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)

Posted 08/06/2009 at 11:53:12am

Can someone explain why google will have a monopoly? What's stopping any other company from doing the exact same thing? Just because copyright holders have agreed to allow Google to scan their works doesn't mean Google has exclusive rights to do so. Any other competitor could come along and do the same thing. Don't get me wrong, it's good that there are people out there checking up on Google, or any other huge company with lots of power, but in this case I'm a little confused why there is so much pressure against this project.

Posted 08/02/2009 at 04:38:00pm

You can send messages to email accounts from facebook, and a link for replying is included. They just don't have an inbound address.

Posted 07/22/2009 at 11:07:39am

I'd really like to know a little more about the Halo and WoW engines as well, more so Halo, but I doubt they are used for any other games.

Posted 07/13/2009 at 04:21:45pm

How could you leave out World Community Grid? It's one of the largest. They work on several humanitarian projects at once. I joined it almost 4 years ago.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp

Grid computing is great during idle time, or to use up the cpu cycles you're not using while at your pc, but be warned, leaving your system on 24/7, when typically you would normally only have it on a few hours a day can potentially raise your electric bill anywhere from $10 to $30 above it's norm, (closer to the higher amount with the machines the people on this forum usualy build)