8/4     I went to Fry's for the first time in ages and was surprised to
        see a 1T Seagate HD on sale. I'm still using my 250G and it's
        only 60% full. What the heck do people put on their HD these
        days, porn? I can't imagine why anyone would want to buy a
        1T drive for personal use.
        \_ HDTV.
	...

5/17    My new 750G Seagate HD shows only 698G available. WHAT THE FUCK??
        \_ 750G = 750*10^9 bytes.  Your OS is probably measuring in 2^30 bytes.
           See GiB vs GB
        \_ Also, disk drive manufacturers advertise "raw" storage, while
           your O/S measures usable storage. You lose quite a bit to
           disk label information, metadata and other various things.
	...

11/7    I just received my 250GB segate HD that is made in China. I've
        had good experience with segate but they were made in
        Singapore. Has anyone been using Segate drives made in China?
        Any issues? It'll suck if my 250G drive would go bad..
        \_ It doesn't matter.  Your drive *will* go bad, it is just a matter
           of when.  Do backups, use raid or mirroring or both.
	...

7/17    My western digital WD800UE 80gb 5400 RPM laptop HD sometimes
        gives off a few "clicking" noise. Although this has been going
        on for a while and I haven't run into any problems. Is this
        the click of death? Should I be concerned? I am using it in an
        external enclosure and had it shortly after I got it. (it
        started to make that noise when I was trying to "disconnect
	...

5/18    dnm, a friend an occasional denizen of #csua has some hardware for
        sale.  He wanted to make it available to local geeks before
        advertising on craigslist or eBay so I'm posting this for him.
        No prices listed, email dnm with an offer.
        -dans
        * At least 5 HP Vectra VL420 DT desktop boxes, all Pentium 4 1.6 GHz
	...

11/15   [unrelated to politics] My debian machine at home (I'm learning and
        tinkering) seems to spin the HD down occasionally.  I'd like to never
        spin down the HD (or at least control which hours it can).  Any
        pointers to doing this?
        \_ # apt-get install hdparm
           # hdparm -S 0 /dev/hda
	...

5/11    If you noticed that your laptop HD never rests because it's doing
        something, and you've already killed all auxilary processes and made
        drives not "Fast Indexable", it's the explorer that's funky. Here
        is one solution. Kill explorer and then run it again. You can use
        a batch file script:
        taskkill -im explorer.exe /f
	...

5/11    I'd like to be able to use my mp3 player as a rescue os disk as well.
        It shows up as USB HD on most OS.  The mp3 player itself works fine
        as long as I store all of the music on the first vfat partition.  I'd
        like to be able to either install linux onto the HD or store various
        ISO images on the HD and have it boot from it, with menu, so I can
        can select different images.  Anyone know of such method?
	...

5/5     I have a Hitachi/IBM Travelstar 80G HD that occasionally makes loud
        clicking noise unrelated to head seek. Today while moving a 150M file
        I started hearing that clicking noise again, and 1 min later my
        computer freezes. I rebooted, tried copying other files and it's fine
        and went back to the same file, and it freezes again. Help?
        \_ Download the diagnostic from the http://hgst.com web site.
	...

4/27    I am seeking data backup suggestion for my wife's computer. We are
        talking about 4G and we have about $400 to play with. A flash drive?
        A standalone RAID box? A Zipdrive. What says the mighty motd?
         -- ulysses
        \_ If it's just 4G, then back it up to DVD. Plextor/TY media. -chiry
           \_ We have found CDs and DVDs to be an unreliable means for
	...

4/19    I went to Fry's today and saw a 400GB HD by Seagate, with 5 years
        warranty!!! That is just amazing. By the way, what is the current MB
        limitation on size? I remember back in the 90s I had to get special
        HD card to go above 4G, and then in the late 90s a special card to
        go above 80G. I'm just wondering what the current limitation is.
        \_ Why would there be a limitation? Granted, I always buy SCSI.
	...

4/10    My iPod prefetches a few songs from the HD, buffers them into memory,
        and then shuts down the HD to save power. If possible, how do I do the
        same thing on my iTunes where I pre-declare non OS swapped mem so that
        I can save power on my notebook?  -ok thx
        \_ <crickets chirping>
        \_ This might work for you on OS X:
	...

2/18    Why is there now Firefox 3.5.8 when there was already 3.6 a month ago?
        \_ Why is there Windows XP SP3 when there was already Vista?
           Generally companies manage patches for at least two levels of
           product.  -tom
           \_ I see.  So Fx 3.6 is more like a new version than an update to
              3.5.x.  --- OP
	...

8/3     VMWare + Windows XP + Validation question. I need to test stuff with
        Service Pack 3 installed. I have a valid key that I own (yeah yeah I
        actually *bought* a copy, please don't flame me for supporting evil
        M$). Is it possible to register the key once, and then duplicate it
        for testing purposes?  Will Windows or Microsoft detect copies and
        disable the rest the copies?
	...

5/31    History of winners and losers by *popularity*:
        VHS > Beta Max
        USB2 > Firewire
        x86 > PowerPC > Everything Else > DEC Alpha > Itanium
        BlueRay > HDDvd
        \_ It's too early to tell RE: "Blue"Ray. They may both turn out to be
	...

2/20    I'm using Cygwin/X on XP.  All the X indows (xterm, emacs)
        seem to have a keyboard repeat rate and a repeat delay that's different
        than the one XP uses for other Windows apps.  When I do "mode con
        rate=xx delay=yy", it only changes Windows apps but not the X apps.
        How do I change the keyboard repeat rate and delay for X?  Thanks.
        \_ man xset
	...

11/29   I'm experimenting with virtualization, and as a poor college student
        I'm wondering what the best alternatives for virtualization are, and
        how best to cut my teeth on messing with non-linux platforms (or I
        guess interesting stuff on Linux would work too). Right now I've got
        FreeBSD7 running on KVM on my home computer (on a Core 2 Quad), and am
        somewhat at a loss as to how to use it. (More details: bridged
	...

11/14   I have a bunch of pictures and I find that thumbs.db on
        Windows XP to be very useful, especially when you're on NAS
        and the network is slow. Having that said, my Win XP has
        stopped generating thumbs.db even though I've set it to generate
        thumbs.db (Properties->View->Uncheck "Do not cache thumbnails.").
        How do I force Windows to generate Thumbs.db? Googling seems
	...

10/12   When XP boots up on my PC, the screen reads "Microsoft (R) Windows (R)
        5.01. 2600 Service Pack 3 Multiprocessor Free."  What does "Free" mean?
        Thx.
	...

9/18    My  7 year old Dell laptop is slowly  decending into its death throws.
        I am seriously considering an Mac laptop; but am having a hard time deaa\
        ling with the price. Curious to find out  if people really think that
        the extra $$ upfront was a good investment. a 2K macbook pro with
        standard config can buy a high end dell laptop
        \_ I have both a MacBook Pro (and before that a PowerBook) and a
	...

6/27    "No extension: Windows XP D-Day arrives Monday, June 30"
        http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/96295
        Among all Windows versions, is XP one of the most sucessful ones?  The
        other one I can think of might be 3.1.
        \_ 2000 was pretty damn good too.
        \_ Win95? It ran the most games. XP seems better than Win2k to me, but
	...

5/5     Any recommendations for data recovery software for NTFS partitions?
        I have an NTFS partition that produces this error in linux:
          "ntfs_read_inode_mount(): Couldn't find first extent of $DATA attribute
           in attribute list. $MFT is corrupt. Run chkdsk"
        \_ Eh... I'd try it with a real windows box before assuming the
           partition is bad.  NTFS itself is pretty solid.  How old is the
	...