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  1. Mercutio

    My HTPC died! New Build Time!

    Maybe they altered a board to line up with the serial number you sent in for warranty tracking purposes? I have to admit I've never checked or really even cared what they send back before, as long as it has the same north bridge.
  2. Mercutio

    Wireless to Wireless Bridge

    I think if you turn off security and use WDS mode you end up with a wireless bridge. There was something funny with the security settings and WDS, anyway, but that's what WDS is for.
  3. Mercutio

    WD 2TB @ 7200 RPM

    Smart cars are small enough to park perpendicular to the road in a parallel parking space. If you live someplace like the north side of Chicago, I can see how that would be a real advantage. On the other hand, there's some dipshit in my apartment building who drives one of those six-wheeled...
  4. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    .1ms access times are slow all of a sudden?
  5. Mercutio

    Windows 7 nonsense

    That, and they want to be able to say that the adoption rate is through the roof as a marketing/sales thing. It was X% better than Vista so buy our stock or suchlike. Overall I'd say Vista was a huge black eye and they'd really like everyone to forget about it.
  6. Mercutio

    Wireless to Wireless Bridge

    Wait. I've gotten those to work before. I think I have one of those in my office. Don't you just have to tell it the network it should be propagating and type in the security info? timwhit, your building may be all steel construction that just messes with 2.4GHz signals. Seems like you just...
  7. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Were they Dells with BTX power supplies?
  8. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Apparently Dell BTX-based systems have an expiration date, and that date is December 1st, 2009. I have five of them that people have brought me in the last week. I don't think I had been inside five BTX systems in my life before this week. Also, it should be illegal to sell computers that don't...
  9. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    These machines have 2GB. I upgraded them myself. Also, in what can only be a facepalm moment, the way these things came into that client's office has absolutely everything to do with the fact that HP makes them available with a pink chassis.
  10. Mercutio

    Laptop for home use.

    I haven't had to deal with HP's business support in years. HP Business Computer products in the USA actually cost more than Dell or Lenovo and based on my limited knowledge their support isn't as great, but I do know another IT guy who swears they're most bulletproof things out there. Which at...
  11. Mercutio

    Laptop for home use.

    I'd like to see an HP do this.
  12. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    HP Mini 1000, 90 minutes is what my users are telling me. I have four samples. One says 60 minutes, one says "maybe a couple hours." The screens don't seem unusually bright and the HP netbook doesn't have any distinguishing characteristics besides asstacular battery life.
  13. Mercutio

    HOW BIG A DRIVE FOR A PAGE FILE DRIVE?

    I still don't think of 2GB RAM as a limitation, either. The only time I get close to that amount on my machines is when I'm running a high-end game plus Firefox with 100 open tabs.
  14. Mercutio

    Macrium Backup

    I've tried it. I wasn't too impressed by it as a tool for end users. It's decent if you just want zipped up copies of files someplace and you're comfortable with the concepts of making backups yourself, but overall it's not all that different from something I could whip together with a set of...
  15. Mercutio

    Something Random

    1.5.x won't update past a certain point. If you have 1.6.x, it'll offer to update to 1.6.2 for you, but if you have 1.5.something, it just updates to the last set of updates for 1.5.
  16. Mercutio

    Server 2008 R2 screen saver

    I dealt with a system on Friday where the printer drivers had to be installed in a particular order or the Print Spooler service would fail to start. The system had five local printers, including two parallel port printers (Oki ML320 and a Zebra label printer) and one serial printer (barcode...
  17. Mercutio

    Netbook for the wife

    Big problem with HP Netbooks: The batteries are abysmal. I'm talking 90 minutes of battery life, here, on something with an Atom CPU.
  18. Mercutio

    Laptop for home use.

    I see no reason to recommend HP over Lenovo. I think discrete graphics are a big waste in most notebooks. They're a source for waste heat, they drain batteries and they're another point of failure. Aero works on 945. You get something called "Aero Basic" if you have a GPU that doesn't fully...
  19. Mercutio

    Need a Printer

    Every printer where I have seen that issue, I've been able to resolve it by moving to Postscript drivers. Just sayin'.
  20. Mercutio

    Windows 7 nonsense

    I worked all weekend.
  21. Mercutio

    Windows 7 nonsense

    You get XP in whatever way you already have XP. There's a phone number you can call and they provide you with a valid key (OEM for OEM etc). I think the presumption is that a Microsoft shop will already have discs floating around someplace.
  22. Mercutio

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    I won't buy anything with SecuROM unless I can kill it somehow, and I won't buy anything on Steam. If I could uninstall Steam and still run a game I purchased, I might feel differently about it, but I'd rather give up gaming than accept the BS that these companies want to force on PC gamers.
  23. Mercutio

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    The day I can download a game and utterly divorce it from Steam once I have it, I'll reconsider their offerings. As it stands, it's only about a half step above malware in my opinion.
  24. Mercutio

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    Not if it comes with Steam, it's not.
  25. Mercutio

    My HTPC died! New Build Time!

    The only boards I've RMA'd recently have been Intel's. Intel's RMA process is a PITA, but the turn-around on getting product back is only about four business days.
  26. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    My first SCSI hard drive was a 1760MB Micropolis SCSI-2 drive. It $1200. I believe it was 3600rpm. It was full height and could (but probably didn't) transfer data at 10MB/sec. Three years later I could buy a 2GB IDE drive for $100. My first 17" Monitor was around $1000. Three years later that...
  27. Mercutio

    Intel RAID controler

    Reconfigure the array. Reload from backup.
  28. Mercutio

    Printers: Fast 1-page documents

    I have a more general hatred of printers. It's not like I specifically hate HP. That's Tannin's job.
  29. Mercutio

    My HTPC died! New Build Time!

    Be lucky they took it at all. I've never successfully RMA'd anything through Asus.
  30. Mercutio

    Server 2008 R2 screen saver

    Speaking of screen savers, I did just find that if I stick the 3Dpipes.scr file in my system32 folder, it runs just fine, even on versions of Windows that don't come with 3dpipes. This made me happy.
  31. Mercutio

    Need a Printer

    Then you're learning.
  32. Mercutio

    >500GB Drives

    Has there ever been a pile of demand for super large drives?
  33. Mercutio

    SSDs - State of the Product?

    Early adopter's premium. That would've been 72 pin Fast Page RAM. By 1996, the market had moved on to EDO, though 1996 was also a year when RAM prices dipped in a big way, anyway. We've been through those cycles before, but the dawn of the age of the internet was something that sold a LOT of...
  34. Mercutio

    Need a Printer

    That's not your fault. It's the fault of the manufacturers for not being willing to make a worthwhile product. Even when you buy a $400 printer or $800 DVD player (coughSonyEScough), you may not be getting anything that would qualify as non-disposable.
  35. Mercutio

    >500GB Drives

    The year before that we went from 250GB drives to 500GB drives. I'm sure they'll get even bigger in the near future, but magnetic disks have kind of stagnated generally. We only went from 1.5TB to 2TB in the desktop world this year, too.
  36. Mercutio

    Need a Printer

    Craigslist, Freecycle, Ebay etc. Look for an HP Laserjet that's old enough to drive. Either that, or buy the cheapest POS you can find and just replace it when you've used all the ink.
  37. Mercutio

    Server 2008 R2 screen saver

    My Server 2008 R2 machines both have screensavers and were updated this week.
  38. Mercutio

    Cheap Color Laser Printer

    HP OfficeJet 6000: "IT Professional" Drivers: 11MB. "Full" Drivers: 204MB. And the total time to install (from a local file) on a 2.2GHz C2D is about 20 minutes. For a fucking Printer.
  39. Mercutio

    6TB RAID5 Home Storage

    If you could get a decent ITX board in there you could probably resell that setup as a Windows Home Server or NAS.
  40. Mercutio

    Cheap Color Laser Printer

    Tannin hates all things HP. Or Santillia and Maxtor. Or me and Western Digital. Or me and S*ny. Or me and nVidia.
  41. Mercutio

    8-port hardware raid

    Software RAID requires only a functional operating system and normal disk controllers. You need those things regardless. It's very useful to be able to build an array of arbitrary size from the collection of controllers on a modern system. At times I've had a single array spanned from Intel...
  42. Mercutio

    Cheap Color Laser Printer

    Thinking about what my customers have, all the HP printers are either more than 10 years old (lots of 4500Ns and Laserjet 3s and 4s), or they were bought, used and scrapped. I've been advising my customers to look at workcenter-type copy machines from Canon or Kyocera or Minolta if they have...
  43. Mercutio

    8-port hardware raid

    Either they're portable or they're not. If the disk controller doesn't recognize an array made by a different controller made by the same company, I'd call that non-portable. The difference between a P35-DS4 and an EX58-UD3R is small enough that a normal drive with Windows on it can go back and...
  44. Mercutio

    8-port hardware raid

    OK: My source drives are a pair of Samsung SP1614C 160GB SATA drives on a RAID0 created on a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 with an ICH9R southbridge. The drives work fine in RAID0 with that board, as verified by the fact that I had to shut down Windows to take the drives out of that chassis and move them...
  45. Mercutio

    8-port hardware raid

    I have a lifetime of bad experiences with Western Digital drives. They weren't any good in the mid 90s. They weren't any good in the early part of this decade. They don't get another chance. Given the choice between being able to recover my data from a failed RAID controller and having to...
  46. Mercutio

    8-port hardware raid

    I happen to have a pair of Gigabyte i7 boards here. I'll run my test again with both of them.
  47. Mercutio

    Cheap Color Laser Printer

    The one thing in HP's favor is ease of getting supplies.
  48. Mercutio

    Something Random

    80 hours is not abnormal for me, though it comes and goes. Breaks for forum posting and finding new naked women on the internet do wonders for my acuity.
  49. Mercutio

    Merc's Useful Tools of the day

    Forticlient
  50. Mercutio

    Cheap Color Laser Printer

    The duplexer sells it and the high capacity toner seals the deal. I've had less problems with Brother 2940s than some of the other departmental printers I have to put up with.
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