I apologize that there isn’t much time left, but for what’s left of March 21, you can snag a Samsung 830 SSD from Newegg for $140.
It’s the best deal I’ve seen on a highly regarded modern SSD. Read more
Move the print spool directory to your ramdisk
You can improve the speed of printing slightly and, depending on the nature of your print jobs, dramatically reduce disk writes if you move the print spool directory to your ramdisk. It’s a little performance tweak you might have never heard of, but it’s helpful.
This trick works best with a ramdisk product that loads a disk image at startup, such as Dataram Ramdisk.
How to move your temporary files to a ramdisk
Moving the rest of your temporary files to a ramdisk provides a number of performance benefits. Program installations proceed noticeably faster, and fewer files written to your system disk means less fragmentation, less maintenance for an SSD, and, most likely, longer SSD life.
Control your debt, stay in school, stay employed and out of prison
Some people are worried that student loans are the next debt time bomb that can potentially wreck the economy, and that fear of student-loan debt will make people less inclined to seek the education they need.
Two statistics should discourage that.
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A Firefox ramdisk profile in Windows
I’ve been using Dataram’s excellent free ramdisk program for several months now and highly recommend it. On some machines, I install Firefox to the ramdisk and move the profile there. But the biggest benefit comes from putting the profile (not just the browser cache) in the ramdisk. Storing the profile in a high-speed, near-zero-latency ramdisk solves virtually every Firefox performance issue. Here’s how to set up a Firefox ramdisk profile in Windows. Read more
My household’s energy usage dropped 19% in 2011
I got a letter from my utility company Saturday morning. Inside was a chart, comparing our household’s energy usage from 2010 and 2011. It dropped 19 percent.
Considering our total bill for 2011 was over $900, that’s hardly chump change. Read more
There’s a 61% chance the Adobe software you run at work is out of date
I read this week that 61% of Adobe Reader installations in workplaces is out of date.
That’s very bad. Very, very bad. Because Adobe Reader is trivially easy to exploit, and there’s more sensitive information to steal on corporate PCs than there is on home PCs.
There’s room for several to gloat over the Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica is, after 244 years, calling it quits on its print edition, and I’m sure Wikipedia is gloating, because as I recall, that was one of its goals around a decade ago.
Wired argues that Encarta did more to kill Britannica than Wikipedia. I tend to agree.
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Are comments worth the trouble or not?
Gawker founder Nick Denton (home of Mac Hacker, er, Lifehacker; Gizmodo; io9; Jalopnik; and formerly Consumerist) says online comments aren’t worth the trouble.
I agree and disagree.
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Apply your monthly patches just as soon as you can
There are only six patches in this month’s edition of Patch Tuesday, and only one of them is critical, but it’s a big one.
The critical patch fixes a flaw in Remote Desktop Protocol, something typically only present in the business-oriented flavors of Windows. But if you don’t know whether you’re affected, it behooves you to let Windows update whatever it wants to update. Read more