It's Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit with Microsoft Security Essentials. You're lucky not to have experienced this little annoying bug that is probably not enough of a time waster that it's worth seeking a solution online, let alone spending the time to submit a detailed bug report. Yes, I know approximately how big the Windows source code base is. Yes, I've made money writing software and also been paid to find workarounds to stupid bugs like this one. I would not allow them to actually change the code, just make suggestions to the "code monkeys." Serious point though: I think there is something wrong with a company that spends 9.5 billion annually on research yet they cannot manage to fix a bunch of six-month-old bugs in one of the most important parts of their flagship product.

It's just completely infuriating that Microsoft has people working on projects like this when their flagship products are full of stupid bugs that it's impossible to imagine could have made it through the simplest testing. Maybe I'm just a little upset this morning because Windows 7 lost all the items that I had pinned to my Windows Explorer taskbar item AND THAT HAPPENS ABOUT ONCE A MONTH. And what's up with not fixing all of the Internet Explorer bugs that the one researcher found six months ago and just publicized yesterday? I've got a good idea for their Research group: Hand each one of them a list of 10 infuriating Windows and Office bugs, along with the source code, and tell them to fix the problems!

He would probably make more money writing a book about who killed JonBenet than he would have by selling his software. I wonder if that's what he's planning to do, because he boldly said that he was wrong in thinking that the mother killer her, but he did not say who the evidence led him to believe actually did it.

Government equipment, not passenger equipment:
http://biggovernment.com/tshepherd/2010/02/24/dept-of-homeland-security-loses-over-1000-computers-in-one-year/

They look downright responsible compared to the US Department of Homeland Security who supposedly lost over 1,000 laptops in a single year (2008).

I haven't ordered too many OEM drives from them, only five or six out of the fifty. The two drives that failed (the open box one that wasn't supposed to be, and its replacement) were OEM drives that should have been packed better. The two most recent desktop OEM drives that I received from them last week were packed very well.

That seems like an unusually high failure rate. I've only had two bad hard drives out of about 50 that I ordered in the past five years: There was the one I mentioned that came in an open sleeve (obviously opened by someone else and not meant to be open), and the replacement drive that I ordered for that one, a different brand, turned out to be bad. They were both high-capacity notebook drives.

I did not order the drive as an "open box" item. It was supposed to be new. They either made a mistake, or they were hoping that they could stick me with an "open box" item and I would not notice. I did notice. I tried out the drive anyway, to see if it was good, but it was not.

This reminds me of the time that I ordered a notebook hard drive from Newegg and the unit that I received came in an opened protective sleeve. The drive failed the first read/write test that I use to check all new hard drives. So I think that Newegg sometimes ships out used equipment, which is not a good idea with a company like this whose tech-savvy customers know when they receive something that does not work.

This hardly seems like news, except that Apple messed up by allowing people who received free, promotional copies of paid apps to rate those apps. If Apple were to prohibit that and also remove any such ratings then that should solve the problem.