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Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't make a decent trackball and therefore is in my eyes disqualified from consideration in my input device purchases. One thing that I really don't like about expensive mice is all the stupid extra buttons. It pisses me off to no end when I find a seven button mouse...

I'm shocked that you were able to find any Thinkpads at all. They aren't available to normal electronics retailers in the US at all, as far as I can tell.

It might not even be a kickback. It might be that these guys sent a hot chick over to buy some poor guy with authority over procurement a nice lunch. That's a really frustrating situation to be in, though.

I've seen quite a few broken netbooks. Lots of damaged screens and keyboards. That might just be the result of people using them in places or situations where they wouldn't have considered using a traditional notebook, but I'm not particularly enchanted with any of the common brands that are...

Interesting thing to note: there are at least two different vendors making keyboards for Thinkpads now. I don't know the difference and Lenovo doesn't distinguish, but there's a good one and a bad one. The only reason I know is that I have two T60-series notebooks and their keyboards are...

Those same kinds of experiences are a big part of the reason I'm such a cheerleader for Thinkpads. Latitudes aren't bad either, but they're not quite in the same class for durability or industrial design. The people I work for bring me Acers and Toshibas and consumer class HPs, and they're all...

172.16.0.0/16 never gets any love. Also 192.168.0.0 is also defined as a /16, despite being on the wrong side of the traditional Class C boundary.

Well, 127 is halfway between 0 and 255. And the whole block is technically available for loopback needs.

By the time this sees the light of day we'll probably be able to get 20TB drives for $99 at Walmart.

I can almost certainly get you the .iso. If you really need one now I can remote in to a system on your end and grab it from Technet.

Some database systems have a provision for doing online backups. It's not impossible to manage. I do make use of RAID 1 on systems where I feel it's appropriate, mostly for critical business data on servers.

It's about getting the applications and workflow the creative-types actually want to use. I very carefully did not say that Windows does not have applications that do the same things. I'm pretty sure Pro Tools is cross platform these days, for example, but there may very well be some truth to...

LGA775 has had a surprisingly long life.

Audio production is an area where Apple's OS has the advantage for creative types. That is not incorrect. MBPs probably suck less, but I doubt it's worth what what they cost to her. She'll wind up using external hardware for all the things she'll be doing so I'm not sure a notebook is the right...

The DVDs that get made by those direct-to-DVD systems are almost always DVD-VRs rather than actual DVD-Video discs. That may be OK if you're watching them on a set-top player but if you ever want to do anything else that involves a PC, you need to be sure your software can deal with a DVD-VR...

I'm well aware. But I don't anticipate a huge change until ATI starts producing chips with a smaller manufacturing process, and I hear that's not coming until next year. Regardless, the 5770 is probably the best deal going in gamer-quality graphics hardware right now.

... and just now the Radeon 5770 has returned to the land of realistic pricing and availability. I got a couple Sapphire cards for $140 apiece this week. Back in December retailers wanted $225 for them when MSRP was $150, just because of demand.

Solution: Don't buy one drive. Buy eight or 10. The last one-off drive I bought, I got from Amazon.com. They packed it in a little box with those plastic air-filled bags. The drive was fine (Amazon has a distribution center maybe 30 miles away so it was only an overnight trip), but that...

Modern versions of Windows certainly are aware of my connection type and how much bandwidth is available on those connections. I'm just not sure why it it always prioritizes the unreliable, low-speed wireless connections over a faster, more reliable one. I usually do have the Lenovo Access...

A new annoyance with Windows 7: It seems to prefer a wireless connection over a wired connection when both connections are present. I thought this might just be a driver issue, but I had the opportunity last night to test several different Win7 notebooks and I found they all did the same thing...

You lost me at "bought." Amazon.com gives me download store credit all the damned time. I've used that a few times. I like their technology, but it's virtually impossible for me to find licensed downloadable music I actually want. There's a solid community of classical music traders on a...

For about 90% of people who have an office suite on their computer, I'd say absolutely nothing.

OCZ finally got back to me this morning. They asked for 15 points of information including motherboard model, RAM voltage and BIOS revision and just gave me a large text area on a web site to type it all in. Not even a proper form. I don't think I'd buy OCZ-anything again.

I don't have much of an investment in SSDs. I have three i7s and two machines with high-end graphics cards. The only thing I really do have is an excessive number of really big hard drives. And kitchens really are expensive. He is not lying about that. But I don't think cabinets are hard to...

The best theory I heard was that Intel wants entry into the mobile/embedded security marketplace. I can't imagine why.

I called OCZ yesterday to try to get an RMA. They told me they have no process for handling an RMA by phone. I have to use their online system. Their online system is not automated. Every claim has to be reviewed by a human being on a first in first out basis. As of this moment I still haven't...

One of my customers is a Primavera (Project Management software) consultant, another recent victim of an Oracle takeover. He's talking about abandoning his business because he's essentially lost all his ties to the software or its developers, and now Oracle is demanding that he obtain an assload...

Why the hell would anyone fuck up their computer with Acrobat software? I don't understand it. It's like asking the Haitian bisexual hemophiliac IV drug addict if he'll take off the condom before he gives you the good time you just paid for.

Unlike Office 2007, it has a File menu. Office is basically the same program it was in 1994 as far as I'm concerned. They just keep moving the buttons and options.

You misunderstand. The machine works fine the minute I disconnect the failed drive. If I plug that same drive in a different machine, that different machine will also fail to finish POST. Well, for the two machines I bothered to try, anyway. OCZ's support is not impressing me AT ALL.

Nope. And the other drive in the same machine continues to function.

I just got my second dead SSD. This time the victim was an OCZ Vertex EX 60GB SLC drive. In this case, the system will not even POST with the drive attached.

I actually like the challenge of setting up a decent budget build. Making an awesome desktop is really easy as the available pool of money becomes larger, but it's always nice to see my low-end setup vs. the big OEMs'.

I've lived without zfs on Linux so far, and I don't think I really want to bother with a commercial product just because it would make storage management for my porn collection any easier. It has a drool worthy feature set, but if I really needed it, I'd be willing to put up with OpenSolaris in...

I got it about six weeks ago.

I have three co-workers and they're all approximately the same age as my mother.

One of my coworkers had been using one of my classroom computers to develop and test code. Classroom computers that get re-imaged on a regular basis. She says she lost almost 70 hours of work and she has no backup or other copy of what she's done. Now I'm trying to decide if I should actually...

I think Lunar might have some heath issues, guys.

Karla Homolka would like to have a word with you. Bonus: Already a resident of the great frozen north.

I have a little gun that lets me shoot a network cable about 25 feet that I use when I'm screwing around up in a ceiling. I don't know what it's called but playing with it is absolutely the only thing I like about doing any kind of wiring install. In my house, when I had a house, I did the most...

Hm. So I did. What do you know? I don't get to spend as much time at my desk as I used to. I'll see what I can do.

I always like playing Worms against the computer with the destructive power of all the weapons roughly doubled. That made drilling through the landscape with a minigun a valid tactic. Man that was a great game.

Yes, it's the combination of DirectX + Win98 that is specifically problematic. Virtualbox was actually the setup I tried first. Plus now I have a nice non-virtual computer set aside for it.

Classic Shell for Win7.

VMware Server, Virtualbox and VirtualPC do not provide that support.

Basically no one likes Cablecard. Hopefully the move to replace it with a new standard for digital cable access will be available soon. Cablecard is a big part of the reason I gave up on the idea of TV on a PC in favor of just torrenting everything.

I was working from the ORA Asterisk book and some hardware "recipes" I found on an Asterisk wiki site, for what it's worth.

I tried to offer Asterisk back in 2005 and 2006. I never got any traction for it with my customers and eventually I dropped the idea; most of my customers think of their phone system as beyond vital to doing business and even if they aren't happy with what they have, it's also not anything they...

I think it took longer to install the Catalyst drivers than it did to install Windows 98.

I decided that I need to build a retro-gaming system. DOS gaming is easy enough to do on any sort of computer, but I had a real problem with early DirectX titles. A lot of them puke on screen resolutions above 1024x768 or on NT-based OSes. My main requirement was that I had to have hardware...