YES, great reference...I still have my trusty Voodoo 5 5500. And people think SLI is a new thing....

Seriously. I've denied warranty service on systems like this before. Indoor smoker's systems build a horrible layer of greasy filth that can't be properly cleaned and kills fans like you wouldn't believe. It's not the hardware's or the manufacturers fault that fans fail, systems overheat, and components fail as a result of this noxious filth. The fault is in not explaining the situation properly. In cases like these I've always taken photos, physically shown the customer why I'm denying warranty service, and explained carefully. I see similar things in machines used in woodshops, machineshops, etc. And for those who say 'it can't be any worse than cat hair' - it is. If you've seen both, you know. Yes, cat hair can clog fans. It can also be easily taken care of with a cheap can of compressed air. Cigarette filth, on the other hand, never really cleans up properly.

Yeah, that's right, just keep your fucking mouths shut and keep hitting the feeder bar folks. After all, this is a fucking Q&A where, presumably, your question actually has a chance of being answered and possibly, just possibly, influencing a decision...why would you want to waste an opportunity like that with a valid question you fucking sheep? Just buy what you're told to buy and go about your business... Side note: I bitch to everyone I know who plays games about this, I tell them it's a deal-breaker for me and that I won't be buying it. And yes, I mean it. Now go fuck yourself you smug prick.

Seriously, I don't care if the only other 'network' I have is a pair of goddamned tincans and some dental floss, I will never, under any circumstances, do business with any division of Verizon again after my experience with their Wireless division. I used to be a Unicel customer prior to Verizon purchasing them. I was a Verizon customer for about 1.5 days before their craptastic completely locked down phones and (at least in my area) truly sub-par voice quality just drove me crazy. Despite having the paperwork from both Unicel and Verizon saying that I had thirty days to cancel service, they jacked my bill from the ~$180 (three lines) to ~$650 due to 'early termination fees' and the like. When I complained they agreed to drop it to $380, never sent a new bill detailing the charges, and sent it directly to collections within a week. I'm still fighting with them over this, and I will never, ever allow myself to be suckered into anything with them again, I don't care if the service is free and comes with a solid gold ruby encrusted phone that grants wishes. Fuck Verizon and fuck their service. If Verizon was a person I wouldn't piss down their throat if their heart was on fire.

How about the fact that interface makes me feel seasick, I'm sick and tired of either having to constantly click OK or disable UAC entirely, and it is, in fact, less responsive then XP on the same hardware. Yes, the hardware is post-2004; 2.4GHz dual core with 8GB DDR-2 RAM. Oh, and arbitrarily hiding options, that have been in one location for multiple releases now, under menus and menus of crap.

Yes, I have serious problems with Vista, and yes, I actually used it for a long time. I switched to the Windows 7 release candidate, which is drastically improved in my opinion over Windows Vista.

I understand the need to rebel against all the rebelling against Microsoft that goes on here, but people do in fact have real problems with Windows Vista that shouldn't be minimized and dismissed out of hand; for me it caused a real dip in productivity which I initially attributed to lack of familiarity, but it didn't get any better until I replaced the OS.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. I had to release an employee recently due to this issue. Not only was his handwriting absolutely atrocious, his English language skills were almost completely non-existent. It was so bad that he just could not be forced to read more than a few sentences in a row because he comprehended so poorly, and it was to the point that it had a negative impact on his capability to form coherent thoughts and communicate ideas; he simply could not express an idea to any other employees.

Technically (p.c. repair) he was skilled, but his language skills prevented him from being able to perform in the manner necessary; his teachers' and parents' cost him a job by not properly teaching him the English language.

Except that the "getaway car" in this case is more like a Greyhound that happens to have stops in seedy neighborhoods...it also goes just about anywhere else you want to go.

My offsite backup server is currently running Ubuntu Server with full disk encryption. The only access it has is with key based SSH on a non-standard port, restricted to a specific subnet. There are no ports forwarded to this machine; instead, it initiates a VPN connection from it's location directly to my local network. It gets a static IP on the VPN subnet, and that IP is the only subnet SSH will listen to.

I use a combination of Rsync over SSH and rsnapshot server side.

I'm not storing any hyper-critical data here, just backups for a webmail/website combo I run for a dozen friends or so. I just like it to be fairly secure. Anything I'm missing here?

You're wrong. The only thing that matters at all with any product anywhere is wrong with Vista; my customers don't want it and won't buy it. Therefore, it is a terrible product that I don't carry and have no interest in.

Now, with Windows 7 my customers have been showing some cautious optimism, so we'll see how it goes.

You know, people keep saying this as if the experience in their local area is the same everywhere. It's not. The maximum available (from the one single cable provider) bandwidth in my area is 6Mb/s, at $60/month. I've used it, at peak times it drops to around 1Mb/s, and the upload never exceeds 2Mb/s. My DSL service (I have a choice of three DSL providers; I use the smallish local one) is 10Mb/s, and I routinely download at a stable ~900KB/s - 1MB/s, which is around 80% of max. DSL's role (in my area) is to provide the competition and thus superior level of service that cable doesn't.

...Except that it doesn't, at least in all cases. On my lowly Inspiron 8600 (32MB NVidia 5200 video) it was enable by default. Even knowing where to change the settings, it took 10 minutes, due to multiple instances of window corruption and crashes, just to disable it. This particular notebook has 2GB DDR and a Centrino 1.7GHz processor, and even with desktop effects disabled it was almost unusable. Pretty though.

I can tell you from my decade of experience as a technician and running a small shop that Seagate HDDs have the lowest failure rate in the business.

See how that works? This is why anecdotes are useless.

Sadly, many of the Seagate HDDs are losing the 5 year warranty and moving to three. Here.

How, as a "computer repairman," can you be so woefully incorrect regarding HDD manufacturers? Quantum was purchased by Maxtor, not IBM. Maxtor, in turn, was purchased by Seagate. In a related not, as of Jan 3, 2009, many of the Seagate HDDs (all of the internal OEM drives AFAICT) are moving to a three year warranty.