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  1. Mercutio

    Third Party Batteries

    The problem with that is that the only OEM batteries I have access to have at least nine months of charge/discharge cycles on them already. Best I can recall, a new OEM 9 cell 7600mA Thinkpad battery will drive a 14" T-series notebook for around 4:30 in reasonable usage (802.11 on and being...
  2. Mercutio

    Rain and flood

    Perhaps the better lesson is that mother nature can overcome any expected assessment of her behavior. I suppose we could get into the impact of global warming on environmental risk assessment analysis, but I don't think I want to open that can of worms with you.
  3. Mercutio

    Rain and flood

    Just think how the residents of New Orleans felt.
  4. Mercutio

    low-end laser printers these days?

    Either way, one drum and cartridge will probably last a sizable fraction of a decade for most people's personal printing needs.
  5. Mercutio

    Intel Core i3-550 Clarkdale 3.2GHz 4MB L3 Cache LGA 1156 73W Dual-Core

    They're zippy for budget systems, though subjectively they aren't much different from upper-end Core2s. Motherboard: Gigabyte H55M-USB3 RAM: DDR3 from one of the usual suspects (Crucial, Corsair, Kingston, Mushkin)
  6. Mercutio

    Kindle

    http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/princeton-study-shows-that-easy-fonts-make-things-harder-to-reme/
  7. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Nah. My friend hates her stepsister. Also, since my friend is 26 and has never had an official Capital R relationship, "slut" is not a word one could use to describe her. She did tell me today that she plans to come back to visit again this spring. And I offered to take her on a vacation to be...
  8. Mercutio

    Kindle

    The theory goes that, because text is so easy to read, we need to less cogitation to comprehend it. Because our brains don't have to work as hard, we don't retain.
  9. Mercutio

    Monitors w/massive brightness range

    I buy almost everyone 22" screens. They're the monitors that cost $120 - $150 and it's just that simple.
  10. Mercutio

    Kindle

    A Nook Color is a fairly capable tablet device and I kind of like that. My biggest complaints about e-ink readers are that the screens updates are comparatively slow. The user interface on a Kindle is kind of awful, too. On the other hand, the text is very sharp and readable and ebooks are very...
  11. Mercutio

    Something Random

    Kent, Washington.
  12. Mercutio

    XBoot - Merge your Boot CDs together!

    All those disk tools are on Hiram's boot disc and probably the ultimate boot CD if you can track down a copy of either.
  13. Mercutio

    Something Random

    From an Email exchange I had with a friend, whose sister has decided that the cast of "Jersey Shore" is her fashion and behavioral template, and whose taste in literature runs to Twilight and "Teen People":
  14. Mercutio

    Monitors w/massive brightness range

    Sadly 4:3 LCDs have gone the way of the dodo. Sniff.
  15. Mercutio

    Third Party Batteries

    Just a quick science experiment to bring up: One of my customers asked me to order him extra batteries for his and his main salesman's Lenovo T400 notebooks. The battery used in that model is the same as the one used in my widescreen T61 and in newer T410 and T510 models that several other...
  16. Mercutio

    Monitors w/massive brightness range

    I'm not arguing and frankly given my situation I don't think anyone can blame me.
  17. Mercutio

    Monitors w/massive brightness range

    Not on a Lenovo. 1440x900 is the highest resolution I've seen on a 14/15" Lenovo screen. If you want to go blind looking at a high-res Dell screen, I gotta tell you, there are better ways to go blind.
  18. Mercutio

    Monitors w/massive brightness range

    He was referring to the notebook. The displays on new Thinkpads are indeed very nice.
  19. Mercutio

    low-end laser printers these days?

    I'd probably go with the more expensive Brother printer, just because I know there's no limit to the things HP is capable of fucking up.
  20. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    I won't be able to go out there again until next week. The theory that IDE emulation or something similar is the source of the problem makes a lot of sense, but of course that's something I can't correct without having to do a repair install of Windows and that's not going to happen on that...
  21. Mercutio

    low-end laser printers these days?

    None recent enough to matter.
  22. Mercutio

    OCZ quits making RAM

    Still waiting to get my 240GB Vertex back, too.
  23. Mercutio

    OCZ quits making RAM

    Now if only they'd quit making SSDs
  24. Mercutio

    low-end laser printers these days?

    I've been directing my customers to Brother laser printers for the last few years. The MFC-2xyz guys are very solid hardware.
  25. Mercutio

    Animating pictures

    That word is much worse than the one I thought you meant.
  26. Mercutio

    Rain and flood

    More reports of Australian streets being invaded by man eating terror fish.
  27. Mercutio

    nVidia Laptop GPU Settlement

    Yes, because I strongly suspect those chips are the single biggest impediment to the laptop having a long life regardless of its present operational state. I have a couple made in 2000 750MHz IBM T20s in my apartment that still work just fine. Someone can say that these are notebooks that are...
  28. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I am Storagereview.com forum user #7. I don't visit the forum any more. It's too noisy there. I've looked a reviews a few times in the last year. I'm primarily looking at performance graphs or a reviewer's subjective opinion about drive noise. I really don't pay much attention to the verbiage of...
  29. Mercutio

    nVidia Laptop GPU Settlement

    I have some customers who have Latitude D630s, and both my parents' notebooks are affected as well. People keep Apple notebooks forever and ever. Even if you don't personally own or support this hardware, you probably know some people who do.
  30. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    I bought the Marvell card. I don't know if I'll get to try it before next week, but at least I have it now.
  31. Mercutio

    question Multiple servers booting from SAS

    SAS does not work that way.
  32. Mercutio

    Compact storage server or storage tower w/ 8 Bay(Min)

    Newegg sells an ARK rack mounted case that has nine 3.5" bays and three 5.25" (enough to hold a 5 in 3 enclosure), which holds a very respectable number of drives. When they're on sale they drop down to $60 with free shipping. Cabling is a nightmare but they're very easy to silence.
  33. Mercutio

    nVidia Laptop GPU Settlement

    Looks like people who have Apple and Dell machines with faulty nVidia GPUs can get the GPU replaced for free.
  34. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    I'd rather have eSATA work the way it's supposed to.
  35. Mercutio

    Something Random

    I was thinking it's like the best parts of Aliens and Black Hawk Down, myself.
  36. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    The big database is SQLbase. It dismounts and dumps a snapshot once a day and has its own maintenance setup, but that still needs to go in with the larger system backup. I'm doing a full backup once a week and differentials through the week. The removable drive is supposed to be replaced daily...
  37. Mercutio

    Something Random

    That's the reality of working for a small business.
  38. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    I'm not sure what you mean. Currently, there are two RAID1 arrays in that machine, one for the OS and one for the databases and file share stuff. I can back up the OS array on the other drive, but the other array's (differential backups) won't fit on the OS drive.
  39. Mercutio

    Lenovo Thinkpads

    I think it's automatic and shouldn't be used unless 3D stuff is actually happening.
  40. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    That's still a Silicon Image chip.
  41. Mercutio

    Rain and flood

    Basically everything that lives outside and comes from Oz can kill people anyway. I've read that even cuddly little Koalas are vicious bastards, let alone Nature-Guide killing fauna and carnivorous plants.
  42. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    There's only one place to put a card in a 1U server. If the card has internal SATA ports but not an eSATA port, there's no place to put a plate with an eSATA port on it. The card would need the eSATA port. All the internal drive bays and ports are in use.
  43. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    I haven't seen any that have onboard eSATA ports.
  44. Mercutio

    Lenovo Thinkpads

    All claims about battery life are lies. I can an uninterrupted get 6:45 out of my SSD-equipped T61 if I disable the NICs and Bluetooth, turn the display brightness down to "3" and use both the nine cell and ultrabase batteries.
  45. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    Tyan says it's not their fault, and I don't have ready access to test another of that particular variety of GT20. But given my past experiences with Silicon Image, I'm not willing to discount the possibility that everything with one of their chips in it might be garbage.
  46. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    Not yet. Every time I'm there I'm under the gun to get crap done in the maintenance window. It's statistically improbable that I got three bad cards from three different vendors, though.
  47. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    No. Yes. Yes. The drives work fine. The enclosures work fine when connected to a different machine on a native eSATA port.
  48. Mercutio

    Rain and flood

    Distances are different up in Canuckistan. They're in some weirdo frenchy measurement system for one thing and for another we're all convinced that your currency is based on beaver pelts and poutine and that everything north of Toronto, Windsor and Vancouver might as well be Nunavut.
  49. Mercutio

    Lenovo Thinkpads

    Funny that this thread is at the top of the list. Now that the UPS man has come for today I have a 12" Edge, a 15" Edge, an L-series, and two SL-series in my office. I like the SLs best.
  50. Mercutio

    Sil3132: Can Silicon Image do anything right?

    In theory, yes. In practice, I doubt it.
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