Recent content by STCNE

I snagged this Ultrabook during the MS student sale, and I am not happy with it. What I was looking for is something ultra-portable that can run Civilization 5 at acceptable fps on the go. Not only is 13.3'' bigger than I thought it would be(Still a tad awkward using it on the lap) but I'm...

One thing I forgot... does your grandpa have any old stereo equipment laying around? I've generally found old stereo receivers and integrated amps to sound better than dedicated headphone amps especially in the budget range. Of course it can sometimes cost a few $100 to get the old gear back to...

Look at the new products Schiit(yeah I know) Audio just released. Their new products are a $100 DAC and a $100 amp. Your grandfather could start out with the amp and add the DAC in later if he felt the sound was still lacking. Schiit also has a 15 day return policy. I've personally tried out...

Son of a... Since this topic is about security companies failing I just figured I'd shoot out a warning to my fellow TPU members. Back in 2004 or so we bought Check Point/ZoneAlarm security, used it a few years, and then cancelled it. Today my dad noticed an odd charge on his checking account...

Temperature is an easy enough thing to test. A combination of coretemp and the intelburntest for the CPU, and Furmark for the GPU. If both temp tests pass, run them both at the same time. When gaming you're stressing both components out and there are rare cases where things are fine with only...

MSE let a trojan through last month, but caught everything it tried to download. I got the trojan while looking up album art on google images. I've also caught it turning it self off because it was 'out of date', apparently it was set to update sometime at night and turned itself off between...

Duke Nukem 3D with the attrition mod. I pretty much grew up on that game and with that mod I've yet to run out of content to play. Also the Need for Speed series before it got into the whole illegal street racing thing, though I liked Most Wanted and Carbon. And Minecraft. The only game I can...

I had both the original megasoma and 2 goliathus pads. All 3 of them fell apart within a matter of months. I really can't recommend a Razer mousepad as much as I liked their mouse. I've been using a Mionix pad for the past year or so. It works great but I kinda miss the days when I had a soft...

The Abyssus is a good mouse. I've gone through many mice and the new Thermaltake mouse was the first one that really felt like an upgrade to me. The Abyssus's sensor is more accurate than the Cyborg RAT and Logitech G500 IMO. I wish they made more fingertip mice with side buttons, it's hard...

Might not be such a bad thing really. How many of us frequently swap out CPUs on our boards? What this could mean is performance boards designed around specific chips and bundled with CPUs, pre-OCed, or even with guaranteed OCs. Nothing worse than buying a high end OCing board and getting a chip...

If you're new to PC gaming, spend that money on some games. If you're going to be using the computer just for gaming see how it does with whatever games you play and go from there. You've got a really nice PC there and there isn't anything really calling for an upgrade IMO. Though if you're...

That's pretty bad. :shadedshu Over the past few years I've managed to talk my friends out of buying Ipods for that exact reason... no SD slot/or in the case of the surface, gimped. Using a Sansa Fuze with a microSD card you'd have to try real hard to run out of space, and if you do you don't...

Lost a Windows install to this a few years ago. It's ransomware and it's an old scam at that. Over 2000 viruses, over 4000 peices of spyware, 20,000 urgent registry errors, etc. I'm glad you got it uninstalled. I installed it 7 years ago or so before I really knew what I was doing with PCs...

you wouldn't download a car... and we're making sure you aren't going to download our mouse... No really, what is the point of this? They can't say it's to stop piracy for obvious reasons. The only other thing I can think of is that there is some kind of tracking or monitoring thing in that...

Of course they have the right to do it, but withholding information on their product that will in no way hurt their product isn't exactly ethical. I'd say the OP of the topic in question would actually be more inclined to buy another Dell had he received that helpful information on their forum...