I had a dead drive with a relatives photos on it once, and came across an identical drive a while later. The PCB connections and crimp-ons looked far too fiddly for my level of tool experience, but on close examination I found one surface-mount capacitor appeared to have lost its magic black smoke.
With a fine soldering tip and some patience I managed to remove the matching capacitor from the working drive and stick it to the dead one. This worked long enough to retrieve the personal files off the drive. I was not prepared to use the drive for any longer than that tho.

Appreciate your right to an anonymous moan about Steam, but have you really had a lot of experience of how things used to be?

In the past I remember many horrible experiences while attempting to install games from a handful of CDs or from 2 or 3 DVDs released by a publisher who had their own idea of how complicated and needlessly annoying the process should be, and then the hassle of finding and inserting the DVD to be allowed to start up a game, every time I wanted to play it.

All I know is a lot of problems went away once I started using Steam, and it has never been easier from the point of deciding to buy a game to the point of kicking of a game session.

I have not noticed any of the mentioned crashy and buggy stuff, altho I have not purchased EVERY game they publish. My guess is bad graphics hardware or drivers. Invasive? what? the steam client that you can configure to start up automatically or not? What is invasive?

Yes, use SourceForge. I put my open source project up on there and my users have BOTH posted a bug report on the project. Easy to find whenever I need to think about maybe checking it out to fix it.

And yet if I forget that I am using such crap software and copy something off a web page and paste it into Lotus Notes, the whole app freezes for over a minute.
Seriously, copy-and-paste was adopted a long long time ago and most people nowdays assume that they can just do it.

So you drive in Auckland? heh. I guess that short sighted lane switching idiocy is more wide spread than just here.

I like cruise control, and I like to be able to roll along at a constant steady pace. I have wondered about when cars may be able to communicate their cruise control status to each other. At the very least, when approaching another car from behind, your car should be able to ask if you want to tag on behind, and then adjust the cruise control to match and maintain a certain distance behind the car of your choice.

I would like to think that such a thing would be accepted eventually and become widely enough used for it to be safe and reliable. Unfortunately there are many, at least here in NZ, who appear to think that a large chunk of something valuable has been carved off of their body every time another car gets past them on the road, and others who appear to be approaching some kind of seizure if they get stuck behind a car which has a gap of 1 metre or more in front of it. Sadly it may take more than technology to fix some of these attitudes.

You think punch cards are bad? IBM is till pushing Lotus Notes as an email application.
Think I would prefer punch cards.

I don't believe you can justify that statement unless you are looking for drivers for something extremely old. The driver support site has been very user friendly for several years now. The quality of the drivers may not have been so great however.

I am having constant bsod problems also, for about 6 months now, on Windows 7 with a HD4850. It doesn't have any problems running games but there is a random driver error when accessing the PC externally, e.g. using the media services from my tv. Unfortunately I have not been able to find a historical driver to fix this, and the Windows suggested driver has the same problem.

I have to say after many years of being reasonably happy with my ATI card that I will not be buying another one.

Well I can still remember the time and place where people thought it was ok to suck on a fag in public.
They would even lend a fag to their friends or co-workers, who had run out of cigarettes at the time.
Then a fag became something entirely different.

I agree. That was how I stopped smoking. The break from tobacco while I had the flu was just long enough that when I was feeling healthy again, the very first smoke I lit up tasted absolutely foul and I never had another one after that. It has to be the best way to kick it. Heeey maybe I could patent my special flu treatments... oh damn, its running around in the wild already.

Actually that term is not uncommon and I have heard a number of IT professionals use it, even an IT manager in a fairly large company. The only issue I have is that some pronounce it like pewter and some more like pooter. I prefer pooter myself.
And why not talk about them in a way that makes them sound ridiculous? How seriously should you take them?

I have a small bedside lamp which used to be sufficient for reading paper books with, but found it to be useless when trying to read my new Sony Reader. Not sure why that is, but ended up using a cover with built-in light now.

Also the bus ride home during winter will require the light, interior lighting quality varies and last winter the drivers usedta turn off the lights randomly for some reason.

If you read the article carefully, it seems his name is the equivalent of "whose name has been withheld", and sure enough, the newspapers here are full of stories... "the drunk driver, whose name has been withheld...", "the armed bank robber, whose name has been withheld...", "the child rapist, whose name..."

Actually my ship will have a force-field extending out half a light year ahead, which is incorporated into the mass-convertor. We won't need to slow down at all to pick a planet up for fuel. I heard some ethecists mention the need to stop and check for life forms but I'm not sure if they were going to be on board for the first trip.