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    Crazy load cycle counts on WD Reds?

    I started getting SMART alerts today because one of my 2.5 year old 4TB WD Red drives exceeded 600,000 load cycles. I checked and all 4 in the pool are nearing this threshold. Back of the envelope calculations tell me this means there is a load cycle every 2-3 minutes? This seems crazy to me...
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    Windows Media CENTER users, what do you use it for?

    According to @GabeAul, people primarily use WMC for DVD Playback. Let's just say this seems a bit implausible. Created a poll here to see what you guys primarily use it for. https://twitter.com/GabeAul/status/595326865205817346
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    Raw Read Error Rate value buggy on Corsair Neutron?

    My 512GB Neutron has a raw read error rate value of "1" (raw value 0x00008104) after 2-3 weeks uptime. This is at least the 3rd time this has happened, if I COLD boot, the counter will reset to near 200 with a raw value near 0. Windows restart does not reset it. CrystalDiskInfo, Stablebit...
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    Is there such a thing as a 4+4 to 8 pin 12V ATX adapter?

    My PSU has a 4+4 pin ATX 12V arrangement (Rosewill Capstone 550-M) Motherboard has an 8-pin connector (Asus Z87-Pro). The part of the motherboard connector that is thicker for the cable to clip on to is at the center of the 8 pin connector. The clips on the 4+4 cable are at the center of...
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    Is today's xbox 360 update an April Fools Prank?

    Seriously I've never seen it update near this slow. And the only new feature we are told about is switching the overpriced XBOX Live Videos between devices?
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    CHKDSK errors even after boot time checkdisk

    The monthly scan from Stablebit Scanner told me I had 2 drives with corrupt filesystems. Not too big a surprise, as I have had several unclean reboots in the past month when I had some UI (including explorer) freezes after enabling WiFi and playing around with a bunch of network sniffers to try...
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    Free XBOX stuff including XBL Gold memberships?

    McDonald's has a promo where you get game tickets with a lot of the items. You can also get tickets without buying anything by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to them with the instructions at http://onehotholiday.com/ EVERY ticket wins something. 1 in 10,001 wins an XBOX One. Edit...
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    PSA: If you upgrade to IE11/DX11.1 with ATI, you probably also want new GPU drivers

    I noticed I had 1-2 logical cores pegged at all times by MMLoadDrv.exe and looked this up to find it was ATI HDMI audio drivers. Looking through the event log also revealed about a dozen various error messages per second from ACEEventLogSource. It definitely wasn't doing this before a few...
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    So is Kinect spying on us now even with the 360?

    It used to be that when I used an app that was not Kinect enabled, the Kinect would be partially powered off (I wouldn't see the red laser, etc). After recent patches, the Kinect laser stays on even when using non-Kinect apps like Media Center. So is the camera now always active to send MS/NSA...
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    Anyone else HATE the new Netflix interface?

    Got the new Netflix app on my 360 this weekend. There are a few pluses, but really these are more bugfixes rather than interface improvements. Specifically, it no longer has a tendency to freeze when you first start streaming something like the previous one did the last few months (I guess...
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    SSD Endurance Testing (Samsung 840) Spoiler: 840 owners won't be happy

    This was linked in the comments thread from the techreport endurance test today: http://forum.notebookreview.com/solid-state-drives-ssds-flash-storage/710497-samsung-840-120gb-endurance-testing-8.html Results are much more disturbing than the techreport test. I like the methodology...
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    Netflix issues on XBOX 360

    For most of the past month, I have been having issues starting Netflix playback on the XBOX 360s. Everything is on wired ethernet, except one of the 3 XBOXes is on MoCA. It works fine on the PC, on the iPad 3 (with better quality), and on my android phones through the WiFi. What happens is...
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    Will Windows 8 make Teracopy suddenly more popular?

    I'm not saying the Windows 8 file copy needs to be replaced. Quite the contrary, it's one of the few positive changes. What I'm saying is, sometimes, you never knew you needed something until you see it in action. And the Windows 8 file copy makes one realize how the Windows 7 file copy is...
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    RDP to 8.1 from non-Windows OS

    Is there any application that will do this? The Linux rdesktop and other RDP clients are able to connect to my Windows 7 box, but not 8.1 RTM. "Remote Desktop Connection" for OS X will connect to Windows 7 (even though it officially doesn't support OS X 10.8), but not to my WIndows 8.1...
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    Anyone want virus definitions from the future?

    Every time I check Windows Update on my Windows 8.1 box, it says there is an "important update" available which turns out to be the Windows Defender virus definitions. If I install it and check again 10 minutes later, the same update will be there again. I think this is because most of the...
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    Help - Asus Z87 Pro USB issues are making me pull my hair out!

    It took a long time to even install Windows 8 with the flaky USB on this thing. After flashing the BIOS to the latest at least it recognized the mouse and keyboard most of the time, although they seemed to be resetting every 15 seconds or so so you had to stop typing during the reset. At one...
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    Is this our last chance to buy PCs/laptops/parts?

    HDD prices still haven't fully recovered from the Thailand floods. Super Typhoon Usagi is heading towards Taiwan most likely hitting Saturday. The portion of PC parts that comes from Taiwan is simply staggering. Should we be expecting motherboard, laptop, RAM, flash, & GPU prices to be...
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    Possible to get just a drive sled for Phantom 630?

    One of the drive sleds on my Phantom 630 is missing 2 and a half of the little things on the side that go into the screw holes of the drive. (I say half because one of them has the rubber circle but not the metal piece that pokes through it). Not using the top 2 3.5" bays (or the bottom 3...
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    Windows 8 Installation Hell

    I just built my first Windows 8 system (still in the process of formatting drives to go into a StableBit pool, installing software, etc). I could not believe what a pain in the ass it was! Really, it's quite insane. The biggest problem is that until the motherboard drivers were...
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    Best storage spaces alternative?

    I was looking forward to the storage spaces feature of Windows 8, but reviews all seem to indicate that the performance of it sucks and it is not so stable. What is the best cheap storage pooling software out now? Preferably something that keeps individual files still readable without it...
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    SSD performance with larger cluster sizes?

    Back when the first good SSDs arrived 4-5 years ago, it became common knowledge that for best performance you should format the SSD with clusters aligned on 4KB boundaries, so they don't get split across flash pages. But the current generation of SSDs uses 8KB or 16KB flash pages. Has anyone...
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    When will 4TB RED drives become available?

    In the US please... although it looks like EMEA might be getting first? Saw a German site with this as well: http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopDetail.asp?ProductID=15915
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    What bolt through kit will fit the stock LGA 1366 heatsink?

    I have a Core i7 920 with the stock Intel heatsink. Twice it has gotten loose on one side because of the piece of crap pushpins, which upon further inspection, 3 of the 4 pushpins are damaged at this point, after 3-4 years of continuous use. Apparently these stupid plastic pushpins will...
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    Is there any advantage to using 8KB clusters on newer Sandforce SSDs?

    I'm thinking now that some drives are internally using 8KB rather than 4KB clusters, is it better to tell windows to format the partition with an 8KB rather than 4KB cluster size? By default Windows 7 creates partitions 1MB aligned so that works out either way, but is there a performance...
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    Interesting thread on reddit about WD10EARS drive performance

    http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/bch10/what_the_hell_western_digital/ I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this effect in other benchmarks. Does HDTach show the same? I would be interested in seeing an Anandtech performance review of these new 4KB sector drives.
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    Which drive is better for media center (DVR) use? WD20EARS or WD20EVDS

    WD20EARS is the part name of the new WD drives with 64MB cache and 4K sectors for less space taken by ECC (and more effective ECC). WD20EVDS is supposedly optimized for multimedia applications. It has 32MB cache and only 512 byte sectors. Both are Caviar "Green". This would be used in...
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    HDD prices, and any info on 3TB drives?

    I've been watching HDD prices for awhile now, as I intend to buy a Ceton quad-CableCard tuner when it comes out, and get rid of my Time Warner DVRs, instead using only the PC as a super-DVR, and would like to have a 2TB drive in there dedicated to this purpose. What I have noticed is that...
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    WTF? Actual Jeopardy answer about 4CHAN!

    http://imgur.com/YT0xK The question was far too vague IMO but the judges sadly accepted it: "What are images?"
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    Zyrtec Addicts Survey

    According to the product literature and most doctors, Zyrtec and other antihistamines are non-addictive, and any "withdrawal symptoms" you may have are actually just your allergies when you stop taking them. After searching online and seeing hundreds if not thousands of people complaining...
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    XBox 360 Universal Remote codes for Vizio?

    Anyone know a code that will get the input button working for my Vizio Eco 42" LCD with the XBOX 360 universal remote? 005 works for most stuff (power, volume, channel up/down, #s), but doesn't work for the input button. There are a bunch of other codes I've found that work for these also...
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    Intel SSD TRIM

    My Windows 7 Upgrade from Newegg arrived yesterday. No new firmware in sight. What gives Intel?
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    Kodak ESP 9 causing Windows 7 blue screens?

    I recently purchased a Kodak ESP 9 when my Epson all-in-one died. It is consistently making Windows 7 x64 blue screen if I try to do a high resolution and/or full page scan. Anyone else experienced this? Any solutions?
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    Anyone else voting for Jimmy McMillan?

    Everyone in our area got a ~45 page paper mailed to them giving info about all the candidates in the upcoming Democratic primary. One got mailed to my wife even and she is a registered Republican. Anyways I was looking through this thing and started laughing my ass off. The first thing that...
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    Wierd issue with Dreamscenes hack for Windows 7

    I installed dreamscenes to have animated wallpaper. As a wierd side effect, the labels for all my desktop icons are 100% transparent. The only way you can read the text at all is because the shadows of the letters are there. Does anyone know how to change this? Another oddity I noticed is...
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    An idea to make SSDs even more ridiculously fast

    When I saw the price of the Fusion IO (80GB for $2,400), the first thing that hit me is The cost per GB is over 3x higher than good quality low latency DDR3-16000!! For high end SSDs why not just use RAM as a write buffer? For the extreme enterprise stuff like Fusion IO, you could make the...
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    Instead of a border fence we should be building a border river/moat

    A friend of mine said he saw a documentary where they were discussing how environmentally unfriendly it is having everything transported to us from around the world today. They said bottled water was one of the worst recent trends because the environmental cost to ship the water was so high...
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    Windows 7 All Programs Menu broken!

    The All Programs menu has stopped working on my Windows 7 x64 install. I can right click it and click "Open" to open an explorer window with the entries for my user account or "Open All Users" to open an explorer window with entries for all users. Neither of these folders seems to have any...
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    Asus P6T Deluxe V2 utils & Windows 7

    Under Windows 7 x64, most of the installers for the various utilities that come with the ASUS motherboards complain that the board is unsupported or needs a BIOS update (even with the latest BIOS & Windows 7 beta versions of the utils downloaded from their site). I finally figured out the...
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    Why does TRIM require a new SATA command...

    In most (ALL?) modern OSes, memory pages newly assigned to a process are zero pages, both for performance (can use COW from a single reserved zero page) and for security (don't want to reuse a physical page containing data another process deallocated). Newly created files (if created with...
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    Vista Windows Update - not SSD Friendly

    For my new system I have 2 drives: C: Intel X25-M 80 "GB" (really 74) (system drive) E: Seagate 1TB I didn't like the amount of space taken on the C: drive almost immediately after Windows install. I figure having more space free on C: is probably a lot better for wear leveling, especially...