GoRedwings19's Computer Help Hotline

currently looking at acer aspire one (aod250). can be had from sams club for $294. i dont HAVE to spend the above mentioned amount. also cant find any real information about the differences between the z-series chips and the n-series chips except for just a different in the bus speeds. anyone actually know more about them? requirements (things i would like to have) windows xp/linux (NO VISTA. under no conditions) < 3 lbs battery should hold charge for at least 2.5 hours. (heavier laptop is ok if battery lasts longer) fanless would be nice but active cooling is ok as long as its not too loud. color must be black. dont want a fingerprint magnet but if its che…

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.

Hopefully some of you more experienced desktop people have a solution for this problem. We have a nearly two year old Intel I7 Ivy Bridge desktop computer. It has 16G of ram, 180 GB SSD HD and a 1 T external HD with the cpu running slightly overclocked. Core speed is 4398 MHz, Multiplier X 44, Bus speed is 99.98MHz. For the past six months while gaming and often times doing nothing taxing to the cpu, we have experienced the blue screen crash with the "windows detected hardware error". I think we need to back off the CPU speed a bit but after reading the Google searches and bus recommendations, I am not confident I can do this correctly. Any suggestion…

http://www.pcper.com/news/Displays/Seiki-Announces-28-32-and-40-4K-Ultra-HD-Monitors-HDMI-20-and-DisplayPort-13 Quick Rundown: Seiki will introduce three different sizes including a 28-in (28U4SEP-G02), 32-in (32U4SEP-G02) and 40-in (40U4SEP-G02) offering with the following specs: Vertical Alignment (VA) LED panel technology with 3,840 by 2,160 4K Ultra HD resolution 12-bit color processing and 14-bit gamma mode HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.3(!), MHL 3.0, DVI and VGA standards display connections Picture-by-picture (x4) and daisy chain mode USB 3.0 hub (1 upstream and 2 downstream) VESA-compliant adjustable monitor stand with quick release Probably not go…

I've heard that one should avoid no-name flash drives because then they'll only last a couple of refreshes -- is that true? I was going to get one of the $10-ish 16G ones. Are there any brands I should avoid? Corsair, Kingston, OCZ, Patriot, Crucial, Transcend, IPSG, Lexar, Sandisk, etc.? E.G., I was told to avoid anything like these.

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…

Who's going to buy a 2.5TB version for their audio storage? LaCie intros 5big Network drive array to RAID junkies the world over - Engadget

Ok gents I've worked on this thing for days now to no avail. My Toshiba LT (Vista) will not recognize my HR DAC. I've rebooted, gone into my INF files to check if any of the USB got renamed, tried all the USB ports, checked for driver updates, etc. Nothing. Any help is immensely appreciated, Thanks!

Just looking for a few suggestions on what sort of router I should go for, including brand, type (G, N, etc.), whatever else. I must be honest and say that networking is a weak point for me and I don't know a heck of a lot about routers in general, but I just need something for here at the apartment that will give me multiple ethernet ports and a solid wireless connection for my roommate's lappy. Thanks folks.

I've got a student in the family who wants to carry a laptop to class. Given the distance between classes, she finds it easier to chill and study between classes at some of the more convenient study areas which have wireless capability. Unfortunately, her present laptop is a desktop replacement and far from "portable". So, can anyone recommend a very inexpensive ultra portable unit she could carry around campus? All it will be used for is papers and research on the internet. It won't carry a lot of large files nor does it need to be a performance dynamo. Small...cheap....wireless. That's about it. Any help appreciated.

So apparently there's a little snafu at Google? I was searching for some things this morning and came across this error message: Warning this site may harm your computer. Essentially google is popping this up for every search. You can't click through the links at all for some reason. Anyone know anything about this. Getting news on it it tough, because you CAN'T CLICK THROUGH GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS!?!?!?!?!

The wife needs a new laptop and it needs to be able rot run AutoCAD seamlessly. Since I’m an Apple person, I’m not so aware of the high end Windows workstations. I’m assuming some gaming computers might work well but them may not be optimized for what she does. Also, she probably wants something businesslike (she does game). Any engineer types that could recommend something? Was looking at Dell Precision and Lenovo Thinkpad. Should have a good keyboard, etc.

So I've been having problems with my wireless for a month now. The wireless card decides to turn itself off at random times, usually once every two days or so, and when I try to turn it back on, it does nothing. So I try the thinkvantage wireless thing and it says its still on when its obviously off. I tried uninstalling the Thinkvantage wireless manager, fooled around with the power settings of the wireless card and logging in and out, but the only thing that works is restarting the computer. Any recommendations thats not reformatting the comp, buy a mac or get linux?

I need an online to do list manager, primarily for coordinating a move, but doesn't need to be specific to that. I've looked into a bunch of the major ones, which seem ok, but I'd be curious to hear if folks have recommendations.

Any way to tell? My uncle runs a company and received an anonymous email from one of his employees saying that these people (3 branch office heads) opened their own company and are channeling my uncle's clients there. And this picture is supposed to be proof.

Ok, so the game that I spent a good part of my formative years playing has been re-released for the Mac and I'm dying to try it again. So that leaves me in the somewhat awkward position of basically not wanting to spend much in the way of $$ on this computer. It certainly doesn't need to be much, specs are as follows: Minimum Specs - Mac OS 10.3.9 - G3 processor - 500 mhz - 128MB of RAM - 106MB of free hard drive space - Turn all special effects off to run at 15 frames per second Recommended Specs - G4 processor - 1.0 ghz - 256MB of RAM - 100MB of free hard drive space So what's the cheapest thing to look for that I can simply plug in in place of my exi…

Looking at setting up a on premise IP PBX system at our new hospital and was wondering if anyone here has experience in that field? Also need some recommendations on a firewall/router solution and PoE switch.

I was just given a Dell Dimension 4600 computer and I fucked up. I wanted to reinstall XP but didn't have the OS disk from dell. I had the bright idea to use my OS disk from my compaq computer. It seemed to work until I realized that the compaq disk doesn't have the drivers for the video card, sound card and most importantly the ethernet or modem! I can't even go online to download the drivers because I can't use the ethernet port. Plus I have to activate it in 30 days. If any of you have a dell dimension computer would you please for the love of god mail me a copy of your OEM XP Home disk? It's no illegal since I have a legitimate key on the side of my computer. I ca…

I thought some of them were pretty funny and of course weird The World's Weirdest Mice - PC World

So my computer has started doing this thing where every time I turn it on, after about 5 minutes, give or take a minute, regardless of what I'm doing on the computer, I get a blue screen of death crash and the computer resets. The weird thing is, once it resets and starts up again, its 100% fine, no more crashes. This only occurs when I start my computer from an off state. When I start back up it always gives me the "windows has recovered from a serious error" box. The reason is something to do with bad memory. Indeed I did add some new RAM several weeks back, but I did not start experiencing this until recently. Nevertheless, I've done lots of trouble shooting in…

I decided a while ago that I wanted to get a small pc to use with my headphone rig and also as an HTPC for watching the occasional movie on. My recent acquisition of a new dac, the Auralic Vega and it's ability to do hi-rez pcm and dsd over usb made this more of a priority. Now normally I'd just go ahead and build something like this myself as I've built well over 100 desktops/servers over the years. After considering that I didn't want to spend my time dealing the tight spaces of really small cases I decided to buy something fully assembled. Naturally I did keep a close eye on parts cost vs cost of the assembled system, if the difference was high enough I'd just bu…

My mac mini (mid 2011 with an OWC SSD has started to slowly flake out during start up. Just about every other start up I get the white screen with the flashing folder icon, indicating that the mini can't find the start up disk. So far I have reset the PRAM and completed a reinstall of OS X from the web by doing the command R at start up. The mac also needs to be restarted after a multi hour sleep period as it goes into pinwheel and does not reposed until restarted. I'm trying to hold off on a new mini until the new 2016 models are released later this spring (at least that is the rumor) Any thoughts, could it be a bad logic board battery or just a …

Is there a way to send a fax via the internet without having to sign up for a service (i.e., a one-time thing). Or, in the alternative, is there a super cheap way to do this? I don't have a fax machine and need to get something out.

I am thinking of finally getting myself a 24" LCD. Right now I have 19" Samsung that I got a few years ago. It is a pretty basic model without any adjustments or inputs, but picture quality has been fine for me. However, now I want to get a nice LCD with composite inputs, HD, and all that other cool shit. I think 24" will be more than enough. I looked around and there seems to be so many options, I am pretty lost. Dell 2408WFP seems to be pretty sweet from features side, and my buddy has an older version of it that he loves... Which LCD can you recommend? Budget is probably around $600, but can be expanded if needed. I will use it for movies, games and internet. thank…

So I went to the Apple trailers site, and it said I needed QuickTime v. 7 to view the Simpsons movie teaser. So I went to download it, and it's called "iTunesSetup.exe" -- WTF? Have they merged the two softwares? Is this like RealPlayah? I really like just having the media player, I don't need iTunes' other carp. So I guess the real question is, has anyone else installed this, and if so, can I still just watch vid clips like on the trailers site with it? Or if I click on the wrong thing, am I going to accidentally buy some MP3's...or somesuch whatnot...?