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I know about Junkbusters, which keeps me off lots of lists. Particularly helpful when I don't want the catalog from that place where I ordered that Transsexual Midget Donkey porno.

I got an AARP membership card in the mail today. I guess the retired people are getting a little more aggressive in their recruiting these days.

I can probably find you a 512MB PC3200 part, timwhit. Anyway, I know all about U-series drives and their vomit-box connection. Some of the PCs I support here have U-series drives, or Maxtor DM8s, which are probably just as bad. Given enough RAM, a slow drive can be made tolerable. Not having...

That $450 machine you're talking about would be a mid-high end system for the people I deal with, ddrueding.

Where else do you get a brand-new $30 hard disk?

I'm not sure if it's a load of crap or not, but I have some candidate machines to try it on. I'll probably have a chance to try it later this week.

$235. It's a POS, sure, but I can build a $235 box today using all name-brand, new parts. Celeron 315 (2.2GHz/533MHz bus) 512MB of OCZ RAM Asrock P4VM800 motherboard (S3 graphics included) Foxconn TLN436-C4002 chassis with 350W Sparkle PSU 20GB 5400rpm Seagate Hard disk (U-series X) LiteOn 52x...

I have to fault their total failure to examine the dangers of Improvised Explosive Devices on their server products. I mean, when I'm pissed at a server I'm not usually thinking "handgun", but rather "I wonder what I could do with a 220V connection, and a few gallons of gasoline."

What Dells are good for.

Doesn't fusing clods take up a lot of space?

Kingdom Come made me yawn, but then I'm not a fan of DC comics in the first place. Too many gods (Superman, Green Lantern, Spectre, Wonder Woman, the Flash, Batman) and not enough mortals (um... Green Arrow, I guess). In a similar vein, there's Kurt Busiek's Astro City, which does an amazing...

The graphic novel of "V for Vendetta" is a far better experience in my opinion. Just like "From Hell" was. The same gentleman - Alan Moore - also wrote the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which was a fun movie, nothing like the comic, but it wasn't trying to be, really), and "Watchmen". Of...

That would be May 23rd. Which is good, 'cause - much as I hate to say it - Intel's next generation chips (Yonah-core) are supposed to be by better in every possible way compared to current X2s.

Miles better than Acrobat

Linux has SDL for DirectX-like functionality. It works pretty well, and some commercial developers have used it in place of DirectX on Windows games (Neverwinter Nights?) Linux DOES have 3D driver issues. Downloading and installing either ATI or nVidia's binary-only package is a PITA for anyone...

Annoying as Newegg is about some things, their prices on a lot of things are very hard to beat. I get lower prices, shipped, from newegg than I do from Chicago-area distributors.

Pimp my Snack

Dell had a $750 off $2000 coupon for Inspirons today, too. :)

Command and Conquer: The First Decade looks somewhat interesting to me. I liked C&C and Red Alert and C&C2. I kind of like the idea that someone went ahead and modified those games to support a more modern platform. Especially when the games are actually, you know, good. I think there's a...

I just got paid to de-crapify a Dell. I'm sorry, but if it's taking your month-old 3.4GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM almost 3 minutes to start XP Home, there's both a problem with the machine and a valid reason to send the stupid thing back. Dell installs a program called MyWay, which is thought by...

The only two people I know who use speech recognition to do anything are using Dragon Dictate. On the other hand, if you have XP or Server 2003 you can turn on the voice recognition that's built into Windows and give it a try. You might as well since you already paid for it.

I just bought two of these guys. I'm a little worried that they'll be too hot or somehow quirky, but I didn't have a lot of selection for an X2-based system with MicroATX and onboard video.

If I said both I would still not be wrong. :)

Once the supply for a particular board dries up, finding replacements for it becomes frustrating in extreme. I usually wind up hitting Ebay and paying essentially new, retail price for a used replacement board. If I'm a little luckier, froogle.com will still have a listing or two for my board...

I would like to know when he's going to apoloized for being born and everything else he's done wrong.

I had a titanium engagement ring. :(

Best Windows tip I've seen in a while.

Thorough review/bitch-fest.

Probably the second one. I know it's getting to be about time for a switch because I actually have a bunch of spare DDR modules and all my home PCs are full.

To be fair that was a T20, which was several years ago. But T4xs have a steel frame around everything and are quite rugged. I guess the only way you could really evaluate would be to look at the service manual for both (unless you happened to have one of each in the shop). Plus there's the...

I think the T-series does a little bit better on battery life and they're about 1lb. lighter on average. They also have the stupid fingerprint scanner. They support more memory (T60 does 4GB!) and have vastly superior internal construction. So... Lighter Better Battery Better chassis More RAM...

1998 or 2006, as long as the information on the site is presented clearly, a site re-deign would be REALLY low on my list of priorities. One of the down sides to being a highly technical, web-savvy person is that you can get used to, and tolerate design changes easily. Most web users aren't that...

As far as I know, Quantum was the only company that just swapped circuit boards to switch from IDE to SCSI. Were it really that simple, wouldn't some other OEM have a 10k SATA drive by now?

Apropos of nothing, I sent a paleolithic 15" CTX LCD in for service a few weeks ago. Literally a month before its 5-year warranty expired. I wouldn't've even tried, save that the person who had been trying to throw it out had nicely packed it in its retail box which said "5 year-warranty" in big...

I think the better answer is just to avoid LG completely. I like LiteOn (still). I like NEC. I have been punished when I have purchased anything else.

Here around Chicago, the easiest way to get dead laptops is to hit local computer shows. I HATE computer shows, simply because I don't like paying for the privilege of buying broken, stolen or grey-market merchandise, but for your needs it's probably the right way to go. There's always some...

Nero Recode? Divx encoder? (.divx) Quicktime Pro?

As far as things go, I don't think Apache OR IIS is a simple system to work with. There's strong and weak points to using both of them. I think I'd rather have Apache overall, but I'm not a web guy and to me the products are pretty close in terms of functionality. Godaddy is probably switching...

When it rains it pours. Someone give me a mini-ITX socket 370 system today. Looks like an i815. It gives a "no-memory" beepcode on start, which I'm hoping just means that it needs some different RAM. It'll be interesting to see what I can do with it, and how a C3 stacks up to a 1.2GHz P3. The...

I know not everyone shares my love for high-resolution audio formats, but pcconnection.com has Toshiba SD-6915SU 5-disc SACD/DVD-Audio/Progressive scan DVD players for $74 shipped. It doesn't do HD-upconverting, play MPEG4 or support HDCP, but even a brand name changer at that price is a pretty...

Wheee!

I'm using 2003. Are you trying to load the entire disk or just a partition. I'm just doing partitions.

Rest assured that Dell doesn't make any money on those deals either. They stopped doing those kinds of deals in the USA sometime last year. Dell is pushing for market share, basically trying to bury HP, but in the long term those machines are horrible for the company - the idiots who buy them...

I am all in favor of a tool like this for every kind of computer. It is 150 different kinds of annoying to find that a machine has shipped with a 14-day trial of Quickbooks or 30 days of McAfee AV (You mean anti-virus didn't come with the computer?!?), or, my personal favorite, a version of Easy...

It's a little robot built into a cooler (an igloo cooler) that can mix 5000 different drinks from a stock of 16 alcoholic beverages.

Ghost will also preserve a bootloader. I have a lab of machines that have grub installed, and I restore their 1st partition (the Windows partition) at least weekly without losing my boot loader. Acronis works while Windows is running. It's wonderful for backing up machines that need to stay...

Great news for Drunken Bastard!

I agree. It's lovely. Reminds me of where I grew up. There was a large picture window that looked out over a cornfield that stretched to the horizon. I saw beautiful sunsets like that all the time.

Try going Start > Run > gpedit.msc instead

One thing I can say is that most LCD TVs make pretty lousy computer monitors or monitor replacements, even if they kind of support the right resolutions. Why not just get a 24" computer monitor? You're probably doing external tuning anyway.