So, AMD (American Micro Devices) has decided ot wage a war against it's only competitor, Intel, for unfair business practices, a'la DOJ vs Microsoft back in 97. The processor manufacturer is calling Intel's business influence unfair. What started as a lot of back and forth, AMD has decided to push it's suit onward to the American leagal system and taking its competitor to court for praciticing 'monopolistic' practises when it comes to selling processors. This harkens back to the anit-trust...

THis starts out simple enough: I got a e-mail form the regional tech department the other day stating that if we are working on certina model e-machines, please note the motherboard type. Apparently certain motherboards and power supplies, when combined, will cause the computer to burst into flames. I am not kidding. I have lamented to colligues and the like that hardware is not up to the same standard as it used to be. While a lot of pre-fab computers makes my life as a techie easy, i...

So, about the time the christmas started flaoting around, a bunch of people in my family recieved MP3 players for christmas. After all the huffing and puffing about there being little solution for the ongoing war against piracy, it struck me funny that the MP3 player is still a sought after accessory. All the big companies have been fighting this 'illegal' format, going so far as to change the law to make backing up music in this format technically illegal. So, I was amused to find that t...

Back in the day, when XP was rearing its head from the depths of Microsoft's Engineering division, Windows 2000 was considered the most pirated operating system at the time. Windows 2000, based on the NT (New Technology) platform, was a successful upgrade from NT 4.0. The stable kernel and programming that we saw hints of back in Windows 3.1 and Windows NT 3.5 were there to shine. Users flocked to it and service releases were common in 0 day warez sites. By the time the Windows XP had com...

Surely there is not one person that is out there that hasn't been in the know about the Piracy issue with Music. It was brought to the forefront when a little college grad created a Unix-based file transfer program called Napster. Fanning, then 22, started sahring his music with his friends over the internet, and a revolution was born. Before the introduction of MP3 (M-PEG Audio, Layer 3), music was pretty safe. You could get it onto the computer, but .WAV files are big. After the introdu...

I have had a lot of people contact me lately about a interesting flaw in Windows XP. It seams that if you try to view large video files in Explorer, or click to get file information, the CPU spikes to 100% for....hours. It seems that just another fatle flaw has appeared in the OS that just can't seem to get fixed. In the past, Microsoft has done what every other software company seems to do...drop crap on the market. Maybe crap is harsh, as the article I first read on this site ( and made ...

Back around Jan of this year, I read a interesting article in a E-Weekly mag. It claimed that WalMart was getting into the Computer Desktop business. They had apparently inked a deal with Sun Mircosystems to put a Java OS onto their computers. The cost for them: 460 Million. This would put the largest Big Box store in the world into a field where they have only dabbled in, and give a big boost to the Sun Microsystems attempt to topple software giant Microsoft. Here is the link to the prod...

The one thing I get asked a lot as a techie and a gamer is: What video card should I get. The choices, back in the day of old school computer electronics was simple. You picked up, pretty much, the highest quality video card you could get, because the technology was still running up the scale. When the videocard started to self-multiple in the same year, things got sticky. My favorite videocard is still the Voodoo 5. I got it from a auction on Ebay after the product line got dumped whe...