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    Initial thoughts on Blackberry -> Android transition

    Damaged my Z10 recently, so got an LG G4. Lots of positives so far, but I do think Blackberry did get a few things right which if there are comparables/equivalents in Android I'd welcome comments on. I actually bought a Z30 on amazon for $200 to help with the withdrawal symptoms. I think if...
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    Suggestions for Android phone

    My contract is up for renewal (Telus, Canada), and I have the opportunity to choose a new phone. I've been a Blackberry user for ages (9700, 9900, Z10) and am very comfortable and satisfied with their layout, design, UI, etc. I have used both iOS and Android devices (tablets and phones) but am...
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    Mini-review: Dell Venue 11 Pro 7140 (Broadwell)

    I ordered a Dell Venue 11 Pro over Christmas and have had over a month to play with it. In terms of context, it was intended to replace two relatively ancient mobile devices; a BlackBerry Playbook (couch browsing) and a Penryn Dell Latitude D630. I mostly use two desktops at home - one...
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    Bookshelf speaker - tweeter hiss?

    I recently got a pair of Kanto Yumi speakers for a good price based on quite favourable reviews. Unfortunately, they seem to have this issue where certain kinds of sound result in the tweeters making an odd fuzz/hiss noise at lower volumes. At zero volume, there's no hiss. At very low volume...
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    Semi bricked hard drive

    I just moved my drives from a 775 board to a 1155 board. All the drives were fine except a 1TB caviar green. For some reason it now shows up as exactly 128GiB or 137.4GB. It is partitionable up to that amount. I've tried multiple SATA ports on the motherboard and enclosures which used to...
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    weird hdd beeping behaviour

    Last night my pc woke me up. seems like one of the drives is beeping. I have seven drives so I didn't try to figure out which one. Strangest part is that all of them seem to be running fine, i.e. being detected and can access all data. any ideas what this might be?
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    Cutting the fat on mid-range build

    I'm trying to piece out a new system for my friend/coworker (this is Toronto, Canada so prices aren't quite as good as the US). She's looking for a good all-rounder, but does want to play games (D3 mostly for now) and wants it to be a decent looking, quiet system. However my current total is a...
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    living room couch kb/mouse

    I currently use some random logitech wireless keyboard+mouse, and it's not only large (full size), but using the mouse on the couch is a pain. I bought some lenovo hendheld keyboard+roller ball but it was pretty crappy. Does anybody have experience with the logitech k400? it actually looks...
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    Flicker with new radeon

    i installed a 6570 for my parents. for some reason the display briefly shuts off every few minutes before reappearing. i think it has to do with the automatic clock adjustments. is there an effective fix? my 4830 and 5750 don't do this so i was suspicious of the low profile 300w antec psu...
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    Portal 2 System Reqs

    I bought Portal 2 recently when it was ~$10. I max out the settings on my i5 PC and it is still buttery smooth. However when I fly home for xmas I'm hoping to try it on my parents' PC that I built for them about 1-2 years ago. It was mostly made from random parts so it's not cutting edge by a...
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    Drives not spinning down on onboard sata

    My 775 machine has four hard disks and an SSD. Since the board has only 4 sata ports one drive is on a silicon image pci card. After reformatting and reinstalling 2008 R2 only the one drive on the pci card spins down. All of the drives used to spin down before reformatting. Am I missing...
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    3rd party LCD projector lamps

    I got an Epson TW-100 for free recently because my condo replaced it with a Benq w6000. I don't plan to use it seriously, but am interested in experimenting with projection. However, the lamp is burned out from being used for quite a few years. The OEM replacement is $400, meaning I'm...
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    Has anybody seen an X25-M G1 get stuck?

    Yesterday morning, my living room PC (on 24/7) got caught in some weird funk. It has an Intel G1 ssd as a boot drive, and the queue shot up to >5 and the drive activity stuck at 100% (as per resource monitor). It was extremely slow and the drive LED was stuck on, but I managed to restart...
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    Positive pressure airflow working!

    This may not be relevant to all users here, but after having cooling issues with my i5 system due to a custom mod (passively cooling a 5750 in a half-height case), I found a solution involving switching to positive pressure. In a vertical orientation, my NSK-1480 has two 80mm fans at the base...
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    Fast and quiet HTPC video card

    My HTPC (or living room PC; see second machine in sig) has a Radeon 4830 installed. However I'm looking for better codec bitstreaming and compatibility with decoding video. I believe new 6000 Radeons won't work with Server 2008 R2 without hacked drivers because new Catalyst revisions won't...
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    Netflix and movie set top player

    I gave my parents my old micro atx pc for their living room last year (Core 2 Duo E7300, 2GB ram, 500GB Caviar Blue, Win7 Pro, in an antec minuet 300). Unfortunately, their main desktop, an old P4, is getting too slow for them. Rather than build a new pc, I figured they could use the new one I...
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    Intel Matrix Storage Gone After SB RMA

    I got my SB RMA in the mail yesterday so I replaced my old motherboarrd and neglected to reset my RAID setup (2 Intel SSDs) because I had intended to wipe them and start from scratch. When I first booted up, the prompt for the Intel BIOS (Ctl+I) showed up and said that my 149GB array was...
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    Case gradually getting hotter?

    Is it normal for average component temps to rise after being on for awhile? I notice that my coretemp is registering CPU temperatures about 5-10C higher at idle. Heatsink looks fine in terms of mounting; I once had one pushpin come loose but not this time. Also, I shut it off for about an...
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    Popping/clicking with event sounds

    I recently got a home theatre setup (Yamaha RX-V667 + KEF 2005.3) hooked up to my PS3 and PC. Generally it works fantastically. However, there is one issue: Music generally plays fine from my PC. But whenever there is a sudden change in the sound (the beep from google talk when a new IM...
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    Experiment: passively cooled mid-range video card in slim case

    I am quite proud of the parts I managed to cram into my NSK1480 (see sig). I slowly aimed to kill each stock noise-generating part with new ones as follows: 1) Replaced PSU fan with Noctua NF-R8. My warranty is void, but I tore out the terrible 80mm fan cooling the 350W PSU, and managed to...
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    Laser printer blowing circuit breaker

    I know printers can spike, but for whatever reason it's happening a lot more frequently now whenever I send a print job and the printer comes out of sleep...you hear the printer click and then the circuit breaker for the outlet goes and everything shuts off. I have the following plugged into a...
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    Indilinx (OCZ Onyx) lifetime

    I put an Onyx into my living room PC so that my hard drives could spin down. Using crystaldiskinfo, I notice that the life status is dropping quite quickly; I installed it less than a month ago and it's dropped from 98% to 95%. I have no idea what's causing all the writes since the drive is...
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    USB 3.0 PCI (not pci-e) card

    How many PCI USB 3.0 adapters are available? I know PCI would be a bottleneck but 100+MB/sec is about 3x as fast as anything I've seen using USB 2.0. The only one I could find was this one: http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad2u3pci.asp Shipping to Canada is almost $30 which...
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    Gigabit ethernet very fast...in one direction

    This is a variant of a common problem. In the past I've noticed that pushing a file from a local machine to a remote machine was always faster than taking a file from a remote machine and copying it to a local drive, regardless of which two machines were used, and where disks were not the...
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    Right angle SATA ports :(

    So I got my new SB system a few days ago. My MSI board left newegg the friday before the recall. I was slightly affected by the suggested workaround since I was planning on keeping one hard drive in my case (plus 2 SSDs in RAID on the SATA3 ports). However, this board is the max size for a...
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    Heatsinks and 775 vs 1155

    I just ordered some Sandy Bridge stuff. My Q8200 has a Scythe Shuriken (rev B) mounted to it. From what I can tell, since it supported 1366, it should support 1155 (neither 1156 nor 1155 is listed as supported on my box and in my manual but online it says it's ok). Am I right, and can...
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    Small mATX case with lots of 3.5" bays

    My NSK1480 has only two bays. Is there another fairly small mATX case (not necessarily slim/low profile) of decent quality that has more? I have a bunch of hard drives to add in. As an Antec fan the only one I could see was the mini P180 but I'd like something not quite as large and expensive.
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    Dual display = higher temps?

    I just upgraded to two screens. I noticed that my coretemp shows about 5C higher on average now, and afterburner shows about 10C higher (and not downclocking as much anymore). Does driving two displays really load things up that much more? Another small dilemma is that my video card has DVI +...
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    Home networking and walls

    I'm in a fairly new (2004-2005) condo with no LAN lines, only coax and ethernet ports for vdsl. All of these route to a cable box inside a closet from the keystone wall jacks through what look like standardized gray tubes (I can see a threaded tube about 1" diameter entering the metal housing...
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    Fixing a blown PSU

    I was fiddling with a PSU while it was on and something made a loud firecracker-like noise (presumably a capacitor). Because it is a proprietary size, I'm finding it hard to find a replacement. Is it possible to repair, or not worth the hassle? When it blew, there was a system running on it...
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    Looking for a low power sub ATX board

    I've kept an eye on the various Atom boards around but none seem to fit my criteria (in order of importance): 1) DC power (e.g. external brick) 2) Uses DDR2 so-dimms (laptop ram) 3) gigabit ethernet 4) mini pci-e slot 5) reasonably priced Any ideas? I really mostly need the DC power and...
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    Some good word for the Seagate Momentus XT

    I thought I'd mention my recent experience with migrating a laptop from a typical SSD to a hybrid. The laptop is a Dell D630 with a T7250 (2GHz Core 2 Duo, FSB 800, 2MB cache), 4GB DDR2-667. Went from an 80GB X25-M (G1) to a 500GB Momentus XT. The issue was lack of space. However there was a...
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    Striped volumes in Windows 7

    I've used software striped volumes in the past for casual server purposes. However this was ages ago with Server 2003. I have 2 80GB X25-M G1s. Does Windows 7 (Pro or Ultimate) support striping them to a 160GB volume and booting from it? I know there are issues related to multiple volumes...
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    Disk space utility?

    Can anybody suggest a "pie-chart" disk space utility? I used to have a pcmag program called diskpie, but it is very old and doesn't work with Windows 7. Freeware and small would be nice :)
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    Overclocking AMD and low power mode

    When I overclock my AMD cards, they lose the ability to idle at low frequencies. Why is this the case? Is there some way to raise the ceiling without bringing the floor up with it? I've brought up my 5750 to 850/1265 from 700/1150, but now it won't drop to 157/300 anymore so it idles a bit...
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    Temps and orientation

    I have a slim NSK1480 case that I recently moved from the living room to bedroom. Before, I used the vertical stands, but there's a nice spot where I can put it horizontally. Unfortunately, my temps rose a few degrees because of this. Can I assume that it's simply because the air circulation...
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    Trouble with a new install of W7

    I'm an intel guy but my friend is having issues with a new AMD system. He has the gigabyte Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H and 2x2GB of mushkin blackline. CPU is an x4 965 and for now he's using the onboard hd 4290. Apparently when he boots the windows dvd it gets stuck at the "setup is starting...
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    uATX Power supply to drive 5670/5770

    There's hinting at half-height Radeon 5670 or even 5770 cards coming out soon. I'm quite interested and the only potential issue is that my case, being uATX might not have the juice to power them (particularly the 5770). The case is an Antec NSK1480 with the power supply pictured here...
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    Good simple HSPA phone

    My primary phone is a Blackberry 9700 on Telus. I have a secondary prepaid running on an old CDMA phone but now that Telus supports 3.5G I was going to get a sim card for my prepaid account. Only issue is that it doesn't support all GSM phones...only newer ones. Could anybody offer...
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    Voltage of memory modules

    I'm getting conflicting reports about the voltage on my DDR2 modules. I'm not overclocking them (Mushkin Silverline 2x2GB) so all of the settings are "auto" in the BIOS. The BIOS reports 1.8V, and so does CPU-Z. However my Windows-based hardware monitor (from Gigabyte for a Gigabyte board)...