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I'd trust a used T-series Thinkpad. Put a $75 brand-name battery in it and it's as good or better than anything being sold new at retail for less than $600. The 1366x768 screen resolution is ubiquitous and inescapable for inexpensive laptops regardless.

Nitsirk tells me that Dragon Age: Inquisition is extremely crashy, needed hours of updates despite being distributed on physical media, requires sign-on to TWO online services and uses a control scheme and UI entirely for the convenience of gamepad rather than keyboard users. I'd say that's...

She's not in pain, not that I can tell. She's never liked being picked up and carried, but now she just meekly accepts when I put her back in her spot on my bed. She's hiding rather than staying in accustomed places, which is what cats do when they get near their end. She's had a fatty tumor on...

I have a Corsair HX750 that I'm planning to use. Honestly, it's overkill for the application; this machine will probably have nothing but an SSD and two or three HDDs in it, and even the CPU and GPU going full-bore won't approach that sort of power draw. I did buy the same Noctua unit dd...

Does it have to be a live conversion? You could try imaging the disk to a VHD or TIB and building the VM from that.

I know there is something terribly wrong with my 15 year old Grace cat. I don't want to take her to the vet because I'm sure I won't be bringing her home.

The X99-UD4. I don't need the extra ethernet or 802.11 support on the more expensive model and I don't feel like trying Asus's quality control given my experience with its current mainstream offerings. With regard to ATI/nvidia, I'm fairly certain that I've bought hardware that won't be as...

Since dd ended up finding a place for his parts, I turned around and bought my own 5930k, 32GB RAM and Noctua cooler, though I went with the Gigabyte board. I'm pairing it with an nVidia 970, mostly because as much as the nvidia-ness will suck, I've heard the fans on a 290X and I know they'd...

Yup. That was the start of my career as a Windows admin as well. And then something would happen, NTUSER.DAT would shit itself and you'd have a user freaking out that all their stuff is gone. Good times indeed.

mklink is functionally the same thing as the ln command on a Unix system, but symlinks are new enough that not everything in Windows handles them correctly. There's a tool called WinLibraryTool from Zorn Software that does, however, allow you to add un-indexed network locations to library folder...

Actually, if you can get past all the site crashing, every single thing Udemy has is $10 right now.

My Thinkpad T20 from 2001 still works as well, but that doesn't mean I'm going to try to use it for anything. It's not even productive to use for web browsing at this point.

dism manages the integrity of the system image, starting from the baseline configuration from source media and as updates and extra software. It works with Microsoft's disk imaging and backup tools and it's sometimes used along with SFC to repair weird, random problems with Windows. It's not...

Ironically, I noticed that one of the dism commands copied over the entire Windows 8 recovery image for later use by Windows. I know why they did things that way, but it's still an enormous waste of time for anyone who has to actually use their tools.

It was break time, and is so often the case, the topic turned to ladies who got ass. Or something. I missed the first part. Plus my office has fast internet service, something that actually isn't true in a steel mill.

Speaking of, hey, here's a brief introduction to using RSS feeds with uTorrent. I leave the question of how that might be related to the preceding two posts to the reader.

This could go in something random but we'll put it here instead. I was teaching a class today of extremely varied racial composition and some of the African American gentlemen were enjoying a particular youtube video featuring a bunch of big booty girls dancing around to bits of "Baby Got Back"...

Since, for some reason, not everyone views copyright law as optional, the MPAA now has a handy web site to let everyone know where they can legally watch the things that were keeping them from stopping their cable TV or satellite service.

I started the DVD-based Windows 8 OEM recovery for a Thinkpad T440p (i7, 8GB, SSD) four hours ago and it's still not done yet. Lenovo used dism to integrate all the application and driver installs and it's actually replaying them one at a time and holy crap someone should tell those people...

Not every touchpad is awful. Like a lot of things, the crappy stuff is most likely on consumer hardware, with some of the worst examples being the HP/Dell vomit boxes.

Probably. What's the full hardware list?

Yes.

Based on testing so far, it looks like one modern Intel CPU core on a Plex Media Server can handle one 3Mbps/720p stream at the default transcode settings. When I tried the same thing using a Core 2 Quad, it couldn't quite handle 3 streams at once at those settings.

We have those concerts every year here, too. The performances are awe-inspiring, held at dusk on the night of a full moon in a forest preserve with an outdoor amphitheater. Not to say I wouldn't still move to California if I had a reason to go, though...

I have come to the conclusion that I seriously, hard-core hate "Material Design", the chunky, information-sparse, candy-color UI theme on updated Android Applications. It's particularly obnoxious in Gmail, but it's also ruined some third party software I use. Material Design applications seem to...

FreeNAS is pretty nifty, but it'll load off a 1GB thumb drive just as well as the 40GB drive you used. Your mom might want the external drive because it's portable. She might also be operating under the not-uncommon impression that external drives are more reliable or somehow indestructible...

X-Com: Enemy Within for Android is probably the best big-studio game I've played on Android, to the point that I'd even like to play it on my PC now that I've played it on my Kindle.

I can't stand facial hair. Not even sideburns. I feel absolutely vile if I can't save at LEAST every other day.

Big Hero 6 is a Marvel movie, so of course I went to the first showing. It's charming and enjoyable and if you have kids they will love it, though it's not as evocative as the canon of Pixar favorites. However, the short that plays before the movie, Feast, is a very special five minutes of film...

The Nexus has a big boy Intel SoC, so there's a lot of potential. It can run apps and games independent of.an attending device and it DOES have some local storage and expansion for downloaded content. The big thing between it and the Kindle devices is which ecosystems it's able to talk to.

Amazon released a Bluetooth digital companion appliance called Echo today. Echo is a speaker and a Microphone that hooks in to components of Amazon's ecosystem so that it can play music, answer questions or interact with things like schedules and E-mail. It's $100 for Prime members or $200 if...

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Buy a faster SSD if you really think you need that. You probably don't need that. 99% of the time it's access latency that you want to improve, not transfer rate. I'm always moving a few terabytes of something around, and if it takes 16 hours to do that, I...

I think that as long as you have a mainstream CPU rather than one of the cut-down budget models, you're probably good for five+ years. A first-generation i3 is still completely viable today, for example.

I used Windows Mobile for years and I was perfectly happy with it. The biggest reason I moved to Android was availability of larger and higher resolution screen options. I generally point people I don't think would do well with an Android device at a Windows phone now. You should be able to...

I've never run a dual GPU setup for longer than it took to troubleshoot something, but double memory bandwidth is a good enough reason to pay the DDR4 premium over a comparable LGA1150 setup. Since I'm not folding and I don't need 4k@60Hz@120fps28xAA (and neither do the shitty console ports...

Yes, though if you're doing an OpenVPN server, you're also going to have to configure the client to talk on the end-point's network, which its own documentation doesn't do a very good job explaining. I made my students set up OpenVPN just working from its documentation and it took them about two...

There are now a small number of AAA gaming titles that want more than 4GB RAM for an optimal experience. Content creation of any sort and particularly heavy web users will also find 8GB+ handy, though personally I don't see a problem sticking 4GB in a typical machine right now, either.

A high end desktop is definitely a huge luxury item. Save your pennies for a decent monitor first and if you want a desktop, maybe look at Sky Lake, the mainstream desktop platform coming next year. You'll probably wind up with 90% of the computer for 50% of the cost. :)

... and rolling back to Server 2008 made the problem go away. Note to self: Never, ever upgrade Windows. Clean installs only.

The computers are for the most part within the realm of reason for a high end workstation, but dd specified $2200 worth of graphics cards and $2200 worth of AutoCAD licenses. If you wanted to move in to a 5820k, 16GB machine, you'd probably be looking at $1200 to get something bare-bones with a...

As a general rule, you'll see a roughly 5% failure rate on drives within their warranty period. When you have dozens of drives, you're more likely to see a drive fail. The 3TB Seagates definitely have more problems than other models, something that I can't really correlate to a particular use...

I did an in-place upgrade from Server 2008r2 to Server 2012r2 for my main workstation a few days ago and I've been fighting with something weird ever since. My file server runs Server 2012 (not r2) and is normally connected 24x7 to an OpenVPN end-point. It's been running that way for a couple...

Congratulations on 4k posts, Howell!

I have a 3TB Seagate drop from a disk array approximately quarterly. Sometimes they're actually bad and sometimes I can't find anything wrong with them, but I haven't lost even one 4TB drive and many of those are coming up on their second birthday. I only lost one 1.5TB Seagate drive, and I have...

C2Ds are basically fine on 4GB RAM as long as they don't have heavyweight security crap (Kaspersky, McAfee) running, but what I'm telling people these days is that anything that didn't ship with a Windows 7 COA on it should probably have antivirus software removed if it's going to continue to be...

I'm looking at a 5820k, an Asus (sigh) X99-A, 16GB of DDR4 and probably a Crucial 500GB SSD, if I want to go the enthusiast route. I could also get an E5-2620v3 and a SuperMicro board for probably $150 more. There aren't a lot of good X99 options generally, but I probably won't use any of the...

Udemy.com has a complete CCNA web-based training course on sale right now for $10 with coupon code MILE10. The course is usually $400.

Actually, just looking at what's on chocolatey.org, I was able to paste together a script that installs CCleaner, AdwCleaner, Spybot, Malwarebytes, Avast and Hijack This. That's more or less my Anti-malware toolkit, and it includes some things that aren't available packaging services. I don't...

That's true - you can find anything you want, and the file sizes are so trivial, right? The problem is that you're explicitly working outside the chain of trust. You have no earthly idea what's being installed along with those .APK files, whether they come from something that purports to be an...

Hint: You can get different RDP apps if you don't like the one you're using.