Recent Posts

1751

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free Outpost Pro, Outpost Security Suite, and Disk Keeper License Giveaway

« Last post by Innuendo on August 03, 2009, 09:39 PM »

Hey, Curt! Cheer up! Another chance to win!

https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=19400.0

1752

Found Deals and Discounts / Contest - Win 1 of 10 free lifetime licenses for Agnitum Outpost Security Suite

« Last post by Innuendo on August 03, 2009, 09:39 PM »

From the Agnitum web site:

Now as we launched Outpost 6.7, we’d like you to tell us about your experiences with Windows 7 RC. Those of you who decided to try the new OS and get your PC protected with Outpost 6.7 can give us a shot about how Agnitum's solution dealt with security issues in the new environment.

Your story can be of any length, but it should be something we can publish on our website - no bad language or libel, please! The 10 best stories will be published on our website and will win for each of their authors a free lifetime license for Outpost Security Suite Pro.

We expect your stories throughout August. September 1 is the deadline for submission!

Good luck - we look forward to reading your stories!


Enter here:

http://www.agnitum.c...ts/outpost-story.php

1753

General Software Discussion / Re: Collectorz.com... again!

« Last post by Innuendo on August 03, 2009, 12:03 PM »

I've never used or purchased any Collectorz software, but I remember checking their software out when they first released all their programs & I distinctly remember thinking to myself, "These guys are taking one program and database, changing the labels to suit different types of collections, and reselling the same program over and over masquerading as different, distinct programs. Is there any possible way a software company could exhibit more greed and be even more unscrupulous?"

Sadly, all these years later, Collectorz has shown me the answer to that question. My sympathies to all who bought into their crap & may the authors have a special circle of Hell reserved for them due to their greed & business practices.

1754

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Free Outpost Pro, Outpost Security Suite, and Disk Keeper License Giveaway

« Last post by Innuendo on August 03, 2009, 11:51 AM »

All right! 

For me, the only thing better than winning free software is helping someone else win some free software! Enjoy your software and remember DC in your thoughts when you think about donating to web sites.

1755

Living Room / Re: Anyone have an i7 chip yet? If so, tell me how you like it

« Last post by Innuendo on August 03, 2009, 11:50 AM »

According to Tom's Hardware there is also an i3.

-Shades (August 02, 2009, 03:11 PM)

I nearly mentioned i3 in my last post, but there's been so little talk about it that I thought I best keep quiet unless I misspoke.

1756

Living Room / Re: Anyone have an i7 chip yet? If so, tell me how you like it

« Last post by Innuendo on August 02, 2009, 02:40 PM »

Well, the smaller brother to the i5s and i7s are going to be the current line-up of processors. Some of the older processors are going to be phased out and some new ones introduced to make things line up more with the new role these processors are going to play.

At least that's the way I understand it. Come this fall things should be interesting as Intel could make some last minute tweaks to the way they want things to play out. Just another reason to wait a few more months, IMHO.

1757

General Software Discussion / Re: Why can't my computer detect the 6th Sata drive?

« Last post by Innuendo on August 01, 2009, 08:44 PM »

Dumb question but how does that affect you loading your own drivers?

-4wd (July 30, 2009, 08:57 PM)

It's not a dumb question at all as the MSKB article is worded such that there should be no effect at all on your own drivers you load, but things wouldn't work right for my friend till he applied the MSKB fix.

I attribute it to MS wonkiness.

1758

Living Room / Re: Anyone have an i7 chip yet? If so, tell me how you like it

« Last post by Innuendo on August 01, 2009, 08:43 PM »

I5 would be the smaller brother then? As in, it is for i7 what celeron was for pentium.

-myarmor (August 01, 2009, 05:04 PM)

No...it's not really a smaller brother, but rather a segmentation of the product lines into business versus consumer so rather than i5 is to i7 what Celeron was for Pentium, but it will be more like i5 is to i7 what Pentium is to Xeon.

1759

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Zipdate Utility for long file names?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 30, 2009, 08:18 PM »

Here's a good news/bad news kind of thing...

The good news is I found a GUI app that does exactly what you want. The bad news is that it's not a compiled executable. Just the source code is provided. Maybe skwire can compile it up for you/us.

ZipDater

1760

General Software Discussion / Re: Why can't my computer detect the 6th Sata drive?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 30, 2009, 06:01 PM »

I'm just glad I could help you out. Seems my friend lost a week's work, sleep, and some hair over that problem he had. It worked perfectly up till he moved to the Win7 public beta.

1761

General Software Discussion / Re: Why can't my computer detect the 6th Sata drive?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 30, 2009, 11:32 AM »

A-ha! This didn't take as long as I thought.

My friend was trying to get the hot-swap feature working with his Antec MX-1 enclosure coupled to his Gigabyte motherboard. He was hooking it up to the JMicron controller (which is rebranded as Gigabyte on their motherboards, but JMicron makes it) and the problem was if he hooked up the drive when the computer was on Vista (man, thought this was an older OS problem!) would not detect the drive unless he went into Device Manager and did a scan for changes or he rebooted.

This was not his boot drive & it was using the Gigabyte/JMicron drivers, but it still did not work till he applied the fix outlined in this MSKB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

The article talks of this fix is only if the affected drive is your boot drive & you are using the default MS drivers, but once he changed his BIOS to AHCI, rebooted, applied this fix, rebooted once again, and then finally reinstalled the JMicron drivers did his enclosure start acting properly.

And for those who don't want to read the MSKB article, I'll sum it up for you. This behavior is not a bug. It's a feature. Yay!!

Seems when Vista installs it takes it upon itself to disable all storage drivers it thinks the user will never need. If the OS installer doesn't detect AHCI it gets the killbit set in the registry.

Today's friendly tip is when installing an OS always have AHCI enabled even if it makes you have to endure the inconvenience of having to install a driver disk during OS install. Otherwise, your nice SATA drives with all their fancy new features are demoted to legacy IDE mode & treated as IDE drives by the OS which means no NCQ, hot-swap, and all the other cool stuff SATA drives can do.

And a final note, superboyac, just be thankful I'm an email packrat and never delete anything enabling me to bring you this knowledge nugget from December, 2007.

1762

General Software Discussion / Re: Why can't my computer detect the 6th Sata drive?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 30, 2009, 11:12 AM »

Just be aware that some versions of Windows have a bug that if you switch your drive controllers to AHCI that although Windows will go through the motions and ask you for new drivers and what-not the drives won't actually be in AHCI mode as these buggy Windows versions will 'forget' to change the necessary bits in the registry and that'll all have to be done by hand if you want your drives to be in AHCI mode.

I had a friend who bought an eSATA enclosure and wanted to you the hot-swap feature if I am remembering correctly. His PC had been set up in compatibility mode & he needed to change to AHCI mode for everything to work right. It was an adventure of discovery for him.

I'll check later and see if I still have his old emails on the subject, but I do definitely recall it wasn't a "change the setting in your BIOS, reboot, and your fixed" kind of deal.

1763

General Software Discussion / Re: Program Whose Time Has Come: virtual folders, collections, file baskets...

« Last post by Innuendo on July 30, 2009, 11:03 AM »

Great ideas and great post. I've said this before, WinFS was supposed to accomplish much of this, esp the part about having having a database backed file store, rich metadata and programmatic access to it. Its a real pity MS decided to scrap it.

-MrCrispy (July 30, 2009, 01:28 AM)

It got scrapped because it didn't work very well. It sucked the performance out of high performance PCs I have heard.

I think this could be done more efficiently by writing a file system driver which would hook into NTFS as well as a windows service that would work at organising tags, collections etc in the background. Obviously this is not a trivial task and I'm guessing it would need OS integration to really work well.

And this was basically what WinFS was. It was a database that hooked into NTFS & I guess that just wasn't a set-up that was efficient enough and quick enough to be viable. I'm sure, though, that somewhere in the bowels of MS there's a team working on the successor to NTFS that will have this kind of stuff built into the filesystem itself rather than something bolted onto the top of something else like WinFS was.

1764

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Innuendo on July 29, 2009, 10:40 AM »

Yes, I'm seriously tempted by this little gadget - very cool for plugging your external USB drive into the LAN at a meeting.

-4wd (July 29, 2009, 01:16 AM)

That is so cool! Now I need about 5 of them....

1765

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3.5?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 29, 2009, 10:04 AM »

Grorgy,
Ahh...I understand. I must have misinterpreted your message then.

Ehtyar,
Indeed, ruined Firefox profiles truly suck. I don't blame you for being careful.

1766

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Innuendo on July 28, 2009, 02:37 PM »

AHH!!  This case is SO sexy.  I need to get it:

-superboyac (July 28, 2009, 10:46 AM)

Must....resist....

1767

Found Deals and Discounts / Free Outpost Pro, Outpost Security Suite, and Disk Keeper License Giveaway

« Last post by Innuendo on July 28, 2009, 02:35 PM »

The Agnitum forum is having a free license giveaway of the following licenses:

    * Five (5) lifetime licenses for Outpost Pro
    * Five (5) lifetime licenses for Outpost Security Suite.
    * Ten (10) licenses for Diskeeper 2009 Pro.

All you have to do is visit the Free Licenses Celebration thread over on the Agnitum forum and tell them why you should receive the license of your choice. Humor and cleverness will go a long way towards winning you the goodie(s) you seek.

Free Licenses Celebration Thread

I'd love to see some DC members make off with at least some of the freebies.

1768

General Software Discussion / Re: Is the party over for Microsoft?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 28, 2009, 10:10 AM »

Dvorak is so non-relevant anymore. Maybe 10-15 years ago he was someone worth listening to, but now he's just a struggling computer journalist like all the rest of them trying to put an exciting spin on non-exciting news so he won't get canned in the next round of staff cutbacks.

Some talk of surplus being frittered away, but others might see it as research and development. What about Access? I remember back in the day when dBase had a stranglehold on the database market & nobody said entry into that software market could be profitable. Microsoft released Access v1.0 for $9.95-19.95 and looking at things now it seems they did all right with the product.

What about the Xbox? The world said Microsoft was foolish to try to compete with Sony and their PS2 especially with how much money MS was going to lose on the Xbox console at its release. By the end of its life while it wasn't a runaway success it had become profitable. Now let's look at the next generation. The Xbox 360 is the second best-selling console in the world and no, the number one spot isn't held by Sony.

Sure, my Microsoft Cordless Phone was abandoned and is collecting dust in a closet somewhere, but it worked well & explored some interesting aspects of phone/computer interaction.

Microsoft is huge & monolithic. They've also got money to burn and therefore have many more opportunities for research & development of products outside of their comfort zone. Some are going to work and some aren't. It's the same with any company except in Microsoft's case a huge failure isn't going to throw them into bankruptcy.

1769

Living Room / Re: Anyone have an i7 chip yet? If so, tell me how you like it

« Last post by Innuendo on July 28, 2009, 09:56 AM »

They are very tempting, but my advice is to wait. Just around the corner is i5, which is the consumer mainstream version of i7, and there's going to be changes in the Nehalam landscape. Motherboards will be cheaper and the socket pinout is going to be different. Everything is supposed to be cheaper as well.

My advice is keep saving and wait to see what i5 brings us. That's what I'm doing.

1770

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Innuendo on July 28, 2009, 09:51 AM »

superboyac, for some reason people seem to be obsessing about this 300W power supply. When I buy something like this the only two concerns in my mind are that it works and that it looks good sitting next to my other PC gear on my desk. I don't care about PSUs on devices like this unless internet reviews start popping up saying something is "woefully inadequate" or the like.

My thoughts on Granite Digital are I compliment you on your taste, good sir. Granite Digital has been around forever. It's just that most of us haven't heard of them because they are almost exclusively a Mac vendor & you can tell by the way all their stuff blends in with the styles of Mac Pros. And if something seems odd in a few of their designs chances are it was done to cater to their Mac customers because there was some kind of need for it.

As for me, although I really like the looks of Granite Digital's stuff I'm not going to buy anything of theirs as I know it will be the first step down a slippery slope towards me buying a $600 silver aluminum Lian-Li or Silverstone case.

1771

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3.5?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 28, 2009, 09:40 AM »

Ehtyar, thanks for the info. I tend to ignore exploring things that just work & the Firefox update mechanisms have always just worked for me.

Grorgy,
Firefox v3.5 and v3.5.1 are not beta. They are safe to use. In my experience Firefox will never tell you about updates to beta browsers, only non-beta versions.

1772

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Innuendo on July 27, 2009, 04:24 PM »

Re the DNS, I thought the front cover was a little wobbly...it came off too easily for my tastes.

-superboyac (July 27, 2009, 01:21 PM)

Empty the cover is a little wobbly, but there are metal coil/spring type things on the back that provide pressure against the drives once they are installed and then there's enough positive pressure that there's no movement/wobble at all.

I am curious as to what the power supply to the DNS is like.

According to the DNS-323 Wiki:

(with two drives)
HDs spinning/powering up - up to 72 watts for 3 seconds
HDs up, high CPU, Gigabit network transfer via CIFS/SMB - 23-24 watts
HDs powered down (sleep), otherwise running - 7 watts

My power brick has the following writing on the bottom:

Jentec Technology Co, Ltd"
Model: JTA0512
AC Input: 100-240Vac/1.2A
50-60Hz
DC Output: +5V/3A, +12V/3A

According to Jentec's web site it's a "34-61 Watt Dual Output Switching Desktop Power Supply."

I've been running this unit for over a year now & it's been a solid performer. I bought this as something cheap to get me by till I could afford something better, but I've been really impressed. I'd definitely buy a second one to run alongside the first if I ever had the need.

1773

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox 3.5?

« Last post by Innuendo on July 27, 2009, 03:55 PM »

Msgt,
When the version known as 3.5 started development it was originally going to be 3.1, but as time went on and new features were added the authors decided that too much was added for it to be just a .1 release so they upped the version number to 3.5 to help show that a lot more work had gone into it.

The 3.5 line of code is now up to 3.5.1 and has been out of beta for a long time. Your only concern will be whether or not the extensions you use will be compatible with the new version. As for upgrading you can just install right over the top of 3.0.12 and everything will be fine. You don't have to delete your old version first.

Ehtyar,
I just thought the rule was that no major new version was to be offered through auto-update just like one couldn't auto-update to v3 from v2, but v2.x upgrades were still offered to v2.x users.

1774

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox --3.5-- Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by Innuendo on July 27, 2009, 03:49 PM »

"Go to Top", an add-on that instantly takes you to the top or bottom of a page rather than scrolling up or down. 

-socalguy (July 27, 2009, 02:35 PM)

Guess I'm old school...I just use the Home and End keys for that.

1775

LaunchBar Commander / Re: McAfee again. Don't ask.

« Last post by Innuendo on July 27, 2009, 03:45 PM »

I agree.  I have several anti-malware programs that I run from time to time.

-cyberdiva (July 27, 2009, 02:02 PM)

That's the best thing you can do. Having a layered defense using multiple things to protect you is the wisest course of action these days. The days of just running a virus scan every month or so are gone.

A lot of people like ot run virtual machines and test out new software in a virtual environment to see how safe it is. I was reading the other day that malware writers have adapted & now a lot of viruses and trojans won't trigger if they detect that they are running in a virtual machine.

It's a constant cat & mouse game.