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I use two different clients: On Windows computers that I control and don't shut off for long periods of time, I use BitTornado. It's fast, fast, fast. It's a modest bandwidth hog though, and it doesn't have a download manager so... On Linux, on computers I shut down (laptops) or computers where...

PM Me, Coug.

Pore? I thought your first name was Murial.

Don't buy Asus. No need to thank me, sir, I'm just doing my job. :D

Link to a mininova torrent for a premade Ghost Image of a 260MB WindowsPE image, suitable for running on a thumb drive. Note to any moderators who might be paying attention: This post violates moderation guidelines and should be, you know, moderated. Bad Merc!

Puny ddrueding (who, I think is actually in his mid20s and therefore extra-puny)! I can sit at a workbench for days without soreness. It's cause I'm such a stud under the extra 80lbs or so I'm carrying around. Just, you know, don't ask me to do a pull-up.

Well, I got my bag back today. I'm told that it spent a couple days in San Antonio, then Detroit again. My cell phone and laptop are fine - the plastic on my cell phone's display is cracked (oh well), but the bag itself is pretty much a write-off (they offered to pay for it if I can find a...

I have hordes of those Bytecc units. Four dozen, maybe. There's really nothing wrong with them except the crappy fans and the fact that the plastic doesn't wear all that well.

The last Intel-brand Intel motherboard I used (granted, that was December 2004) couldn't stand having 4x512MB Crucial PC3200 DIMMs in it. Wouldn't even boot. I think I ended up buying two 1GB sticks for it.

IIRC Granite Digital has them.

Congratulations Will! What does the "WT" stand for, anyway?

Some guy asks Shrub if he's seen "Brokeback Mountain". Well, I think that's funny.

I'm sure the damned thing sounds like a leafblower, but being a 16xPCIe card, at least all that cooler is blocking is a useless 1xPCIe slot. The thing that strikes me most is how completely fucking insane the PC hardware press is about this hardware. This is a $500 part, and they're talking...

News update: Most motherboards - Gigabyte, Intel, Asus, Epox, DFI, whoever - that have four memory banks - have at least some issues with all four banks being full. Checking manufacturer compatibility in that case becomes much more important. This isn't an AMD issue. It's a "consumer PC Parts...

I have one IDE to SATA bridge. I've disconnected drives from it (SATA, then PATA power), but I can't say I've tried reconnecting one.

Most brands are NOT flimsy - even crummy ones (I have lots of crummy ones, part of the trainer thing). Also, they can much ALL be inserted but not powered on. They can NOT be hot swapped, however. Most have a spring loaded dust cover for times when there's nothing in the bay. You'd have to look...

Wow. There's a nick I haven't seen in a while. Nice seeing you again.

Dreamhost is pretty nice, for what I use it for (i.e. mostly my private FTP needs). Shell access is slow but I have nothing else to complain about. Also... Six different SF members emailed me to find out what was going on while we were down. Folks, I don't have any special or additional...

Wedding Crashers was funny for about the first half hour, downhill from there. Fortunately, there were enough boobies and miscellaneous hot young starlets to make up for it. I thought it was funny the first time I saw it, but it was less so on repeated viewings.

Stuff like this is why we get together and send you a PC every so often. Thanks for all the hard work. :D

When I bought my first P180, I bought a 24-pin extension cable at the same time. I kind of fiddled about with several different PSUs (HEC, Sparkle and later Enermax). I can't recall a motherboard that has ATX power on the very top edge of the board, but in my estimation that would be the only...

Naw, I had a largish saddlebag with my laptop, coat, and the clothes I had worn the day before. It was a little too big to fit under a seat and should've gone in the overhead bins, but LOTS of people, even in Coach seats, were taking three carryon bags besides their briefcase or whatever (like...

The interview itself was fine. I was there for four hours, which is probably a good sign. I'll know if I got the job in a month or two (they're hiring based on anticipated need and, I'm told, hiring processes at multinational companies can sometimes be glacial). I think they want me to live...

Sigh. Video cards are an obnoxious expense in a lot of computers, too. Look at what the cheapest cards you can get actually ARE. S3 ProSavage for $15? ATI Rage 128 or TNT Vanta for $20? Radeon 7000 for $30. Is that hardware you actually want to install? Boards with integrated video...

Freshly installed XP Pro SP2 with no running programs all all the default crap (eg System Restore) pretty much uses 220 - 240MB RAM. Unless that guy did a bunch of tuning to his Windows setup, I think he's at least partially constrained by RAM.

Er.... Who cares? "Unichrome" is pretty much a Savage4 chip, which is IIRC DirectX6 hardware (that'd be... 1999 or so?) But so what? The VGA out is perfectly good up to 1280x1024, which is about all I would ever expect out of a low-end business machine or for that matter all most business users...

The only use I've seen for 3D mark is for measuring the size of one's E-penis at LAN parties. People with case lights and windows and high 3D Mark scores are invariably overcompensating for the shame of their tiny, tiny pee-pee. Also, I'm pretty sure that graphics-related "gaming" benchmarking...

It's just never come up. I don't vacation and "business travel" to me means driving 70 or so miles to see a client. The few times I've wanted to go somewhere far away, I've taken the time to drive. There's lots of other things one would think a 30-year-old man would've done, that I haven't...

It's like a cell phone, but apparently there are uses for them other than having annoying people leave you voice mails about all the work they want you to do the following weekend.

Intel and nVidia right now both have northbridge-native SATA controllers that need no special Windows drivers. Everyone else (Via, SiS, ATI) uses an external chip for which drivers must be loaded under Windows.

Shucks. Well, here's the link to the O RLY? owl then. It's a funny picture. Click on it and behold its glory. Tomorrow I am off to interview with Honeywell. Again. I get to be on a plane for the first time in my life, but the person booking my trip is possibly the most cruel human on the face...

I have a Sapphire Radeon 9200 that kills the AGP slot of whatever motherboard I put it in. I'm saving it for the next customer who really pisses me off... I can't say I've had a bad time with Gigabyte video hardware, but I've had Sapphire and Powercolor cards go bad on me. I can probably list a...

Sol, adding drivers to an nLite slipstream is the thing that caused nLite to fail spectacularly for me. Is that something you've actually done and gotten to work? Anywhoo, I think sysprep (rather than a custom Windows disc) is the way to go regardless. ddrueding is making 15 identical...

Yes, you would need an OS to install from SATA. However, if you ask me really nicely I can help you out with that. Sysprep is a beautiful thing.

The Gigabyte K8VM800M is a wonderful, beautiful thing. It's socket 754. I don't think that's in any way a drawback. It's all those happy Via things. Stable. Predictable. Boring. I use them all the time and I do so without apology or reservation. My second choice, oddly enough, is the Biostar...

The issue that comes to my mind WRT integration of the UPS and PSU is how much the damned thing would weigh. Most tower cases would become extremely top-heavy if they had a big old UPS battery in the upper part of the case. Maybe not a big drawback but certainly a design consideration.

The O RLY? owl makes me laugh. I do not to know why. It makes me laugh and reminds me of Tannin, which may be because it also kind of looks like a sock puppet.

I noticed on one of my X2-based systems that the PSU fan and CPU fan stayed on for ~5 seconds after the system powered off. I don't know how much good that does, but I don't remember PCs doing it before, and I thought it was odd.

I managed to catch a CBC interview with Paul Martin last night on the way home from work. He sounded really weasel-y, qualifying practically everything he said. I can see how that would be unappealing. One of the reasons conservatives (in the right wing sense) play well to idiots is that they...

As of a few months ago when I tested them Recode has identical quality as Shrink (not very good). It just runs quite a bit faster. Have you looked at the version that comes with Nero7? That's the basis for my statement. I looked at two frames side-by-side (both recoded from the DVD of...

Also S*ny, which is called S*ny because its name is that which may be neither read nor spoken. S*ny products are made from the ground-up souls of child molesters and manufactured on Indian burial grounds. Remember that when purchasing your next DVD-RW!

I officially anti-recommend all things manufactured by Western Digital, AOL, nvidia, and all Windows software developed by Apple. Had to get that one in early. :D

FWIW, I like DVD Shrink a lot, but lately I've been using DVD Decrypter + Nero Recode. Recode 2-pass is faster than Shrink+Deep Analysis (it supports multithreading and therefore flies on an X2), and I think the video quality is somewhat better as well. I have heard nice things about CloneDVD...

My understanding from several articles on the subject is that pretty much anything that's advertised as thermal goop is going to work about as well as anything else. I prefer - and tell my students - that thermal pads are the better deal if you can get them. It's very easy to misapply thermal...

We've been in the 40 - 50F range for the last couple weeks. That's about 25 degrees warmer than usual for this time of year, if anyone is wondering. Mid-December was our last really cold spell. It was down around 0F here. During the winter I keep cases of soda outside on my balcony. So on the...

There are known issues with misplacing the layer break between DVD-9s and pressed DVDs. In the past I've used DVD Decrypter and had it work, but I've only made DVD9s a couple times. If you mount your ISO with Daemon Tools or the like, can you play your disc?

I am particularly amused that Aussies refer to the residents of Victoria as "Mexicans". I had to laugh when I saw that one.

Ages and ages ago, I used to have people complain to me because they had to buy displays for their PCs, because their friends had Commodores or Ataris that could be hooked up to a TV... And how broke do you have to be that you would want used speakers?

The Sil chipset is autodetected under SuSE 9.2 and 10 for sure and I know of no reason why it wouldn't work with anything else that has a 2.6 kernel.

The GA-7VAXPs I have had fail all died because the northbridge fan died and as not removed. Are you sure that isn't what killed yours?