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Dell had a $750 off $2000 coupon for Inspirons today, too. :)

Command and Conquer: The First Decade looks somewhat interesting to me. I liked C&C and Red Alert and C&C2. I kind of like the idea that someone went ahead and modified those games to support a more modern platform. Especially when the games are actually, you know, good. I think there's a...

I just got paid to de-crapify a Dell. I'm sorry, but if it's taking your month-old 3.4GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM almost 3 minutes to start XP Home, there's both a problem with the machine and a valid reason to send the stupid thing back. Dell installs a program called MyWay, which is thought by...

The only two people I know who use speech recognition to do anything are using Dragon Dictate. On the other hand, if you have XP or Server 2003 you can turn on the voice recognition that's built into Windows and give it a try. You might as well since you already paid for it.

I just bought two of these guys. I'm a little worried that they'll be too hot or somehow quirky, but I didn't have a lot of selection for an X2-based system with MicroATX and onboard video.

If I said both I would still not be wrong. :)

Once the supply for a particular board dries up, finding replacements for it becomes frustrating in extreme. I usually wind up hitting Ebay and paying essentially new, retail price for a used replacement board. If I'm a little luckier, froogle.com will still have a listing or two for my board...

I would like to know when he's going to apoloized for being born and everything else he's done wrong.

I had a titanium engagement ring. :(

Best Windows tip I've seen in a while.

Thorough review/bitch-fest.

Probably the second one. I know it's getting to be about time for a switch because I actually have a bunch of spare DDR modules and all my home PCs are full.

To be fair that was a T20, which was several years ago. But T4xs have a steel frame around everything and are quite rugged. I guess the only way you could really evaluate would be to look at the service manual for both (unless you happened to have one of each in the shop). Plus there's the...

I think the T-series does a little bit better on battery life and they're about 1lb. lighter on average. They also have the stupid fingerprint scanner. They support more memory (T60 does 4GB!) and have vastly superior internal construction. So... Lighter Better Battery Better chassis More RAM...

1998 or 2006, as long as the information on the site is presented clearly, a site re-deign would be REALLY low on my list of priorities. One of the down sides to being a highly technical, web-savvy person is that you can get used to, and tolerate design changes easily. Most web users aren't that...

As far as I know, Quantum was the only company that just swapped circuit boards to switch from IDE to SCSI. Were it really that simple, wouldn't some other OEM have a 10k SATA drive by now?

Apropos of nothing, I sent a paleolithic 15" CTX LCD in for service a few weeks ago. Literally a month before its 5-year warranty expired. I wouldn't've even tried, save that the person who had been trying to throw it out had nicely packed it in its retail box which said "5 year-warranty" in big...

I think the better answer is just to avoid LG completely. I like LiteOn (still). I like NEC. I have been punished when I have purchased anything else.

Here around Chicago, the easiest way to get dead laptops is to hit local computer shows. I HATE computer shows, simply because I don't like paying for the privilege of buying broken, stolen or grey-market merchandise, but for your needs it's probably the right way to go. There's always some...

Nero Recode? Divx encoder? (.divx) Quicktime Pro?

As far as things go, I don't think Apache OR IIS is a simple system to work with. There's strong and weak points to using both of them. I think I'd rather have Apache overall, but I'm not a web guy and to me the products are pretty close in terms of functionality. Godaddy is probably switching...

When it rains it pours. Someone give me a mini-ITX socket 370 system today. Looks like an i815. It gives a "no-memory" beepcode on start, which I'm hoping just means that it needs some different RAM. It'll be interesting to see what I can do with it, and how a C3 stacks up to a 1.2GHz P3. The...

I know not everyone shares my love for high-resolution audio formats, but pcconnection.com has Toshiba SD-6915SU 5-disc SACD/DVD-Audio/Progressive scan DVD players for $74 shipped. It doesn't do HD-upconverting, play MPEG4 or support HDCP, but even a brand name changer at that price is a pretty...

Wheee!

I'm using 2003. Are you trying to load the entire disk or just a partition. I'm just doing partitions.

Rest assured that Dell doesn't make any money on those deals either. They stopped doing those kinds of deals in the USA sometime last year. Dell is pushing for market share, basically trying to bury HP, but in the long term those machines are horrible for the company - the idiots who buy them...

I am all in favor of a tool like this for every kind of computer. It is 150 different kinds of annoying to find that a machine has shipped with a 14-day trial of Quickbooks or 30 days of McAfee AV (You mean anti-virus didn't come with the computer?!?), or, my personal favorite, a version of Easy...

It's a little robot built into a cooler (an igloo cooler) that can mix 5000 different drinks from a stock of 16 alcoholic beverages.

Ghost will also preserve a bootloader. I have a lab of machines that have grub installed, and I restore their 1st partition (the Windows partition) at least weekly without losing my boot loader. Acronis works while Windows is running. It's wonderful for backing up machines that need to stay...

Great news for Drunken Bastard!

I agree. It's lovely. Reminds me of where I grew up. There was a large picture window that looked out over a cornfield that stretched to the horizon. I saw beautiful sunsets like that all the time.

Try going Start > Run > gpedit.msc instead

One thing I can say is that most LCD TVs make pretty lousy computer monitors or monitor replacements, even if they kind of support the right resolutions. Why not just get a 24" computer monitor? You're probably doing external tuning anyway.

Actually, leaving the Indexing service on might well be one of the niftier things you can do with Server 2003. There's a pretty simple recipe for using the Indexing Service + IIS to make super-fast (Google-fast?) searches against the files on your computer. You have to write custom web page to...

You could always take up scientific computing as a hobby. Never know when you'll need to simulate air currents in a hurricane or all the molecules in a nuclear explosion.

I started learning with a short list of commands and a general idea of things I wanted to do. I started learning on the command line though and I'm still most comfortable there. Stay out of the GUI when you're learning. Stay out of the config tool (linuxconf, Yast etc). Set a goal (I want to...

In the past, the "noname" hard disks at CompUSA have been Maxtors, but who can really tell in this case.

I tell any and all of my students, in every class I teach, to ditch Norton or McAfee for AVG. I do this without any reservation. It works better and doesn't try to be some kind of extension to the OS. I got tired of bitching out home users who can't be bothered to whip out a credit card once a...

Apple has absolutely nothing to gain from doing that. They sell hardware - and make money doing so. Their OS works WELL with that specific hardware. Apple can't possibly support the billion and one possible configurations of beige box in the world. Supporting OSX on non-Apple hardware would, I...

Been there, done that. Maybe because I'm more often dealing with corporate versions of the poxy Symantec Malware? I hardly ever see "Norton" Antivirus, but I support Symantec AV Corporate several places (which, oddly enough is not usually the problem), and of course I hand out Ghost licenses...

The Norton Removal tools never work. N E V E R. I've tried them dozens of times for dozens of different products, and each time I've had to do the manual removal. Anyway, tell your customer to sit down, shut up and install something decent like ZoneAlarm if he has to have a Nonstandard Firewall...

Those town-hall things are usually filled with pre-screened republican zombies. No surprise they booed him - there wasn't a single other person there capable of thinking for him or herself. Anyway, todays reason I think George Bush should be removed from office and then voted out of humanity is...

Geeks make better lovers. It's a fluffy piece, but it's something we've known all along. :D

It should come as no surprise, but I'm going to say it anyway: I believe that it is actually unethical to install Norton Internet Security. I've run across spyware/malware programs that have more useful functionality and aren't so difficult to remove. As an IT professional, you should be...

I'd say you ought to know better than to install that piece of shit, but someone is probably holding a large-caliber handgun to your head while you do it, or it's part of some unpleasant gang initiation ritual or something, right? Anyway, you need to start all over again. That means finding the...

You guys missed a wonderful chance to get the best sound card ever made. :(

I wouldn't trust a case/PSU under about $35. Not only because of unfinished edges, but also the possibility of bending the whole back of the case while installing the I/O plate or just bending one site to the point that devices can't be installed or covers can't be put back on without Buck's...

Most of the portable DVD players I've seen use a laptop-type DVD mechanism; they're basically the same thing on that count. On the other hand, the laptop will be heavier and therefore harder to move.

Always wanted to read Shogun. I've never found a copy at a time when I was looking for something to read. I just finished several science fiction novels by Elizabeth Bear that I enjoyed very much.