CoffeeFiend

If that's your attitude then that's perfectly fine, as most employers would rather not hire you anyway. Win-win.

It would work just fine. A switch is indeed what you're looking for.

Great news The VS2010 release date was announced here (provided link only confirmed for SQL Server), but it's so short I might as well copy/paste the whole thing here: Can't wait!

Nice rig overall. Not a killer gamer's rig (due to the video card) but no complaints Win7 x64 would work just fine on it.

The CPU has a TDP of 95W by itself and a Radeon 4850 will use another 100W or so (IIRC) on its own. Then you have to add everything else... And leave some expansion room for future upgrades, and you don't want the thing running at 100% either. I mean, I have good quality Seanonic 350W PSUs in the kids boxes, but they're low power Athlon X2's (45W TDP) with onboard video, NOT a Core i5 gaming machine with fancy video card. Either ways, there's only $10 difference between the two. And for that $10, you get lots more power available to you (534 vs 360W on the 12v rails -- nearly 50% more), a higher efficiency (it's 80+ silver i.e. over 88%) which will easily pay for the difference and more, 5 years warranty, it's ready for a 2nd video card (and his board has two x16 slots as well), etc. So why not?

I know. I'm still under $700 without them Good call. And here is my updated list, for a i5 750, including a board that also has that: One more option, v2, copy-and-paste edition: Intel Core i5 750 Quad Core Processor Lynnfield LGA1156 2.66GHZ 8MB Cache Retail Box $219.99 Gigabyte P55A-UD3 ATX LGA1156 P55 DDR3 2PCI-E 2PCI RAID GBLAN CrossFireX USB3.0 SATA3 Motherboard $150.99 still 4 DIMM sockets, two x16 slots, etc. Also has USB 3 and SATA 6 Gbps in case he has a need for those. Corsair XMS3 CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1600 CL 9-9-9-24 Core I5 Dual Channel Memory Kit $99.99 OCZ Z-SERIES 550W 80+ Silver Certified 24PIN ATX 12V Afc Power Supply W/ 120MM Fan $74.99 (there's a $25 mail in rebate, NOT included in that price) Powercolor Radeon HD 5750 700MHZ 1GB 4.6GHZ GDDR5 2XDVI HDMI Display Port DIRECTX11 $139.99 (there's a $10 mail in rebate, NOT included in that price) otherwise you can get a 4850 with 512MB for $99 (if you don't really need DirectX 11 yet) Antec Three Hundred Mini Tower Gaming Case 300 ATX 3X5.25 6X3.5INT No PS Front USB & Audio $53.99 Hard drive -- you already have. I'm assuming you also have the DVD-RW, otherwise a 24x Samsung SATA DVD-RW will run you $28 extra. Then I'd make it price match themselves (directcanada and ncix are really the same company) -- in your cart, select "start price match" and fill the prices and URLs (so far, they've never turned any of mine down): The exact same RAM @ $96.47 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...facture=CORSAIR The exact same CPU @ 218.88 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...nufacture=INTEL The exact same video card @ $138.01 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...ture=POWERCOLOR The exact same motherboard @ $147.68 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...acture=GIGABYTE That would pretty much be it. Before price matching or mail in rebates, the price is $739.94 (w/o the DVD-RW). After price matching with themselves (I still love this game), it's $730.02 so still $30 over budget (unless you go with the 4850 in which case you're down to about $692). Then if you do get the $35 back from the mail in rebates, you're down to $695 Or $657 if you go with the 4850... Mind you, I'd still look at a Athlon II X4 620 build like puntoMX said (more $ left for a better vid card like a 4890 or other things) It's nice for sure (I just built a box for a friend last week with a nice coolermaster case too). However: So I went with that, just like he said...

One more option: Intel Core i5 750 Quad Core Processor Lynnfield LGA1156 2.66GHZ 8MB Cache Retail Box $219.99 Gigabyte P55M-UD2 mATX LGA1156 P55 DDR3 2PCI-E 2PCI SATA2 RAID Sound GLAN Motherboard $106.99 (not bad at all: has 4 DIMM sockets, two x16 slots, 7x SATA and one eSATA, spdif and toslink, firewire, it has solid polymer caps throughout, etc) Corsair XMS3 CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1600 CL 9-9-9-24 Core I5 Dual Channel Memory Kit $99.99 OCZ Z-SERIES 550W 80+ Silver Certified 24PIN ATX 12V Afc Power Supply W/ 120MM Fan $74.99 (there's a $25 mail in rebate, NOT included in that price) Powercolor Radeon HD 5750 700MHZ 1GB 4.6GHZ GDDR5 2XDVI HDMI Display Port DIRECTX11 $139.99 (there's a $10 mail in rebate, NOT included in that price) otherwise you can get a 4850 with 512MB for $99 (if you don't really need DirectX 11 yet) Antec Three Hundred Mini Tower Gaming Case 300 ATX 3X5.25 6X3.5INT No PS Front USB & Audio $53.99 Hard drive -- you already have. I'm assuming you also have the DVD-RW, otherwise a 24x Samsung SATA DVD-RW will run you $28 extra. Then I'd make it price match themselves (directcanada and ncix are really the same company) -- in your cart, select "start price match" and fill the prices and URLs (so far, they've never turned any of mine down): The exact same RAM @ $96.47 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...facture=CORSAIR The exact same CPU @ 218.88 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...nufacture=INTEL The exact same video card @ $138.01 there: http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=...ture=POWERCOLOR That would pretty much be it. Before price matching or mail in rebates, the price is $695.94 (w/o the DVD-RW). After price matching with themselves (I love this game LOL), it's $689.33. Then if you do get the $35 back from the mail in rebates, you're down to $654.33 Or $614.33 if you go with the 4850... Mind you, I'd still look at a Athlon II X4 620 build like puntoMX said (more $ left for a better vid card like a 4890 or other things)

Nice homework. Too bad that's against forum rule 2.c [closed]

You can barely buy a good quality low wattage PSU for ~$40, so the bundled PSU with a $30 case... I wouldn't want of it for free. It is There's a whole lot more to it than just the memory controller (new Lynnfield core). Pretty much every benchmark on the web or benchmarking app will confirm that (passmark, everest, pcmark, etc) But why buy previous generation everything when you're really not saving anything (and is of less value and less future proof)? You don't quite need a i5 750 to play games, for sure. A dual core would be plenty for most games. But as far as quad cores go, your options are pretty limited: -Core 2 Quad, slower than i5's and not really cheaper -- I'd buy one today if they were priced better, but I could upgrade to a i5 for just about the same price as a slower C2Q would cost me (selling my old parts to pay for part of the upgrade) -i5/i7 good but definitely not cheap -AMD's offerings -- may not be as fast, but great value if you don't need the absolute fastest e.g. Intel Core2 Quad Q8200 vs AMD Athlon II X4 620: the C2Q is like 3 or 4% faster (not really noticeable outside of benchmarks) but costs 50% more... The AMD CPU has very similar speed, but for $50 less (I'm a bit tempted to sell my C2D to buy one of those)

Not really. The i5 750 is $200, and the cheapest non-crippled quad core (with VT and all) is the Q9400 at $190 which is slower, uses old DDR2, the old socket 775 and all that (not exactly future proof). Totally not worth it for a $10 savings. The i5 is also a better value (costs 5% more, but is 15% faster)

Nobody will host that, and almost nobody would download something that huge either. Compress it first (try 7-zip using max compression), it'll be MUCH smaller then.

Full retail, clean install. Are all of your USB devices working properly besides this one?

Our Wacom tablets are working just fine under Win7 x64 (I believe I was using an older driver last time -- WacomTablet_605-7.exe). I don't ever remove anything, so I'm no help there.

Sizes and positions are kept in localstore.rdf, which would be located in C:\Users\YourNameHere\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\somerandomstring.default\

Same here. The built-in firewall is plenty good. I wouldn't switch to a 3rd party firewall even if they all became free and/or open source. As for Kerio, it's quited dated (from 2003), and as such likely won't work with "modern" OS'es, or IPv6, or x64 versions of Windows, probably doesn't integrate with Windows (and other apps as well, or using scripts, or group policy, or ...) nearly as well as Windows' own and so on. Lots of people seem to like Comodo. I can't be bothered to even try it.

Yes. That's precisely what he said. That's because XP's installer is dating back from the NT 3.x era, from 15 years ago.

It would be, if there was any truth to it. Even the link he posted showed it wasn't the case (false positive from one particular vendor), and that information was there by the time he posted it.... Like nitropuppy already said, you have slow laptop onboard video, and there's not much you can do about it. It has Intel GMA 4500MHD onboard video which is quite bad for games (even for onboard video). It gets 697 in 3dmark06, whereas fairly popular video cards (available under $100, nothing extreme) like the nvidia 8800GT and 9800GT score about 12000 (not quite 20 times faster). If you look at some benchmarks around the web like this, you'll quickly see it's inadequate for the vast majority of recent games (even with the settings on the lowest level) e.g. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Unreal Tournament III, Left 4 Dead, F.E.A.R. 2... But it'll run some older games like Counter-Strike: Source just fine, but that would be a game from 2004. Then again, it's way underpowered for some other games from that era e.g. Doom 3 (also from 2004)

So many ways to skin a cat This one doesn't work though. And if it actually worked, it would test for Windows 7 (and 2008 R2) or later. You're taking a string made from all kinds of stuff (including the 2 simple numbers we want to check), and then use a math operator to compare the 2 different strings (I wouldn't say using greater or equal between anything else than 2 numbers "simpler" than what I had posted honestly), and it doesn't work. VersionString on Win7 is "Microsoft Windows NT 6.1.7600.0". Compare that against string any version number, and it'll return true regardless (i.e. try Environment.OSVersion.VersionString >= "9.9.9999" or such, as M is 0x4D and 9 is 0x39) Then again, one could consider checking if the string is exactly what they expect it to be but it tends to change (depending on service pack and such) so it might be error prone. Using Major and Minor will work as expected.

No point in trying to translate vbscript that uses WMI (it doesn't translate well at all -- normally WMI is used rather differently in .NET), especially when there's a "native" way to do it without any of that. Even if I wasn't doing it the normal way, I'd sooner PInvoke GetVersionEx. And even if I was using WMI, I still wouldn't use SoftwareLicensingService as it's only available Vista and later OS'es and as such the code (as-is) will fail (as in crash) on XP, and the Win32_OperatingSystem class is meant precisely for this. In C# you'd simply do this: System.OperatingSystem osVer = System.Environment.OSVersion; if (osVer.Version.Major == 6 && osVer.Version.Minor == 1) { //running Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 } If my memory serves me well (haven't done any VB at all in the last couple of years), it would be translated into VB.Net like so: Dim osVer As System.OperatingSystem = System.Environment.OSVersion If osVer.Version.Major = 6 AndAlso osVer.Version.Minor = 1 Then 'running Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 End If

That just isn't possible. You have to have physical access to the packets to capture them. You can't capture packets that aren't sent to you. You can run something like wireshark on the other machine (netsh also works for newer machines), or you can use advanced features (port mirroring and such) in some modern network equipment to make it easier for you.

Use Process Explorer (instead of task manager) and Autoruns (instead of regedit, to get startup entries)

That's another address it uses. You often have to do a ipconfig /flushdns for these changes to take effect.

That most likely wouldn't help. Either: -the chip is good but the data is corrupted; in which case copying the corrupted data to a new chip won't solve anything... it needs to be reprogrammed, but where to get the valid data? -the chip is defective; can't get valid data from it which causes the problem, in which case reprogramming another one with the same thing wouldn't help -the chip is good and you have proper data on it, in which case the chip isn't be the source of the problems in the first place Flashing an eeprom over I2C is the easy part here The hard part is finding valid data to put on the chip (old or new), and perhaps soldering SMD parts if you're not used to it and/or don't have the proper equipment

Have you blocked the Google Analytics script by any chance (or set the domain to an invalid IP in your hosts file or something)? That would cause such errors in any browser. Works fine over here (not using Opera though! )

WM_DEVICECHANGE and DBT_DEVICEARRIVAL