OT: Technology and Geek Stuff Thread

[Tony G]

N ice avatar!

you mean those bastards charge you to make changes?????

[LightninBoy]

So I totally geeked out this week.

The family PC bit the dust a few weeks ago. After ruling out hard drive failure, I decided to just rebuild the thing: new CPU, new motherboard, new memory, new power supply, new DVD writer/burner, and new solid state HD. Really, the only things that are the same are the case and multi-card reader.

Couple things that I'm impressed with. First, the new Intel I5 chips are frickin amazing. 7.3 outta 7.9 on the windows experience scale and that's completely stock - no overclocking. I bought a graphics card but decided not to use it cause the integrated graphics on the I5 are good enough so far (just needs to run Lego games and the like for the time being).

Second, I splurged on an SSD and boy am I glad I did. Single biggest improvement I've ever made on a computer. Boot up is sub 10 seconds.

This is the first time I've done anything like this. I'm really happy with the results. It really wasn't that hard and it was fun going over all the parts and what they do with the kids.

[Tony G]

Second, I splurged on an SSD and boy am I glad I did. Single biggest improvement I've ever made on a computer. Boot up is sub 10 seconds.

My nephew the techie did this also. Make sure you set it up so your temp files go to a 2nd drive. SSD's allow a finite number of writes so you want to put the temp files where they won't go against that.

[scott2020]

Toying with getting this phone and the $35 per month plan with unlimited data, web messaging and email with 300 talk minutes. Has anyone used Virgin Mobile that can comment on how good or bad they are?

http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-...ider-phone.jsp

I'm in MO and have used them for about a year or so. One thing to keep in mind is it only works on Sprint, no roaming, so if you go to areas with no Sprint service you can't use it. I go to some rural areas without Sprint coverage, but I have a backup phone from Page Plus cellular. Page Plus uses Verizon's network which is far more extensive, and is prepaid.

Sprint (Virgin) works great when you have coverage, but their network has been getting slower and slower on the data side. Overall for the price, it's decent. Thankfully I'm grandfathered on the $25 plan. They recently went from $25 to $35 for that plan.

[Tony G]

I might go with t-mobile, cause they have a cute girl in their commercial

[Dr. Emmett.L.Brown]

N ice avatar!

you mean those bastards charge you to make changes?????

Not too shabby on your avatar sir;-)

and yes those ass nuggets charge for anything.....
$5 per programming change
but I can't complain.... they did waive them ....this time...

[Coop]

TB - I am almost ready to build my new tower - going i7 6 core with ssd and 12 gb ram...

[LightninBoy]

My nephew the techie did this also. Make sure you set it up so your temp files go to a 2nd drive. SSD's allow a finite number of writes so you want to put the temp files where they won't go against that.

Interesting, I'll check into that. Turns out there are a several little tidbits like this when working with SSDs. One of the things that held me back from getting an SSD earlier is that, because of the limited space, you need to manage its use carefully. And that's hard to do on a family PC. So one thing I did, for example, was to move the Users folder off the SSD and onto a 1TB HDD. Doing that right is trickier than it should be.

TB - I am almost ready to build my new tower - going i7 6 core with ssd and 12 gb ram...

Sweet. I considered the i7 for about 10 seconds when the MicroCenter sales guy said that I could get $50 off a motherboard if I get the i7.
But they had the i5 at such a rockin price I still couldn't justify the difference.

[Coop]

Tony - I've heard that SSD's supporting TRIM handle the issue of writes and deletes.

[Kansas]

HELP! OK, I have tomcat running on my laptop. Using eclipse. I've got a test-app I want to test. It works fine when I use URL http://localhost:8080/test-app. But I don't want to have to put 8080 in the address. So I changed sever.xml to use port 80 only, and restarted tomcat, which supposedly would allow me to just use http://localhost/test-app.

But it doesn't work. I still have to use 8080. Plus, even when I stop tomcat i can still get http://localhost:8080/test-app to work. I don't understand it unless I have another tomcat process.

Any ideas from you nerds?

[Coop]

What OS is your laptop running kansaw?

[In_The_Back]

TB - I am almost ready to build my new tower - going i7 6 core with ssd and 12 gb ram...

Nice. Betting that cost less than I spent on my Thinkpad for $1200, 4GB, i5 quad core, cheap graphics. Not sure why it cost so much now... That's going to be one kickass PC.

At least I found this little adapter thing that allows a few extra external monitors through a USB hub. Pretty nice since the external monitors have a higher resolution than the built in laptop screen.

[Kansas]

What OS is your laptop running kansaw?

Windows 7.

[Kansas]

Do I need to do something with my host file?

[Kansas]

HA! I fingered it out. I touched the index.html file and voila. Musta been a cacheing issue????