Recent Posts

601

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Swift To-Do List 7 Standard FREE today 2012-03-26 Only on BDJ

« Last post by Innuendo on April 04, 2012, 03:26 PM »

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."

-Steven Avery (April 03, 2012, 08:03 AM)

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.

602

Living Room / Re: NAS Recommendations?

« Last post by Innuendo on April 02, 2012, 12:42 PM »

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.

603

Living Room / Re: Those "Boy's Own" type comics from the 40's & 50's

« Last post by Innuendo on April 02, 2012, 09:09 AM »

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.

-JennyB (April 02, 2012, 06:20 AM)

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

604

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to Build a PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by Innuendo on April 02, 2012, 09:04 AM »

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.

-Carol Haynes (April 02, 2012, 02:54 AM)

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.

605

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to Build a PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by Innuendo on April 02, 2012, 08:59 AM »

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.

-Carol Haynes (April 02, 2012, 06:44 AM)

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.

606

Living Room / Re: How the heck did she capture my phone display?

« Last post by Innuendo on April 02, 2012, 08:53 AM »

How do you do that by accident?

-Deozaan (April 02, 2012, 08:03 AM)

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

607

General Software Discussion / Re: restart router after few minutes of inactivity

« Last post by Innuendo on April 01, 2012, 09:16 PM »

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.

-4wd (April 01, 2012, 08:27 PM)

608

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to Build a PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by Innuendo on April 01, 2012, 09:13 PM »

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

-mouser (April 01, 2012, 11:53 AM)

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.

609

Living Room / Re: Those "Boy's Own" type comics from the 40's & 50's

« Last post by Innuendo on April 01, 2012, 09:08 PM »

My favorite part of the excerpt...

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

 

610

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PerfectDisk Free Edition

« Last post by Innuendo on April 01, 2012, 09:26 AM »

It looks like the FTP is the 64 bit installer.

-Steven Avery (April 01, 2012, 01:49 AM)

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.

611

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: PerfectDisk Free Edition

« Last post by Innuendo on March 31, 2012, 09:58 PM »

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...PDFree/x64/setup.exe

612

Found Deals and Discounts / PerfectDisk Free Edition

« Last post by Innuendo on March 31, 2012, 02:59 PM »

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.co...efrag-beta/#more-710

613

Living Room / Re: I'm Going to Build a PC. Suggestions?

« Last post by Innuendo on March 31, 2012, 08:44 AM »

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.

614

General Software Discussion / Re: fr3 files

« Last post by Innuendo on March 28, 2012, 06:34 PM »

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

615

Found Deals and Discounts / Arcsoft Software Sale in Partner with Softpedia

« Last post by Innuendo on March 26, 2012, 03:54 PM »

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.c...tners/softpedia.html

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

616

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: 'Sale' at Daz3d.com - most main apps free until the end of March!

« Last post by Innuendo on March 24, 2012, 07:16 PM »

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

617

Living Room / Re: Windows 8 is just a Service/crapware pack for Windows 7

« Last post by Innuendo on March 24, 2012, 07:04 PM »

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.

-Carol Haynes (March 24, 2012, 03:46 PM)

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.

618

Living Room / Re: Windows 8 is just a Service/crapware pack for Windows 7

« Last post by Innuendo on March 24, 2012, 07:00 PM »

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.

-Carol Haynes (March 23, 2012, 08:30 PM)

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.

619

General Software Discussion / Re: xlsx corrupt file, password protected, can't open...need help

« Last post by Innuendo on March 24, 2012, 06:52 PM »

...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.

-superboyac (March 23, 2012, 10:03 PM)

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.

620

Living Room / Re: NAS Recommendations?

« Last post by Innuendo on March 23, 2012, 08:16 PM »

"What, that?   I've had that for years, just hadn't got around to using it."

-4wd (March 22, 2012, 07:59 PM)

When I first read your post I read "that" as being your wife.

621

General Software Discussion / Re: Tagging audio files in itunes+ipod is an absolute NIGHTMARE!!

« Last post by Innuendo on March 23, 2012, 05:20 PM »

Could you recommend unofficial program(s) that can interface with iPhone 4S? Thanks in advance.

-erikts (March 18, 2012, 11:27 PM)

I don't own an Apple iDevice myself as I don't want to be locked into Apple's way they want you to use their products & that seems to be the problem with the new iPhone 4S and the new iPad 2. Seems Apple didn't like people using 3rd party programs to maintain their devices so they tightened things up for IOS 5 so unfortunately, not a lot of choices out there. No one has figured out how to interact with IOS 5 without iTunes installed....yet. The MediaMonkey people seem to always figure it out first so keep an eye on their web site for updates.

I did find, however, a program that's supposed to be able to do what you're wanting provided you have iTunes installed on your PC. It's called iTools. Keep in mind I'm not endorsing this program in any way. I'm an Android person myself.

Good luck & report back to let us know how it works out for you.

622

General Software Discussion / Re: WHAT Thaah ?

« Last post by Innuendo on March 23, 2012, 04:48 PM »

Well... I got an answer... just not the right topic.      This return email was about a question I had in July 2011.       Same older ticket number too.  I wonder what's going on over there?   

-crabby3 (March 23, 2012, 06:20 AM)

Maybe they've scanned their PCs enough times with their AV software that their PCs have gotten so slow they are backlogged back to answering tickets 8 months old.

623

Living Room / Re: Windows 8 reportedly set for October debut

« Last post by Innuendo on March 23, 2012, 04:28 PM »

Why is three years too soon? Windows 7 was released two years after Windows Vista. Back before the huge gap between XP and Vista Microsoft adhered to a two-three year release schedule & after Vista was finally released Microsoft announced that it was going to return to that release schedule.

I'll take the opposing side that three years between OS releases is far too long. In the IT world three years is an eternity.

624

Living Room / Re: Windows 8 is just a Service/crapware pack for Windows 7

« Last post by Innuendo on March 23, 2012, 04:21 PM »

The consumer preview is pre-beta software. They have basically just stuck Metro on top of Windows 7 to get people exposed to the new Metro interface. Once it enters beta that's when the rubber will meet the road. That's when Microsoft will actually begin shaping the OS into what Windows 8 will be.

There *will* be a fully functional UI for keyboard/mouse users. Microsoft has promised that all along. It's just that the developer & consumer previews have been built to showcase Metro and what it's potential will be. No need to panic yet.

And anyone who says that Windows 7 is just an optimized version of Windows Vista either hasn't spent much time with Vista, 7, or both.

625

General Software Discussion / Re: How to become Admin' for real?

« Last post by Innuendo on March 15, 2012, 10:55 AM »

The root of the C: drive (and other select folders) are protected by Windows from being written to by misbehaving/malevolent programs. This is generally considered to be A Good Thing as it can protect you from a lot of grief if one's PC is ever compromised.

Turning off UAC and circumventing Windows other security protocols is not a good idea at all. If you should ever want to save something to one of these protected zones, just right-click on a program's shortcut & select Run As Administrator if it's just a one-time thing. If you need something more permanent, then you should go into the program shortcut's properties and select Run This Program As Administrator on its property tab.

The smartest method is to work with UAC rather than try to work against/around it. If you are trying to download something from your browser to the C: drive, make a folder, and save the item inside it. You won't be bothered by UAC at all then. The location C:\ is a protected space, but say....C:\Downloads or C:\Graphics is not.

Personally, I have my primary hard drive set up as two partitions.  There's a small 75 GB partition & that's where I installed Windows. It's my C drive. I leave that for Windows to do what it will & for those brain-dead programs that don't know how to do anything but install to C: (Yes! They STILL exist!!). The rest of my primary drive is my D: drive. It's 1.8 TB or so & that's where I save all my downloads, install all my programs, and keep their data.

With this system even with having UAC on the highest, most secure setting I only see UAC prompts two or three times a week and that's when I'm doing something I know needs admin access like registry edits or installing certain programs that work at the system level. A sweet side-benefit to laying my hard drive this way is if the need or desire to reinstall Windows ever comes up I can just format that 75 GB partition immediately & reinstall Windows. I don't have to worry about copying/saving anything because everything is on the other partition.

(Oh, C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86) are protected spaces as well. Using my system above everything is installed to D:\Program Files and D:\Program Files (x86) which allows older programs and games that don't know anything about UAC to work properly.)