Dave Garrett

I was in the same boat earlier this year - I had a 9-year-old desktop that I'd built myself and was way overdue for replacement. I wound up replacing both my own and my wife's desktops (which was an even older Dell) with refurbished HP desktops from Micro Center. I found that with a little patience in waiting for the right deals to come along, I was able to get machines with 4GB RAM, 1TB hard drive, a quad-core 2.9GHz AMD CPU, and Win7 64-bit Home Premium for between $300-400. I think those are the minimum specs you should be looking at - the Intel i3 or i5 CPUs are certainly worthy as well, but you'll pay a premium over AMD CPUs for them, and in my experience you won't be able to tell the difference for web surfing, word processing, spreadsheets, and all the other basic functions you'd expect to perform on a computer. Gaming, video editing, or other similar activities that are CPU-intensive may be a different story. The only drawback with the machines I got is that the stock power supplies, at 250W, are really undersized if I start adding additional components - I will likely have to upgrade to 450W or better ones before adding bigger graphics cards, additional internal drives, etc. But I haven't had the need to do so yet, and may not any time soon. Why those specs? Quad-core CPUs are the de facto standard now. There's no excuse to settle for a dual-core unless you're really aiming for a bare-bones system, especially if you're planning on keeping it for a long time. As for the RAM, it's cheap, and you'll need more than 2GB for Win7 to run with enough pep when you have multiple applications open; right now I'm using 2.75GB of RAM with two mail clients and two browsers open (Firefox and Chrome, albeit both with quite a few tabs open concurrently). Hard drive space can be pretty variable depending on how much downloading you do, but I don't see too many desktops with the above specs with less than a 500-750GB drive these days. You can never have too much disk space. Refurb machines are worth looking at because "refurb" does not necessarily mean "used". In many cases, such as with the HPs I got, the manufacturer designates them as refurb because they're discontinuing them, and want to get rid of existing stock. The warranty is typically 90 days as opposed to 1 year, but you're getting a pretty steep discount in return for rolling the dice in that regard, and most hardware failures are usually going to happen within the first 90 days. I got my dad a refurb HP machine earlier this year that turned out to be DOA out of the box (stuck in a bluescreen loop), and HP promptly sent him a prepaid shipping carton to return it for repair, turning it around within a week after going over it thoroughly. My dad has considerable work experience in the retail electronics industry and is very computer-savvy as well, and he was pretty impressed with HP's customer service in dealing with this problem, but as the saying goes, your mileage may vary. The prices I mentioned above do not include a monitor. You should budget $150 or so for a 23-24" full HD (1080p) LCD monitor - 1920x1080 resolution. I've had good luck with Samsung and Asus monitors. 23-24" units are in the sweet spot where they're plenty big enough for regular use, including watching movies, while still being relatively cheap. Anything bigger starts to get considerably more expensive. I went from a 19" analog CRT to a 23" digital LCD and could not believe the difference in size as well as resolution. A decent-sized monitor will make a budget-priced system much more livable, so don't skimp here. I would strongly recommend a router even if you only have one computer and don't have an immediate need to set up a wifi network, because having your computer behind a NAT router makes it far more secure than using a software firewall only - the router's IP address is the only one that's visible to the public internet, as the router assigns private IP addresses to all the computers or other devices behind it. Think of it as cheap insurance, another layer in the onion that you need to build an effective security strategy against the legion of malware purveyors out there.

A cursory forum search didn't turn up any mention of this, but I may have missed a previous discussion. Anyone else seen this? I recently picked up the DVD at the film's website, where it's available for the very reasonable price of $8.95. The film itself is fairly brief, but there's over an hour of extras in the form of interviews with many of the people featured in the film. Learned some things I didn't know, and if you're interested enough to be hanging here in the first place, I suspect you'd find it well worth watching. Website

Barns & Noble seem to have a Criterion sale every year or maybe even a couple of times a year. I'm not sure since there is no longer a B & N near me, but my son in New York has taken advantage of their Criterion sales. B&N usually has a 50% off Criterion sale in the summer and one in November. They just had one last month that ended three weeks ago. It's gotten to where I hardly ever buy Criterions until their sale comes around.

It's a good bet that anyone who trots that hoary old chestnut out has likely never been on acid themselves.

Anyone else seen this yet? It just opened Friday in limited release (NYC, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Houston), but will hopefully roll out to a wider release soon. It's a must-see for anyone with even a slight interest in 70s funk and soul, but the backstory should ensure broad-based appeal among other audiences as well. Official movie website Also looks like Now-Again Records is coming out with a new "deluxe" edition of the outstanding compilation of KSB recordings they released in 2006: Kashmere Stage Band - Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974

Finally made it to this yesterday before it closed today: Helmut Newton: White Women - Sleepless Nights - Big Nudes Very impressive to see some of these photos in large-scale prints after being familiar with them in books. Also read a comment in the visitors' guestbook that made me laugh: "These photos smell like cocaine!"

Did you get rid of just the premium digital cable packages, or did you actually revert back to analog cable? Comcast, along with almost every other cable provider, is phasing out analog cable as they can cram a lot more digital channels into the same bandwidth that analog transmissions consume. Sooner rather than later, existing analog customers are going to get a letter mandating the switch to digital cable if they want to continue receiving service. Also, Comcast has a 250GB cap on residential internet service, so you may want to keep an eye on the usage meter available on their website under your account settings if you're going to be streaming a lot of video. I don't really use Hulu or Netflix streaming, so I'm not sure how much bandwidth they consume, but I've heard that streaming a lot of HD content can cause you to hit the bandwidth cap quickly.

As an aside, DeepDiscount.com currently has that disc and the other three live Airplane releases by Collectors' Choice Music for ridiculously low prices - between $2-3 per disc. Just search for "Jefferson Airplane" and you'll see them. Apparently they are blowing out these and a bunch of other CCM releases that have been discontinued in the wake of wholesaler Super D's acquisition of Infinity Resources (parent company of both DeepDiscount and CCM). I picked up all four for $14 and change shipped, only remembering after the fact that free shipping is offered on all orders of $15 or more.

$658.98. Somebody say something about a recession? Not that I'm defending yet another overpriced box set, but... Achtung Baby Price Tracker

Combine very sharp puppy teeth with the aforementioned puppy tendency to chew on everything within reach, and you're going to get regularly nipped even by the best-behaved pup. I had the same kind of scratches and bites up and down my arms and hands when our dog was a puppy, but she grew out of the biting/chewing habit (although not before ruining a coffee table I'd had since college and a few books) once her permanent teeth had come in. I'd definitely look into some basic obedience training before considering returning him to the agency, but this is probably not something you're going to fix in several days.

It's Garry Shandling's Show - complete series 16-DVD set for $49.98 at Daedalus Books.

Moldville

Looks like you do have to have admin rights to install it - if there's no chance of convincing someone in IT to do it, there's an older version available that doesn't require admin access to install it, but it doesn't have all the functionality of the newer versions. Details at the bottom of this page.

Looks really cool...don't know if I can install it on the corporate PC, but if I can... It's been a while since I've had to install it on a machine that I didn't have local admin access on, so I can't remember if that's required or not. It's basically a collection of Excel macros, and IT organizations tend to get cranky about things like that when they're not coming from a trusted source. Also, be aware that the developer publishes updates semi-regularly, and will force you to upgrade after a certain period of time by disabling the older version you have installed. Not sure if this is done by just embedding an expiration date in it or whether it phones home to check for available updates. Kind of a pain in the ass, especially if it turns out that admin access is required to install the updates, but it's so useful that I've managed to overlook these kinds of minor hassles.

If you use Firefox, various combinations of Flashblock, Adblock Plus, and NoScript will fix that shit right quick. I've used Flashblock for years, and it's dead simple - Flash content is automatically blocked but displayed as a Flash icon that you can click to enable the content if you choose to do so. Adblock Plus in conjunction with NoScript will give you almost total control over how webpages are displayed, but the downside is that figuring out what specific configuration best fits your needs can be complicated.

The most essential toolkit I've ever run across when it comes to having to deal with fucked-up data formatting in spreadsheets: ASAP Utilities

Unreal. This set has only been out for about two and a half years, and it was list priced at $120 when it was released. I got it at a pretty decent discount, but I still paid a hell of a lot more than $16.99. Anyway, if you're even a casual fan of the series or of TV Westerns, you should jump on it - it's a really nice set and beats all of the previous releases hands down.

Not sure where I ran across this recently, so it may have already been mentioned here: camelcamelcamel

Me too. At least they don't proudly advertise how low in carbs or calories their beer is. Anyone who's seriously concerned about either when it comes to selecting a beer is missing the point.

The full set of photos from that exhibit can be found here.

I've been on both sides of the eBay fence, and quite frankly there's plenty of bad behavior on the seller side as well. Wildly misrepresenting the condition of used items and gouging on shipping fees are the most common, although eBay has really tried to rein in the latter (and has arguably swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, so everyone suffers as a result of the actions of the most egregious offenders). But yeah, there's no shortage of asshole, bottom-feeding buyers who expect something for nothing and throw a fit when they're called on it.

Priceless! The untweaked "Nighthawks" is a personal favorite and is currently my desktop wallpaper.

The first computer I ever owned was a Mac IIx. And I've given serious thought to making the switch to an iMac for some time but ultimately couldn't justify the price differential. Macs are very nice systems, and OS X gets points from me for being Unix-based (and if not quite free like the various Linux distros, certainly inexpensive enough). But if you haven't lived with Windows 7 for a while, and your experience of MS operating systems is limited to previous versions of Windows, you might be quite surprised by how much it just works. This series of posts is worth reading, particularly the second one containing the Mac vs. Windows PC comparison table.

Not familiar with BJ's except through word of mouth - we don't have them here. And I can't say that I've really paid attention to the computer offerings at Sam's, as I tend to prefer Costco when it comes to warehouse club stores. The local newspaper has a very good technology columnist who publishes recommended specifications for desktops and laptops every year, geared toward novice, home, and power users. You will probably find his most recent update for desktops useful.