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Regarding the hosts file: Windows 8 and 8.1 ignore the contents of the hosts file if Windows Defender is running. I have a script that grabs the MVPS.org hosts file and puts it where it goes, but I've observed that Windows Defender will re-enable itself occasionally after Windows Updates. I...

I have a 3770k on my main desktop. I've had it for a couple years now. I haven't kept the same main desktop for more than a year since I was sedrosken's age. I have a perfect excuse to buy a ridiculous new setup next month and I'm still trying to decide if I actually want to bother. If there's...

I actually update that document periodically, though the last few revisions have lived on my Google Drive instead of the web. FWIW, both Firefox and Chrome read PDF files without any additional software now. This is fine for probably 95% of web users. The NTFS permission or GPO settings that...

Here's my list of proactive steps: 1. Adblock Plus in every browser. Also the Easylist TPL in IE and the High Security level for the Internet Zone (this will make IE annoying to use so it won't get used). Make sure Easylist, Fanboy's Annoyance Removal, Malware Domains, Social Blocking and Spam...

I don't need OSX, except to have a machine running it someplace so that I maintain familiarity with it.

We've had picture heavy threads before and SF has been fine. Most of my desktops are utterly not safe for work and not for the impressionable eyes of youngsters such as yourself. :D I had to spend 40 minutes today explaining to someone why he has to use a password to access his web mail. He...

I spent about half a day mucking around with my NUC to make it properly work as a Hackintosh. I was thinking that the combination of Launchpad + XBMC would be a pretty decent alternative to the Server 2012R2 (read that as Windows 8, for all intents and purposes) install it has on it now. ...

Allcast is pretty spiffy. Basically, you gain the ability to screencast your Android to anything that can act as a DLNA receiver. It's not free, but it does specifically work with the Xbox86, PS3, Roku and FireTV.

Dude. Evernote. Or OneNote. Whatever. Get that crap synchronized with Gdrive or Skydrive or something. Your notes are more important than an OS install or a single device, man. There's no reason in 2014 to tie any of that to a single software install or piece of hardware.

You know as well as I do that ain't happening. My goal here is to look for extra, helpful steps to include in a process that I can document and pass along to others so that I don't have to clean up every machine someone tells me has a problem. Right now, I have two versions of such a document...

It's a trade off between capacity, durability and portability. The disk drive will be cheap, but it's also likely to break and you may have issues powering it, depending what you're plugging it in to. I used to carry and use three or four 2.5" drives in external enclosures, but since I have 64...

The Sidebar was removed from Vista and 7 because it was found to have horrific security problems.

The most typical thumb drive failure for me seems to start with a "This drive needs to be formatted" message followed by a failure to format. That's also a fairly common indicator that an SSD has crapped out.

It's back to school time, which for me means getting to look at or hear about the malware that's been on high school and college students' computers since May, the last time they actually looked at a device other than their phone. I have a standard procedure that works pretty well (install...

Mine definitely get loved to death. I suspect I get 12 - 18 months out of the high capacity drives I carry around for system images and data transfers. I have a small pile of dead soldiers I need to send back to Sandisk or Lexar right now.

Every time I look in to it, Dell seems to be the only affordable/appealing option as far as name brands go, with the HP, Apple and Viewsonic products all being in the "Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh harder." range of pricing. I have a weirdo Korean off-brand 27" monitor I got from Fry's...

Looks like Toshiba offers Recovery Media for sale here.

I'm thinking sedrosken would have a hard time coming up with a ~20GB flash drive or the like to back up on to.

You can just hit pause. The space bar. I do that all the time.

Most modern laptops have their product key stickers inside the battery compartment. Also, since legality probably isn't a concern for you, it's relatively easy to get a KMS Activator to use with a copy of Windows Enterprise editions. I'm not a huge fan of using UEFI either. I can't seem to...

Known as one of the best restaurants on Earth, the $295 per person Chef's Tasting Menu at The French Laundry, as reviewed by a four year old. as told in many, many photos.

A few companies are now talking about extremely inexpensive x86 machines with small SSDs and low-res screens that will run full-blown Windows 8 in the ~$200-$250 range. They'll be limited to 2GB RAM, which basically makes them Netbooks redux, but they're probably closer to what a lot of people...

I've been using Waterfox lately. I loaded up 80 pages of tumblrs full of animated .gifs and crap and got RAM utilization up over 3.5GB for the waterfox process and I've left them there while I do my normal browsing. I'd say that it's working fine, though I suspect that if I loaded several tabs...

Since you now have your cool little HP box up and running, have you tried it out for video content yet? Or is it dedicated just to audio at this point? I'm curious to know whether it behaves well enough for high bit-rate video playback. Not to advocate something totally, completely that is...

Do third graders get the metric system? I think you should at least try to communicate this in metric since it lends itself better to scale.

This Universal USB installer is pretty handy. Yes, it'll turn a random Linux .ISO into a bootable thumb drive. But I also noticed that it will do a lot of techie tools and rescue CDs without a whole lot of work. Also, here's a Lifehacker tutorial on making a Live Windows install on a thumb...

This is so much better it's not even funny. Thank you Doug.

I get something like 65/20 when I speedtest to the nearest site but only 40/12 when I test to my Colo in South Bend. The important thing is that I'm getting service that's fast enough that I don't have to worry about how fast my service is. I have one customer that's stuck on a 192k DSL line. I...

There are "lite" versions of XP. One that I've used in a couple specific circumstances would load on an original Pentium and only required 40MB RAM. Of course, it wouldn't take updates and had a lot of functions stripped out, but in most other respects it was functional. I believe it was called...

Nope. Chrome has a Reload button to the left of the address bar. IE is the one that put Reload off to the right where it doesn't belong.

It's probably a registry issue rather than a problem with the font files themselves. There's are a couple programs that are supposed to Fix Windows 98's fonts folder, but the standard practice for fixing anything about Windows 98 was to just do an in-place reinstall and that's what I'd suggest...

I want the constellation of icons to the left of the address bar to be Home, Refresh, Back/Forward. I use an Add-on to make the Stop button kill animations, so I'm sure I'm in the minority of people who still use Stop as well. Mostly I think that putting Refresh at the end of the Address bar is...

I messed with it for a while this morning. It's tied to the Music app. Opening "Music" turns Screen Mirroring on for some reason. It doesn't go off until I manually enter settings to turn it off. That's seriously aggravating.

I finally got sick of having to manually select my Google Drive folder structure while Saving stuff in Office 2013, so here's a script that adds it as a "Place" just like Onedrive and Sharepoint.

I see nothing wrong with paying for a game using whatever legal means are needed to do so and shifting the format to a pirated copy that does not include DRM misfeatures that I do not agree to have. Do I trust the pirates more than the developers and publishers? Absolutely. No question.

You should have backups in %appdata%/roaming/mozilla/firefox/profiles/profilename/bookmarkbackups. Firefox normally makes a backup every day and keeps about 2 weeks' worth of copies.

Android XBMC kind-of supports SMB, but when last I messed with it, your shares had to allow anonymous access.

The FireTV can have XBMC sideloaded and they definitely are fast devices.

Uninistalled and reinstalled, yes. It's actually one of those apps that can't be disabled without root, but I do have root. Since I actually do use it, I'd rather not take it off completely, but it beats the hell out of me what is happening to turn it back on. For a while I thought it might be...

Chromebooks run Android apps now, so IMO, they're vastly more credible devices than they were six months ago. My mother does really well with an Android tablet instead of a Windows PC.

I realize this is a long shot, but does anyone else use the screen mirroring function on their Samsung device? I do, and it keeps turning itself on after I turn it off. I don't want to remove it because I actually use the feature, but the phone isn't respecting my choice as to when it should be...

I'm the post-child for using shit-tons of tabs. I have 91 of them open in Firefox right now and another 12 in Chrome. But what's the functional change? The "X" moves with the open tab. You still have to navigate to the tab to select it and close it. I can understand being annoyed with losing the...

Server 2012r2. Gotta do something with those Technet licenses. I know I installed an Intel driver and I have the Desktop Experience installed. When I get home I'll check. I actually like the tile interface on the TV. It's kind of an abomination on Windows Server, but functionally it's pretty...

You're probably asking the wrong person. I'm the guy with all the porn and the stripper collection and absolutely zero contact with children. But, OK, violent things happen in this movie. It's comic book violence, but people get disintegrated. Space ships blow up. Some of them are visibly...

There's probably a video driver update I haven't bothered to do since the day I set the thing up. Music playback is going to depend a lot on how you organize and how you've chosen to preserve metadata. I do a lot of my playback in XBMC, but my collection is well organized to browse by the...

I am SO FUCKING GLAD my eye is better. New Marvel movie, new slobbering BJ of a post about a new Marvel movie. The first thing I'm going to say is that the stinger at the end of this one - I want to spoil it so bad. There's a reason it didn't get shown to critics. I roared when I saw it...

It's a Samsung UN65ES8000. It's supposed to though I admit that I've never messed with it.

RAM usage looks to be tied to the number of files being synchronized. I sync'd about 100GB of fairly large files overnight (in addition to my normal activity) and RAM usage remained pretty low, around 200MB. I added in just 5GB of pictures and it increased to 360MB. I have resources that I can...

I'd be curious to know if that machine can actually keep up. Yes, it's a 15 year old MMO, but presumably they've made some improvements in their technology over that time.

A few devices have 50/60Hz options but no 24Hz among the ones I actually have plugged in to something. Doesn't look like my NUC will do it either.