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What do you do to protect yourself against zero-day exploits and malvertising attacks? Being smart on what you download isn't enough any more. Not in several years. Especially not with modern quiet botnet-type malware. I use Norton 360 at home as I've been able to get freebie 1-year...

I can understand disabling some of the telemetry stuff, maybe, but disabling services for no gain, or disabling antivirus...sheesh. :( This stuff isn't "bloat", or at best, in the case of services, taking a small risk for no real gain.

A couple of the tech sites reviewed and benchmarked the "Black Viper" Windows XP tweaks - disabling services and the like - back in the day. Worked out that it did pretty much did nothing. If anything, it hurt performance. Microsoft knows what they're doing. Those extra services are just...

I think I found my answer for sure, it sounds like that's pretty much the case. https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/4794/more-windows-10-answers-how-activation-will-work-on-an-upgrade So, it would theoretically work, I guess, if I could somehow extract the win10 key from the...

If that was the case, how could you clean install win10 on it, either? I'll try giving it a shot tomorrow or Friday, I guess I'll find out. I'd prefer to get a win10 pro activation out of this anyway.

So if I install win7 pro, upgrade to win10 pro, wouldn't the machine be activated for win10 pro at that point? Seems like I could then do the upgrade to my vanilla win8.1 install and I'd end up with win10 pro, as I don't think the activation would care that I was doing an upgrade install vs a...

I'm trying to figure out a way to upgrade my vanilla win8 laptop to Win10 pro. Because I'm way too busy to deal with a clean install / reinstall of all my programs. I have some win7 pro keys I'm not using, so I could install it. Could I install Win7 pro temporarily to my secondary HDD...

An alternative to Straight Talk is AIO wireless (now branded Cricket). AT&T-owned prepaid brand, AT&T coverage. 500mb plan is $35/mo with autopay (no taxes), 2.5gb is $45/mo. My wife is on straight talk (wasn't worth changing her over) and I'm on AIO (I alternate between the 500mb and the...

The point of Dragon Age Origins was IMO that it was an old-school, pausable, semi-tactical party-based RPG. It was like a new Baldur's Gate, of sorts. They tossed that all to the wind starting with DA2. Now it looks like every other action RPG in the world lately where you control one...

I've used a USB 3.5" floppy drive on Windows 7. I had a dual-floppy 5.25"/3.5" drive under Win7 or Vista 64bit for a couple of years. But I'm not sure I actually used the 5.25" drive for anything, so not sure it worked. But it showed up and Windows recognized both floppy drives.

UEFI / Windows 8 laptops boot crazy fast. I just put my old Intel 120GB from my desktop into my new Asus n550jv laptop...boots up in seconds. On my desktop there was a good 20 seconds of BIOS / AHCI detection / etc.

The biggest difference on an SSD should be the time between when you get the desktop/start menu and when things become actually usable. This should be like...0 seconds on an SSD. Versus a HDD before when it was really about 30 sec - 1 minute before things became actually usable (as stuff...

Exactly. I do this for a living now, and there's exploits like this all of the time. Ever used HomeDepot.com, for example? http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/01/11/home-depot-website-compromised/ http://www.infosecstuff.com/home-depot-website-hack/ And typically you're going to get a...

We're using antivirus firewall and LAN white listing for this at my work.

I had a problem like this that frustrated me for months on my wife's Toshiba laptop. Ended up googling the chipset info (like Realtek xxxx) and finding a driver that fixed it from Lenovo. Extracted the driver to a folder and force-installed it for the wi-fi chip...and it fixed the...

This isn't intrinsic to virtualization, though. You could lock down a physical XP machine in the same way (turn off internet access, limit flash drives, etc). I'm a security professional and for our remaining XP machines, we're locking them down in a very similiar sort of way. Don't need...

The Alienware 14 was actually pretty much perfect for me (OK, a bit heavy/blingy), but even from the outlet I was looking at $1200-$1500 for an i7 model and I wanted to stay in the $600-$800 range if possible. Too much extra $$ for me, for the glowy gamer bling and graphics power. The newest...

Ended up with an Asus N550JV for $900 plus some cash - I didn't like that the video card has DDR3 memory instead of GDDR, but it was one of the few laptops with an IPS screen and I decided that mattered more day-to-day, seeing as I'm not a heavy PC gamer these days. Might have gotten a...

Everyone wants you to do a subscription now instead of paying once for the product. Office, Photoshop, music, streaming, heck my wife even tried a fitness app they want $10/month for so that you can stream lots of workout videos. :rolleyes: I wonder when they start trying to get us to pay...

If Lenovo was saying anything about a release date for the Y40 that would be nice. I can't find anyone with an 800m series laptop ready for sale despite most of them showing in January at CES. I've seen conflicting reports on the y40/50 release dates, everything from mid-March to "end of...

I'm eyeballing up the Asus G46vw as well as the Y410p. Really don't want to go to 15.6", already lugging a Lenovo w510 for work around in my bag, this would be a second lappy. Which is faster, the GTX 660M in the Asus, or the Y410p's GT 755M? Not too up-to-date on GPU knowledge, especially...

Coincidentally the motherboard seems to have gone out on my desktop last week, so yeah...laptop sooner than later would be nice. :S I'm torn because I like the Lenovo Y410p / y510p and they're a really solid deal right now, but they lack IPS screens. Maybe the new models will be priced OK.

At least most of them knew it was a phone. I swear I saw one of these last year where kids had no idea what a VHS tape (or maybe it was a cassette tape) even was.

No, the problem is those of us NOT paying $250/mo Uverse bill. We'd gladly pay $10/mo for HBO-GO app for Android/Roku/etc and the content. But I'm not paying $60/mo+ for TV (which I swear a large percentage of the cost for is sports which we care very little for) plus paying for HBO.

I agree with the others, if this was a decently powered Android box with the Play store, controller support, and XBMC install able from the Play store, it would have done a lot better. It seemed awesome to me (especially if you could easily take it with you to hotels on trips, etc being really...

Bingo Biggest problem there. I work in the field (although I'm a relative newbie) and to me the scariest / best malware is very quiet. Even the average botnet infected computer isn't doing anything that would alarm people that don't know how to look at their network traffic - that's the...

Thanks, that's about the timeframe I'm looking at (next week) so I'll keep an eye out. I love buying on the price/performance curve also though, so if the new releases push prices down on some other models, esp. refurbs/etc I might go that route. The Y40 and Y50 look nice. I see they dropped...

5 month bump here, gonna be buying in a couple of weeks. Any new laptops to consider? The y410p has gone down in my list a bit due to the lack of an IPS display and the fact that Lenovo doesn't seem to ever be releasing the dual-graphics ultrabay add-on. :S There's a couple of new variants...

Are you running wide-band (40hz) enabled on your 5ghz N on your router? I had a lot of problems with Android devices holding a solid connection to 40hz bands on Tomato. Check your other poweruser/tweak settings on the router. Double check also for channel interference if you're near other...

I see a lot of comments about the headphones having fade in / fade problems...including on the logitech forums. Anyone have any hands-on comments on it? I'm wondering if this is a hardware specific bug of some sort or not.

Agreed, 100%. Seriously, can you not see the point of VGA on a laptop? A LOT of home users still have VGA LCDs. A lot of corporate users are driving old LCDs via VGA. Every conference room has VGA. I work at a company with 60,000+ Lenovo workstations. I see people carrying around laptops...

Thanks, seems like a nice option. I'll keep it in mind. I'd prefer 1600x900 for viewability over 1920x1080 (I'm not big on the "OMG pixel density!!" mentality) but it is IPS with a video card and a backlit keyboard. The Sagers and such are too hardcore for me and pricewise, are also...

I hadn't stumbled into that one, seems to fit the bill, thanks. I'll put it on my short list. I did find the g46 but it also seems to have the Centrino 2230 chip with no 5ghz support. :S But as long as it doesn't have a whitelist maybe I could install a different one...

No backlit keyboard on the Vostros... :( Man, it is really hard to find a decent 13-14" laptop with a dedicated graphics card and a halfway decent display (IPS preferably).

Hi all, I'm in the market for a laptop. I would prefer 14". 15" might be OK if I really had to do so. It needs a decent dedicated graphics card, and a backlit keyboard. I would prefer room for a mini-pcie or m.2 SSD as well as a HDD. I REALLY liked the Lenovo Y410p, but there is no 5ghz...

If you want phone service with near 100% reliability, lots of data coverage, and coverage even out in the sticks, keep your Verizon coverage for $100+/mo. If you're willing to give up a little of that you could try Pageplus for example with any Verizon phone - they're a Verizon MVNO...

I'm always disappointed we don't have the dish-washing and hospital robots as predicted in Heinlein's The Door Into Summer. The concept of a drafting robot is funny since we got CAD instead. Asimov himself never expected computers to go where they did... he ret-conned them into the later...

Cablecard rentals were $3/mo from Charter, dunno about Time Warner. You can run the Tivo Streams over wi-fi - no need for Moca adapters. All you need is one Tivo plugged into the cable (not the cable modem). I can't help / don't know about OnDemand - I have literally never paid for OnDemand...

Pretty sure that is the case. Aren't these basically placebo tools as far as performance goes? Pretty sure MS says it's B.S. As long as your disk is defragged you are OK. I write these off like the Black Viper tweaks - they don't actually do anything helpful for performance even though you...

I know HTPCs are popular with the crowd here (I have one running XBMC) but our old TivoHD is still used at my house for recording OTA, or Cable before we went OTA. If you want simple/useful for wives, babysitters, etc, nothing beats a Tivo of some sort. And unlike a cable company DVR, it's...