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I'd gotten some good advice about adhesives and lubricants here before, so I thought I'd try again. I have a fancy Aeron chair that was broken in storage. The plastic seat pan frame is just busted. But I think it might be glue-able. And considering the replacement seat is $150 or so...

Navigating from the default logical directories - that windows thinks I ought to use - to the physical directories that I actually use, is pretty annoying. When a file dialog opens (open/save) how can I tell windows what directory to default to? Is there any way to use shortcuts or bring...

So, if I move the OS drive to the same model computer, what problems should I expect? I've done this before with no problem, but there could be a security or licensing issue that wasn't present on older laptops or OSs. I'm doing this to determine if some issues (windows crashes when...

I haven't seen this in a loooong long time. If I understand this correctly, it's using 13/13gb virtual memory. So the swap file is 6gb (for whatever reason) and 7gb of ram is consumed, that's 13gb. But, I do have 8gb of RAM. Is there some overhead I'm not accounting for, that wouldn't be...

I'm planning to add an SSD an older laptop with *only* SATA 2. Obviously that will limit max throughput to ~250MB/s or so, though IOPs will be unchanged. But, here's my question. I noticed that SSDs can consume a bit more power (up to 2x) than traditional spinny drives, and have seen a...

I need to get a GbE NIC for an older computer that will run as a server (OS undecided). In my shopping, I find that some cards are labeled as "server" cards and some "desktop" cards; there appear to be two versions of some cards. What's the difference? Reliability, driver support...

I slapped this computer together from parts last week and noticed that the Phenom 960T is running all cores at the same speed at either 800, 1600 or 3.0ghz. There's no sign of 3.4ghz "turbo", even throwing only one thread at it. I'm testing it with superpi, and watching speeds / temps with...

On an SSD, is there any difference between: 1. partitioning your drive with 10% less space 2. using the mfr's over-provisioning tool to block off 10% space 3. keeping 10% space free for the life of the ssd

I need a backup solution, maybe you guys have some recommendations. My requirements: - bootable option - backup to network storage (cifs, nfs, etc?) and usb storage - incrementals or versioning - browseable/mountable backup images - exclude folders or partitions (I'll use something separate...

I have a bunch of broken plastic things and want to repair them. Subtly, and tastefully. Not with big goops of hot glue. But, I also need something robust and preferably not brittle like crazy glue (?). I used to have a cement for plastic, which would slightly melt the two plastic...

well... I got a deal on this and grabbed it, not realizing that it didn't come with the upgrade kit (spacer and USB / SATA adapter). Is there no way to buy samsung's upgrade kit, so as to be sure that it will work with samsung's data migration software? I did a clean install (and everything...

What's the oldest / lowest end graphics card that will take the load off the CPU for encoding h.264 MP4s ? This is for a DLNA media server; my need is to transcode HD movies (720p minimum) in real time in a format that all players work well with (mp4). I think the mobo I intend to use for...

I'm having some trouble maintaining gigabit speeds on some runs in my house. I've looked at cheap cable testers ($20-ish) but I am wondering if there's software that will let you do these things (and more) on a laptop or pc. My laptop all have intel or broadcom nics. Is there windows...

I used to use netstumbler to browse wireless networks and devices. But, it no longer works, due to either an incompatibility with current Windowses or adapters. Can anyone recommend anything? I need something to troubleshoot utilization issues and hopefully figure out which neighbors are...

you guys might know this. I have a sticky xbox 360 controller and it looks like I need to lubricate the joystick mechanism. What lubricant should I use that will stay in there and not dissolve the plastics? I assumed something had gotten in there and have been working at the mechanism...

Can someone recommend a utility (or method) of measuring packet loss? I'm trying to determine which router is dropping packets, and how much. Some kind of client-driven stress test would be good, like a windows utility that fire traffic at the router and get some failure rate or graph over...

Is anyone familiar with this? I've been using this for a few months as a workaround for my older 32-bit laptop to get at >4gb until I can transition. It's a hack for the 7600 kernel to enable PAE on a non-server windows OS. It does the job and I haven't had any problems. The problem is...

I suspect this is a usb 5v current issue, but I'm not sure. It happens only on certain drives attached to certain computers. They click away when plugged in, failing to start up, and may register in windows as a malfunctioning device. But the errant drive will work fine when plugged into...

How good is 1366x768 (WXGA) on a 15.6" display these days? These seems to be really popular with business notebooks. With modern pixel tuning tricks (AA + subpixel tweaking), is this acceptable? The last time I had a low resolution display like this, I absolutely hated it; it was...

windows (7) is switching windows on me, seemingly at random. I'll be in the middle of something in one window, and it will switch me to another, recent window, almost like a sort of phantom alt-tab. Or, mayble clicks events in windows aren't being triggered until much later, when a different...

i haven't been to hardocp in awhile, and to hardforum that much recently. But I just noticed that there are no ads showing up, anywhere. i'm running adblock plus and put in what I think are exclusions following this pattern, but they have no effect. @@||example.com^$document unless you...

This isn't as obvious as I would have thought. I have a mystery computer here that has Windows 7 installed, and a Vista COA. Microsoft update works as it should. I have no way of knowing if it's legit, or if MS is providing updates grudgingly, or if an activation crack is getting around...

In the windows 7 task manager, have any of you ever seen the memory consumption go above your amount of physical memory? I see this regularly in XP, but never on my W7 machine. It's possible that I "broke" this a while ago with repartitioning shenanigans. It could also just be that the w7...

Are there any issues with flat ethernet cables? I don't understand how they can achieve the same signal integrity if they don't use twisted pairs or shielding (at least I assume, given their flatness). Are there different length or speed limits? Example...

I just bought a 16gb SD for readyboost to speed up an older laptop. That machine is maxed out with 4gb, so it would be much more desirable to use the SD card for swap to lighten the load on the HDD, but I assume that would burn out the MLC chips pretty quickly. However, it seems there are SD...

I've been noticing some inconsistencies and weird behavior in my home wifi setup. I'm starting to suspect some kind of serious security issue. Periodically, the router (netgear wnr3500) will become unresponsive and not allow anyone to connect, requiring a reboot of the router. I assumed this...

I can barely use the site because of all the scripts hanging firefox (14.0.1) - it becomes unresponsive and eventually asks to shut down one of a number of different scripts, which has little effect whether I kill them or not. Not sure what the problem is, however I don't seem to be having it...

I have a couple of old laptops (all hp nc6230s w/XP) that I still use. One of them I use for personal business (eg. online financial stuff), and that one developed a pattern of overheating the south bridge, leading to its demise. I swapped the hard drive to another nc6230, and in short order...

Is this possible? PAE? I've seen some conflicting information about this online, but it sounds like this will allow my relatively old laptop with w7 x86 to map the full 4 gigs of it's memory (right now - 3gb). If it works. It sounds like it's an easy thing to try, I'm just curious why it...

I accidentally deleted a folder structure via a network share and am trying to recover it. The problem is - besides the fact that windows has no way to do this - the recovery programs recover individual files and dump them all in one folder regardless of original path. Any advice on this...

So, my 7200.11 1.5Ttb was failing and I tried to RMA it with Seagate. That was a month ago. They sent me a 2tb Constellation drive, which was about 50% bad blocks, per chkdsk. I talked to seagate and they sent me a 2nd 2tb Constellation which failed to even spin up. I sent both those back...

I'm looking at the Samsung ecogreen F1, which is on sale today. Samsung's drives require some special sector-alignment. Is this the same sector write-alignment that SSDs require? What does this do? What happens if you don't have them aligned? What happens if you move the drive...

I have a 1.5tb seagate barracuda (7200.11 ST31500341AS) which occasionally makes loud mechanical clicking noises (like metal on metal) when idle. SMART shows nothing out of the ordinary and Seagate Seatools says it's ok. It's always made these noises, which make me a bit uncomfortable...

In the past I've used Linux for file servers, after noticing that they tend to give better raw file transfer performance. Keeping up with all the administration tasks got to be a bit much, so I tried switching to Windows 2003 last year, but am finding the performance to be quite sucky. Why is...

I've been considering powerline networking for my home, because of certain difficulties pulling cables in one area. Wifi is saturated here in the city. My first question is - how do I interpret the speed ratings? If the device is 500mbit, does that mean it's split 250mbs upstream and...

I have an HP 8510p laptop, which is an older C2D T7500 using an 865 chipset. I had a stick of DDR2-800 and a stick of DDR2-667, so naturally the memory ran at 667 (333mhz). Recently I swapped out the 667 stick to 800 (identical to the other 800 2gb), and assumed that the memory would run...

I'm not so hip to current benchmarking tools. I think I used to use pc-mark to compare all my systems, which seems to have stopped at version '05. As I recall, it was a Huge package (a few hundred MB?), and an '05 tool probably won't test current processors adequately. It should also be free...

I'm going to install an SSD in my laptop, an HP 8510p. I googled up this post below, which suggests that some SSDs require 3.3v and not all laptops provide that through the SATA power connector...

I have a compaq presario whose drive is failing (bad blocks in OS partition). I don't have recovery discs for it, and the recovery partition is intact, so I want to copy everything to another hard drive. But that hasn't worked out so far. The original drive is 500gb. As an experiment, I...

A friend of mine got a 28" 1080p Hannspree ST288MUV TV/Monitor and is trying to use it via HDMI from a windows 7 pc. The image appears cropped (and possibly scaled) so that you can't see the windows task bar, side icons, etc. Horizontally it looks like it's scaled outside of 1920, but...