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You know, the regular-not-from-swine-flu has killed 13,000 people this year, and yet all our schools and restaurants have bravely remained open in spite of it. Honestly, I think all of this - and I mean ALL of it - is coming from the media that is tired of covering financial news that they...

Hm. I'm not entirely sure. I know I've zeroed out whole drives with dd. Generally if I'm actually installing Linux it's not a big deal. I would think that it would, since installing grub is pretty much always the last step in the install. Hm. I'll have to try that out.

Tannin, it takes me all of maybe 90 seconds including the download time to install all the Firefox extensions that I need. If I really cared I'd just package them all up in a .MSI file or use the Firefox Extension Backup addon to make a single-source install, but even that's not a big deal...

I don't know about Ubuntu's installer but both SuSE and Fedora/Centos will optionally format partitions during install.

Xrecode is a Windows program for sound file conversion and for processing .CUE + Bigfiles into individual tracks. It supports MP3, Ogg, AAC, Flac and APE, which seems to cover about everything I regularly run in to. It's free and seems free of spyware.

You might be better off with a 4770. I believe those use less power.

The one problem I have right now with ATI's hardware is the difficulty I have with the integrated audio for HDMI. I don't want to use it, and Vista/Server 2008 is really, really insistent that I do so when I want to watch even a regular DVD, to the point that it un-disables the hardware if I...

Chrome will also have a useful plug-in architecture in version 2, something that Opera and Safari sadly lack. IE8 has content blocking support and seems decent for page rendering, but the only reason I have to use Opera is if I need three simultaneous shopping carts on Newegg. Which, sadly...

Greg, you need to give up on the idea that a great deal of texture memory is an indicator of performance. You can get $50 cards with 1GB of RAM now. They're still $50 cards. In many cases I'm not even sure the GPUs that are attached to that hardware can even USE that much RAM; it's just a bigger...

My game and bench systems are the only ones I might reboot regularly. I'm more likely to replace an entire PC than reboot one. Yes, I'm bad about operating system updates, too.

After all the "You need a special PSU for the 8800GT[S/X]"-crap, I was able to run a Q6600 and a 8800GTS off the 380 Watt uATX power supply in an NSK3400. I can also attest to the fact that the PSU in an NSK3480 isn't enough to make an ATI 4870x2 go, though.

Being able to actually read the type is a big argument for an HDTV. I had a large presentation display for a while that could manage 1024x768 but these days it's hard to justify something like that when it's possible to find a 37" LCD for $500.

9.04 is brand new and it's entirely possible that it's not bug-free. Here's a suggestion: Revert to whatever version actually worked and then do an upgrade, rather than a full new install.

If they're OS flaws rather than IE flaws they do tend to get fixed quickly, sometimes even out-of-cycle. IE flaws, well, there are some things that Microsoft has known to be broken for YEARS without fixing. But I've never heard of MS saying "We have the fix now and we're going to wait six months...

Media sensationalism. We'll be all about Swine Flu for a week and then another white chick will go missing in Aruba and we'll forget all about it.

My 75GXPs lived long and useful lives. I still use 80GB drives in business machines and 40GB drives for classroom stuff sometimes. Mostly I shy away from Hitachi because they are characteristically warm in a way I do not like, but for me they have a much better track record of reliability...

Hm. Sounds like how ever Ubuntu installed, it doesn't see your hard disk. Are you maybe in AHCI or some other special BIOS mode?

At least Microsoft doesn't say things like "We're well aware of the critical security issues with our software that's installed on 80% of all personal computers, and the fix will only be made available in our next scheduled version point upgrade, to be made available six months from now, and...

Is grub-install /dev/hda not working?

This bit of code is very entertaining. Read the comment. But I'll excerpt: " // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or...

My bookmarks toolbar is filled with folders enough to stretch a 1680 pixel wide screen. That's space I feel justified in using.

Sometimes we ask here because someone might already know and/or we don't properly have time to search.

On some of my home computers, Firefox might be restarted upwards of twice a year.

Dragon Naturally Speaking has this neat thing where it can take a voice recording and transcribe it to plain text or a Word document. Very handy in conjunction with a voice recorder. I use a Creative Labs MP3 player for that purpose.

I leave my office delibately cluttered and intermingle my personal belongings with those that belong to my employer. A couple times, someone has had the bright idea to clean the store-room that is my office and both times they wound up throwing away something important. I get bitched at for...

Nero Vision and Ulead MovieFactory will both do DVD-VR to non-retarded format conversion, if you have either of those.

WDC has historically called 6000rpm drives "5400." The x00AB drives were widely thought to be 6000rpm. I would be willing to accept 4200rpm with no detectable heat or noise if I could get a 2TB drive from an OEM I am willing to trust, but that's not the way Hitachi or Samsung operate.

I've had theoretical uATX boards not fit in the Antec 3840 before, but they were both boards that were slightly wider than normal uATX spec (XFX something-or-others). A lot of boards have to be somewhat carefully wrestled into that enclosure because the 3.5" drive bay gets in the way. I've...

Not a fan of the bookmarks toolbar, I take it?

Sysprep removes all unique information about hardware save for the hardware needed to start Windows, which amounts to the hardware needed for the Windows installer (the graphical-mode part of the install) to start. That's basically the HAL and disk controller.

My funny story for the day. I have a friend that I know through another internet forum. She kind of got thrust into a System Administrator's job and she's not entirely qualified for it, so she uses me for help quite a bit. We chat a lot and have been for about two and a half years. She has a...

Uh, it kind of sounds like you don't know entirely what you're doing with sysprep, but that's OK. The constant reboots were from a low-level hardware mismatch between your source and target machine, either a HAL mismatch or more likely a disk controller driver (or operating mode, though I doubt...

One thing you need to understand, Greg, is that not all clock cycles are created equal. You can't just say "twice as fast" and have it be so. Newer Intel chips have shorter execution pipelines and literally do less work to perform computation, which is part of the reason AMD is getting spanked...

I genuinely don't believe there's such a thing as a good generic external enclosure. I have a couple Vantec top-loading SATA enclosures that I use, and several of the bare drive units like the one ddrueding linked, but USB enclosures are pretty much eternally frustrating.

Well, with three X25-Ms in RAID0, my City of Heroes level load times are about 1/6th what they are on a 7200rpm magnetic disk. Which is pretty huge. On the other hand, for $1200 worth of hard drives, I'd damned well better get 5 second load times. My i7/920 is presently sitting at 3.6GHz and...

Well, with three X25-Ms in RAID0, my City of Heroes level load times are about 1/6th what they are on a 7200rpm magnetic disk. Which is pretty huge. On the other hand, for $1200 worth of hard drives, I'd damned well better get 5 second load times. My i7/920 is presently sitting at 3.6GHz and...

What did the Mormons do to you? Where did they touch you? Was it a bad touch? Did they make you wear their magic underwear?

Lenovo's been slow to ship for a while now. The rep I've dealt with in the past says there's an issue with their battery supplier. Buying direct from Lenovo I usually see product in between two and six weeks. Of course I can buy systems from Newegg or CDW or something, but those are invariably...

It's a chipset limitation. Netbooks are all pretty much based on some ancient iteration of the 945 chipset. And because Microsoft doesn't want these machines to be any faster or nicer than they have to be. They don't want $300 notebooks with XP running circles around $1000 ones with Vista, so...

Most of what I'm looking for is not RIAA/MPAA-represented materials. It's not a big issue for me. I'm downloading porn, classical music (mostly European labels) and comic books. When there are TV shows I'm getting there are groups I'm looking for, but it depends on what you watch and what you...

Demonoid is still around. Pirate Bay is still around. PureTNA, Empornium are as well. The short list of things to do: Turn on data encryption and/or SSH tunnel your stuff through a third party. Run Peerguardian. Don't download USA studio movies or music that was ever top 40. Don't watch or...

Yes, but given the disparity between the speed of the drive and the rest of the PC, it might not be a performance increase to do so. Everything fundamentally boils down to waiting on the drive to spin and seek. Modern OSes already do lazy writes to the hard disk.

I doubt that the drive's mechanics can deliver data fast enough for that to be worthwhile.

Depends on the machine. I know some Asus models won't see the extra RAM but I've put more RAM in a bunch of other netbooks.

Maybe a Lenovo X300? That gets you an SSD and a real CPU, and also size and weight to make Netbook owners jealous. I keep having to rant to people who don't understand the functional difference between a Netbook and a proper notebook. At this point I'm pretty good at it.

PDF 995 CutePDF OpenOffice Office 2007 has a free plugin that does it as well.

I generally buy TrippLite UPSes, because they're a Chicago company, which means I'm supporting the local guys and also because anything I order from them I get next day.

Her user profile is too goddamned big. Make a new user account. Watch it load quickly. Look for things like how many installed fonts, how many printers, how much crap is on her desktop.

I've found Vuze to be a resource hog for both RAM and CPU time, even on multicore systems. To put that in perspective, my habit is to never stop seeding nor ever clear out the list of shared torrents on either of my torrent machines. Both have probably several hundred torrents, and both do so...

I would pay obscene amounts of money for 50/10 internet service, even if it were shitty Comcast. The idea of having a 10Mbit upstream pipe gives me a happy.