bright, presumably to offer longer battery life. I can't think of any notebook that reasonably offers long battery life, a...

I've watched the last episode of Battlestar Galactica five times since I got it.

I do listen to audio streams from my NPR station. I usually have one or more browsers open. I have three different browsers that I use for different purposes. I usually have a game open and my e-mail runs constantly. My phone runs about two days if I don't charge it. For all the stuff I keep...

I was actually surprise to hear that iPhones don't support Multitasking, as that's something Windows CE managed to handle 10 years ago on hardware that was approximately 1/20 the MIPS of the CPU of my current device. I took it for granted that it would be supported. And how the hell do you...

In normal day-to-day usage, CPU speed is practically irrelevant. People just don't do much work that's going to hit the CPU harder than some other component in the system. It's difficult for me to subjectively tell the difference between an E2200 and a Q6600 if all I'm doing is browsing the web...

I've been HTML-izing some handy things that can be found on the articles section of this web site. At the moment, the articles that someone might want to pass around are: How to Manually Repair a PC with Hijack This 2009 Updated Anti-Malware Procedure Information and resources for blocking...

The boot disc repair for Vista and later seems to be good at fixing messed up boot records or volume IDs, and that's about it. Vista and later absolutely HAVE to have System Restore turned on. If you turn it off, you lose all your old backups, including the snapshot from the initial install...

Most HD porn now is shot with soft focus, or in such a way that the performers are not the only things occupying the frame. FTV.com likes to use stunning outdoor sites for its HD shoots. SapphicErotica.com does dressed sets with antique furniture. Playboy has fantastic art direction for...

It's very clean and well regulated in Euroland. Montreal apparently has a trade as well.

Nope. It's there to be used.

You are wrong and furthermore you can do the repair with any disc that has the same license (OEM, retail, VL) that is at of the same service pack level as the install you are repairing. And if Adobe CS3 breaks from that it's not the fault of the repair system. I do repair installs all the...

I'd bet anything there's a rootkit at the vase of this. Here's my current scan procedure.

Both. I buy drives in quantities of 10 or 20 all the time, though.

I saw a deal for a Creative Vado HD for $129 yesterday. They record in 720p and aren't much bigger than a cell phone. Buy direct from Creative with code VADOHDFRIENDS to get that price. If I had the tiniest need for a video camera, I'd consider that. Sadly, I have no need for a video camera.

I prefer to buy enough drives at once that I get manufacturer packaging anyway. :D

My monitors that aren't TVs are Dell 22", 24" and 27" screens. None of them are TN panels (even the 22", which surprised me since it was so inexpensive). I believe they're all mid-grade sorts of displays. I don't notice any issues with color fidelity, but of course my needs aren't geared to...

It's very much a standard Antec case, only with the PSU situated at the bottom rather than the top. I actually like the open design of the Three Hundred better than the compartmentalized P180. The system I built has seven 1TB drives and one Intel SSD in it and the cabling isn't quite as much of...

I can take a picture of that cable reaching if need be. I still have that system sitting here.

Who cares? OEM drives are sold without a data cable, a disc with some worthless software on it and no pretty box. They have the same warranty and are otherwise the same product as the retail units. The only times "OEM" are an issue are CPUs, where OEM means no HSF and no warranty, and for...

I would think the main thing you have any operational control over would be NTFS cluster size. The files are 16kB apiece, there's a 16kB cluster size option. That would be the first thing I'd try. That certainly will be the most efficient use of disk space, but I'm not sure that it will lead to...

That sounds like an awful lot of image thumbnails to me.

I just built a system with an Antec 300 case and a Seasonic 380W PSU. It was more than long enough. My generic motherboard choice of late has been the Intel DG31PR. I've been able to find them for around $50 and I don't have any particular objections to them. I would really, really avoid that...

In my home and in my parents' home, computers are situated such that noise is largely baffled and unnoticeable. Normally, the only thing that makes enough noise to be problematic is the optical drive, but that's only an issue for a few seconds when a movie starts playing. And I can hear most...

The one I built for my father a couple months ago used the MSI version of that Gigabyte board, a Via Envy HT sound card, an LG HDDVD/BDROM drive, a 500GB Samsung boot drive and two HD103UJs for video storage, a Motorola Bluetooth dongle and a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard for PS3. I went with...

I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Every Samsung drive sold in the US has a three year warranty. As I recall their warranty service is handled through an address is New Jersey.

Meh. I suspect they're one of the many, many sites that have been hit with that javascript/Acrobat advertising network exploits recently. People have been infected from ads served off CNN and Fark.com recently, too.

Industrial effluent. Five of the largest steel mills in the United States are within 10 miles of my apartment. They skirt environmental regulations by releasing the majority of their airborne waste at night. Anyway, I'm sure that your ho-hum landscape would be a huge step up from what it is I...

paugie, you live on a tropical southeast Asian island. I live in a place where, if I leave windows open, I get a 5mm coating of soot on every horizontal surface.

I believe it just moves data to contiguous blocks of free space, which would typically be farther out than inner blocks that are used first. From watching defrags, I know that it also moves data back in as it frees up space on the inner parts of the drive. Or at least it used to; I don't see a...

Watchmen was an exceedingly faithful translation from the comics to the big screen. The only weak point for me is Silk Spectre's acting. Rorschach is brilliantly psychotic and the Comedian is an utterly charming asshole. I've seen it twice already. I got a great big old kick out of the showing...