Agreed. My philosophy is if you don't leave a VM, your reason for calling is not very important and I will not call you back. This goes for work and personal calls.

We did the same thing. Unfortunately the performance was terrible and roughly 25% of what was required. I hate having this legacy crap in our DC, but would have felt a little better if it could have been virtualized to at least mitigate hardware issues going forward.

I'd be curious to see the statistics of perceived OS Decay between installs on mechanical drives vs SSDs. I would always reload my system every 12-18 months on XP and then Win7. I don't think I reloaded Win7 again after I got my first SSD for my boot drive. I also did a clean install of Win 8.1 on an SSD, but it's only been 2 months so far.

Leech ZMODEM. :-)

Cisco and their UCS Blade systems would disagree with you.

It just seems odd that someone would wait for the fuel to (presumably) run out. Why not just immediately dump the plane into the ground/ocean/etc whenever said parties took control of the craft?

It seems like the only items Microcenter has superior pricing on is Intel CPUs for whatever reason (at least in Georgia). I bought my first computer from them over 20 years ago (386DX), but not much since. Newegg has proven to be a more reliable and less expensive source of computer parts over the years although they only have an online presence. Frys pissed me off several years ago by not honoring their online prices (when they were outpost.com) at the brick and mortar stores.

I only buy from Microcenter and Frys when they have a sale. Their non-sale pricing is pretty terrible at best (minus the junk in the "bargain bins")

Hmm. Unless you are ordering a lot from Amazon, I don't see how the $79 annual fee for prime is worth free (2 day) shipping. Typically I get most items in less than 5 day from them anyway. I've also been very lucky with NewEgg since they opened a warehouse in Tennessee. I live in Georgia and on several occasions I've gotten my order next day, although 2 day is more typical.

Don't get me wrong, my Touchpad is a great unit (especially for $99 and still working great after nearly 2 years), but I'm getting to the point I'd like a more powerful/lighter/thinner/longer battery life/accessories/etc tablet. I had no intention of buying a tablet (it was my first), but at that price it was worth the risk to see if a tablet would be a good fit for me.

I looked long and hard at the Nexus 10, but the recharge issue has really turned me off. I've read a ton of great things about the Nexus 7, but I'm not sure if I would be satisfied with a smaller screen. That being said, I have no problem waiting until the end of this year or even next year to finally get a new unit, especially if I'm going to drop $500 or more and I have a perfectly suitable unit right now.

Bring on a super cheap Surface and I might take a chance on Microsoft too.

I would jump all over that. I'm about ready to retire my fire sale purchased Touchpad.

This is absolutely true. I took this for granted when I picked up a Galaxy S3 for my personal phone. My work issued phone is an iPhone 4s and I find I use it much more often simply because its size. I prefer Android over IOS, but the S3 rarely get used unless I am at my desk or sitting on my couch for example. When I'm on the go (which seems more often than not) I am using the iPhone. My next Droid will be more of a "single-handed" form factor.

I believe he said he has 3 kids under the age of three, the effort has surely been made already!

My wife isn't much of a gamer (aside from a few of the IOS variety), but she took interest in the New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii a few years ago and has also enjoyed it on the Wii U, which has a few extra features to involve a 2nd person if you aren't playing in full co-op mode. She also starting getting into Mario Galaxy 2 as long as I was around to help her through some of the more challenging levels/bosses. About the only other game she showed any interest in was Plants vs. Zombies, which she has played on both the iPad and PC.

Something else you might want to consider (if you haven't already) are board games. We got a few that we could play as a family, focused around games my 6 year old could play and surprisingly the wife really enjoyed Castle Panic. I think she likes the co-op and strategy/thinking aspects of it. She didn't care for Castle Keep and we haven't had a chance to break out Catan: Junior yet. You'll have more variety to choose from since you aren't looking for something that a young child grasp. I went this route as I was tired of playing Monopoly, Sorry, etc, "classic" board games.

Wow, I don't remember anything about this news. Coincidentally I've just started having GPU issues with my 4 year old laptop (Asus) with a 9800M GS last week. I just chalked to up to it being beaten to hell in general (used it for business travel for a few years) and then my kid abusing it and finally putting the nail in the coffin playing a lot of Minecraft during his time off for the holidays. It lasted a lot longer the Dell I had in 2006 with a 7900 GS (I think that was it).I even had the video card replaced once under warranty. Guess that's what I get for going Dell.