The Tech Question Thread

Jonathan it's your tech thread duder. :loco:

Erik has hell frozen over, that's crazy.

I wish every 'puter acted like my Droid phone.

But then I'd have to put it in my pocket and charge it nightly.

That'd be pretty stupid really.

Erik or anyone else feel free to answer my iTonksless Mac query/desire.

I've never liked it but whatever. Now the new version is abysmal.

Somebody stole $292 from me this morning and that didn't bother me.

Trying to burn 3 CDs in new iTunes after that made me want to kill everyone.

Quite literally: I would prefer that someone stole money from me than use iTunes again.
 
So you can still use your Nokia to play Snake?

I bought some $20 earfuds for my new free iPud.

Also I'm getting used to iTonks. It's fucking horrid, but whatever.

I only transfer files to an mp3 player about once a year so who cares.

And as a player for my 'puter musicing it still works clunky but fine.

Of course the stupid part is that my phone transfers and plays mp3s fucking killer via Winamp, but it sounds like shit. Also when I'm rocking out to Enslaved whilst soldering poop at work it's pretty annoying to get text message bloops and other random phone bullshit interrupterring my god damn lead fumed chi.
 
I've had the new iPod Touch for a month now and I really like it. At the same time I finally caved and bought a dumb phone. It's the first time in at least two years that I've had a phone.
Carry on.
 
so you bought an ipod touch, which is almost exactly an iphone without the phone part, and then you bought a separate phone at the same time

that's...
 
If it's like Canada, you can't get an iPhone at a carrier/shop without a dataplan. He'd have to go buy a used one that is carrier unlocked (or of the carrier he wants), setup a regular dumbphone plan anyway, and then swap the sim into the iPhone and change the AP.
 
I don't feel like paying $100 plus a month for a data plan when all I need a phone for is emergencies on the road. I have free wi-fi at work for the iPod. When I'm filthy rich and stuff maybe I will splurge for an iPhone. In the meantime, no thanks
 
What's the typical life for an external hard drive? I've had my Seagate 500gb hard drive for about 6 years now. Is it time to invest in another? I see we are up into terrabytes now...jesus...pretty affordable too. Who makes the best, basic, most reliable external HD?
 
What's the typical life for an external hard drive? I've had my Seagate 500gb hard drive for about 6 years now. Is it time to invest in another? I see we are up into terrabytes now...jesus...pretty affordable too. Who makes the best, basic, most reliable external HD?

hard drives is basically a duopoly now, all the competition has merged or died out. there are seagate drives and there are western digital drives. (there are also toshiba drives, but they're garbage)

the long and short of it is it doesn't matter what you get. if you look around the internet you will see hordes of people claiming that WD is shit and only seagate is real and vice versa, but they're both wrong. wd and seagate are basically the same, who cares. try to get the higher-priced drives and not the bottom-barrel range and you should be good. i've personally had good luck so far with western digital's green and black ranges. (WD has their ranges named after colours. blue = cheap shit, green = slower but uses less power, black = fast, red = optimized for file servers and shit)

concerning external drives, the maker of the enclosure literally doesn't matter at all ever, it's all the same chinese shit with different logos. inside there is invariably either a seagate or a WD drive.

as far as hd life goes, it's a crapshoot as you should always expect a mechanical drive to fail at any given moment.

that said, i've had drives survive for 15+ years without a hitch. all modern drives are capable of self-diagnosing errors before they happen. you can run crystaldiskinfo on the drive and see if you get any red alerts, if not you should be good for the foreseeable future
 
My wife got a new laptop not too ong ago that had the newest version of Windows with touchscreen/etc/blahblahblah.....so anyways, WTF happened to Windows?!?!

The jumped the shark with Vista but got back up with Windows7 imo, but W....T....F?!

:puke: