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The kids are as young as 17 and as old as 20. They're AB Honor roll students who meet a maximum income level and have been accepted to a four year college. As old as 20? Yes. A lot of the girls are first or second-time parents (most of the boys are, too, but it's not as much of an issue for...

You can get a decent BD-ROM drive for $120, Santilli.

Yes, because the wastes of Free Will and Oxygen that are Republicans have done SO MUCH in the name of freedom, privacy and security in the last 8 years.

AMD's 780G platform, however, offers real, modern, integrated GPU that does support such playback assistance, and it's priced fairly reasonably. You could certainly build a modest new machine around such a motherboard for around $250 (motherboard, CPU, Power Supply, RAM), compared to the $100...

Honest answer: if you have a physiology or chemical sensitivity that isn't represented by the options available at your local drug store. I would like to need a condom some day. D:

It was a sunny afternoon in March when she stopped by Woot’s creative offices. She said she was there to sell us ink cartridges for the office printer—but as it would happen, she also ushered our two wide-eyed interns into manhood. She called herself Elexa. What a vision! She was thin, but...

As a car guy, it might make more sense if we relate this to cars. Toyota makes a Camry, which is a perfectly nice, reasonable car that I would hazard to guess is an ideal car for your typical urban/suburban 3-person family. Toyota also makes an Avalon, which has all the same functions a Camry...

I'm within $.23 of my maximum budget on each PC, if that tells you anything.

That's still not a $25 card, either. :P

I'd rather not give them printers at all. $50 more money spent on hardware (actually, more like $70 if they'd let me use Vista Basic rather than Premium) would make those machines DRASTICALLY better instead of being the slugs that they are. In two years that money won't matter, but I really do...

I believe you need dual-link DVI support for 2500x1600. Those are not found on lower-priced cards. Standard DVI does top out at 1920x1200. So yes, Lunar is correct that a cheapie isn't going to be the best option.

More thoughts on some hardware I've gotten to play with recently. Shuttle K45 barebones: They're $100 shoebox machines based around an i945 motherboard. No slot for an optical drive and no Ice-Q cooling. Guess what? They're great. I've built about a dozen of them. Stick something in a...

Apparently, one can fold on nVidia GPUs now.

I'm doing my "Teaching Kids how to build computers" classes again this summer. As in years past, this means buying low-end parts by the score. Here's the system: Celeron 430 1.8GHz CPU Intel branded 945-based uATX motherboard (with no PCIe slots, something I didn't notice until after I bought...

You are clearly suffering from some kind of deficiency of imagination. All a five year warranty on a WD drive means is that you'll have an opportunity to double the cost of the hard disk in shipping charges from UPS/Fedex.

From an HD-watching standpoing, you'll be better off with a more up to date graphics card. Fairly modest cards from ATI (x2400s and up, basically) and from nVidia (8400s and up) have at least some support for offloading HD-video decoding onto the GPU. This is a good thing.

There is *no* price premium for the T-series, when compared to units in the same weight and performance class as similar models from Dell, HP or Toshiba. In fact, Ts usually come out cheaper if your buying anything but the baseline model from each product line.

Acronis is looking for beta testers for its Exchange backup server product. They indicate that people accepted in their beta testing program will receive a totally sweet copy of Echo Workstation for free. I don't know how many of you have test setup where you have both Server and Exchange...

Er... why have POP3 turned on, even?

There are 11 I still need to do. Magpie. It was written by Ben Goodger, project manager for Firefox. He abandoned it when FF2.0 came out, but someone else continued development. Unfortunately, the new guy doesn't have permission to update addons.mozilla.org, so he just leaves comments on the...

A lot of the excess is coming from some new security features. Disk-space-wise, Vista keeps a secure copy of every executable on a PC, which can require a substantial amount of disk space. Vista also does a lot of very aggressive caching of files in RAM, which in theory should make things faster...

I have an amazing difficulty imagining life with a notebook as a primary computer. I probably would've built myself a desktop and limped along with faster drives and a real screen until I could've gotten the "no compromises" notebook from China. I really don't think there's anything wrong with...

I rented "The Golden Compass" but I don't see any reason to own it. The only Disney titles I'm genuinely interested in are the Fantasia discs. And honestly, for a cartoon, I don't really see a difference in quality for being DVD vs. HD. Digital Playground has some porn titles in Blu Ray, but...

I got in a long argument a few weeks ago with another "techie" who swore up and down that widescreen represented an IMPROVEMENT, based on the argument that the 16:9 screen would have more pixels than "one size down" in 4:3. Apparently that's the monitor manufacturers' claim. They show pictures...

One of my favorite Extensions is not supported by its original author any more. I have to turn of the Extension security checking to get it work. This makes FF3.0 bitch at me when I start it up. Which will be a problem every 60 - 90 days, I guess. I'm going to back up all my open tabs on all...

Is she delivering to Exchange or to her PST?

The main problem with Blu Ray is that the library available to date completely sucks. I have two drives (a burner and a player) and two movies (Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2). I use PowerDVD8. The licenses can be had on Ebay for about $5. I have it working on Server 2003, so I imagine that it...

I completely hate myself for mentioning, but Windows Mobile smartphones normally ship with Office Mobile Edition, including Outlook Mobile. I've tested Exchange installations with it and it pretty much does Outlook stuff - it syncs Calendar, Email and Address Book and generally behaves the way...

For reference, a Celeron 430 (1.8GHz) on an i945 with 1GB RAM and a Seagate "AS" 7200.10 (i.e. total slug) will score between 2.0 and 2.2, with "Windows Graphics" as the lowest score. "Gaming Graphics", amazingly, is higher. I don't know what the deal is with score variations, but I see them...

I've deployed it on about 300 stations so far. I only had one issue, and that came from a spyware infection rather than a problem with SP3 itself. I'm told by people with older machines (P4s, basically) that there's actually a subjective performance benefit to installing it. I did 75 Vista SP1...

Ubuntu can install from Synaptic. You certainly don't have to use the command line to install apps.

He may have been looking at a vendor web site rather than directly at Lenovo's. XP Pro is a $22 upgrade from Vista Home Premium, which is what ships on Thinkpads by default.

My current Thinkpad T61 is an absolutely top of the line model, tricked out, every available option except the integrated camera. C2D 9500, 4GB RAM, 64GB SSD, 14" screen. The machine clocked in at about $3000 with a 3 year warranty. Thankfully, I wasn't the one buying it. Lenovo is no longer...

So people who for whatever reason are wealthy should not have to contribute in any greater amount to the well being of their country than those who live in trailer parks and eat ramen noodles five nights a week, and that's what "fair" is? 'Cause I would say that's unbelievably, moronically selfish.

That's not fair either. That's the opposite of fair, since it would put the highest burden on those least able to pay.

JFV10. They're slow for copying little files, but do very well with larger ones.

A lot of the unemployment issues have to do with their immigrants as well. France offers citizenship to residents of its former colonies (eg Algeria), who come for the promise of a better life, but find out that France doesn't have work for them. The end result of that is a bunch of pissed off...

Watch the videos. They're funny.

The PS3 is architecturally different from a PC. From my understanding, it's closer to how a mainframe works, with lots and lots of little execution units rather than a few monolithic ones. I'm not sure that a PC does have more processing power than a PS3, depending on the task. It's just...

The Transcend 8GB model I like was on sale last week at Newegg for $32. I have two already but I bought one for each of my coworkers.

Lately, since I don't have the desire or motivation to do anything else, I've been scanning the various craigslist metros for the most bizarre personals ad I can find. This has replaced my previous hobby of find the weirdest crap available on ebay.

The galling thing about the tax rebate thing is that it's not a rebate. We're going to be borrowing the money to do it (having already spent this year's tax revenues) and therefore we'll be paying interest on it until the end of time. Taxes realistically do need to go up. There is no way to...

Indiana finally got its first Jamba Juice last year, about 20 miles from where I live. I love the big fruity and expensive milkshakes. I stop in those places whenever I see one now.

I use... 1 or 2 cans kidney beans 1 can "spicy" chili beans 1 can black beans or sometime no-fat refried beans 1 can of corn, drained 2 cans of stewed tomatoes 1 big onion, chopped fine 1 big green pepper, chopped fine Half a jar or so of jalepenos, or a couple fresh ones chopped fine A good...

I've not found a dough I like well enough to do the make my own thing. California Pizza Kitchen frozen ones are pretty good though. I like the Megherita one best.

PUI tonight?

Fundamentally, there's almost no difference between Edwards, Clinton and Obama. The question really is down to voting for a white chick, a black guy with a funny name and the usual guy in a blue suit. But the way I see it is this: Hillary is not Bill. She's got a lot of skeletons in her closet...

Anyone have any strong opinions on the current crop of Presidential candidates? I'm liking Obama, even though he's not a big fan of NASA. I don't know anyone who is willing to say they would vote for Hillary. Edwards is... present. I suspect he's going to have a cabinet position from one of...

OK... Whatever this thing is, it's operating in Safe mode as well, right? That suggests it's either convinced Windows that it's a service that should start in safe mode, or it's convinced Windows that it's necessary to open or work a system file (usually Explorer.exe but sometimes WinLogon)...

That the French have issues with integrating immigrants into the culture that its native residents are taught to treasure really is not part of its social welfare programs. The programs themselves appear to be working well.