Author: Dave Farquhar

Who made that power supply?

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

I found a cross-reference for power supply brands and OEM manufacturers. It’s a couple of years old, but still useful.

Way back when, I knew that Sparkle Power actually made PC Power & Cooling Silencer power supplies. Since Sparkle units were cheaper, I bought those, and got good, reliable power from them for years until they were obsolete. That information is obsolete now too; Sparkle was bought out by FSP many years ago.

This chart tells you a whole lot more than that. And it validates that my current practice of buying Seasonic power supplies whenever possible is probably good, since Seasonic is the actual maker for several premium brands of power supplies today.

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DNS and iTunes and other streaming media

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , , , ,

There are reports floating about regarding third-party DNS affecting downloads of movies and other media, particularly from iTunes.

So, if tweaking DNS settings used to be what all the cool kids are doing, maybe it’s about to become less trendy, thanks to advice circulating to ditch third-party, centralized DNS providers like Google and OpenDNS, because they “defeat the distributed nature of DNS itself.”

The answer of what DNS to use and why is more complex than that.
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A free SSD alignment tool

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Windows , , , , , , , , ,

We’ve talked recently about the importance of aligning your partitions on your SSD or your RAID array. What if I told you you could align an SSD or RAID array for free? Here’s where to find a free SSD alignment tool–it’s just not normally billed as such.

Alignment helps performance, sometimes tremendously, and it also dramatically improves your SSD’s life expectancy. Newer versions of Windows automatically align their partitions, but only if you do a clean installation to an empty drive. Older versions of Windows created their partitions starting at sector 63, for tradition’s sake. Maybe moving off sector 63 made dual-booting with Windows 9x harder.

Two readers, Jim and Xrocode, suggested utilities to do the job. One costs $30 and seems fairly automatic. One is free and requires a small amount of work. Grab the freebie here. It’s a 274 MB download, so it doesn’t even take all that long.

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Optimizing Windows’ startup sequence

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

In days of yore, it was possible to go by one simple rule. When several minutes passed between the time your desktop appeared and the time you could actually do something, you could just run MSConfig and disable anything you don’t recognize. Back when a typical PC started up maybe a half-dozen things and a sick PC started up 12-18, that was manageable.

Not so much today. Not when there are 22,528 known things (as of 30 Nov 2010) that insert themselves into system startup.

I didn’t make that 22,528 number up. How did I know?

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Cleaning up what CCleaner can’t

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Longtime reader Jim ` offered to share his oh-so-sneaky method for killing temp files. I’m happy to share them today. Read more

Upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 with USB media

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , , ,

I wasn’t in any hurry to switch to Windows 7, but when several places put the Windows 7 family pack on sale for $125 or thereabouts, I figured I’d better get it. The normal price on three upgrades is $100-$110 a pop. And you know how it goes. Once you get something, you really don’t want it to just sit on the shelf. Why let the software collect dust while I wait for 64-bit Firefox to arrive?

So I want to install it off USB. It’s easy, right? Well, it’s easy if you’re running Vista. But the instructions floating around for making bootable Windows 7 installation USB media don’t work if you’re running XP. At least they didn’t work from any of my XP machines. Read more

Screw sizes and tips for various common types of Lionel track

Dave Farquhar Toy trains , , , , , , ,
Screw sizes and tips for various common types of Lionel track

So, maybe you set up a loop of track and an electric train for Christmas, and now you’re thinking about a permanent layout. I’ve been there. Once you build a table, you’ll need to attach your track. Screws are the most common way to do that. Here’s a list of the best screws for Lionel track. Read more

Merry and blessed Christmas to all

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

I just wanted to take a minute to wish all of you a very merry and blessed Christmas. With the snowstorm, we had a whiter Christmas than I remember having in a very long time, and driving home from Christmas Eve service was a bigger adventure than I bargained for. My older son (who’s not quite 3) actually slept late this morning. That’s probably the last time that ever happens. I’m sure he’ll be up at 5 or 6 like every normal child next year, and for the foreseeable future.

I’m doing some computer upgrades now, so I may have some new experience to relate in the coming days. We’ll see. Hopefully there won’t be too many stories of disaster and recovery.

Don’t use Internet Explorer this Christmas

Dave Farquhar security , , , , ,

In case you haven’t heard elsewhere, there’s a nifty unpatched vulnerability for Internet Explorer floating around. And it’s actively being exploited. Metasploit, an exploit toolkit used by penetration testers and script kiddies alike, is able to detect and utilize it.

Under these circumstances, Microsoft has been known to rush out a patch before the next scheduled Patch Tuesday, but the Christmas and New Year’s holidays will obviously slow things down.

In the meantime, installing Firefox and/or Chrome is prudent. I have and use both, since, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a time yet when both of the two most popular alternative browsers had unpatched exploits in the wild.

How to get more blog traffic without being sleazy

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

Something Steve A. wrote last week got me thinking. I’m paraphrasing, but if I’m interpreting him correctly, he’s written every day, or nearly every day, for about four years and would like to cut back, but is kinda-sorta addicted to the traffic he gets by writing every day. But there are more effective ways to get more blog traffic.

I think writing every day does increase your traffic, to a degree. But for long-term, sustainable traffic, I think it helps only indirectly. Here are seven things I’ve found that helped me get more blog traffic. Read more