As much as I hate to say it, I may be switching from Firefox (v3.6.3) to IE8. Why? I'm getting tired of getting 'you need to install a missing plugin.' Then when I hit install I get 'install manually.' So I have to go to the software's website, download and install it manually and hope it works...

The new OS from Microsoft, it seems, will require massive upgrades in hardware and massive compromises on privacy and copy-protection issues. If a discussion is begun on this, I can refer to specific articles. Note that my only personal interest in this is that my kid insists this new OS is the...

iHello, iYes, iPeople, Steve Jobs iis iNow iDead ! II iHope iThat iWe iCan iNow iStop iWith iThis iBloody I iBefore iEverthing ! iIt iIs iTime iTo iBarry iThis iBloody i****ing iI iToo ! ;) :) iDon't iYou iThink ?!?

I've been getting the dreaded blue screen of death periodically. I ran ram checkers on my Corsair 1 GB dual channel memory and everything is fine. The BSO messages say device error or device driver error. I get the BSO even while running Windows 7 with similar messages. My configuration...

Here is what happened. Lightning hit my cable modem and blew up the integrated NIC as best I can tell from when it was my Windows XP machine. Everything else seemed to work. I want to use the machine with Linux and a wireless network card. it will be a frontend mythtv box. yes. i am very...

Over the past few years the capacity of disk drives (and the amount of space typically used on them) has greatly increased, and now it is getting more and more difficult to figure out how to back up these drives. What type of hardware (and software) do you use on your systems for backup? Up to...

Hi again, Just wondering if anyones got any ingenious methods of stopping dust from accumulating inside their cases. Has anyone tried covering the airflow holes with fine mesh-type filter material, like the stuff in air conditioner or clothes dryers filters? I'm guessing it would reduce air flow...

Does it work? As the file formats are different, why would you even do this, except to share a single internet connection? But has anybody ever done this? RL

I have an Epia-M Mini-ITX motherboard on which I'd like to upgrade the BIOS because of some problems I've exhausted all options on fixing. (See "Poor or no Video Performance"). I have a hard drive with fresh XP install attached to it, along with a DVD player, on the primary and secondary IDE...

Dell XPS 200 with XP Pro (if I can get the OS loaded). I can see the hard drive when I install it in my main system. I have changed the BIOS to make hdd ATA. I put the hdd in the Dell and ran Hiren and found and fixed some bad sectors. There were supposedly all fixed. But that proves that Hiren...

I have a Foxconn RS0338 Mini-ITX case and an EPIA M10000 Mini-ITX mainboard. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811153113 http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/motherboards/EPIA_M10000 I've only put together ATX PCs before this and I cannot figure out what hard drive and DVD...

Holy crap, has anyone noticed the fast rise of high prices for SATA hard drives? I bought a 4-drive NAS container a couple of months ago and decided to do some research on the reliability and performance of various 1 and 1 1/2 TB hard drives. When I bought the storage unit you could get 1TB hard...

all colors filled PC tech magazine published and printed in England. How come they do that? England don't make any of hardware related computer industry. In fact, England has no company design or make any of hardware stuff. Most stuff designed either in US and Asia and produced in China. Why...

A question about buying Windows XP Pro for a new computer. I notice that the prices run the gamut from $190 to 280. The cheaper versions are OEM. I don't know too much about OEM OS. Are they legal? Are they the same as retail box? Can you upgrade from them? What are their downsides if...

I'm experiencing persistent freezes--screen freeze, mouse and keyboard not responding. I've tried installing XP Pro several times and never make it through without a lockup. I was able to run Windows 98 for several hours, but eventually it froze too. I was also able to run Mini-PE Boot from CD...

I am working on a friend's laptop that had a hard drive failure right after her monthly Spybot-AdAware-Clean-Defrag routine. On her old FAT32 machine this saved her ass, since almost all of the files were contiguous so when a diagnostic had her use here restore disk, loosing all of her old stuf, I...

Dureing the weekend, I installed a 40gb Seagate hard drive into friend's old computer. The date of the BIOS was 1996. As I was running Fdisk after installing the drive, the program told me that the BIOS could be configured to recognise the "new large hard drives bigger than 2gb" and did I want...

I bought a cheap sil3114 sata card to try as an add-in card in a motherboard that has no SATA ports. It worked OK until I tried flashing its BIOS to the latest version. The updflash.exe utility started up, but failed. Now the sil3114 card hangs the computer when booting. Seems I bricked its BIOS....

Enermax Noisetaker or OCZ Powerstream?

I was posting earlier that if you want a decent computer, you should build your own. It only takes a flat-blade screwdriver, and you don't even need to know how to partition a hard drive anymore. (window xp, for example, will install itself with almost no input from the end user, even on a...