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Hey! Don't laugh at those Foxconn cases. They're a really good value for the money. Loads better than all the other $25 cases I see inflicted on people. They have loud PSUs though.

Hey, did everybody see that Walmart is going to stock - as in keep in inventory - a few models of Dell PCs? Desperation move from Dell? Another nail in the coffin for mom and pop shops? Or is this the big opportunity for the Michelob and NASCAR set to realize what kind of crap Dell actually makes?

You have $200 and no stock of parts any additional parts. Build a worthwhile computer.

We've had this argument before. I would rather buy lots of moderately priced disks than one large one. As long as I have ports available, two 500GB drives are a better deal than one 750GB. I use RAID10 or RAID0 arrays and spread multiple copies of my data across multiple locations. I haven't...

You're certainly a little sadistic tonight, AD.

I had a long day and many, many people were trying to get me angry enough to break out the strangling gloves.

I've actually had to deal with people who do stupid things like use their laptops on high-pile carpet (laying on the floor) or on their laps, on top of their blankets in bed. If they buy particularly retarded bottom-venting laptops, just doing that is enough to kill the whole computer.

I think I'll be OK with what you're sending Coug. I will try to get more when do my second wave of students, maybe. Or maybe pick a motherboard that has two IDE connectors.

The NSK3300s are my standard classroom box. They're lovely, but they need another string of SATA power connectors. They are also very, very quiet. Arias do have thermal problems. One of the things that convinced me to dump the shoebox form factor was my inability to properly cool one.

Local disti. Sometimes I see lower prices from various shady internet dealers and sometimes I will actually buy from them, but Windows licenses are one of the few things that are consistently cheaper locally than on Newegg... And I still don't think Vista Premium adds anything to the Vista...

OK. Screw Shuttle. Antec NSK2400 Super-easy build. Takes normal parts. Well ventilated. Nearly silent. Has spiffy channels for all your cables instead of wadded-up shoebox mess. Looks like home audio equipment. PERFECT for an HTPC. I've done three of them now and the total build time is about...

I notice that the couple of place I normally buy software are listing Vista Home Premium at the price point where they used to offer XP Home. They aren't offering Vista Home Basic at all, which is too bad; I'd rather give the less expensive option. I don't think Premium adds anything to the...

Hm. Guess I'll be buying a lot ahead of time then.

Looks like I can buy OEM stickers for Vista for about $12 less than I can get XP. I wonder if that's because of demand for XP licenses or because Microsoft is cutting prices on Vista?

I haven't bought a Seagate PATA or SATA drive in a good many years. I filled a couple 750GB drives for ddrueding a while back and one of them died. That's not a good impression. But I've been buying TrueImage as part of the standard software load for PCs I sell. It'd save my customers money if...

So it breaks out like this: Samsung drives have low-ish capacity but are reliable and fairly quiet. Hitachi drives are high capacity but get kind of warm and make noise. Reliability is a question mark, since they seem more willing to use four-platter drives. On the plus side, Hitachi puts...

Yeah, everything's running through a nice-ish home UPS setup. I can't be the only person who has problems with those things, can I?

Check your E-mail, Coug. I paypal'd you about five hours ago.

Grr. One of my VIP customers just had their third, *THIRD* WRT54G this year die. I walked him through resetting it and connecting a different PC and resetting his Internet service and everything else. Nope. It just doesn't want to route any more. It still switches and APs, but those things...

I'm a big fan of Onkyo/Integra equipment and that particular unit has pretty much every feature you'll actually use built into it. Net-Tune is kind of OK but since my receivers are all hooked up to PCs that I don't ever turn off. Another nice thing is that most Onkyo receivers carry a two year...

I print nothing but invoices and receipts. I have VPN connections to most of my clients. I just send the stuff directly to their printers. Why can't people who want color do what normal people do and just print the crap out on the fancy printer in their office? I'm pretty sure the Samsung 510...

You're talkin' bout some awfully expensive RAM there, Liam.

The E6320 doesn't have much room for overclocking on DDR2/667. Or at least, they don't on the Gigabyte boards I'm familiar with.

Here in the midwest, we don't get fashions until a couple years after you coastal people are done with them. I have never heard of a mega tunic.

The Deskjet 932s are far and away the most reliable of the inkjets I deal with. Unfortunately it's not like you can buy a new one. Photosmart 7xy0s drive me nuts. There's nothing about them that DOESN'T break.

For the messy desk people, a photo of Al Gore's home office. Note the layers and layers and layers and layers of awesomeness. Also, check out that monitor setup he's got.

Coug, the parts would be going to US ZIP code 46304 and if you can get 'em for $.75 or less I'll be ecstatic. As far as computer building... the idea is to teach these people that their computer is nothing to be afraid of. They can work on it and learn more or less how it works without too...

20 would be a good start... I'm doing kid classes this summer. The kids are 18, not 14 like last time I had to do this. And they're supposed to be "normal" kids. I get to do three sessions a week with these kids. We're going to build some computers, install Windows and drivers and software...

I need a hundred, minimum. I have, uh... six. Looks like I have six. This is easily as annoying as having to buy IDE cables.

Anyone know of a particularly cheap place to get lots and lots of standard molex to SATA connectors? Used to be, they just gave you bunches of them when you bought motherboards or something. Now I need a bunch of them and I do not want to pay $2 apiece for them, which what everybody wants to...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,131742/article.html

My school was really good at being segregated (400:1 caucasian to "other" ratio) and apparently broke some kind of state record for most potheads per capita or something. And Indiana only mandates two semesters of PE classes in high school. As I recall, all we ever did was run around a track. I...

Four drives in the eight months since the last time I sent some drives back. One of them was dropped (my fault) and though it works, I don't trust it. Another was DOA (probably UPS's fault). Two others do in fact have SMART failures. One of those was two years and eight months old. I buy a LOT...

Fushigi, that was truly vile. Thank you for the nightmares I will be having. I don't remember the people I went to school with very well. Some of them were probably in sports and choir, but I think most of them were a distinct, non-jock species. My school was much better at music stuff than...

Um... I just submitted four drives for RMA on Samsung's web site. They told me to ship them to: SAMSUNG Receiving 25 E. Union Ave Unit 1 East Ruthrford, NJ 07073

I've had long term issues with Linksys APs and routers. I had the same problems with the older ones as the new. The problems I've had with 'em go back years at this point. Unfortunately, nothing else works as well and is as cheap and as available as those WRT54Gs.

Yes. I do remember that. I daresay there aren't many people here who used NT3.5. Graphics drivers should never have been in the kernel to begin with. It was a dumb idea, and I'm completely certain that it was the largest single contributor to NT's reputation as an unstable OS. 3.5 was *not*...

Um... it's just how my company's upgrade cycle hit. We got a gigantic paycheck from a client that had been holding out on us, and we've needed to get new machines for a while. Basically, we have computers that are in nine year old cases. They aren't made to deal with the thermal load of an...

I use the standard firmware on APs that someone might call for support on.

I'm not a retailer but I certainly build enough systems (40 this month, for classrooms, and possibly 60 - 70 next month). My concerns are the possibility of Vista-related support calls (how do I turn the little prompts off?), complaints of poor performance and lack of application compatibility...

I believe there is already a TinyVista. But it may be just XP with some skinning and free tools that resemble Vista features. There's also a vLite, similar to nLite.

I have a lot of 'em that either stop doing wireless or have the WAN port die, hard reset or no.

How are your failure rates for WRT54Gs so low? Mine easily quadruple that.

I only buy RAM that supports the standard 1.8V spec. I'm under the impression that Intel-based chipsets are just pickier about RAM. Most of those weirdo modules will work on my Gigabyte and Intel-brand boards, if I mess around with the memory voltage or in some cases just save the BIOS settings...

You can create multiple pagefiles on different drives. Windows addresses them separately according to which drive is least busy.

Really? Then why isn't Vista subjectively any faster? Windows Server is truly, subjectively faster than XP. Vista isn't. Whatever it's doing with that extra memory, it's not making the computer work any more quickly. Unused RAM will be used to load additional programs and work with large files...

The huge, offensive "Why not?" comes down to this: Vista, sitting at an empty desktop, is using 250MB more RAM than XP, which could be going to something useful. What's Vista doing with that RAM? Is it making my computer work better in any way at all? People with notebooks are finding that...

Nothing wrong with Peachtree. It has worked for a lot of companies for a long, long time. There's also Cougar Mountain. I have one customer that uses it. Microsoft has a bunch of financial packages as well. I don't know how well any of them work, but in this particular case I think MS would be...

32bit. 64Bit is a colossal PITA.

Sometimes it's awesome, too. Obviously no one wants to watch "Backdoor Cheerleaders XVIII" in HD, but if you get an actual cinematographer and a director with some idea of how to actually shoot (e.g. Andrew Blake or Joone or Micheal Ninn), it's just as breathtaking as everything else in HD...