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It's possible, but I don't think the marginal improvement is worth the investment. Chasing the last 1% that stands between what I have and some magnificent audio perfection is what distinguishes my brother from me. I have a great setup (less the HDMI I know I don't have, but my stuff is ripped...

Most of the fine tuning I've had to do in relation to volume control was as simple as bumping the volume for my center channel.

Handy, I have fantastically expensive speakers. Speakers that cost more than my car. They're REALLY nice. And my receiver can make them louder than I could ever hope to play them. I'm not my brother the audiophile nutball, but I'd say that if your aim was to get better sound, you'd be better off...

The preamp is basically just going to make the speakers you're using it with louder. That's cool and everything but I'm not sure it's needed with a decent receiver.

I really, really hate, nay, despise the way that every gathering of adults I have been to in the last three years or so turns into a discussion about what other presumably adult persons do with their time on Facebook.

My boot drives are almost always plain old 250GB SATA drives or 80GB SSDs, LM. The assumption I make when I set up a system is that there will be at least five hard disks in it. The other four will be as ginormous as I can afford and they will be used in some kind of array.

I'd like better onboard graphics as well, but that's not a make or break issue for purchasing a system. I suspect I'd be happier to find notebook-style switchable graphics and a discrete onboard GPU rather than just another iteration of Intel GPU. In notebooks, I'm perfectly fine with whatever...

Me, since my budget systems are still Core2s and not i3s. I still have six G41M-ES2Hs to sell. But I'm going to buy a bunch of RAM regardless.

Amazon will ship it for free, though.

I'm still fondly recalling June of '09, when 2GB of DDR2 got as low as $16.

The newest version of Handbrake apparently supports BluRay ripping though AnyDVD is still necessary.

At some point I'll replace my main receiver but it's lower on my priorities list than paying for all the blank LTO4 tapes I have to buy.

The nine year old $2000 Integra Receiver I have that works just fine.

I just wish I had a receiver that supported HDMI.

I don't remember what I have any more in my living room or bedroom but as I recall they're palladium and teflon and the banana plugs are gold. Probably $100 or $150/foot. Maybe more than that. It's retarded audiophile stuff.

I use my brother's stupid-expensive hand-me-downs, but I've never been able to tell the difference between those and cables and connectors I've purchased at Home Depot.

I'm perfectly willing to rip DVDs and I have a seriously huge library of local content (~7500GB). I've been doing this stuff seriously for years now, so I have a very good starting point for not really having to download anything if I don't want to. I do not ever torrent feature films. I only...

I run btguard on one notebook that doesn't do a whole lot besides that. Most of the stuff I'm downloading is, frankly, not going to get me in trouble. I will say that you should probably do an "advanced install" of their client, because the software they include otherwise is utorrent 2.0, not 2.2.

There's a speed reduction. I get probably 250kB/sec, which is fast enough. I don't use btguard for everything, just the stuff where I think it matters. Everything I've read says their encryption is good enough and they definitely aren't logging anything, which is what I want it for. Ratios...

It's been 11 years since we've had a serious technical issue related to hard disk capacity. It's been a nice run.

I suspect my year is going to be kind of crummy but I hope things get better for other people.

It's a persistent drawback of 3D, at least in every presentation I've seen that way. I don't think I could quantify it, but it's very obvious to me.

I guess that's enough time for everyone!

Looks like a lot of happy people there, paugie. What's the stuff in those bowls?

What's it like in the future, time? I'll also wish everyone a happy new year to everyone. Except ddrueding. Screw that guy. ;)

At least 90% of the time, 3D is a gimmick, but I've seen it both ways and I have to say that Tron is a movie where the 3D does enrich the experience. I hate the glasses and the way that color gets washed out in a 3D presentation, though.

I got an unopened package of gum once in a box from Newegg.

The market for ultraportables is already based more on status than capability, but an Eee isn't the same thing as an X201 or Macbook Air and anyone who might buy one knows that. Some of the executive doofuses who carry those notebooks now might very well be able to get away with an ipad or some...

He can and he does, sir.

Intel finally announces some new SSDs. Short story: They're tiny and performance is in line with an X-25M, but they aren't available to end users and they're even more stupid-expensive than normal for their capacity.

I enjoyed True Grit on just about every level. The Coen brothers don't make bad movies but it was easily the least Coen-y movie they've ever made. Still, it's well worth the couple hours. If you go, know that there will be gentle, manly tears. It's that sort of movie.

It's clunky in that input is god-awful. The size is fine.

Hilariously, if somebody did smash in my window for a $100 GPS, they'd probably ignore the $5000 worth of easily sale-able computer parts that are in the back at all times.

So I bought a GPS. Mostly because I'm three for three on getting lost while visiting my parents in Knoxville. It's a Garmin Nuvi 205. It's unbearably clunky. I find myself wanting to plug it into a PC and drop an address book into it from that, but it does not appear to have that functionality...

That's a very good build, actually. I think MSI motherboards are a touch sketchy and of course there's some unfortunateness with your hard drive selection, but I think your hardware spec is very reasonable for the machine's functions. There are Windows media remotes and very good wireless...

Of course, having recently praised Amazon for their good shipping methods, I recently ordered a pair of drives that were delivered flat in the bottom of a box that contained nothing else but two air packs that did not even reach the edges of the container on any side. Neither of the drives...

I work in a windowless room. My classroom is a windowless room. It's very common for me to not see the sun for four days in the winter time.

Aren't the Kingston drives rebadged Intel X-25s?

Usually my period is not a very happy time even if it's a holiday. :P

No but they will never be forgiven.

I'd still take OCZ. Nothing can beat WD's 13 RMAs for 9 drives in one year record.

I usually buy 22" Dell or Hanns-G (depending on budget) screens for pretty much everything. I think a 19" widescreen is too small for useful work on a desktop and frankly most office dwellers love all the screen real estate even if the lion's share of them do change the resolution of their...

I've been three different places and haven't made a decision yet. I really don't notice a difference between a $500 mattress and a $1400 one. I suppose the more expensive ones last longer but I don't know that for sure.

Clearly, you are cursed and must repent for your evil ways.

I do that, exactly. I keep a 15" Thinkpad R52 out by the couch in my living room. It's perfect for light browsing. It has a 1400x1050 screen and is primarily used to VNC/RDP into my other computers. With 2GB RAM and a 100GB 7200rpm drive, it's perfectly respectable, just a little bit heavy.

A laptop fom 2006 would need three things to be made useful: A 7200rpm drive, a new battery and at least 2GB RAM. Depending on the notebook, a knockoff battery could be $30 to $75. Fine. A 500GB SATA drive is probably $60 more. Whatever the biggest 7200rpm IDE drive, it's probably $100. And 2GB...

I'll wish you all a jolly Saturnalia.

Usually if they get that big and you aren't dead they probably aren't going to kill you.

What friends?

Savings as percentage of income, perhaps? Japan would be a rather conspicuous counter-example to that idea; they're a nation of thrifty people and they've been in an economic morass for more than a decade, where our economy is run on the assumption that people who have money will immediately go...