About a year ago I had a new vendor ship about twenty computers to my company. They were supposed to contain Intel SSD's but instead contained Kingston drives. All of those drives failed within a year. As they fail I have been swapping them out with Intel drives and they just chug along nicely after that. I even took one of the RMA'ed Kingston drives and put it in my laptop to see how it did. It made it four months and failed just last week.

Here's what that failure looked like. It started off where the aystem would just freeze up for a couple of seconds about once a day or so. After a week that started happening more like once an hour, but the system would always come to life again, it would just pause for 10 seconds or so. Then after about another week it started hanging completely. First once a day, then several times a day requiring holding the power button down and restarting the system. Then I RMA'ed it.

The original drive was a kingston ssdnow 100, and lasted 11 months, the replacement was a ssdnow v200, it lasted 4 months. They just shipped me a replacement today, we'll see. It may go straight on ebay!

I thought PCs didn't get viruses?

Oh wait, that was Macs.

That is exactly how I feel. I used a brand new Ubuntu install a week ago on a friends computer. The sound didn't work. It was like a flashback to 2005 when I stopped using Linux... it's too bad really, I did love tooling around with Linux but now I get all the Unix I want from my OS X install.

I think the problem here is the approach. I live in Oregon in the US and we have a vote by mail system. I get my ballot in the mail and then when I have time I sit down with my laptop and a glass of wine and slowly go over the thing, looking up all the ballot measures on my computer. I have three weeks to do this in. I have never had to make a special trip into a voting station and I'm glad, it sounds like about as much fun as going to the DMV or something. My point is, electronic voting? Screw that. Vote by mail.

As for the issue at hand. If it ain't open source I ain't trusting it.

If Orlando was in Texas, then yes.

Does anyone have any suggestions for getting rid of the damn thing?

Instead of flaming each other maybe we can skip to the part where we say how to remove it completely. Same goes for Windows Malware. If we put in one tenth of the energy documenting the removal of these things that we do into flaming there wouldn't be malware to speak of. Removing the stuff is a pain and every tech I know has a different set of tools they use to do the job.

In regard to this piece of malware I have scanned computers with Integro's VirusBarrier X6 and it takes days to complete a scan and doesn't seem to be able to remove it anyway. How it takes days is beyond me, there's only a handful of malware for macs and it seems like a full scan would take seconds, but hey, that's just me.

Take a look at the Control Panel from Windows XP on. They set up this categories view as the default. The problem was they didn't think it through so that even their own programs, think Outlook, didn't have a place there.

So in order to get to the Mail icon, or Java, or any other 3rd party icon you have to switch views to the icon view to find things.

Now look at Windows 8. It's going to be like that for everything. They have this new whiz-bang interface, but it's half-assed, not thought through and it's going to be inconsistent with every application that comes along. It's going to be a god-damned mess from the get go.

It might look good on a brand new tablet/notebook hybrid but as soon as you install anything on there other than what it came with it's going to start looking like crap.

It's not going to work on a domain. I doubt it'll work for gamers. No DIY enthusiast is going to be making anything for it. The best Microsoft can hope for is that they siphon off some money that would have gone into Apple, but in the long run their trajectory is headed straight down hill. All the company can do is flail around like a wounded pig as it slowly dies. Every chance the company has had for the last 10 years to make a move in the right direction they have stuffed it up.

The should have fired Steve Balmer a decade ago. They should have made a bitchin' linux distro in the late 90's instead of battling it tooth and nail. They never should have thought of the Zune. Plays-for-sure? stupid. Xbox? good job guys, you killed Sega, happy now? BTW, how's that working out, made any money yet? Bing? Oh yeah? You didn't watch much Monty Python did you? Vista? dear god. Windows 7? It's just vista but with a couple of mild interface tweaks. Office 2007? Everyone hates the ribbon so what do you do, put it on everything. Idiots. Office 2010? Really, you moved the tabs to the left in the Options dialog and charged for it? Screw you too Microsoft.

http://tinyurl.com/68lu7js

Seriously? What's your tip off for a savvy user then?

Wow, I wonder how health care got to expensive in this country. Oh wait, that's how. Every penny spent on this was a waste.

i think the cheapest way to get a mac is to get a dell mini 10v for $230.

It's gotten to the point where there's no reason to use windows any more aside from in a VM.

Plug a mouse into Windows XP, 7, whatever version and then Windows will tell you, New Hardware Detected, please wait while we install your drivers, Yay! You device is now ready use about 60 seconds later.

Plug a mouse into OSX, it works immediately. done. I don't care what it had to do to make it work, just do it.

Same with flash drives. Same with desktop search. Same with Application installation. Same with damn near everything.

If you want to waste time and worry, use Windows. If you want to use a computer, use OSX.

5 major versions deep and still no forward slash search. Until they hook up / to cmd+f I'm going to have to stick with Firefox. It seems so simple and so many people have asked for that feature that I'm really surprised to not see it added.

I'll give them this. The ability to drive a GUI with just a keyboard. From moving and resizing windows to sane tab ordering they just have that down. OSX it half baked and every app I've ever used in Linux can't figure out tab ordering. When the mouse goes out, windows is the only bet.

I'm in the process of recovering all my data after I had both the drive I was working with and my backup disk go at once.

I was playing with my primary drive, maybe a little rough, but I figured my time machine backup was solid and I had just updated it before delving into this project.

Long story short, the time machine backup was erased because the volume was picked up by another OS X installation and when asked if I wanted to use it for Time machine I said no. Then I went to use the backup and it was gone.

Right now I'm running r-studio to try to recover the data.

Anyone know any other HFS+ undelete tools?