So, for about a month now, I've been running Ubuntu Linux 10.whatever on my laptop. Partly because Vista, after coming with it and being used for a couple years, was doing really random bizarre things like not recognizing USB things unless they were plugged in when the computer was turned on ( Read more... )

Okay, so. I am absolutely done with Vista on this thing, when the computer runs a high quality downloaded version of a video slower than streaming the same video from Youtube, I'm done ( Read more... )

Okay, my laptop has 3 gig of memory. Unfortunately, it also came with Vista. And while it's been slow anyway, I'm sick and tired of the endless boot and shutdown times, and the fact it seems to keep deciding to eat up all the memory and lock up Explorer even so I have to manually turn the damn thing off. Seriously, I had far less problems with ( Read more... )

Okay, so this one program I'm using for this research project?

It's written in FORTRAN.

Seriously.

Can anybody recommend a good program to go through a lot of music files, identify the duplicates, and remove them? I installed iTunes, and it asked if I wanted it to consolidate my music library, which meant it made copies of all my other songs into the iTunes directory. More organized mostly, yes, but now they take up twice the space. And twice ( Read more... )

If you're looking at buying a new USB thumb drive, make sure it doesn't have the "U3 launchpad" on it. If it does, the thumb drive's been preformatted with a second partition, which has been made read-only. That partition contains the "U3 Launchpad" program, which autoruns every time you put the thumbdrive in. Every single time. And it ( Read more... )

Man, why'd it take me so long to decide to get into engineering? Man ( Read more... )

Okay, tech support time. For some reason, when I try and start up Mozilla Thunderbird now, it just locks up, it sort of half-loads, but all the outside edges are all speckley and it doesn't respond. I tried downloading the newest version, which still does it, and it worked fine several days ago, I don't know of anything that should have changed ( Read more... )

Why is it taking me days to try and figure out how to import my old offline contact list into ICQ/Gaim. Cripes ( Read more... )

Okay, so I'd like to try switching over to GAIM, since it's open-source and all, but there's no functionality for importing contact lists. Which isn't a problem for things like AIM that have contact lists stored on the server, but I have a huge ICQ contact list built up over a decade. Most of it's gone dead as people moved on and changed and ( Read more... )