Had a HDD go down a couple days ago and its been a pain. At first my windows installation went corrupt after it couldn't boot with that drive, but that was easily fixed with system restore. So I've been trying to fish the unbacked data off the failed drive and I'm still at it. The closest I came to mounting it in Linux was with Linux Puppy, but the files were read only and I couldn't copy them. Basically I don't care much about the drive, just the data on it. I was hoping I could fish the files ...

I remember Jafo telling me about his rig, so you could imagine how horrified I was to see his beloved Level 10 being assailed and ridiculed by PC Gamer on a public forum... they list it as one of the "ugliest they've ever seen".    http://www.pcgamer.com/the-eight-ugliest-pc-gaming-cases-weve-ever-seen/?utm_content=buffer7daa8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=buffer_pcgamerfb 

Yesterday, my rig kept cutting out on me after like 5 or 10 minutes of use. I was trying not to panic! It was so simple that it was funny. The PSU power cord wasn't seated firmly anymore. Cracks me up how the mind can race away with all kinds of crazy scenarios before checking the simplest first.

Been trying out some new vid cards. At first, I installed a Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 480 4GB and it ran great. Great on the burn in,  and great with memory consuming games like DOOM, but when I would go into FOB on MGSV the fan would spike to 100% and go into an infinite loop error. I would shut the game and bring up Trixx to try adjusting the fan, but it was unresponsive and would blue screen. I figured it might just be a minor fix, but I looked and saw that lots of people were having the...

Microsoft need to get serious about making Operating systems in the future and needs to give me at least 1 good reason to switch from Win 7 which is the best Operating system I've used to something new. With Win 8 I have nothing but reasons NOT to switch. Get serious people.

I just got another 16gb of ram to make it a full 32 and my rig knew it was there but couldn't use it and I found out why. Win 7 Premium can only use a paltry 16 gb. If I want to use the full 32 I'll have to upgrade to pro, which I will likely do very soon.

  Spent the weekend assembling my new i7 rig which I have affectionately named "Ripley". All the hardware is Hackintoshable should I decide to go that route and dual boot with OS X. Specs: Fractal Design Define R4 Case, Black Pearl Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz Gigabyte Intel Z77 Dual Thunderbolt ATX Motherboard (GA-Z77X-UP5-TH) Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHZ 1GB Corsair Professional Series  A...

cnet (Download.com) has always been a trusted site, but this morning their download hit me with a nasty hijack called browsemngr.exe. It hijacked all my browsers and it took me like 20 minutes to clean it all up. Watchout.   C:\ProgramData\Browser Manager\2.3.796.11\{16cdff19-861d-48e3-a751-d99a27784753}\browsemngr.exe O23 - Service: Browser Manager - Unknown owner - C:\ProgramData\Browser Manager\2.3.796.11\{16cdff19-861d-48e3-a751-d99a27784753}\browsemngr.exe

Its really tough to choose a mobo for the rig I'm building. Its probably the toughest choice to make. I generally want Intel Z77, LGA1155, 32GB ram, and at least 2 x SATA 6Gb. Which motherboard would be best? Gigabyte seems solid. What would you use if you were building a rig now? I don't really need an extreme gaming rig with 4 cards.

Which card would give the best bang for the buck? Are any of these cards bad in terms of performance when it comes to excessive heat or noise? Which would be best for the price. Anything better in this range? I was leaning towards the GTX480 which should be able to handle anything I throw at it for a good price. 1). EVGA GeForce GTX480 1536MB  $199.99 2.) EVGA GeForce GTX570 1280MB  $259.99 3.) EVGA GeForce GTX660 2048MB  $229.99

I just installed an EVGA 9800GT and its giving me some snap, crackle, pop on the sound. Its not an extreme case, but its definitely there, and its definitely because of the card. Its also annoying. When I tested the problem on a fresh install of Win 7 64-Bit, the video card driver wasn't listed in Windows upgrade like it was with my old card, so I went and downloaded it from the NVidia website cause I wanted to get the latest one. Right after the install, the pop and crackling began. I'...

I've begun to change my music files from Mp3's to Flac. I like the Flac format because it gives me the full range of sound, unlike the lossy Mp3's I've been listening to all these years. Even when Mp3's are ripped @ 320 kbps, they just can't match the sound of Flac.

I really like OpenSUSE Linux, but the best distro is PCLinuxOS . If there was ever an OS that could help me 'throw Windows out the window,' this is it. Ive tried using Mac as an alternative to Windows, but I guess it just wasn't for me. At least Apple implores its users to 'Think Different,' Microsoft insists everyone 'be Genuine.' So what would be their catch-phrase be, 'Be Authentic?' Although I like Vista very much, I'm turned off by the Orweillian efforts to ensure my 'authe...

The OpenSUSE 10.3 Gnome environment is another great one. OpenSUSE 10.3 is the best version of Linux Ive ever used and its still under constant development. I seem to gravitate towards Red Hat based distros. I set up this Gnome configuration on a Compaq Armada with this partition scheme: /boot 100 MB swap 500 MB / the rest of the hard disk I had also set it up with a Windows XP partition that I shrunk before I added my Linux partitions. I personally do like the Gnome ...