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Surprised no one had posted this one already...

For a limited time the authors of Sticky Password are teaming up with Softpedia to bring you the latest version of Sticky Password for $19.99, a savings of 33% off the regular price of $29.99. (And these guys usually never run sales!)

Get the deal here:

http://www.stickypassword.com/softpedia

I was using a Dell Zino with Win7 and my WHS for storage across my homes ethernet.  Now setting up a jailbroken Apple TV2 and XBMC to stream media from my WHS.
It is quite full featured for such a small box, instant on doesn't hurt either.

The problem with an Apple TV2, at least a stock one anyway, is that it isn't capable of 1080p.

There's another DC thread about it here as well.

I thought *this* was the BRU thread?

After a few years hiatus using Mac OS X, I've just come back to Windows (alongside the Mac still though) and it's funny, I was in a total panic to install AV and Windows Updates before anything terrible happened.

Fortunately, the rush to install patches & updates before drive-by malware infects your Windows install has been a thing of the past since Windows XP SP2. A lot of things have changed for the better in the Windows world during your hiatus (and some things for the worse...and some even no change at all).

I think overall you'll enjoy the direction Windows has gone & the direction in which it is going.

During a [somewhat drunken] discussion last night, the topic of synchronization software reared its head and hissed at us.

I've got nothing to add, but I do wonder what it's like getting inebriated with friends & then have a rousing debate about syncing our stuff.

[@Innuendo.]

Thanks for posting re this @Innuendo.

Glad you are enjoying the freebie. I hope it encourages you to try out the trial version of the retail product. PerfectDisk is my favorite defragger by far and I've tried them all (and try out every new version their competitors release).

It looks like Jiri is trying to limit the damage:

"Jiri Novotny:
The Ultimate edition includes mainly "premium" features compared to Professional. You don't need them: 100 extra tree icons, spellchecker, two-line displaying of tasks, etc. Even in the future, the Ultimate-only features will be mainly features like this, eye-candy, etc. Everything truly important is in Professional - and always will."

While those are noble words from Mr. Novotny, his pricing structure does not bear out his words. If everything "truly important" is in Professional then why in the world are people going to pay the $110 for the, by default, 'non-important' features in Ultimate?

It does not make sense.

Forget the $119 price...I'd settle for finding a price in the U.S. similar to what 4wd paid for his...AUD $221 (approx. US $230). Closest I can find is US $270 (well, US $250 if you are comfortable ordering it off of eBay) with most vendors pricing being over US $300.

I'm not that old, but I can remember "2001 AD." It might be interesting to have a look at some issues of that again.

When you do, please let us know exactly when our flying cars are supposed to show up! 

I have three monitors and have found very few games that don't play well. For the couple of games that don't play well pressing Win + P and choosing just one monitor to play on invariably fixes the problem.

Glad to hear that gaming has finally caught up with multiple monitors. Now if the game developers would let us hook up enough for a 360 degree view.

Yes that is the one. By the way one minor frustration of that case is that it doesn't come with an external 3.5" bay.

Not much need for an external 3.5" drive bay these days. In these parts, it's hard to find anyone with a 3.5" floppy drive anymore.

How do you do that by accident?

Umm...butt-dial while dancing at the club with the hotties?

Unfortunately, router is rather generically used for combined modem/router these days, as is modem when they mean the combined modem/router, (parents). 

Especially since the OP is talking about DSL. It's very rare to see separate routers & modems handed out by DSL ISPs. It's almost always a unit with both built in.

A 28" monitor sounds really nice.. BUT if it were me, personal preference, I'd rather have two 21" monitors.

I think it all depends on how you work/play. I'd rather have one huge monitor rather than two smaller ones.

Okay! Okay! I'd rather have two huge montors.

Seriously, though, since Miles plays games it might be best to stick with one monitor. A lot of games don't work well with multiple monitors.

[maybe back too]

My favorite part of the excerpt...

“we fully believe we can get a man safely to the moon; maybe back too."

 

[x64]

It looks like the FTP is the 64 bit installer.

Yes, Stephen. The link I posted is to the 64-bit installer which is why I typed "here's a direct link to the x64 installer" and the FTP URL even has x64 in the path name.

I couldn't reverse-engineer the path for the x86 executable & I have no x86-based Windows installs to run the CNet installer to let it tell me what the path is.

I can't install it because I already have PerfectDisk Pro installed, but....here's a direct link to the x64 installer without having to go through the stupid CNet download manager:

http://ftp.raxco.com/pub/...load/PDFree/x64/setup.exe

For a limited time (how limited, I do not know), Raxco is offering a feature-reduced version of its defragger PerfectDisk at no cost. While the program requires an email address to run Major Geeks reports they were able to enter a fake email address with no complaints from the program. Check out the program details here:

http://blog.raxco.com/201...ree-defrag-beta/#more-710

Looks like I'm late to this party and I just skimmed the thread, but I'll try to interject some points that I don't think anyone else covered.

Re: graphics cards...this is tricky. There's nothing preventing you from running PhysX on an AMD card. However, PhysX is owned by Nvidia and they put little checks in their PhysX drivers that only allow GPU-acceleration on Nvidia GPUs. This yields better performance & in a lot of cases enhanced PhysX effects in your games. Another consideration outside of games is Cuda. That's an Nvidia exclusive as well & if you have any software that takes advantage of Cuda acceleration you might do well to consider Big Green.

However, things aren't so bad on AMD's side of the table. Per dollar spent you usually get more horsepower for your money with AMD & their cards are definitely more power-efficient than Nvidia's. AMD's cards handle a few esoteric video formats/codecs better than Nvidia as well.

If going with an Intel platform new chipsets are coming out touting the new PCIe v3.0 standard which are promising optimized data pathways for greater throughput. You can find this new standard in the new H77, Z77, and X79 chipsets. While PCIe v3.0 won't future-proof your new PC it might in the long run help you get a greater life-span out of it.

Now as for monitors, go big or go home. Try to find something with the ever-increasing more rare 16:10 aspect ratio. You won't notice much difference if watching movies at your desk, but you'll really value the extra screen space when you switch gears to productivity software.

Google tells me that Fractal Explorer is the application that opens fr3 files.

Arcsoft is offering some (all?) of their software at a discount up to 50% through a promotion in conjunction with Softpedia:

TotalMedia Theatre 5:
was $99.99 - now $49.99

Panorama Maker 6:
was $79.99 - now $55.95

PhotoStudio 6
was $79.99 - now $55.95

MediaConverter 7.5
was $39.99 - now $23.95

http://www.arcsoft.com/partners/softpedia.html

No word on how long the promotion is scheduled to last.

Thanks for this, Carol. I'm not artistic at all, but maybe it's time to learn.

I don't want to reopen the can of worms but I really can't see why people are still upset about ribbons. Having been using then now for 5 years (!) I have to say I wouldn't want to go back to the bloody silly toolbars in Office 2003 and earlier.

These days the only people who gripe about the ribbons are people who never gave it an honest chance & are dead-set against change. Coincidentally, those people usually refuse to move away from the Classic Start Menu interface and/or are Linux users (Sorry, Zaine!).

If you put some time into re-learning the way the program works with the ribbon interface you will most assuredly have a bit of a hard time adapting, but once you have, you will find yourself accomplishing things faster than you could with the old 2003-style menus.

I am not so sure that the Consumer preview is that far from the beta - they have to get a beta and a RC out pretty soon if they are going to hit the much leaked October release date.

What a lot of people forget (or perhaps don't even realize) is that Microsoft has multiple teams working towards an OS release that leapfrog one another with releases till RTM. What we have seen in the Consumer Preview is the result of the work of one such team. When Beta 1 hits we'll be seeing the resulting work of a different team who have been working months towards that release & will most likely have implemented code and features the Consumer Preview team didn't have access to for inclusion in their release.

As going far back at least as far as Windows 2000, people have always proclaimed that the sky is falling when Microsoft releases their preview releases. By the late betas the panicked masses have an "Oh, okay" moment of realization when they realize the preview release was nowhere near feature-complete.

Microsoft learned a valuable lesson with Vista that they vowed would never be repeated as well. Now, if things haven't changed by Beta 2 or 3 then I'll happily join all the nay-sayers in screaming towards the heavens.

...sigh...yeah.  The last backup is from a month ago.  I didn't want to rely on cloud services, so I haven't really figured out a good syncing solution with usb drives.  I can use ftp from a static remote computer, which I use with SFFS, but with USB I need something a little more mobile and complex.  So in the meantime, I haven't been backing up much and now I've paid the price.

If you're like me you've probably got a drawer full of small capacity thumb drives. Next time save a copy of your file to a couple (or more) different flash drives & you'll be prepared for disaster.