Posted 11/20/2009 at 07:52:52pm

I'm guessing you are not a subscriber to the mag, or you might know that the Ask the doctor questions posted online are typicaly from the most recent publication, and sometimes there's quite a bit of slack time.

Posted 11/12/2009 at 05:12:24pm

I'm still using a 19in CRT... Gasp! 75Hz in case your wondering. Unfortunately it's not very "Maximum" but it's what works until I can afford a very high quality LCD that's both quite a bit larger, and can reproduce most of the sRGB color space since I do quite a bit of photo editing. For now, I just have to do a lot of zooming in and out while making edits, but at least my colors are accurate. For anyone wondering, I do calibrate about every six months, and this old CRT has been rock solid.

Posted 11/11/2009 at 03:42:43pm

Maybe I am mistaken... I'm specificaly speaking about the range of color the monitor can reproduce. The article mentions percent of NTSC color reproduction but RGB is a slightly more inclusive color space, and it is that level of reproduction that I think matters more for photographers and maybe even gamers. Am I way off base? Any monitor review I've ever read in relation to photography or print layout reviews based on sRGB reproduction.

Posted 11/10/2009 at 10:39:27pm

Sure NTSC is the right way to go about judging a monitor for video output for Movies, but Photography relies on percentage of RGB or sRGB coverage. Don't video games also render in the RGB color space?

MPC is usualy on top of their game, but this is one article that let me down, and is rather unusable for me.

Posted 10/29/2009 at 10:21:03pm

I already use a whole house electricity meter called The Energy Detective. It's been really useful in helping me figure out how much energy we waste. I found out that my house was pulling near 200 watts even when I thought Nothing was on! I started eliminating unused but plugged in transformers wherever I could. Now I'm down to 80 watts standby power. That's about a $14/month savings! Having a history record and nice graphs on google would be even better!

Posted 10/19/2009 at 07:01:12pm

After limping along on a P4 (not even multi-threaded) for far too many years, I finally built a new machine almost a year ago now. I loaded Vista 64, and 6GB of ram, along with the Intel Core i7 920, and it's been simply amazing. I run grid computing sometimes, Adobe Lightroom 2, and Photoshop CS4, Premier CS4, and a few other heavy apps like DVD video transcoding, and I often watch the load balancing on the 8 logical cores, as well as the memory load. Vista 64 does an awesome job. The only compatibility issue is my work does not support 64 bit for VPN, so it's back to my laptop for working from home, which is fine with me, I enjoy working from the living room, kitchen, or backyard.

I've preordered Win 7, but I won't be loading it immediately. I'm going to see what news comes out about everyone elses success or issues first.

Posted 10/01/2009 at 09:42:55am

Even a fully powered down PC draws some power simply to monitor the power switch. Plus all the peripherals that might be plugged into transformers that leach power all the time. I got a Kill-a-watt meter, and found that my desk was still pulling 39 watts even with everything powered down. I estimate on average my desk goes unused 20 hours/day. I did some math and found out that turned out to be $5 on my electric bill each month. Since then I arranged my power strips in such a way that now I can easily cut power to my entire setup with one conveniently located switch flick. Imagine this savings multiplied by hundreds of thousands of computer owners...

Posted 09/14/2009 at 05:18:13pm

I've had to call Microsoft when reinstall XP before. I can't remember if my disk is a full or OEM, but I've been using it since XP launch date. I've probably reinstalled 12 times or more because of many reasons, often switching hardware, or to a whole new system. I've noticed that if a lot of time has gone by since the last reinstall, like 9 months, there's no issue. But when I reinstalled 3 times in 2 months, it made me call.

I've probalby called 4 times, and it's pretty scripted. They ask what you to explain what you've done, then they ask you to verify that you are only running the OS on one machine, and have completely removed it from the old machine. Then you read them your key, and they read you some verification code back that you must enter, and that's it.

If you lie and have several machines checking in for auto updates I imagine your key will get blacklisted, but I'm only guessing. I have no idea how strict they are.

Posted 08/12/2009 at 02:27:39pm

I can only think of two off the top of my head:

1) Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz   ->   Core i7 920 OC'd to 3.3Ghz

2) 256 MB Ram   ->   1 GB in the P4 system a couple years ago

Posted 08/06/2009 at 01:52:48pm

I've got nearly the same build, including the SAS drive.

At first I was worried that I went with SAS since it appears to be such an odd-ball in the consumer market, but the the performance is unmatched without going to solid state.

When I was planning my build I had no idea what SAS was until I saw the Asus P6T board had it available. Then I compared the Fuji SAS drives and the VelociRaptor and for price and performance the SAS drive was better at both. (I just reccomend a case fan be pointed directly at it)