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Spyware Removal: Drop PC in Dumpster
morganx writes "The New York Times is reporting that some users prefer throwing out their PCs and buying new ones to actually removing their spyware. Does this mean lots of free hardware for the dumpster-divers among us?"
And the dupes they just keep a coming.
It's Americium-241.
For more info on americium, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
it takes the exact same power as the other drives, though it'd be prudent to look up which order they are, i don't have them memorized
Is one of the benefits of being a Slashdot subscriber NOT having to see duplicate stories on the front page?
As a subscriber I can answer this with an authoritive "no fscking way".
You do get to see articles before they "go live" to the hoi-polloi, and you can even e-mail the editor if you think there's a problem with the article (say, if you know it's a dupe from about 48 hours ago).
You can see for yourself just how well this all works out.
On the power leads, red is 5V and yellow is 12V, for both floppy and hard disks.
because the geek squad @ Best Buy is charging little old ladies $300 to "fix" thier PC (when it needs rescueing from spyware) and simply add a spyware detector but not actually use it.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
All you need is a moltex to floppy adapter (it's basically the same cable, only with a different connector). For example here is one for $1.69.
They can't ship an OEM copy of XP; if they ship a CD, which most makers do, they have to ship a recovery disc locked to that model of computer.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I have had to set up several new Dell's from scratch that lack a floppy drive, yet use SATA harddrive's. I have found that the easiest way is just to find the sata drivers and slipstream them into a SP2 installation disc.
Instructions can be found all over google, and it typically takes less than an hour or so to make a good slipstream that you can use on most every computers' installation.
Some links i had bookmarked: Here and here.
Check out NLite to slipstream service packs, hotfixes, answer files, and drivers. It works really well for all my custom windows disks. Get it here: http://www.nliteos.com/
Colleges don't get any of your property taxes, and their computers are paid for directly by the students, often with a separate IT fee. The older computers often go to departments which don't have enough grant money to afford newer ones. If you go to a university surplus auction, you probably won't find anything faster than a P-II.
Not to mention that new computers actually end up costing less, because they do not require as much repairs and attention from the IT people. Fans, power supplies, and hard drives start to crap out in massive quantities after a couple of years and are not very economical to replace when there are hundreds of machines.
As far as the best buy thing: stupid people deserve to get ripped off. If you don't know anything about computers, you probably shouldn't be buying one.
I used to work for a university too and we regularly upgraded systems. One of our primary reasons was that old machines simply started wearing out. Floppy drives, CD-ROM drives, power supplies, monitors, etc. all start going bad. Yes, you can repair them, but once you have 100+ systems and stuff starts breaking fairly regularly it comes time to just start replacing entire lines of systems before failures occur. This minimizes student frustration with happening to find that broken machine.
Heh, I'm sure you were just being funny. But on a serious note, if all the customer has are the OEM disks, then that's what must be used. I know ME sucks total ass, but I would never pirate XP (or any other piece of software) to a customer. Unless they are willing to pay for an upgraded OS...the software they have is all that gets upgraded.
Life is not for the lazy.
Most BIOSes now have the ability to accept USB devices as 'Legacy' keyboard and mouse devices. IE, my Micro$oft Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard and Mouse work perfectly in BIOS/Setup/etc -- Even though they connect through Bluetooth to the USB Bluetooth Dongle. All you need is to enable that support. Should work fine. Even on a Hell^H^H^H^HDell
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
You can in W2K. The BIOS provides disk services, which enable the first stage partition/format to succeed. After that, the cut down version of Windows that the installer runs in loads hardware drivers which take over the disk sub-system and if the SATA drivers are not compatible with your chipset/motherboard/drive, the system will blue-screen with a vengance.
Dell desktops have been particularly prone to this over the past year. We had to get the SATA drivers from IBM, as the DELL recovery CDs did not work.
oh, dell still sends an actual OS cd. that's the only plus to buying from dell that i see...
This is what really ticked me off when I worked for higher ed. We had a site license for every OS we used, but still had to pay the MS tax on new machines.
I think it's more an excuse to update their PC. (Like getting a new BMW when the ash trays are full.) Possibly one reason people don't just wipe and reinstall is that many PCs now come with some weird OEM installer that uses files stored on the harddisk; if that's screwed you have to buy a new OS at retail, and for not much more you can get a new PC with an OEM Windows and repeat. One might suspect planned obsolescence. I might have expected a mention of the Mac mini here; but it seems like many abusive relationships, no matter how many times they beat you up you convince yourself that they've turned a new leaf and go back for more punishment rather than breaking away.
Amazingly, no-one seems to have complained yet that this story is a dupe of this one from Sunday.
That must be fairly newsworthy in itself!
I say we take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure...
If you have a "campus agreement" licence then you didn't have a site licence.
You had a site upgrade licence.
What that means is you were entitled to upgrade any OEM version of Windows, to any other version of Windows.
So, you could upgrade a bunch of 98 machines to XP, or "save" some money ordering XP Home on your Dells rather than XP Pro, but you aren't allowed to install XP on a white box with no existing MS Operating System.
It is a misunderstanding many people have about the more common versions of MS site licences. It's foolish to think MS don't cover all the bases when creating such purchasing agreements. They didn't become that rich by allowing people to bypass the Windows Tax legally.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
Why are you trying to boot of a disk to format prior to installing Win XP? Win XP has an option in during the setup to format the drive for you. I haven't used a floppy disk for about 4 years, yet I've installed Win XP countless times. All you need to do is set the CD drive first in the boot order and that should do it. No floppy drive is needed.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Yeah, I get $7.39/hour and we "charge"* $35/hour minimum.
* Of course it's not real money, it's a sheet of paper that says "so and so department has allocated $35 to computer repair expenses".
My other car is first.
Yea, um, if you don't have drivers to actually boot the disk, you need a driver disk, to install said devices and format.
Case in point, I had to install an HP Blade BL20 G3 (brand new P4) yesterday, and couldn't get the Windows 2000 boot process to see the drives (there are USB CDROM and Floppy drives on this, since blades don't typically have any of those). And it wouldn't work. HP ships a specially configured CD for installing Windows.
So yea, it's possible he's running into a problem. Not supporting driver CD's is a problem Microsoft needs to solve. Most linuxes I use support manufacturer disks that aren't floppies... Why can't WindowsXP?
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_J._Hanlon