Messages

1

Living Room / Re: More ammunition why patents are EVIL

« on: July 03, 2011, 06:42 PM »

Doing that alone would probably result in the majority of lawyers being put out of a job. Immediately making the world a better place.

-Deozaan (July 11, 2010, 05:40 AM)

Interestingly enough, Jesus said that you shall always have the poor with you, and it were the Lawyers of the Law that sentenced him to death.

2

General Software Discussion / Re: Partition Alignment increases performance

« on: July 03, 2011, 06:32 PM »

Has anyone here actually benchmarked their before and after results? I'd be very interested to know how big a difference this makes. IMO disk access is unacceptably slow these days compared to CPU, memory, and GPU speeds.

- Oshyan

-JavaJones (July 14, 2010, 03:26 PM)

In this scenario, "seat of the pants" is a very valid benchmark.  I have aligned partitions using the commonly available Paragon software and have literally visually seen impressive performance when nothing else was changed.

In the whitepaper, there is an allusion to two transactions being performed per read/write.  I have personally witnessed the lag through the HD LED on the front of not a few computers before and after aligning partitions.  Before alignment, the HD light would flash twice, hence darkness in between.  Once aligned it was a solid flash with no space in between for the same IO transaction in Task Mgr.

3

Living Room / Re: Dell knowingly shipped millions of defective computers?

« on: July 03, 2011, 06:25 PM »

My current job uses Lenovo and I haven't been very impressed with their reliability so far.  It makes me wish we had some Dell PCs here...

-darklight_tr (July 06, 2010, 08:50 AM)

IMHO, it is up to the IT director to figure out what they will be using.  If you are looking for a certain configuration find the best off-lease at least one generation back.  The companies that overspend on their technology encourage companies like Dell to empower Intel and tell us how much "cutting-edge" technology we need and at what price.

Once we use multiple vendors for product specific items we will greatly decrease this ignorance to fault capacitors.  It is like the new GM collapse.  Rubycon, Panasonic, and Nichicon will become standard practice, even if they have to buy up their competitors and take over the plants that make their designs but with seriously inferior standards.

4

Circle Dock / Re: 7 inch touchscreen

« on: July 03, 2011, 06:04 PM »

this is amazing! tempted to find one of those touch screens   

-Archon of Fate (June 28, 2010, 07:55 PM)

The Nokia N800 and Fujistu Stylistic series would be great too with a Network interface instead of USB, on Ebay for $50-$120...cheaper platform without wires...

5

General Software Discussion / Re: Slash your windows boot time

« on: November 14, 2010, 04:12 PM »

I found Process Lasso by Bitsum Tech which works very well for me and not only speeds up the boot but also keeps your system snappier, can be adjusted in real time by a few clicks...I was able to put XPSP3 on a 400Mhz Celeron 512mb with it.

6

Living Room / Re: Low energy use always on pc -- what's better, a laptop or a mini (htpc) pc?

« on: April 15, 2010, 09:41 PM »

Here is a nice one for $188.

http://tinyurl.com/y4k2nja

7

Living Room / Re: Networks and external drives

« on: March 08, 2010, 11:03 PM »

Also there is another solution that requires a purchase, you could get a 2.5" HDD in an external case (I like MovingStar) that uses 2 USB jacks to provide the power so there is no AC adapter.  Then get some 3M Dual Lock tape (from ACE or Radio Shack) and mount the drive on the back of your laptop.  Viola!  Removable External.....

8

General Software Discussion / Re: Why the aversion to .NET Frameworks?

« on: March 08, 2010, 10:43 PM »

For me my disgust with .NET started with a $3400 HP 19" laptop that came pre-loaded with Windows Media Center 2002.  It was going to replace my TV, DVD, Stereo, and Full Tower computer with a 21" CRT.....

After having it only a short while, all the Media Center functions stopped working.  I had to get on the phone with HP and after walking me through a 2 hour removal process with huge command lines working in the CMD window, it seemed that the .NET 1.x version was conflicting with the newer 1.x version and to quote Monty Python, 2.0 was "right out"....all the wrong extensions, etc. had permeated EVERYTHING....

I had the original discs from HP and even with a fresh, clean install, the Media Center functions would not work due to how .NET was installing incorrectly.  Even to this day, with those same discs slightly modified by nLite to accept any computer, they will not work properly and give .NET errors.  Even the Experience pack and the Space screensaver (EVA spacewalk guy) don't work properly on certain hardware configurations.

Now today, you can download great programs like CDXP Burner but they do not function unless you have the proper .NET framework installed.  What I have finally done is keep all the versions released, 1.1, 1.4, 2.0, 3.0 all on a separate USB drive and keep that in my 'toolbox' for when I am diagnosing certain problems on computers, because they are 20, 200, and 300mb downloads that I simply don't want to wait for, but even with USB 2.0 you still have to wait for extraction and then installation, rebooting a few times, etc....

I liked it when there was only the VB6 Runtimes that needed to install and everything was peachy in W2K...I just don't understand why we need to download and install a 200mb library of 'possibilities' to use a program that is 4mb in size....

I also agree that it was never designed for Linux, and installing the wrong version even below other versions can make X interfere with Y, and to diagnose it is bullocks!!!!!!

9

General Software Discussion / Re: Batch photo filter software?

« on: February 09, 2010, 02:05 PM »

http://www.giveawayo...oner-photo-studio12/

ZONER PHOTO STUDIO 12 IS AVAILABLE TODAY ONLY FOR FREE.  TRY THAT ONE!

10

Living Room / Re: Thinking about setting up a dedicated "secure PC" in my house.. Thoughts?

« on: September 28, 2009, 08:20 AM »

I have found www.gearxs.com to have really low prices on everything.  You can get a computer for $57.88 there.

11

General Software Discussion / Re: Sysinternals PageDefrag: Good, Bad?

« on: April 22, 2009, 01:47 PM »

Oh, one more quick note about older computers with not enough ram or DIMM slots to upgrade, they sell compact flash to IDE adapters for $5 on Ebay that you can buy and put a 1GB+ compact flash card in, then put that on your secondary IDE channel as slave below your CDROM then once formatted you could completely move your Page file to that disk and even though it is not going to be as fast as real RAM, it is definitely faster than a page file on your primary IDE mechanical drive since disk I/O operations per IDE channel is the hindrance.

12

General Software Discussion / Re: Sysinternals PageDefrag: Good, Bad?

« on: April 22, 2009, 01:31 PM »

12GB ha!  XP (32bit) can only use 3GB of Ram and most of the laptops I have seen with Vista pre-loaded only come with 3GB as well.

As mentioned, JKDefrag automatically downloads and uses PageDefrag from SysInternals very well by itself.

I use JKDefrag in this manner: 

1.  I first delete all the temp files I can by using the last page of the GUI and optimize the registry as well.  CCleaner style. 
2.  I also turn on "show hidden folders/system folders" in Tools/Folder Options and delete all the folders that are in BLUE and start with $NT (Service pack uninstall), as well as empty the recycle bin again.  I've never had to uninstall an sp or hotfix.
3.  I then set XP for "No page file" and reboot. 
4.  Then I run JKDefrag GUI and move everything to the END of the disk. 
5.  I then reset the Page file to whatever I feel is optimal based on the computer, typically the standard 1.5x Ram, accounting for any shared video cards, and reboot again.  This places the page file as close to the outside edge of the disk it is able to find in a contiguous space.  I have used 2x Ram sometimes when the computer has more HDD space than ram.
6.  I then re-run JKDefrag GUI in "last access" mode making sure I specify any additional space hogs such as the c:\windows\installer\* directory. 
7.  From that point forward you can leave JKDefrag Screen Saver in whatever mode you like best and set it to wait an Hour before it kicks in, and then only defrag if the last defrag was more than 24hours ago.

Works like a charm!

An interesting thing to note is if you have the time to sit there and watch JKDefrag, you can learn all sorts of things about your computer and usually run across several other large TEMP folders you never knew you had that can be deleted as well, such as MSO, various folders in the "all users" portion of Docs and Settings, and any folder with a hexidecimal name,   Just stop the GUI, wait for the screen to reappear, go into explorer (with hidden/system turned on) and delete that folder, empty the recycle bin, then restart JKDefrag.

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General Software Discussion / Re: software for removing greenscreen/inserting any background

« on: January 29, 2009, 02:53 PM »

How about Comedy Webcam?

http://www.at32.com/doc/comcam.htm

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Living Room / Re: My computer is older than YOUR computer!

« on: November 05, 2008, 04:22 PM »

Hey I can put together a 486-dx in a hearbeat and don't try me!  I still have all my Windows for workgroups 3.11 disks and I was running AOL and found a girlfriend in 1996!  ha ha.  no joke.

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Living Room / Re: Best Freeware FTP client?

« on: December 09, 2006, 01:42 AM »

I'll throw a vote in for VUBrief 5.3.  Set it and forget it.   Plus it does so much more...