Posted 12/04/2008 at 01:22:24pm

I can think of another name for Comcast...

Anyway, seriously, I'm not worried about hitting their cap, half the time I can't even get on the internet.  Ok, so it's not quite that bad...and I'm hoping it's because they're working on upgrading my area to the higher speeds...

 Personally I think they should've introduced the ability to check your bandwidth usage (even on the web under your account info) BEFORE they ever introduced the cap.

 Qwest has started to advertise fiber in town, so maybe I can switch to that before long...

Posted 11/17/2008 at 07:49:33am

Not that retailers are given a lot of options when it comes to pricing products from Micro$oft, but one wonders if the OEM licenses, back to school deals, etc will be as prevalent with this direct from redmond...

Posted 10/02/2008 at 02:39:07pm

My beef with Blockbuster is shortly after I started to like having the in store rentals, not 1, not 2, but all 3 of the Blockbusters close to me in town went out of business!!  There's no way I'll drive to the ones left just for that "extra".

Switching to netflix soon!

Posted 09/20/2008 at 08:00:28am

Let me begin by saying I was never going to buy this game, so take these comments for what they are.

 Publishers that keep insisting on crazy DRM schemes for PC games do not take the PC Gaming industry seriously in the first place.  In fact, they would probably be tickled pink if PC gamers just went away so they could totally focus on the consoles where they don't have near the issue with pirated software because of the consoles built-in DRM.

If you want to have DRM, make it for multiplayer only!  Even then I'm not sure it's necessary.  A bunch of us used to get together and play a LAN game and we'd do what it took to make sure everyone could play.  Eventually everyone ended up buying the game so we could play on the net.  But it sure was nice to be able to expose people to the game without having to buy it 10 times.  

 No DRM means nothing for hackers to hack...which means they eventually go away and do other things.  Keep throwing new challenges their way and they're never going to go away and people will continue to play the games without buying it.

Posted 09/10/2008 at 08:06:08am

MCE Integration... I use SageTV, so I have this today and don't have to worry about M$ putting any DRM on the files I save.  3 tuners and Showanalyzer all running on my homemade WHS box working like a champ.  Plan to expand this once I finish remodelling my house and get all my systems and extenders put in place.

A few features that would mean something:

• Automated (i.e. scheduled) backup of the server to external drives (this is currently a manual process)
• Speed up the client application (takes forever to connect)
• Speed up the file restore interface (very slow)
• Improve the system monitor (for clients) feature set
• Agree with the comment about the master drive being an issue (mine claims to have issues about once a month that require a repair...then it seems to be ok)
• 64-bit OS would be nice

Posted 07/23/2008 at 12:03:39pm

When manufacture's start putting this onto laptop motherboards, that's when this will be a really big deal!  When I'm at the airport and have to wait 3 minutes for my laptop to boot up just so I can do some last minute weather checks or e-mailing, it's really annoying!  I usually end up leaving my laptop in hibernate when I'm on travel just to avoid this, but that has it's own problems.

 Anyway, I see no reason for this in desktop machines, but in a laptop it would be extremely handy and would force microsoft to do something to either speed their boot time or create an instant on ROM.

Posted 07/03/2008 at 10:09:33am

So you subscribe for a year...then decide you don't want to resubscribe...does the software just stop working?  SO now you have all of these documents you can no longer open without either buying or resubscribing - think I'll stick with the boxed version that I can use for 10 years if I want to!

Posted 05/05/2008 at 08:03:26am

I'm currently remodeling my home and would love to have more info on the Z-Wave stuff you selected, how you configured it, etc.

Posted 03/31/2008 at 07:33:13am

When Max PC had their article about how bad Windows Desktop Search was (I was using it), I went ahead and banned it (I was experiencing degraded performance) and went to Google's Desktop Search. I usually like Google's products and do everything I can not to use Micro$oft's bloatware, but GDS just couldn't get the job done! Even after installing plugins so that it would look at some of the file types I wanted indexed, it was still an inferior product. I installed the WDS 4 preview on Friday and that night it had already built a big enough index to save me time and find what I needed when GDS could not (I currently have both installed)! So it's good to have WDS back and hopefully it won't have the performance issues on my system that it had last time.

Posted 10/25/2007 at 07:21:56am

So which desktop search package is recommended at this point?