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The GP just wanted me out of his office. No question about it. I went and got some tea tree oil, which is supposedly a natural antibacterial, and poured the whole bottle in with my body wash, and I spent $40 at a laundromat washing all my clothes and bedding again. At this point I'd just like...

I did some math and figured out that my company would save about 3% annually on ink if we printed our manuals in Garamond rather than (sob) Comic Sans and almost 36% if we quit printing everything in color. My company spends more for ink than it does on any individual's salary, so this is not...

PowerDVD 8 and 9 have an option for that.

Around here I think nonpayment might be a big problem.

... and yet I still watch...

I don't have real insurance (catastrophic, yes, but not anything that would actually help), which means I have to find doctors who are willing to see uninsured patients (not all of them will), willing to see new patients, and willing to see patients in a timely fashion. So I called the...

My ex is telling me I need to see an infectious disease specialist. The doctor I saw said a dermatologist. My ex's concern is how close my wounds have been to lymph nodes and now to my carotid artery and says I need to do something Real Soon Now. I'm really feeling like I'm getting a mixed...

Make sure you grab drivers from Acer's site. In the past I've found that even Acer can't tell what hardware is in any particular model of their notebook.

I can connect to nine open APs right now from my bedroom. I do, in fact, swipe bandwidth from my neighbors late at night. Makes the torrent seeding go faster.

RAID is not a backup technology. It is a data integrity and availability technology.

I think he's still on dialup.

The new code is 15x faster. I would say that is rather significant.

WPA with TKIP was, until today, probably the default security setup most reasonably smart folks had on their wireless routers. Now it looks like you'll need to be switching to WPA2 or WPA/AES instead.

That is why I continue to use software RAID even on cards that can do it in hardware. I like my data to be recoverable if necessary.

It's a process of elimination. And on some level, some of that hardware you probably don't REALLY care about, like the modem. Basically, on a notebook like that, you need drivers for all of the following: Display Adapters, Wired Networking, Wireless Networking, Audio + the Microsoft UAA driver...

Those Perc5 controllers really are a bargain, but if you're using the hardware RAID function, you probably should buy a second one. If that controller fails your data is hosed.

It would probably work as long as the routers were configured to use different networks (192.168.0.1/24 and 192.168.1.1/24 would be good), but every current data plan from a mobile provider (i.e. unless you're grandfathered in on an old plan) caps at either 200MB or 5GB a month. So you'd have...

The sound driver on Gateway's site works for both XP and Vista.

Many recent Gateway notebooks are actually made by Compal. Very often you'll find a Compal model number on the bottom of the notebook. Finding out the Compal model should give you a good way to look up specific hardware. Actually the Gateway web site does a pretty decent job of narrowing down...

Sony notebooks tend to be poorly made and have... idiosyncratic software setups, even weirder than the way Toshiba typically mangles Windows. I'm not even applying my usual Sony bias here. On the other hand, the weight is about right for the specs; she's not looking at some boat anchor desktop...

MRSA is antibiotic resistant staph. There's a much smaller than normal range of antibiotics available that treat it. Staph, once you have it, is very hard to get rid of. In a lot of cases, there are asymptomatic carriers who have some staph bacteria that lives in their nose. My nose was my...

No clue.

Today I was officially diagnosed with my third topical MRSA infection in three months. Lucky me.

What's wrong with GNOME, again?

The only stuff I can find on Ebay is PCI-X or 64bit PCI, which unfortunately doesn't work on anything I have just sitting around my apartment.

I just bought one of these for a customer. Hopefully it'll just sit in a corner with 4TB of disks in it and by a nice file and backup server for them. If WHS is less than perfect I'm sure it'll do just as well as a Linux/Samba server. I really like the form factor, though.

I just bought a Canon SX100IS to replace my now-dead Casio Exlim. As of yet I have no comment on it as a camera, except that it works a great deal better than the camera in my phone.

Interestingly, this batch of drives was not packaged in half a shipping case as I expected it to be. Instead, each drive was placed inside a small cardboard box (the size Newegg uses for RAM and cables and stuff, like 7"x1"x4") that was packed with bubble wrap surrounding the plastic clamshell...

I've not had a problem with recent Seagate notebook drives. I've got 6 of the 500GB 7200.4s doing various things and other than a slightly annoying clicking sound they make when they start up, they've been good.

Why wouldn't you be running data recovery on a server that in all probability has more CPUs, RAM and a better disk subsystem than your laptop in the first place?

First thing is, yes, that Syba Expresscard thing absolutely sucks. I bought one and it seems to disconnect from the system every so often. I get an assload of Error 57 events and I have to pull the card out to make the drive work again. I'm hoping my next Thinkpad just has an eSATA port. Every...

I loaded the .wim files off the DVD onto a Windows Deployment Server earlier in the week. ImageX for custom .wim files probably works fine, too. Otherwise there's always sysprep.

The whole point is to eliminate copper. If I get actual 1000Mbit, I'm looking at roughly 3x the throughput for network transfers vs. cat6. On the other hand, since I don't have any 64 bit PCI slots anyplace, it looks like cheap NICs are out of the question right now.

I've recently come into possession of an 8 port 1000baseSX switch and some cables. Has anyone ever in the history of time seen either 32 bit PCI or any sort of PCIe NICs that support some form of 1000baseSX connectivity? Cheapest things I can find are TrendNet 1x PCIe NICs for $150 a pop.

I'm about to buy 10 of those Samsung 1.5GB units. I'll see how I do. :)

"Loose" is the opposite of tight. "Lose" is the opposite of win.

You know that's not how MBTF works, right?

Not unless you want it to be. I'm just saying that there's a problem with Acer notebooks.

Relative to the number of notebooks that I fix, and relative to the number of Acer notebooks I have ever worked on, Acer notebooks are by far the most likely to have an issue that requires replacing either the display or the inverter. I've done 11 in the last two years. The reason that's a big...

Once, yeah. The server's hardware management told me it had stopped working right, anyway. All the fans and crap were OK so I'm not sure what happened there.

I bought at least two that wouldn't even hit 333MHz. :P

One thing I've found in my life as a tech is that everything with an Acer badge (I don't know who makes their stuff) on it has a REALLY delicate screen. Also, Acer's support site is really bad. I'm sure that thing is pretty nice other than that.

It's a BIOS option in recent Gigabyte motherboards. There's nothing really secret about it.

Why is it so fucking hard for Microsoft to write an operating system that is capable of copying files in an expedient fashion? 6.36GB from an internal SATA drive to an internal X25-M on my Thinkpad. Total time remaining (after 10 minutes): "About 40 minutes" WHY?

The specs for what's allowed in a netbook are mostly set by Microsoft and its desire to not supply Windows XP to anything with actually decent hardware. So Netbooks have Atom CPUs instead of Celerons, support for at most 2GB RAM and use older graphics chipsets. $350 will buy a 1.6GHz Atom + 1GB...

Probably spinrite, honestly.

It is good that both Coug and Lunar are with us. And that Buck apparently still stops by, too.

That's what she said! Thank you! I'll be here all week. Try the chicken.

You should be installing a new version of flash every time you're prompted to anyway, since the semen-gargling morons at Adobe have a standing record of zero-day exploits in every new, patched version of Flash.

Learn to love prompts. They're for your own good anyway. :)