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Thanks a lot dude for the simple trick !!
The link you gave didnt work though.
Here the right one.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/print.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/print.html

All you have to do is append print.html to the end.

Or is it just me who is missing it?

You can read the original thread here

And if you don't like clicking through 40 pages, there's a print view here

The editorial staff at this pub is repeating the usual MS party line:
this version will fix that, so buy it.

In 2006 it's "Oh security! Yeah we fixed that."

Well, the facts seem to tell otherwise:
Tom's Harware:
"But Microsoft hasn't taken this principle entirely to heart, either. The first user defined during installation is automatically granted administrative privileges. Worse yet, the reserved account named Administrator is not required to have a password to log into the machine!"
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/page18.html

My exchange with a Microsoftie claiming their admin problems are solved.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=186700&cid=154 08915

In conclusion decades of "yeah we fixed that" on top of an OS *never* designed with security as an underlying principal and we've got more of the same.

And the "tipping point" for publications is when the Microsoft advert dollars stop pouring in.

I'll change my tune when they start paying me to say otherwise.

From the review:

This dialog box is a complete mess. Why even have this service? Why is everything on Windows so obfuscated as to need a wordy, three option dialog box just to ask people if they'd like to turn off the eye candy when the computer's performance suffers.

Dialog boxes like this are exactly why Microsoft is sliding farther and faster behind the simplicity and flexibility that Mac OS X and Linux represent. What a goddamn joke that Windows even needs such a dialog box or the tangled mass of crap that likely supports it.

Microsoft knows that an example of a valid domain is example.com, not treyresearch.com

Not hard at all. http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/print.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vis ta/print.html

Yes, but none of these cases do that.

Did you even look at the article? Look at the second page.

The fans these cases use are absurdly small

Again, if you looked at the second page, you would have seen the AeroCool ExtremeEngine 3T case with a 25cm side fan and a 14cm front fan.

Simply replace "index.html" with print.html. This trick works across all of Tom's sites. So, for this article it would be this link

Next time read the second page of the article. The first case reviewed has a 250mm fan on the side for cooling. It spins at 800rpm for quiet operation. The front fan is a 120mm that is also quiet, although there were no dB numbers given. The rest of the cases impede airflow with useless plastic and extra grating, but the first one was pretty good.

Your suggestion about leaving the doors off is only good for people without pets or young children. Furthermore, if the power supply is blocking the fan-propelled air from directly reaching the CPU heatsink, its possible the CPU will actually operate at a higher temperature than if the doors were on and quiet fans placed in the pre-punched case mounts.

The meat of the article is on page 26 for those who are actually interested. Ignore the last 2 pages, they're basically ads for "input devices that light up".

Oh come now, everyone on slashdot needs a Hello Kitty keyboard.

Very much out of your ass...1) You are ignoring the memory increase you are going to get. There are performance differences between the memory bus on the XP2200 and on the Athlon 64 (or the X2). You also bought your processor near the death of the XP line. I had my first Athlon 64 almost two years ago, on the now mostly dead 754. Remember, the cores have changed a few times over as well.

Now go here and compare the T-Bird 1400 to just about any chip in the chart. You notice that the AMD64s near 3000+ are all almost twice as fast in divx and performance is hardly close in most tests. Now granted the 2200+ is a bit faster then a 1400, so go here and use the charts to get an idea of the difference between the t-bird 1400 and the XP 2200+. Oh and remember, that 1400 is actually the speed on the T-bird. The 2200+ is only running at about 1800 unless overclocked.

Overall, you should be seeing anywhere from 50% on up in performance and that is just by fudging the numbers together a bit. In an actual test, you might find the improvement to be much better. Also note, some of the Sempron's could provide smaller improvements in performance for some things, so you could possibly get a cheaper CPU and not go with a 64. Prices on 754 should start falling more soon, I would think. With AM2 and Socket 939, I just cannot see AMD supporting more then two sockets at once. Socket A is already mostly dead and 754 has been falling off slowly. But just remember that would mean moving from one dead socket to another.

Very much out of your ass...1) You are ignoring the memory increase you are going to get. There are performance differences between the memory bus on the XP2200 and on the Athlon 64 (or the X2). You also bought your processor near the death of the XP line. I had my first Athlon 64 almost two years ago, on the now mostly dead 754. Remember, the cores have changed a few times over as well.

Now go here and compare the T-Bird 1400 to just about any chip in the chart. You notice that the AMD64s near 3000+ are all almost twice as fast in divx and performance is hardly close in most tests. Now granted the 2200+ is a bit faster then a 1400, so go here and use the charts to get an idea of the difference between the t-bird 1400 and the XP 2200+. Oh and remember, that 1400 is actually the speed on the T-bird. The 2200+ is only running at about 1800 unless overclocked.

Overall, you should be seeing anywhere from 50% on up in performance and that is just by fudging the numbers together a bit. In an actual test, you might find the improvement to be much better. Also note, some of the Sempron's could provide smaller improvements in performance for some things, so you could possibly get a cheaper CPU and not go with a 64. Prices on 754 should start falling more soon, I would think. With AM2 and Socket 939, I just cannot see AMD supporting more then two sockets at once. Socket A is already mostly dead and 754 has been falling off slowly. But just remember that would mean moving from one dead socket to another.

I'm guessing you mean spellcheck in for input areas/textboxes? At first I thought you meant on any (static) page. It's certainly doable, like Tom's Hardware Intellitxt: a Javascript function that gets loaded at the end of the page load, reads through the page, and converts keywords to green links that show (annoying, IMHO) advertisement when the user mouse-overs the link. So it's certainly doable using GreaseMonkey, or as an "add-on" for site owners.

Use a dictionary of most used words (88600 of them?), and use XmlHttpRequest to ask the server if it sees an unknown word.

AMD's Athlon 64 is 36% faster than Pentium 965 EE in UT2004 http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&m odel1=238&chart=71&model2=329 Is Intel's new Core 2 Extreme only as fast as AMD's FX-57?

If Slashdotted, the link from the US site of Toms Hardware for this article is here (yup, got that one from digg. They seem to be faster ...)

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz _cores/page14.html

"With a heavy load (100% utilization) on both CPU cores, the difference between standard clock rates and overclocking to 4.1 GHz is pretty dramatic. The resulting boost in performance comes at the cost of 216 W of actual power consumed!"

"

Too bad that "free" 1.5GHz comes with a 216W increase in power consumption, totalling nearly 500W for the system.

Graffiti v1 is very easy to learn, easy to read, and easy to decipher on a machine.

Check out this representation of the alphabet in Graffiti.

You can do X as a reverse of a K in that alphabet; U and V were a bit different (V is easier to do right-to-left for the machine to recognize the stroke, but you can make the shape the same as a "real" v). I actually did some of my paper notes in Graffiti (in University) since they tend to be mono-strokes (rather than the polystrokes to make up them more complicated letters when we write out traditional english), making it easier for shorthand note taking (which has a strict stroke form/order dictated by speed and readability!).

There you go: simple strokes, easy to read by eye, easy to read by my 68000-based Palm from 1998 as well as my current StrongARM Palm of 2004!

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx =33&model1=282&model2=288&chart=97
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx =33&model1=282&model2=288&chart=102

The 7800 GT (~$350) yields roughly 50-100% more performance than a 6800 GS ($200).
So .. you get roughly 1.75 times the performance, for 1.75 times the price.

A shocking ripoff. Compare that to a similar investment in CPU. You could get an Athlon 64 3500+ for about $200, or an x2 4200+ for $350. Will you get 1.75 times the performance out of the x2? Not even close, even on multithreaded apps.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx =33&model1=282&model2=288&chart=97
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html?modelx =33&model1=282&model2=288&chart=102

The 7800 GT (~$350) yields roughly 50-100% more performance than a 6800 GS ($200).
So .. you get roughly 1.75 times the performance, for 1.75 times the price.

A shocking ripoff. Compare that to a similar investment in CPU. You could get an Athlon 64 3500+ for about $200, or an x2 4200+ for $350. Will you get 1.75 times the performance out of the x2? Not even close, even on multithreaded apps.

They hold back each new iteration until prices slack off on the current product. AMD beat them to the 1 GHz punch because intel was holding back their own 1GHz chip to squeeze more profit. After AMD beat them, they released theirs 2 days later.

Yes, that would seem rather cynical and deliberate, wouldn't it? That is, unless you also remember that Intel released their processor but was unable to deliver in volume for several months.

And unless you remember that Intel's next processor, the 1.13 GHz had severe stability issues which made Intel retract that processor.

Both of those two incidents pretty much shows that Intel was certainly not so much ahead of AMD at the time, that they were sitting with processors ready for the market and just waiting for the market to get ready for the processors.

I have found some old stories at tomshardware.com, describing this if you should have forgotten about it. Let us remember that Tom is known to be very pro Intel biased, so any negative mentioning of Intel on that page should be taken seriously:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/08/28/intel_admit s_problems_with_pentium_iii_1/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/08/28/amd/index.h tml

They hold back each new iteration until prices slack off on the current product. AMD beat them to the 1 GHz punch because intel was holding back their own 1GHz chip to squeeze more profit. After AMD beat them, they released theirs 2 days later.

Yes, that would seem rather cynical and deliberate, wouldn't it? That is, unless you also remember that Intel released their processor but was unable to deliver in volume for several months.

And unless you remember that Intel's next processor, the 1.13 GHz had severe stability issues which made Intel retract that processor.

Both of those two incidents pretty much shows that Intel was certainly not so much ahead of AMD at the time, that they were sitting with processors ready for the market and just waiting for the market to get ready for the processors.

I have found some old stories at tomshardware.com, describing this if you should have forgotten about it. Let us remember that Tom is known to be very pro Intel biased, so any negative mentioning of Intel on that page should be taken seriously:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/08/28/intel_admit s_problems_with_pentium_iii_1/
http://www.tomshardware.com/2000/08/28/amd/index.h tml

The Mother of All CPU Charts 2005/2006.

AM2 uses DDR2 memory. It is expected to become cheaper and more available than DDR when most companies move their production to make it. I don't want to fob you off with a cheap RTFM, but there is no easy alternative to reading what Tom's Hardware / AnandTech / Ars Technica have to say about the matter.

I used to have a Socket 478 motherboard with a P4 2.4GHZ CPU (Northwood) in it. Then I looked at the "Mother of All CPU Charts" (2004 & 2005) and saw how high a Northwood chip still is on those charts. Now I have a 3.4GHZ (Northwood) cpu in my motherboard.

And so far my rough benchmark with DVD Shrink bears out those charts. Copying a DVD with all the quality settings checked used to take 2 and half hours. Now it takes a little less than an hour and a half.

It's amazing for a cpu that's 4 or 5 years old to be as fast as stuff that's still being released. Processor speeds have really stalled in the last few years.

I used to have a Socket 478 motherboard with a P4 2.4GHZ CPU (Northwood) in it. Then I looked at the "Mother of All CPU Charts" (2004 & 2005) and saw how high a Northwood chip still is on those charts. Now I have a 3.4GHZ (Northwood) cpu in my motherboard.

And so far my rough benchmark with DVD Shrink bears out those charts. Copying a DVD with all the quality settings checked used to take 2 and half hours. Now it takes a little less than an hour and a half.

It's amazing for a cpu that's 4 or 5 years old to be as fast as stuff that's still being released. Processor speeds have really stalled in the last few years.

Ah, I just solved the mistery.

http://www.tomshardware.com/site/rss.html will get you to http://www.pheedo.com/f/toms_hardware

Pheedo is probably Tom's Hardware RSS feed service provider.

As far as on Slashdot, I'm not so sure if linking 3rd party news feed rather than direct link is allowed or not. CmdTaco can vertify this, but I see why not, as far as I can tell, this is service used by Tom's Hardware for RSS feed.

Here's a direct link, which I suggest people click instead.

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=2f7b00fedef1b1 aaf8f53264f52ab593'
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:51:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=e775b0954ac069d8a92b7f4de89cd184; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i='
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:55:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=cbb0abd047cf9f72646099df2cb484a2; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://topix.net/r/0B=2Finhu=2B2pR5VWZkYknE0WZiWNL 0NhCfT8=2B9MWL6oIElKGAsgk1kPisf=2F=2F3R2SI5DquuKsf TXudof3cRdeIuzMw=3D=3D
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Ah, so we are getting somewhere! http://www.topix.net/ is probably where ScuttleMonkey gets his news from.
http://www.topix.net/search/?q=Asus+PW191&x=0&y=0

$ curl -I "http://www.topix.net/r/0R96orA8cnXCv3fD02tmzS76ey BdqIGSBCIHxhH9xHFC=2FppW1YhQ75XPwaejjkpr1RcmsITzvT KfplNztrejYeawM8mKPHJGAXXxWCRuULi8=3D"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:59:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) (Gentoo/Linux) mod_perl/1.27
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Heh... go figure...

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i=2f7b00fedef1b1 aaf8f53264f52ab593'
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:51:07 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=e775b0954ac069d8a92b7f4de89cd184; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

$ curl -I 'http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?i='
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:55:45 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.54 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.0.5-2pheedo1.1
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=cbb0abd047cf9f72646099df2cb484a2; path=/; domain=pheedo.com
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://topix.net/r/0B=2Finhu=2B2pR5VWZkYknE0WZiWNL 0NhCfT8=2B9MWL6oIElKGAsgk1kPisf=2F=2F3R2SI5DquuKsf TXudof3cRdeIuzMw=3D=3D
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Ah, so we are getting somewhere! http://www.topix.net/ is probably where ScuttleMonkey gets his news from.
http://www.topix.net/search/?q=Asus+PW191&x=0&y=0

$ curl -I "http://www.topix.net/r/0R96orA8cnXCv3fD02tmzS76ey BdqIGSBCIHxhH9xHFC=2FppW1YhQ75XPwaejjkpr1RcmsITzvT KfplNztrejYeawM8mKPHJGAXXxWCRuULi8=3D"
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 09:59:09 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) (Gentoo/Linux) mod_perl/1.27
Location: http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/04/21/asus_pw191_ lcd/
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Heh... go figure...

"While a lot of their competitors are using a white Macintosh look for lack of better ideas, Asus is innovating, offering designs that are both personal and novel."

The first thing came to mind when I saw this Asus PW191, was this Apple's Mac mini.

Innovating? Personal and Novel? what a laugh...

SATA/300 can transmit 300MB in a second. Based on tomshardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/21/samsung_add s_capacity_to_fast_and_quiet_t133_series/page9.htm l
and
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/21/samsung_add s_capacity_to_fast_and_quiet_t133_series/page8.htm l

Max read or write speeds is about 70MB/s on top of the line drives. This is essentially why for single drives ATA/300 is really overkill but it makes sense in some raid configurations.

SATA/300 can transmit 300MB in a second. Based on tomshardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/21/samsung_add s_capacity_to_fast_and_quiet_t133_series/page9.htm l
and
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/21/samsung_add s_capacity_to_fast_and_quiet_t133_series/page8.htm l

Max read or write speeds is about 70MB/s on top of the line drives. This is essentially why for single drives ATA/300 is really overkill but it makes sense in some raid configurations.

In my opinion, Dell has sacrificed manufacturing quality and support for greater profit margins. The cost-outs of Indian tech support and price deals from Intel seem great on paper, but you can put a lot on paper that doesn't work in reality. It doesn't help that average consumer is beginning to realize that clock speed can be deceiving. AMD has been successful because of a combination of improving old designs (recycling technology) and innovative designs for new processors. If Intel could do the same with their cores, we probably wouldn't have an article to write about.

Not so easily. It is unlikely that they will give you block-level access to the drive. That is, you can't format it. However, there is a solution. You just fill the drive with one huge file that contains a virtual disk image, and now you can format that with anything you want, and raid it with other disk images on other servers.

As a bonus, you get disk encryption essentially for free. Here is a great app for Windows and Linux for creating and mounting encrypted drives in a file that I've used to do exactly this (on SMB servers). For those of you using XP, here is a guide on how to hack XP to enable the raid5 features that are disabled in the non-server versions.

Most importantly, however, during normal usage, most idle time to due hard drive latency isn't spent waiting for the hard drive to transfer the data off the platters, but waiting for the head arm to seek to the right cylinder. Seek time ain't going to be reduced just by switching to another bus interface.

• File server scenario: eSATA performance is above USB2, but at most points only very slightly.
• Web server scenario: Performance of eSATA and USB2 is virtually identical.
• Database scenario: eSATA is slight better than USB2. Interestingly, though, RAID1 is a lot better than RAID0.
• Workstation scenario: Fluctuates greatly. At some points, eSATA even performs worse than USB2.

Toms hardware states it is a 20% improvement over the pentium D. That puts it at a 2.4 compared to the pentium D, which is still behind.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/07/aopen_relea ses_core_duo_to_the_desktop/page5.html

Think about it: 20 years ago, computer science taught you to write good programs in relatively low-level languages; now they teach you to program in languages like Java with virtually no regard for efficiency. Programs could be written much, much more efficiently, and most of what we use today could easily be made to run on hardware over ten years old if more effort was put into optimizing it.

20 years ago we weren't doing what we do now with computers. Pull out a word processor from 20 years ago and tell me that it looks like a "good program" today.

More to the point, Java isn't slow! In many cases, it even beats C++.

My cellphone runs what is probably the closest thing to a production Java OS that exists today. The Danger Hiptop runs an entire OS on top of a Java VM, and while certain key functions are written in assembly (graphics functions, mostly), the OS manages to fare remarkably well considering that it's running on a 24MHz ARM with 4MB of memory. Neither Palm OS, nor Windows CE, nor embedded Linux would run as well on a system that is so limited.

the programmers take up every ounce of system resources they can now by being lazy

That's quite frankly crap. I remember a time when PCs struggled to play MP3s and run a word processor at the same time. Now I have no trouble playing a DVD while streaming media accross the network and recording two channels of TV.

None of the software on my system is "taking up every ounce of system resources". Right now, I'm using 4% of my CPU and have over 800MB of free physical memory (which is being used for disk cache at the moment). Is my PC high-end? Not in the least. I have an Athlon 64 2800+ system with 1GB of DDR400 running Windows XP.

and most of what we use today could easily be made to run on hardware over ten years old if more effort was put into optimizing it

A GPU from ten years ago wouldn't even be able to run today's games, let alone at a decent framerate. Forget about encoding XVID captures of DVDs, either - look at this chart (the bottom one) and note that a $150 2.4GHz Athlon 64 "Newcastle" does in 2 minutes what takes the fastest CPU from 10 years ago (the Pentium MMX 233, which is actually only 8.5 years old) 20 times as long.

Remember how problematic it used to be to print a large document? Remember how long PDF files took to open? Remember how long it used to take Flash animations to load? Remember how crappy video used to look?

The problem with people like you is that you forget what it was really like just 15 years ago. Mac OS was a dog on the computers of 1991, as was Windows. HP-UX took minutes to boot up. Even 10 years ago, the only reason that we didn't notice how slowly webpages rendered was because most of us were using modems. Pull out a copy of Netscape 2.0 and an old 68040 Mac to run it on, then tell me that we're not doing better. Fire up Word 7.0 on a 33MHz 486 with 16MB of memory and Windows 95, then tell me that applications aren't faster today.

Microsoft Word starts in 3 seconds on my system. Less if it's disk cached. I can resize it without a wireframe mode because the system is fast enough to redraw the application as I resize it.

Software uses more memory today because it does more. No one would think of working with 50MB photographs in 1996. No one would think about editing DV footage without expensive hardware.

WOW, Where do you get these 10 GHz (or since the gp said 500, 5 GHz) Pentium Ms? Yes, I know its not all about hertz, but It is not even possible, much less believable that a Pentium M is 10x more powerful than a PIII 1.13Ghz coppermine or even a lowly PIII 500Mhz(unless you mean for playing games, which is mostly due to the older video cards in those machines). For reference you may refer to this chart.

  65 CPUs from 100 MHz to 3066 MHz

I have a Dell 2005FPW, and it's fantastic for games. It especially shines if you can run the games at the panel's native resolution (1680x1050). More and more games are including support for widescreen aspect ratios. For example, right now I'm running World of Warcraft at native, and it looks fantastic. Even when I run games at lesser resolutions, the scaling is pretty good on this unit. I'd like to be running Oblivion at 1680x1050, but my video card (GeForce 6600GT) can't quite keep up at that resolution. There is no ghosting when playing games on this monitor, at least not that I've noticed.

I'd recommend not paying attention to the manufacturer's listed response times, there's a sickening amount of gamesmanship going on with those specs right now. For example, many LCD monitors are advertised as 8ms refresh because that's the response time in one *very narrow* range of the color spectrum. When you actually play games on these monitors, it quickly becomes apparent that the refresh times for wider spectrum shifts is actually much longer than the value advertised by the manufacturer. You're better off getting real-world measurements from somewhere like Tom's Hardware. See the bottom of the linked page for an example of one of their LCD refresh latency graphs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/27/the_spring_ 2006_lcd_collection/page3.html

If you can't find that kind of detailed review for the unit you're considering, go with subjective impressions of people who game on that monitor. I'd heartily recommend the Dell 2005FPW, and so would four of my gamer friends.

Toms Hardware constantly is doing reviews of monitors and such, and just released a new review of 19 monitors the other day

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1940865 ,00.asp

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/03/22/pentium_ext reme_edition_965/

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2725

...it's called the Medusa, made by a company called Speed-Link. Tom's Hardware did a review of them a while back. They have 5.1 surround built-in (i.e. there are 3 drivers in each cup) and have a very good mic. Here's the review: http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/14/headsets_ga mers_can_love/page2.html and the product page: http://www.speed-link.de/prod.php?lang=en&sys_id=8 &pb_id=8&prod_num=SL-8790 Note that THG was doing a comparison of gaming headsets, and the Medusa came out on top.

Back in december, Tom's Hardware managed to get two dual-GPU GeForce 7800 cards working on a regular SLI-board. In their bechmarks the performance increase was quite good. Although not worth the money ofcourse, but none of the high-end gaming cards are.

Supermicro has offered AMD solutions for a quite while now - just not under their "main" brand name. If you don't know that their Aplus products exist, you won't find them. Although I'm sure no one would go on record, I'd wager that Intel has pressured a heavily Intel-dependent vendor to not promote AMD's product.

In fact, go to SuperMicro's home page, and you'll notice no mention or links to their AMD based products.

This isn't the first time that this has happened. When AMD first shipped the Athlon, very few board makers dared to ship Athlon solutions for fear of Intel shorting them on chipsets. I recall, but cannot substantiate, that Asus and Abit first shipped Athlon boards under a "shadow brand", much as Supermicro is doing here.

I, for one, cannot wait to buy some of the Supermicro^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h, um, Aplus gear.

The last motherboard I had was a gigabyte. It contained a Dual Bios system which could recover a user flashed bios back to factory defaults.
Complete and utter safety in case of a bad flash.
Heres a small THG article about it.

You are right about most machines however, it may not be enough unless you can replace the bios.
For the totally paranoid, take the suspect drive out and put it into a cleanroom machine.

Regularly updated on Tom's Hardware

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/Short-List -GAMING-VIDEO-MONEY-ftopict169937.html