GoRedwings19's Computer Help Hotline

Having experienced two seasons of fires and one mandatory five minute notice evacuation we realized that among other things we have too many important items dispersed in too many places to adequately accommodate a last minute evacuation. So we've been doing some house cleaning and now have ten fifteen HDs that have been copied to a portable HD and need to be disposed of. There are a lot of recommendations on line but so far I have narrowed it down to either using a demagnetizer or drilling holes though the unit. Do you folks have any better more effective suggestions? Obviously due to the fire hazard, using a blast furnace is out of the question. Thank you.

Steve Jobs' worst nightmare gets a review: WarMouse Meta review -- Engadget

I attended this CME course and they gave us the lectures in iPod video format as well (.m4v), but I don't have an iPod or a Mac, so I'm having a hard time finding a way to play them on Windows. Does anyone know any reverse encoding software that can make them into a file that I can playback? Thanks.

Through the generous kindness of Nate and all his wonderful Nateness, I was able to receive a nice linksys wr54g (I think, its the one that cannot take the DD-WRT firmware) as I was having router issues. It has worked pretty well, but the one thing I notice is that when multiple things are accessing the router at the same time, it tends to drop out. For example, I had my ipad, and two laptops were exchanging music through itunes as my work tablet will be returned, and it would suddenly drop out of connection, and wouldn't connect back to the router until a couple of minutes. I upgraded to the recent firmware but nothing really. Also, some of you may know that the ipad…

We just installed our cable internets at our apartment today and I picked up a wireless router. Now my roomate's laptop isn't able to do WPA Soooo, we're using WEP 128 bit right now. Now we're in a pretty nice building and when I use my wireless browser program to look for SSIDs I see about 15-20. Most are locked, one or two aren't. Which obviously means there are tons of wifi users in this building. How paranoid should I be about people cracking our WEP? For what it's worth I only get on the internet about an hour at night, and he probably does the same. Neither of us leave our laptops running all the time; I might overnight or during the day if I'm downloading s…

So I got my Aura Note USB DAC/CDP/Integrated and it sounds great, but whenever I have it plugged into my computer via usb I get alot of noise. I assume it's related to the computer in some way, as more activity (scrolling, opening programs) directly affects the noise. It doesn't even matter if I'm using the usb input or not, I can be playing a cd and the noise will be there unless I unplug the usb cable. What should I do? Would a usb hub or something help? Or maybe a shielded cable? I'd appreciate any suggestions. Also, I've used a few other usb audio devices and never had this problem.

My mom is ready to pull the trigger on a new desktop computer for her business. A few machines have already been recommended to her by a computer support guy that she has worked with for many years. I wish I could offer her more help, but I am pretty clueless with respect to any of the new computers being offered these days beside Apple and she isn't interesting in getting an Apple for her business. I think she would like to keep the price in line with what has been recommended, so the $500 to $1000 range. Typically, she uses such a new machine for about six to seven years. My two primary concerns are, first and foremost, reliability and then good to great value for h…

There is going to be a pretty big sale on a 1 TB internal sata hard drive from Seagate at Best Buy. $189. 32mb cache Just a heads-up http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1292021

anyone have any experience using the apple wired keyboard on a pc? I have one of those awful logitech gaming keyboards and am looking to change. I'd be using the board with the numeric keypad for excel and calculator purposes. a little light googling turned up this helpful article: Use Apple Mac Keyboard on Windows PC Computer but I am wondering if any casers have any experience or opinions. thanks.

alright, this is mostly a question for mac users, but if you windows users got some advice, i'd love to hear it. anyway, i have a bunch of tv shows downloaded on my external hdd (scrubs, house, lost, bsg, etc.) and my roommate wants to watch them on his computer in the other room sometime. i have a macbook and he has a macbook pro, and we're both running leopard with file sharing on. i'm using an 802.11g network and since about a month ago, the video streaming worked perfectly fine. my roommate could watch any and all shows that he wanted by simply connecting to my computer via the shared network. recently, however, the video streams have basically gone to shit. he …

I need to add a second HD to my G5 Powermac (dual 1.8Ghz) and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations? Should be SATA IIRC. Thought I might get it from OWC or newegg? Something in the 500G or so range I think, but open to suggestions. The PM has an 80G and I haven't filled that up yet (kids are working on it though). I went back 4 pages and didn't see a similar topic, so thought I would just ask.

My computer got hit by malware yesterday, which took all day to eliminate. Since there wasn't a lot of specific info online, I thought I'd post this in case it hits anyone else. Most of the web results point to 2012 recommendations that are out of date. This particular redirect hijacks your address bar and search results (for all your browsers) to SearchMagnified or SearchingMagnified, obvious bogus domains that will no doubt take you to further exploit sites. It also redirected direct links and bookmarks to these sites. I looked through the list of browser settings and add-ons (I don't run any), running processes, installed software, and even the hosts file and…

We have to send Alden's Lenovo for service and need to back it up to a hard drive. Any good free or cheap options for backup software? Thanks

My sister is in the market to replace her (now failed) Macbook Pro, and balked at the >US$2K price tag. What is the current go-to? iPad Pro? What about outside of Apple? Hackintosh? I have an ASUS myself, using the reasoning -- just by the laptop from the company that makes the boards for other companies.

My Macbook Pro (2.4Ghz, 2GB, factory refurb, bought May 2008 ) won't wake up out of sleep mode. The Superdrive will spin up (picture CD is still in the drive) but I can't get it to reboot. I've tried the PRAM keystroke and reseting the power management and nothing works. I've scheduled a Genius bar session at my local store on Thursday night but I was wondering if anyone on here has run into this before Right now is when it sucks to only have a computer as a source

Ok... I've done it. I really did! I went ahead and bought the worse possible sound card ever with the Razer brand name smeared all over it instead of the Asus Xonar or the Azuretech Prelude, which are supposedly much better for their price and actually designed correctly. I mean... how bad could it be? Reason? Nothing really, it costs $199.99CAD here and jumped on it when saw it go for $89.99CAD in one of the Sunday special savings ad for my local computer shop. Impressions: I just installed this card into my computer less than an hour ago and I already have many complaints about it. The main reason I bought it, apart from the relatively cheap price, was…

Here are a couple reviews of a 24" EIZO, which you can get for around $2400 (about 3x the price of Apple's 23" and 4-5x the price of popular Dells/etc) http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/09/16/eizo-coloredge-cg241w-high-end-monitor/ http://www.macuser.co.uk/macuser/reviews/129056/eizo-coloredge-cg241w.html excerpt: pricey though

I was trying to figure out if my power was out last night during the storm so I can figure out whether to throw away perishable foods. I think my computer (imac) was on when I came home this morning (although I was tired so I certainly could have turned it on without thinking). I don't have the "startup automatically after a power failure" checked in energy saver nor do I have a UPS. If I type "last" in terminal, it has a reboot at 4:37am this morning (I was not here at that time). Also, the system log says 4:37:43 AM locationd: locationd was started after an unclean shutdown So that seems to indicated that computer shut down and restarted on its own. I d…

I want to go as paperless as possible at home. Receipts, manuals, invoices--physically storing all that crap is making me nuts. I use sheet fed scanners at work all the time and I love them. But the industrial-strength versions of these things are too expensive. So, based on some initial research, I have identified the following two products: Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M Scanners | Sheetfed Office Scanners : FUJITSU United States The Neat Company - NeatDesk for Mac Your job is to help me decide on one of the above, or find another competent machine (not a lackey). EDIT: Oh, and it ideally should be Mac-compatible. Go!

Two separate questions: What are the best choices for ergonomic keyboards? What are the best choices for trackballs?

The default umask setting when I save anything on the unix system at work (via samba) is that everyone can read it. This is totally stupid and I have talked to the chair about this but nobody wants to change it. I know that one can change this setting for the whole system in the smb.conf file. Is there a way that I can change the default for me when I login. I have already changed the default setting when things are created when I am logged in via ssh but can't figure out how to do it when copying files from my computer. Most of the files I save are grades and letters of recommendations and things like that and I don't want to risk forgetting to change the umask…

Ok, Had some computer issues recently and was forced to rebuild my computer. I've have one of those Logitech Laser mouse thingies... something 1000. Downloaded the drivers and it installs setpoint. The damn thing is acting so twitchy... should I just uninstall setpoint? Will all the fancy extra buttons that I dont really use still work? dammmmmmnnnnnnnn yoooooouuuuuuu Logitech!!!!

This is the message on the console: Java Plug-in 1.6.0_21 Using JRE version 1.6.0_21-b07 Java HotSpot Client VM User home directory = C:\Users\Alex ---------------------------------------------------- c: clear console window f: finalize objects on finalization queue g: garbage collect h: display this help message l: dump classloader list m: print memory usage o: trigger logging q: hide console r: reload policy configuration s: dump system and deployment properties t: dump thread list v: dump thread stack x: clear classloader cache 0-5: set trace level to <n> ---------------------------------------------------- Ad…

So Microsofts fears may come true... Official Google Blog: Introducing the Google Chrome OS

Just saw a thread about this on Audiocircles so I thought I would post the link here: Something wicked this way comes…the Dell Inspiron Zino HD AMD at Home