Posted 11/12/2009 at 11:17:39am

the worthless overpriced crap that some manufacturers come up with. If the flashlight lasted 1000 years it is still priced about twenty times what it is worth. You'd have to be pretty gullible to spend $300.00 on a flashlight no matter how much money you have to throw away.

Posted 08/07/2009 at 06:26:52pm

80mm is the standard case fan size. 120mm is found on a few custom systems but it is far from being the standard.

Posted 07/31/2009 at 07:38:16am

The time I went into a local conputer store looking for a replacement heatsink fan. The guy behind the counter wanted to know if my processor was a Celeron, Pentium or Athlon, this after I asked specifically for a Socket A HSF.

Posted 07/20/2009 at 07:19:10am

I am a little puzzled as to why he was able to access the 1 TB drive before reformatting the OS drive and now he can't. Is he using he same version of Windows before and after? I am assuming he has updated his newly formatted drives with all of the latest service packs and updates. Maybe not. Perhaps in the editing of this question/answer some vital details were left out. Or am I just missing something?

Posted 07/16/2009 at 12:29:28pm

As a former Mastering Engineer for EMI Music at a compact disc manufacturing facility, this doesn't surprise me. That the original CD is superior in sound quality to an MP3 rip is a gimme. But the convenience that an mp3 library gives for playing a large number and a wide variety of songs can't be topped. I start Media Monkey, set it to shuffle mode and let it play without having to swap discs or pick and choose tracks. However, I prefer to do my own ripping and that is where owning the cd comes in. Not to mention the Artwork and lyrics that come with most discs.

Posted 07/08/2009 at 12:25:09pm

My first computer was a Heath H89 with a 2 Mhz Z80, 32k of RAM and a SSSD 5-1/4" Floppy disk drive that held 100K per disk. I built it from a kit that was much more complicated than the component level builds I do today. Soldering skills were an absolute necessity. I eventually upgraded it to a 4 Mhz Z-80, (again soldering skills required), 64K of RAM and a different floppy controller with external drives that allowed me to store 720K per disk. This upgrade allowed me to run CP/M 2.2 rather than the proprietary HDOS that came with the system. Heath eventually came out with a 10 meg. hard drive upgrade that cost $3000, which was way too pricey for me. I built the system in 1981 and used it until 1990 when I donated it to a church in Iowa. But before doing so I played the game Adventure through to the end several times. Not to mention Dungeons and Dragons.

One of the annoyances of CP/M was that any time you swapped disks, you had to do a Ctrl-C or you would get an error when you tried to read the new disk. But if you were interested in writing custom applications you had everything you needed to do so. It came with an assembler, Microsoft BASIC and there was also a Pascal compiler available for $$49.95 called Turbo Pascal. I did several programs in Turbo Pascal and wrote several articles for a magazine entitled Sextant Magazine sharing my software gems. Using Turbo Pascal I could include in line assemby code that would access directly video memory directly. This increased execuation speeds exponentially.

But alas I am rambling too far down memory lane. I find myself on a maze of twisty little passages all alike. Or is it a twisty little maze of passages all alike?

Posted 07/04/2009 at 08:24:05pm

Sorry guys but in my experience I have found IE8 to be a better overall browser than Firefox. I haven't seen any of the bugs IE8 that several have mentioned. Even the load times for the sites (this one included) that I frequent are faster with IE8. I compared load times at many sites and found this to be true. I am not sure why my results are so different from the magazine reviews but it is truly the case.

Additionally, I prefer several features in IE 8 over Firefox, such as navigating my Favorites list. Given my experience I am not interested in cludging up my systems with Firefox 3.5. Of course on my Linux system IE8 is not a choice so I use Firefox by default. But I don't like it as well.

Posted 07/04/2009 at 09:32:51am

Thank you for the informative review. I had been considering purchasing Premiere Elements but given what you have to say about it I think I will give it a pass. I don't have the latest and greatest in hardware. With that in mind can anyone recommend a good video capture and editing program? You mentioned ULead and Corel. I have a Core 2 Duo E7200 with 2 gig of memory and a 500 gig Sata drive on one system and a Dual Pentium E5200 with 2 gig memory and a 160 gig PATA drive on the other. Both systems use the onboard Intel graphics.

Posted 06/29/2009 at 09:24:41pm

Well, maybe not quite that good. But the last time I paid $50.00 for a version of Windows was way back in 1998 when I bought Win 98 upgrade edition. And it didn't work nearly as well as Windows 7 RC has worked for me over the last couple of months. I have been running XP for seven years now and have never been even tempted to switch to Vista. But I downloaded the RC release of Win 7 and have been very pleased with the performance. It boots faster, is less resource hungry, seems more stable overall, and runs all of my current applcations without exception. I installed it on a second machine that is an old socket A runniing an Athlon Xp 2500+, 2 gig of RAM, and some other legacy hardware without any hiccups at all. I gladly preordered two copies of Win 7.

Obviously if you are happy with whatever you are running stay with it. But XP support will run out next year. And I imagine Vista will not enjoy as long a support life as XP enjoyed. So like it or not you will have to switch eventually. Personally I am ready now, without any reservations.

Posted 06/27/2009 at 03:51:10pm

I have two systems with SATA drives and I don't hear any noise from them that even closely resmbles grinding. And I don't have loud fans to mask any noise from the drives. They don't make any more noise than my PATA drives do, in fact they probably make less. I think the Doctor has hit the possible causes very accurately.