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My internet connection is being annoying at the moment or I'd be playing right now. I wrote you a little guide to the different types of toons instead. Anyway, yes, you should be launching from the updater. That is actually normal. There are usually tiny patches once a week on Tuesdays. The...

I play City of Heroes. I love being a Super Hero. I play several hours a week, and for me it hasn't gotten old, even a year later. I happened to visit the COH home page a moment ago. I see there is finally a free trial up and running, and I thought I'd bring it to the attention of SF's gamers...

Has anyone used a Radeon Xpress 200-based board yet? I've spoken to two people in the last week who have said highly positive things about the MSI RS480M2-IL. It's hard to find people in screwdriver shops willing to say positive things about ATI products, so I'm more than a little curious what...

I've been happy with the last few Thermaltake power supplies I've purchased. Again, not silent, but quiet, and they don't skimp on molex connectors.

I've been using Portable Firefox, actually. I can't say I've ever used Peerguardian or Protowall.

Tracking cookies aren't anything to be worried about.

I don't build SPECIFICALLY to sell on Ebay. Sometimes someone will ask me to build a PC and then decide they don't want it. I try to keep those PCs around for the next person, but if I've already ordered my next bunch of parts, or if the PC in question has something special in it (expensive...

Something like half the PCs I build are least-possible-cost machines - under $500 including the monitor and the Windows COA. That means that things most of you would call compromises are facts of life for me: Integrated video, secondhand displays, $40 cases. 80% of the motherboards I use are...

DC comics were shit in the 60s. That's why the very character and continuity-driven Marvel comics came to the forefront in the early and mid-60s. Secondhand Lions was a good movie. I saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith tonight. There were funny moments but I found myself laughing at jokes that were ABOUT...

Another comic book movie has come out, so it's time for me to make another post in this thread. DC Comics is owned by AOL-Time Warner. AOL, font of all evil on the internet. Strike One. DC Comics are the "establishment" comics that everyone knows from, at this point, four generations of...

The most recent review of a Samsung drive I can find is the SP1614N. What's a HD160JJ? Samsung has never sent SR a review unit as far as I know, and Samsung isn't an SR advertiser. I'm surprised their review was as good as "Better drives are available."

Sigh. Tannin, one of these days I am going to make a trip to bloody Oz just to teach you how to run your shop properly.

XP's partitioning will only format partitions under 32GB with FAT32. Personally, I never bother. Someday, you guys will learn the value and the power of sysprep. Ghost means never having to use fdisk or gdisk or any other disk, folks.

Or use a 17" and a 128MB 9550Pro and a have a decent $400 game machine. Although, to be honest, I think game machines really do need a full 1GB of RAM. The big MMOs (WoW, EQ2, MxO and COH) all do much better, and so do the big-name shooters. So, OK, a 17" CRT, a 9550 Pro, an extra 512MB RAM...

I visit Boingboing.net a couple times a day, just to see what's up. And almost every day I find something interesting or worthwhile there. Sometimes those same things also find their way to slashdot or Fark (photoshop contests and boobies links, huzzah!) or any of the other perfectly good ways...

I'm kind of leery of those Allied PSUs. Anything that's that light can't possibly be that good as a PSU. Are you having good luck with 'em? The Foxconn case is at least cosmetically similar to some recent Compaq enclosures. It's solid steel (OK, maybe not that similar to Compaq after all...)...

Those ATI X700s are super-nice cards for the money. They're somewhat faster than 9800s, substantially faster for DX9 stuff, and the price, $120ish, certainly is right. Wish I could find one that's passively cooled.

Well, I meant that to be a new post. Oh well. Y'all will read it anyway.

Saying something nice about a vomit box One of my coworkers just bought a Gateway laptop, some kind of low-end P4. She asked me to load it with the software we use on our classroom PCs. So I did: I installed XP Pro and Office 2003 and all the other stuff we use, then downloaded and installed...

It's a Foxconn TLA776. I found them locally for $43 but Newegg has them for around $50.

Tannin, we all know you are in the business of gently prying money away from the poor innocent people who accidently mistake Redhill for a Harvey Normal's.

Well, my employer has asked me to work a miracle again. Every year we run a class for disadvantaged kids to come in and learn about computers. This year the kids in question are building and keeping new PCs. Given that this hardware has to fit inside a tiny budget for a much larger class, the...

Ah, the sweetest three words in the English language: "I was right." :D You know Greg, sometimes people actually pay me money for knowing what I'm talking about. And sometimes I do things - like install 64-bit Windows XP - just so I have knowledge of them when the topic comes up on SF. Who is...

Actually I bought and received a pretty nice 600m through that deal. I just got it, and I'm working up the energy to reload it with something annoying than XP Home. I see an AOL icon in the default desktop and I am offended. But, OK, considering that I paid a hair over $900 for it AND it has...

Have you tried running it from the recovery console?

Intel runs similar events ALL THE TIME for its authorized resellers. .

You probably have a bad 7VM400. I've probably built 50 or 60 machines with that particular board without the problems you're describing (over an 18 month period, which is basically the whole life of that board). There are no issues with that board and windows XP installs. There are no issues...

I've never seen such a thing. However, a couple weeks ago Dan's data reviewed a $25 plate that is basically the "guts" of a vanilla USB enclosure. Of course, that doesn't help much, since you're apparently looking to replace your boot drive. Wow. Yuck.

Most of the cheapies - up to and including Adaptec's $50 2-port card - use the Sil chipset. It certainly works well enough for not having any advanced RAID features.

I have a boxed set if you want 9.3, Handy. I really like the default GNOME setup better than the KDE that is the install default. Anyway, you should only need to use smbpasswd to set correct linkages between accounts on your Windows PCs and those on your Linux box. Not that hard, actually.

Yup. You need keys. If your customer already has a VLK, you can recover it off one of their other machines with the Belarc Advisor. Or, you know, ask someone who has some spare licenses or something. Cough.

GoGo City has been in business for at least five years. They were one of the last places I was aware of that stocked the wonderful Voodoo3 3000.

I wouldn't trust consumer reports to review anything. All their reviewers are non-experts, and sometimes completely moronic product features turn a very mediocre product into a top-rated unit. Need proof? Look at their reviews for computers sometime. I have a Soleus portable non-Window AC that...

Via Envy is a marvelous audio solution. It's the reason I put up with my fussy, fussy Albatron A64 boards. Envy works fine in Linux, at least for stereo audio (I have to confess I never tried analog multichannel) and Fedora core 2 and 3, and Suse 9.x both autodetect that particular chip. Audio...

No pops or interruptions when using TOSLink (found one in the box the card came in!) or crummy (I'm talking an 18-gauge, 50 foot long wad of cable, here) coax. Maybe it's an analog thing. Also, I sent an email to bluegears about the availability of the digital I/O daughterboard. Got a reply...

Well, the stock fan on my X800 Pro is dying. Of course. It's the only card I have that has a fan on it, and the racket it's making is the only identifiable "computer noise" in a room full of mostly pretty quiet computers. Anyone have a suggestion on something passive and...

And of course, 10 seconds after I get done typing the above, the power to the whole PC cut out as surely as if I'd unplugged its UPS. Coincidence? Maybe. But I went ahead and upgraded its PSU from a 400W HEC to a 480W Thermaltake unit.

Of what? It's a card in a PC. Mostly I'm interested in how well this thing spreads sound out across my speaker set. A couple of things I can say now that I've run some CDs through it: It mixes heavily for bass and rather less than Soundstorm did for the center channel. This is highly...

I've been contemplating a Honda Odyssey for myself. There's a really nice-looking used one at a lot I drive by every day. It's been on my mind enough that I took it for a test drive. It's comfy and drives exactly like a sedan, which is just what I want. I have these fantasies about putting more...

I just got around to putting mine in last night. I am a happy camper. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, and minor driver annoyances aside, it does it well. More review-age later.

jump.

I haven't tried it with XP since I have a moral objection to using it on my personal computers. Server 2003 - my company has a TON of licenses for the Web Edition that we're never going to use for anything - is very fast and has very little fat IMO, so I just use that these days.

Meh. Wait for Chenming or Compucase to release a less expensive version.

Apparently the Nipple developer kits that're shipping out are using 3.6GHz P4 560s that use a standard Phoenix BIOS and NOT Openfirmware. Developers are reporting that they can dual book Linux or XP on those machines along with OSX. Given these things as fact, it's safe to say that whatever...

Maybe crappy nvidia drivers. I've had complaints about every version that's ever been posted on nvidia's website. Mine were more stability issues than data corruption but in this case I'd look at Microsoft's driver for a while before I went blaming hardware.

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-262.pdf

I do not get spyware. Or viruses. Of course, I know what I'm doing, and if I'm doing something that's anything other than perfectly safe, I do it on a *nix box. First thing I do is install Firefox. I've been keeping it, with all the plugins I need, on a flash drive that I just copy to other...

Four new members today. What's up with that?

I've never been on a plane at all. I'm almost 30. I've decided that I won't be getting on a plane. I went to pick someone up at the airport once upon a time and was strip searched for my trouble. I was wearing cotton shorts (no zipper), a cotton tshirt and a $3 pair of plastic flip flops (i.e...

There are corporate AV products that don't require subscription. One of the only good things about Symantec AV (the other being server-based management). But, OK, every modern AV program *I* am aware of eats CPU cycles for breakfast, and no one cares, 'since for the most part we're all driving...