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  1. Mercutio

    A little something to shake Tea's tree

    I've attached Hitachi SATAII drives to KT600-based systems. They have worked fine.
  2. Mercutio

    Aprox. power usage?

    That seems like an awful lot for the sort of power supply that normally lives in a 1U machine. Is that a peak value or is it sustained?
  3. Mercutio

    Scheduled burning to DVD...

    I do something like xcopy /h/i/c/k/e/r/y/w d: I think there's a special command for writing to to a WORM DVD, though.
  4. Mercutio

    Need a cheap but reliable motherboard & CPU

    Thanks LiamC. Mostly I was just trying to refute Tannin's statement that it's impossible to befunge the KT600. It was, er, the most vivid description I could think of.
  5. Mercutio

    Scheduled burning to DVD...

    What OS? 2003 Server can write to a DVD/RW natively from the command line.
  6. Mercutio

    Rollcall: who is running what?

    What the heck does that sentence mean?
  7. Mercutio

    Recommendations forum?

    I don't see why we couldn't change the title of the Toolbox. It doesn't get used very often anyway.
  8. Mercutio

    Need a cheap but reliable motherboard & CPU

    Also, I endorse Albatron motherboards with Via Envy sound chips. AFAIK they are the ONLY Athlon boards out at the moment that use something besides crappy AC97-spec audio. Albatron boards, however, don't work with Raden 9600s. Makes me wonder if they have any other weird defects, so I tend to...
  9. Mercutio

    Need a cheap but reliable motherboard & CPU

    No, but cheap, reliable and fast, taken together, are.
  10. Mercutio

    Rollcall: who is running what?

    Well this won't take long or anything... <sob> I'm fully aware that most of the PCs I'm describing here are better than what a lot of people here have as their only machine. I apologize for that. Let's start with the computers in my office at my trainer job: WorkPC: Athlon64/3200, Albatron...
  11. Mercutio

    Need a cheap but reliable motherboard & CPU

    Would it surprise anyone to know that Asrock is the "budget" arm of Asus? Me neither. For the record, Gigabyte, Soltek and Biostar are pretty much tops in my book right now. I've bought MSIs recently (VM400s) and they were just fine, and I've bought Soyo boards (KT600s) that sucked like Jenna...
  12. Mercutio

    A little bit chilly

    Hey, we had a heat index of 122 today. I actually had to turn off all the PCs in my apartment.
  13. Mercutio

    A little bit chilly

    I only have AC in one room of my apartment, and a portable unit in my computer room. My bedroom, however, is several shades of miserable and has been all summer long. I can't get the temperature in the room below 88F (31C for people who like less accurate scales). Add that to my windowless...
  14. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    At one time there was talk of AMD bypassing DDR2 completely for DDR3. I'd like to know what happened to that idea. Groltz, I will say that I really like my X700 Pro for a gaming card that's not utterly outrageous.
  15. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    That was an unusually passsionate description from Buck. Almost as if written by an expert. :) Aren't you supposed to be passed out?
  16. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    I kind of liked the ease of assembling a slot 1 system, actually. :P
  17. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    Tannin, are you suggesting that I didn't know the correct voltage, or how to set the correct voltage, for CPUs made in that period? That's simply insulting. I stand by my valuation. They sucked. They were slow. They were flakey. They got too hot. In the couple years that those chips were...
  18. Mercutio

    Windows *Vista*

    It's a name. Yay. I can't help but think of crappy cars and bad real estate descriptions.
  19. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    Buck, do you want a time out?
  20. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    Value delivered to the end user was in effect negative. The C*rix 6x86 products are among the worst computing devices I've ever seen installed in a computer. They overheated constantly and behaved poorly when you could get them to run at all. Bad, terrible hardware for that time. Pretty much, I...
  21. Mercutio

    Would you buy a used dishrag from this meathead?

    I have a student who repairs electronic novelty devices - jukeboxes, arcade games, slot machines - for a living. Apparently a certain class of these machines run DOS. Old DOS. Like DOS 3, or something. At any rate, he stops by my office and pays me $5 - $10 apiece for as many working drives as I...
  22. Mercutio

    New Computer Money just came in

    I'm happy with the Inspiron 6000 that's bumming around my office as well.
  23. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    What the HELL is wrong with you? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?!?
  24. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    Where are our mods? Tony said a bad word and I want it expurgated! IMO there's no reason - and never has been a reason - to avoid 754. Sempron chips are nice, and the Athlon 64 is the same processor no matter how many pins it has.
  25. Mercutio

    New Computer Money just came in

    Yes. You're talking about a laptop that can't run on a battery. That's not crazy, just stupid. As far as dual cores go: I think it'll be three years or more before programs start to take advantage of the full capabilities of those chips. P4s have had hyperthreading for a couple years - a...
  26. Mercutio

    AMD to crap on customers, Q1 06

    Remember how Socket 754 was the platform that was going to be orphaned by AMD's long term support for Socket 939? Um... yeah. Turns out, early next year, the high end mainstream AMD chips will be living in a happy new 1207-pin package, along with a DDR2 memory controller. I'm sure there's...
  27. Mercutio

    Firefox v1.0.5

    It does everything I want as well. Of course, at home I'm as likely to use text based elm as anthing else...
  28. Mercutio

    WD increases HD warranty periods

    This brings to mind an famous aphorism: You can't polish a turd. Not that WD isn't trying.
  29. Mercutio

    Best program for copying DVD's, and CD's?

    The only thing I've used it for is extracting boot sectors from CDs. Anyway, I'm not sure why you're making such a big deal out of copying capabilities, Greg. Unless the CDs you legally own are CDs that have copy protection, whatever burning software you have will make a perfect duplicate.
  30. Mercutio

    Best program for copying DVD's, and CD's?

    Meh. ISOBuster works too.
  31. Mercutio

    New Computer Money just came in

    $2000 buys overkill on the desktop. However, I think that if you bought a modest, $700 or $800 PC, and a nice 20" LCD, that you'd be just as happy as if you blew the whole two grand. Something like a Venice core a64/3200 Gigabyte 939 board to taste 1GB RAM 200GB Samsung Hard disk ($89 at newegg...
  32. Mercutio

    Stupid Lawsuit

    The Big Easy is another cool movie set in New Orleans.
  33. Mercutio

    What is it with these guys?

    As I tell my students: A good computer technician should be able to swear continuously for two minutes without repeating himself.
  34. Mercutio

    Word 2003 messes folder Modified Date

    I also still use Wordperfect 9 for linux. Every time some major library gets updated I have to spend half a day figuring out how to make it work on my machines again, but it's worth not having to deal with word and not having to retrain my fingers to do OpenOffice or something.
  35. Mercutio

    I/O plates piss me off

    There's a company called "Chiefvalue.com" that appears to be a screen-scrape of newegg. It DOES NOT have any boilerplate about not warranting motherboards. I'm not sure how legitimate it is, but it has newegg's prices and shipping, and doesn't have a retarded "we don't want your bad...
  36. Mercutio

    Stupid Lawsuit

    Not to change the subject, but here's another great example of legislative excellence: Guy forms a corporation to claim money earmarked for a non-existant business.
  37. Mercutio

    I/O plates piss me off

    Serial, Parallel and PS/2 need to stay at least until I don't have to drop into DOS to do a BIOS upgrade. On the other hand, what percentave of users hook up 6 speakers or use digital audio outputs?
  38. Mercutio

    Is Your Boss a Psychopath?

    Yes, it is wrong. On many levels. But also funny...
  39. Mercutio

    I/O plates piss me off

    My rant for the day: I just got in a nice, new Gigabyte K8VM800M. With no I/O plate in the box. Called zipzoomfly, who said they'd only do anything for me by email. EMAILED zipzoomfly, got back "It's not our problem." Now I've emailed Gigabyte, and called Gigabyte's north american office, and...
  40. Mercutio

    Remote Backup Solution - - - Please help

    Acronis backs up whole drives. For any reasonably new computer that's going to run into tens of gigabytes. Over some kind of wide area link?
  41. Mercutio

    Best program for copying DVD's, and CD's?

    Nero has options for doing the same stuff as Roxio. Using Roxio makes the baby Jebus cry. But yeah, Alcohol 120% is certainly handy for making copies. Also, if you're copying a CD that isn't copy protected, there's no need for anything like a "raw" mode. Everything is just ones and zeros, and...
  42. Mercutio

    Remote Backup Solution - - - Please help

    What kind of connectivity do you have? How many machines? What operating systems? Are we talking about full backups or critical files? It's probably a better idea to put an LTO unit on site than to slam a central machine with X number of backup jobs, over WAN links.
  43. Mercutio

    NEWZ: Seagate Releases 120GB & 100GB 2½ Inch Notebook Dr

    I'm comparing mine to WD2500JBs, Maxline 300s and Samsung 200GB units. I don't see Seagate drives very often.
  44. Mercutio

    My fun project

    No. I just want to see what I can get off these drives. For the record, Easy Recovery Pro got nothing. Nada. Active Partition Undelete didn't see anything, either. Get Data Back for NTFS did something interesting: It managed to recover some data - about 20% of the array, actually - well enough...
  45. Mercutio

    NEWZ: Seagate Releases 120GB & 100GB 2½ Inch Notebook Dr

    7k250s are certainly much warmer than other drives I've used in the 200 to 300GB range.
  46. Mercutio

    My fun project

    Odd that Pradeep mentioned how hot Hitachi drives get in his other post... Over the weekend I got my replacement batch of 20 7k400 SATA drives, and I decided to use some of them to move around some existing data. So Saturday I installed four of them on a cheap 4-port controller controller, a...
  47. Mercutio

    NEWZ: Seagate Releases 120GB & 100GB 2½ Inch Notebook Dr

    That's normal for Hitachis, yes, even with some amount of active cooling.
  48. Mercutio

    City of Heroes Free Trial

    Well, I'm looking at the patch notes for the next update to the game, and I'm not happy about them. I'm almost to the point that I think the only good game is Master of Magic. Or maybe the non-sucky original Half-Life. It's not like there's tons of new PC games any more. Once you discount...
  49. Mercutio

    Stupid Lawsuit

    This thread just gets better every time I see it.
  50. Mercutio

    Stupid case innovation

    It's finished metal, and the cables are laying flat on either side of it. The piece in question could just as easily be plastic. I just think having a hook or strap there is a really great idea.
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