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She's fine. Apparently she's run in to a problem in home-buying that the property she most wants to own fails a radon test. Apparently that is not uncommon for homes in the area where I live. Nits, your lurker status is preserved. :P

Surely there's a local Craigslist/Ebay equivalent?

I take very few pictures. One of my friends has some of the blue hair-ing process but I don't have any. Has anyone here had any experience with Radon remediation? Nits wanted me to ask.

One of my students carries a Samsung Galaxy audio player. He quite likes it, but it's physically very close to the HTC Evo I carry around all the time and shockingly expensive for an audio player. I suspect you could get a very similar level of functionality from any three year old Android phone...

It's really not a big deal at all to add some folders to the standard libraries. It takes maybe a minute to add the standard four. I'd prefer to move the whole \Users directory structure, but THAT is a lot of work since Windows still doesn't do symlinks quite right for system directories. It's...

MHDs often have issues well before they finally shuffle off. SMART errors, changes in characteristic noises etc. All of those things are something more than nothing, which is the totality of what an SSD will do. I'm not arguing against backups or against SSDs. I just don't think they're an...

Intuit is awesome at making sure filling out tax documents in the US remains complicated.

The problem with not having a MHD is that SSDs die without any warning at all. One day they work and the next day they don't. In a managed environment with shared resources and such, that might not be a big deal, but for home users and typical laptop systems, that's a huge, huge problem. Windows...

If you have a desktop with an SSD, you NEED to have a traditional drive as well. Use it for backups, use it for your pagefile. Use it for hibernation. If you're using Windows 7 or anything *nix, put your home directory on it as well.

Windows is not going away for mainstream business software. I don't like their crap with development frameworks either (and, hey, I'm not a programmer because I don't want to be a programmer), but it does strike me that there's nothing stopping people from using older tech. For the most part...

I once ran in to a server that a "techie" DBA had set up that RAID10 implemented on the hardware controller and software RAID5 for the main storage volume. The guy could NOT understand why his writes were topping out at 2MB/sec with 15k SCSI drives.

Really not that many people have to think about electricity on a way that requires knowledge of its units of measure on any kind of regular basis. Most likely, it's something people learn in a two week span during their seventh grade science class and never need again. Which also describes the...

My hair is blue because ladies are better at Xbox than I am.

Most of my students are electricians. They'll be happy to tell all manner of horrifying stories about bad installations and what electricity does to things. I lost a bet and now I have a blue streak in my hair. So far, no one I work with has even noticed.

That's where all the fancy IT Trainer learnin' comes in handy. :)

Open gpedit Go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization Choose "Do not display the lock screen" and change it to enabled.

For any version of Windows 8, if you configure a program to run automatically on login via Task Scheduler, you can skip straight to the desktop as well.

I really like Canon LiDE scanners. If you're used to a 15kg monster I suspect you'll be quite happy moving up regardless.

He's going to run softraid on top of hardware raid. His write performance will be every kind of absymal and he clearly doesn't belong anywhere near a $500 RAID controller.

I don't think brain control is all that far off, really. MS has the Kinect and fancier phones are looking at what your eyes are doing already.

I don't think Intel needs a schedule any more. It's more like "We'll release things superior to everything AMD makes when we get around to it." Though the socket proliferation is bothersome.

This board was given to me along with $1200 worth of CPUs and RAM so I can't entirely complain. For the most part, I buy Intel or Gigabyte. I really only look at Asus when the Gigabyte equivalent is clearly unsuitable (usually because of unfortunate heat sink placement) or when I have a need so...

Four days and still no RMA approval from Asus. I don't think I've EVER gotten an RMA approval from Asus. Way to service, assholes.

Man a G620 is nothing for most people to complain about. I think the big gulfs for day-to-day usage right now are between people who still have single core machines and people who have deliberately crippled stuff like Atom and Celeron processors. Everybody else is in roughly the same boat. The...

The US is overwhelmingly Christian, and to a degree that's unthinkable in the rest of the northern hemisphere. Moreover, we're still extremely puritan in our values. It doesn't surprise me at all that someone outside this country would be willing to assume an Americans are bible thumpers because...

We've had this discussion before, but Security Essentials is easily the WORST of the free options. AVG is a total pig, but at least I've observed that machines that have it installed typically aren't infected by things. They spend two hours a day doing scans, but they aren't infected. Avast...

I found a this thing today while stuck at a Walmart waiting for someone to put tires on my car. It seems like a great idea to me.

Front audio should have one pin filled in for identification purposes.

Homeplug isn't the cheapest thing in the world, but it fixes crappy 802..11 pretty well.

No. Do it faster.

Everyone needs to be block ads all the time. This is not optional. In Firefox and Chrome, use Adblock Plus. Make Sure you subscribe to both Easylist and Fanboy's list. IE should be updated to at LEAST version 9 but version 10 is out as well. IE uses tracking protection lists. You need both...

Uninstall Java. Uninstall Norton whatever using their Removal Tool. Use ninite.com to install Avast, Spybot and Malwarebytes. Hit Filehippo.com to grab Hijack This, Ccleaner and Spywareblaster. Run MBAM to update it to current. Right click on Spybot, go to properties, compatibility. Tell it to...

Yup. Probaby not worth putzing around with, but you'll pay about the same amount to get a USB 3 hub of any sort.

It's the "cheap out" one. My offices only have the APs that I've set up and authorized in range. In 2.4GHz that means that there is ALWAYS strong signal everywhere in the building (well, unless I close the door to the bank vault, but that would be silly). Regardless, my Boxee and Roku and the...

The CPUs and RAM were freebies that came with the dead motherboard, but video transcoding has been a primary function for fast machines for me for a long time. For a long time, I had linux machines that I fed DVDs and stored .avi or more recently .mkv files. Transcoding BDs is definitely less of...

I think so. It seems to be legitimately better for file service needs and it will be nice to run all my media tools natively instead of having to putz around with WINE. Yes, 24 3TB drives once I get them all. I've been buying one or two every time I see the price dip down to something I feel is...

My new storage machine: Norco 4224 2x Xeon 5645 (12 threads per CPU, 80W) 24GB DDR3 Asus Z8NA-D6 (if they actually let me RMA it) X25e 64GB (for OS) IBM M1015 + HP SAS expander Presently I'm short 4x Barracuda 7200.14s and I'm still waiting to see if the board can be RMA'd, so I'm not quite...

I have yet to find any consumer electronics that offer legitimately good experience over 802.11. I think in part that might be because we ask those devices to stream video, which is pretty much the worst case scenario for 802.11 in the first place, but also that the devices are seldom in a place...

It's not a bad back burner project. Speaking of, do you actually have your network documented and diagrammed, or is it all in your head? Do you have anything that vendors can refer to for future reference? I've done that for all my customers but it occurred to me after I read this post that I...

Do you have a way to get smart TV-like features in your living room? Samsung Smart TVs actually have built in Plex support, but I've found myself showing people stuff on Youtube/Flickr/Picasa stuff in their living rooms all the time. I don't know if that's something that's in your life, but if...

In theory, this is where having managed, locked down switches would've been super helpful. You could've required 802.1x port authentication and defaulted their crap to a null VLAN or something and then at least they'd have to involve you at the point when they're plugging crap in to your ports.

Be glad you've never dealt with the horrors of a Acer BIOS.

You can't always turn it off.

That assembly breaks rather easily on seemingly every laptop, but I've learned my lesson from countless HP Pavilion and Acer/Emachines/Gateway notebooks that if they break once, they're generally not worth fixing. Maybe jtr could do an awesome soldering job that holds better than the factory's...

Floppy drives will need to exist at least until Windows XP and Server 2003 are retired, particularly since part of the PITA of getting it working on newer hardware is dealing with the joys of storage controllers for which those OSes do not have drivers. I keep a USB floppy drive in my car and...

Unfortunately, there's no earthly way to make a 1U system quiet enough to use in a normal home setting. They could be nice little LAMP servers or maybe they could serve as a testbed for VMs, but I suspect the power bill and noise annoyance would make them unappealing. But they are probably...

They do break down their results and discuss their methodology, but it's a PC Magazine test and I strongly suspect they're biased in favor of their biggest advertiser.

The choices for budget AMD A75 motherboards are kind of ugly. MSI boards have never been good to me but I'm not sure I'd want the Asrock equivalent. My typical choice for a decent-looking budget case is Compucase.

I flatly refuse to believe that Norton Internet security rates above everything else on offer. The rest of the list is roughly on par with my experiences , but I see far too many houses machines with Norton AV on them to think it does anything but suck and die.