PPpppst! Are you Buzz Lightyear? I LOVE your movies! Mmmpphmpphmpphmpmhmhmh!!!

Okay so you are paranoid about someone attacking your device via Bluetooth, yet you're connection is a unsecured unencrypted WiFi network. Also if you believe someone is coming in via Bluetooth, then it's limited range, and someone in your home is doing it. Time to file criminal charges or move. This might be legit. However this strongly reminds me of a client we had to deal with that we had to finally tell to stop calling us, as he believed "hackers" were out to get him, and installed a virus in his phone line. As in the wire. Despite hours and hours of patiently explaining how it was impossible, and local phone company replacing and checking for wire taps according to him. He believed it because a person would always join the AOL Chat room he was in and tell him his phone conversations he just had. This was in dial up days. Within the last year, the same guy stopped in. (Only I recognized him as others who were working for our business at the time have all left). He claimed hackers kept installing viruses on his smart phone and he wiped it and they kept coming back.

Silly. Everyone knows its Steppenwold that makes FTL possible.

Immediately thought of this as soon as I read it. http://xkcd.com/325/

I work at a small local workbench and have seen many of the issues above. (Customers ranting on how smoke is caused by a software problem, or that the screen on a laptop not working has nothing to do with the giant fist mark on the screen, hell even customers coming in saying their new laptop shut off and wont turn back on, who thought she didn't need to plug it in and charge it because it was "wireless"). The best story that comes to line is a guy we call "Phone Line Virus Guy" who we have dealt with on and off for over four years. Approx 40 year old guy, so not some 70-80+ year old who's inept to technology. Originally, he called our store 4 times in one week, somehow getting a different person each time and taking up 10-15 minutes of our time each time he called asking how to remove a virus in his phone line. He was stating how he would sign on AOL and this person IM's him and emails him saying things he said in phone conversations. He was told they put a virus in his phone line. Try as I might none of us could convince him that if he had any virus it's not in the phone line but on the computer, and even then it sounds more like a prank. APPARENTLY he had even gone to the length of getting a new computer, and even having AT&T replace the phone wiring in his house. After being rude and criticizing us for not telling him how to get rid of the phone line virus over the phone for free, we would have no choice but to politely hang up on the man. End of the week one of us exchanged the story of our phone call and it was revealed that he talked to every person working at our store all different days of the week. Later that week when talking with several other customers who offer their own computer repair services, we find out that he had called them as well. So about a year later, same exact thing happens. He calls us every day for a week, except after the second call we write his number from caller-id down and then dont answer. However on the first call after we told him to go to the Police over this if he thinks he's being spied on... he responded "They won't answer my calls anymore". Fast forward to a few months ago. He then physically comes to our store. This time he has a Android based phone, and is insisting that he has a virus on it, because now the "hackers" are not only listening to his phone conversations (and emailing and harassing him about them online) but they are also tracking his location and saying and talking about places he has been. After spending over 20 minutes of valuable time trying to explain to him that what he's saying is impossible yet again, we had to walk away from him and tell him there's nothing we could do to help him.

Many not build upon the Hollywood's decades of pain staking research into the subject. Clearly the cheapest, quickest, and most effective manner is to send Bruce Willis into space with a nuke. Problem solved.

I would think about putting the box in the garage. Yes it seems like a great location, it's out of the way and such. However it might not be the cleanest place in the house. I for one know my garage to be one of the dirtiest places. In the winter the car drags in massive amounts of sand from the the winter roads, and leaves in the spring. Spiders and other insects, not to mention baby snakes and rodents, also make their way in from time to time and would just live a nice warm dark place inside the case to live...in city area's it could also attract roaches in from outside. (Despite sonic repellents and traps they still get in). Combined all that with being near moisture (wet car or rainy days). I don't see the case lasting long there. It would need to be cleaned out fairly often to keep fans and heat sinks from gunking up. Of course I understand some people's garages are nice and clean, and not subject to some of these things, but just saying I know for me it would not work out well.

Dr. Evil would be proud...

This just in: Every troll whining about radar systems in FPS's aren't real and ruin the game play all shut up at one. Everyone was happy and the world prospered.

A customer came to my place of work, a local workbench, and asked if we could recover a file from a 5.25" Floppy. Luckily coworker managed to dig up a working 5.25" from our junk bin, and put the floppy in.. and it worked. The last modified date on the file was from 1991, and it was a CAD design for some Microwave device the company used to make back in the day.

I've had quite the negative experience with HP/Compaq. They've had a ongoing problem with many of their dv2000, dv6000 and dv9000 laptops which are nVidia chipset based, mostly those with AMD processors, where the south bridge chipset fails. This started happening after about one year of use, and more prevlant once laptops got 2+ years old to the point where I see at least two a week now at my local workbench. With such a massive problem, you think they would issue some recall or something? All they did was issue a extended warranty, which adds one year warranty to the affected laptops. Most only had one year warranties.. and if they are two years old, it does NOTHING for them. Also, only those who took the time to search could find the extended warranty information. This is almost worst than the recent Dell problems IMHO, and the press and the like has not picked up on it. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01087277&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&product=1842189&lang=en

Well.. we are talking about the "death" of a company =P

They've been declining for years, and been selling defective parts for years. I work at a local small privately owned workbench, and for years Dell's computer's motherboards BIOS, by default, has SMART error reporting turned off. If you turn it on, and go to "restore defaults" it will also reset it to off. I turn it on in every case in hope that it will save someone's important data, which I have seen SMART do, so that they can backup their data before the drive completely fails. I discovered this when someone brought us a maybe 4 month old Dell desktop system who's filesystem, and this windows, was ripped to pieces. Running a diagnostic tool, in this case SeaTools for DOS on it, revealed SMART was tripped, and it fail read element tests, so bad sectors. Seeing SMART was tripped, I wondered why the BIOS did not report it, as most modern BIOS have it and it is enabled by default. I looked, and found the above results.

Yea. I have no idea what the setup was in my dorm at the time. I know it was done on a tight budget. Likewise, my solution at the time was to throw DDWRT on my cheapo Linksys router and make it a AP just for myself and room mate.

I'm going to suggest the ultra low tech solution and suggest a good old fashion land line. With a modern cordless you can go your dorm's floor and perhaps one above and bellow with ease with it. The problem is if you use a call over WiFi at a university, you will have to stay where you are for the duration of the call. I had the same issue two or three years ago. The university had just a series of repeaters / access points with same SSID / Chanel lined up, and if more than one was in range (as they usually are to provide decent coverage) my wireless device would hop between the access points. Fine for web browsing, but using any service such as VOIP would result in the call disconnection each time it "hopped" between AP's.