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I'd rather die of congestive heart failure than emphysema. Hell, I'd rather die almost any other way than of emphysema. Putting that aside, Here's what happens when you run the Gettysburg Address through Powerpoint's Auto Content Wizard.

I like my Benq projector just fine. Their Optical drives don't impress me, however. I've been quite happy with various Samsung electronics I've purchased - hard disks, DVD players, LCD and DLP displays. At this point, if I'm purchasing electronics I'll look for Samsung first, if only as the...

Ghost 9 is a truly great program. It doesn't do anything particularly stupid or behave in any really unexpected ways. It images drives, just like its distant DOS ancestor. Symantec added much-appreciated CD and DVD burning, USB and Firewire support and wrapped in boot manager and a GUI for...

That's weird enough to be a warranty issue IMO.

If I ever set foot on a dealer lot again I will be sure to try that.

Right Click on the "Special", choose create shortcut, drag as usual.

Godaddy has been doing some kind of scummy things lately with redirects of parked domains. I can register/host it for you if you'd like. It'll give me something to do with the 19GBs of space I'm paying for and not using.

George Bush meets with the Queen of England. He asks her, "Your Majesty, how do you run such an efficient government? Are there any tips you can give to me?" "Well," says the Queen, "the most important thing is to surround yourself with intelligent people." "Bush frowns. "But how do I know the...

Kind of off the subject, but why does buying a car feel the most degrading human activity of all time? Seriously, I went to look at a car Saturday morning and left feeling like I could look up to the jizzmopper at a Serbian Rape Camp.

Sometimes, ignorance of a certain scale is actually pretty scary. Glad none of my customers are that bad.

Asus brings back soundstorm.

I meant to say that "I've done Samsung RMAs three different times with a total of five drives. They got replacements back to me within a week of the ship date on my end." but I accidently deleted most of that line.

Man, Maxtor used to have a great RMA service here in the USA before the Quantum merger. No questions asked. You could send a drive back for being dusty or for making a noise you didn't like. Samsung's RMA here in the USA is on the same level with Hitachi and Seagate I think. I've . WD has the...

The ones I ordered from Newegg used Apex-labelled or Allied PSUs. They appear to be identical. I bought them because their looks have a nice "wow" factor associated with them, but found myself replacing about 40% of the power supplies from those machines within a year.

Apex are OK except that I've had problems with Apex-branded PSUs. I'd suggest FoxConn, which makes wonderfully sturdy mid-range cases that have the drawback of having kind of loud case fans, or CodeGen, which are also well constructed but have CodeGen PSUs (again, not a really great choice in...

Oh man, I remember when you were looking for that last one, Groltz. I was genuinely worried until I got to that last line.

Biostar's products are somewhat more reliable than Shuttle, in my experience. Not as nice as Gigabyte, but they're certainly high on the food chain of budget motherboard vendors.

Well, yeah. That's the problem. But realistically, who upgrades a CPU these days?

I normally either do 3 passes or let it run for 24 hours. I hate to bring up Sandra, but as it stresses a wider array of system components, it might be another tool to try.

Oh man, I know the feeling. One of the customers at my training company rolled out some low-end Optiplexes a couple years ago and asked me to stage and deploy them. One of PCs arrived without a hard disk (as in, it wasn't inside the case. At all.). I tried for about a week to get them to ship...

On the other hand, there's a substantial truth to some of his other claims; the copy protection really does insert itself as a low-level device driver on Windows. I'd like to see evidence of course, but it's worth following up - the list of complaints with regard to Starforce software, and the...

And dredging up something old, here's someone who seems to have found Starforce spreading from one PC to other computers on his network. I think that I want Starforce on my computers to about the same degree that I want a bad case of Herpes.

My local distributor is offering me a very nice price ($52) on some older Biostar Via socket 939 boards - the ones that can't run dual core chips. Knowing these boards have that mild flaw, I can't decide if they're really a worthwhile purchase. Any thoughts?

Some fun Vista Press Coverage. Ouch. And then there's this bit about MS rewriting 60% of the existing code for Vista. I think the phrase "Train Wreck" is appropriate at this point. I'm giving up on my Vista experiment for now. There are just too many things I can't do from Vista. Explorer...

OO doesn't really have a functional equivalent to Access, does it? Base is more like a frontend to whatever other database you have, I think. Anyway, you probably can use ADO between Writer and your mdb file to get the job done if it's really important.

For a time, VLK (activation-less) licenses for XP Pro were available with purchase of as few as five copies of Windows. That policy has been rescinded and now the only way to get a VLK is to to be in one of maybe five enterprise licensing programs (Select, Certified Partner, Gold Certified...

Plus! is a combination of the Mail Plus! Service and Yahoo's Music Download service. I don't think anyone cares about that. :)

Just to prove how right I am, Fortune 500 Companies are Advertising on what're basically porn sites these days. That would probably really awesome if I ever unblocked ads for some reason.

Santilli, if your PC is connected to a home theater or through a digital output to a fancy set of speakers with a Dolby Digital Processor, you're getting exactly the same sound you'd get from any DVD player. If you don't have either of those things, I wouldn't be terribly worried about sound...

Excel stuff works pretty well. I've seen Word documents that would choke Writer, but most things are perfectly fine. I don't think textboxes are all that common in Word docs. Are they?

Really? I've had great luck with them. I use 611BRPs to replace the failed WRT54Gs I keep running into, or Netgear AP/routers with unsatisfactory range. The trendnet 802.11 products for me have been a happy medium of not breaking all the time and having decent wireless coverage. I also have...

The Dual Core Thinkpad X60 is making me think very hard about how much I like money, Tannin. Of course, that's the other way. It's only got a 12" screen. But it weighs 3lbs and lasts over 5 hours on a single battery.

Goddammit Tannin, if you'd just buy a decent copy of Ghost instead of the for-shit old one you've been using, you'd like it, love it and it would be one of your primary tools. Anyway, I don't see a point in disrupting a functional Windows install because of a drive change. Motherboard upgrade...

You need to talk to the people who make the game. There's probably a patch or easy fix. There are tons of games that won't run unless you're an administrator (e.g. The Sims), for instance. As for what's going on with your DVD player, I have no idea. I use PowerDVD 6 on a Server 2003 PC just...

Really Fast Drive.

About half the apps I try to install fail for one reason or another.

Did you play the same game I did? There are hundreds of great storylines in the missions you get in CoX. The only thing is, you have to stop to read them. In the end, I gave up on CoH because the developers have added in all the bullshit timesinks that weren't in the game when it was new -...

re: MAME box. My Via system runs "modern" MAME titles (Killer Instinct) poorly but is probably great for anything of mid-90s vintage or earlier.

You could also save $10/machine and not install RAM that's never going to be used.

Go to Control Panel, Administrative tools, Performance. Open Alerts, right click and choose New Alert. You can configure alerts for any computer on your LAN, via its UNC name (\\servername). There are all kind of counters you can track and there you can define any Action based on an over/under...

Why so much everything?

In City of Heroes, Healers don't just heal. They also buff up or debuff bad guys, and they have worthwhile attacks as well. The dynamic in that game is basically spending lower levels doing something that contributes immensely to the success of a group, while at higher levels you hardly need to...

Try setting an Alert for \\servername using the ICMP counter Messages/sec and setting the default action for "under 1" to "Send a Mesasge To". The only down side to that is you'll need the Messenger Service turned on to receive the alerts. It can also send an email. Given about half a second I...

Er... the Windows Event Management service can do that.

Firefox 2.0 Alpha is out. Also the Calendaring app for Thunderbird Lightning had its first point release yesterday. I'm not someone who would use a calendar app (I don't even use an address book), but maybe Tbird will actually be a valid Outlook replacement someday. Looks like they've got a...

The point of Cthulhu-related games is essentially that nothing you do really matters anyway. Even if you had a nuclear device, Nyarlathotep is just going to be radioactive and annoyed (well, more annoyed than usual). I don't think you're going to find a game based on Lovecraft's mythos with an...

I was talking about something in a class and I used the phrase "This will be like fun, but, you know, not." It struck me that that phrase is a pretty good description for a lot of things in life, and I decided to register it as a domain.

It can be slow to load but I've had it for quite a long time now - six or nine months - and I've found it to be an excellent fill-in for a real mail client.

Yes. It looks like this: The neat stuff I have there - I *do* use Thunderbird (or elm) most of the time - but I have a tabbed interface that allows access to my mail spool even while I'm reading or replying to another message and, through the magic of AJAX, I can even do local client-ish...

Actually, I *like* to play healers. I have an Empathy Defender and an Empathy Controller at 50 in City of Heroes, a Thermal Corrupter at 40 in City of Villains (all at the limit for those games), and my DDO Cleric is my highest character there. DDO certainly does have fun elements. There's an...