A roll of dateless buffalo nickels would also be a good choice. For those that aren't familiar with the design, the date on the buffalo nickel was on a raised area, which would eventually wear off. Since you can't read the date (at least without resorting to tricks like using acid), the coin really doesn't have much collector value anymore.

One of the problems is that those adapters only work with drives that can report their geometry to the bios so that it can auto-configure itself. If you have to go into the BIOS and type in the number of cylinders, landing zone, etc. then those adapters are useless. Luckily I have a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter and no shortage of PCs that have PATA ports on the motherboard so I'd have no problems retrieving the data from that laptop.

That's pretty much it. He knows his boss is the same way, and doesn't want to give some wishy-washy we don't know but we're working on it type of answer when his boss asks how long it's going to take. By giving him an answer, even an answer he may even know you made up on the spot, he's got something that he can tell his boss, and when that estimate turns out wrong he's got someone else to blame.

To make it even more fun, Intel won't release 64-bit drivers for a lot of their integrated graphics for the Atom. Which means that if you want to run Windows on them, you pretty much have use the 32-bit version. Luckily there's always Linux.

My favorite are the cheap notebooks that are advertised as "Quad core processor!". What they don't tell you is that it's a quad core Atom. Granted, for a lot people it would be good enough, but I'd rather have one of the Haswell-based Pentiums even if it's just a dual core.

The mainstream desktop I7's are pretty easy to keep track of because there's actually not been that many of them. If someone tells you they have an i7 in their desktop, it's probably one of the four chips in your list. Now dive into the mess that's the Pentium/i3/i5 lines. Most i5's are quad's, but some are dual's with hyperthreading. But that's what the mobile i7's usually are. But so are the desktop i3's, except that they can't turbo boost. And the very high end Haswell i7's have a 5xxx number. Shouldn't that be a next generation chip? Why do the Haswell-based Pentiums get a 3xxx number? What's better, a G3460 or a i5-3340? Probably the Ivy Bridge i5 but why does the Haswell Pentium chip have a bigger number? Why do most of the "K" chips not support VT-d, but the 4790K does?

For my work load, a first generation i5-680 (3.6Ghz, dual core, fastest clocked processor from the first generation) is about 10% slower than a fourth generation i5-4430 (3.0 Ghz, quad core, slowest clocked "normal" i5 from the current generation that's not a low power or mobile variant). Note that this workload is extremely single threaded, so if you're doing something that's multi-threaded the two extra cores in the Haswell i5 will make a huge difference. But this does suggest that cores in a Haswell are about 30% or so faster than the original "Clarkdale" processors on a per-clock basis.

What do you mean? They just started this a year or two ago.

The last two digits used to be the engine displacement in liters, and the letters meant something too (i.e. 535i was a 5-series, 3.5L engine, fuel injected) but that hasn't been true for a long time.

Those people who swore by XP for the most part switched over to "Classic" mode and never went back. I actually haven't seen Luna in a while - the sticks in the mud who still won't move off of XP are all using "Classic" mode.

For those who haven't used Windows 8 or later, Windows 7 is the last version that where you can revert back to the Windows 2000 look. As far as I can tell you can't actually customize much in the later versions of Windows except the titlebar color.

There's still some Windows 2000 machines kicking about around here. It's amazing how fast those computers seem, just because of how responsive the Windows UI is. This is despite them running on Windows 2000-era hardware.

In my opinion, that would actually be Vista.
Vista

It's basically the same look as Windows 7 except the colors are more subdued and aren't as garish. I also like the "classic" theme in Windows XP. The default "Luna" theme in XP still has to be the ugliest thing out of Redmond.

That was brand engineering. Take the same car, swap some unimportant trim pieces and slap a new front/rear end on it, and you've got a whole different car! That's how you end up with GM with a half-dozen different brands all try to sell variations of the same car.

In terms of updating models, the trend now is that the refresh cycles are getting longer and longer. In the 50's and 60's, styling was huge and they'd basically redesign the entire car every year. In the 70's and 80's they may leave the car mostly the same but change something like the grill and taillight lenses every year. Nowadays they'll sell the same car for 4-5 years with no real changes between the model years.

Of course it is. That's why they had to skip over Windows 9.

I've seen this kind of thing happen. It seems that after a few days or a week or so, something breaks with Windows Explorer and it won't update automatically unless you manually refresh (push F5, whatever). This will persist until you reboot the computer. I've seen this behavior on every Windows 7 (and Vista) system I've used that stays up long enough. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but my guess is that it has something to do with Windows' broken-ass thumbnail generator which has all kinds of problems unless it's a small directory that only contains image files.

Yeah, you can just buy the cheap Chinese knock-off honey, that if you're lucky, is just flavored corn syrup.