The Official Computer Geeks Thread
 

So all of the computer geeks out there, I want this to be a thread for you to post about cool new things that come out that could be good for us to have/download. For example this is a wee feature that dims your computer at night so you don't get brightness and glare.


Flux

Ummm... I just bought an iPad 2... that's pretty cool, huh?

Regarding F.lux I don't think automatically adjusting the brightness or screen colour according to the time of day would be much help. It would really depend on the light of the room you are in. It would be better if your computer or laptop had some sort of built-in light sensor and the software adjusts the screen brightness and colour according the light in the room.

If anyone is looking for a really good 1TB hard-drive get a Buffalo MiniStation HD-PCU2. Got one recently and they are the shizz.

http://static.bhphotovideo.com/image...345/753123.jpg

Buffalo Technology - Products - HD-PCU2 : MiniStation

I'm so cold right now if I was a computer I'd be operating at maximum efficiency.


There's an app called Jump that allows you to remotely control your desktop or laptop from your iPad. I've experienced no compatibility issues with iOS or Windows, and overall it's one of the better apps I've downloaded. Hell I was using it last night to download games from Steam while in one of my night classes.

Flux does dim based on lighting in the room though.

I like the look of that hard-drive I'm going to be picking one up asap.

Ah that's not too bad then. I think it's more useful that way.

I posted a pic of the USB 3.0 one by mistake, mine is USB 2.0, both of them look the exact same though. Yeah I was looking for a new 1TB external HD and my friend who works in a computer accessories and repair store recommended it to me. It's a bit more expensive than the average 1TB external HD but it's worth it. It won't crap out on you after a couple of years.

The last hard-drive I had fell apart and it was a Seagate. I will get my mate to get me the drive at wholesale prices so I get the best!

Looks hot though.

It is a very nice looking HD. It matches my laptop as well especially with the blue lights :D

I'm a bit cautious about Seagate. I have an Iomega HD as well that I use for especially for music and apparently they're meant to be crap, although I've had it for a couple of years now and have no problems with it. Just worried though that it will suddenly die on me one day.

Haha awesome! My computers a Torshiba Satellite so it would fully be complimented with blue lights. :D

Oh yeah that's the issue with buying a hard-drive, you have to be sure it's going to last or you need a back up for the back up! My friend has a back up for all his 3 2TB drives. Insane!

I just keep all my stuff on a central computer which I can access from througout the house. And I have a backup drive for that computer.
I'm pretty picky about what I keep. So it still fits just fine on a 1TB drive :)

Been meaning to get my hands on a server for a good price. Something I can throw all my music, films and stuff on to and use as a media hub.

Just buy a NAS harddisk with raid capability.
Throw in two identical 2TB HD's and it'll backup itself.
You won't have to do a thing and your music will be available throughout your network.

Anyone who thinks they're geek should try installing Arch Linux sometime.

In semi-related news, over the past 3 days I've installed 5 different linux distributions on my netbook and upgraded another which is installed on an external hard drive.

**** is complicated yo.

I need a new computer before I can join chat, considering I broke my laptop, my iPhone and my desktop computer. I'm not doing to well. :'(

Been meaning to try Arch Linux, a few of my friends are using it. I have Ubuntu installed on my laptop along with Windows. It's alright I guess, I only really use it for internet sometimes and just to mess around with. It seems to be a bit faster with internet and is a lot easier on my laptop's resources compared to Windows 7 but it can be a bit buggy sometimes, and it seems to freeze on me more times than Windows. Been thinking about uninstalling it and replacing it with Mint.

Don't bother. Try lubuntu. I've been through what feels like every ubuntu distro recently and its by far the fastest and most reliable of the bunch so far. mint is a little bloated imo, especially since it uses GNOME by default, which is way more resource intensive than the LXDE environment Lubuntu uses.

Oh, and xubuntu is worth a try, but its not actually all that fast compared to lubuntu. Still a lot lighter than ubuntu or kubuntu though.

I'll give Lubuntu a shot then, it'll probably suit me more as I'll only be using it as a secondary OS on this laptop. The LXDE desktop looks a lot lighter graphically than GNOME. Mint would probably be more suited to small netbooks using it as a primary OS.

Not really. I tried mint and didn't find it to be appreciably quicker than vanillabuntu. Lubuntu is much faster. And really, lxde isn't lacking on features (and it has some things I prefer over gnome)

DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL:

You know you're a geek when you hear "tablets worth €440,000 seized by police" on the news and think that's a lot of ipads.

:laughing:

Tech geek tip of the day:

DEFRAGGLER.
It's awesome. You can defrag entire drives, folders and even single files. So, defragging your porn folder is now possible without having to do the whole drive.

You can also defrag free space, and another neat feature is you can have the defragger move large files that typically don't get used often, to the end of the drive (the slower part) and specify minimum file sizes and file types.

A few weeks ago, I found a smashed-up laptop in a dumpster at work. I pulled out my screwdriver (yes, I keep one with me) and removed the hard drive. A 320GB WD Scorpion :)

I finally got around to ordering a case for it off of NewEgg. It arrived today. I fired it up, and naturally, the first thing I did was search it for porn. Found about 100GB of videos, nothing remarkable. But there were some nice explicit shots of some girl named Ashley hidden away in the dude's music folder, under Disc 2 of some NAS album :D

Anyway I saved the porn, formatted the drive, and now I'm now in the process of copying my 200GB comic collection onto it to free up some room on my internals for downloading more crap.

It's pretty cool.

Defragging is indeed quite useful. I defragged the C drive on my dad's computer a few weeks ago because it hadn't been defragged in about two years. It's an old Dell with 512MB RAM and XP and was also one of the slowest computers I've ever used. It basically took hours but it seemed to run a bit quicker and smoother as a result. Also setting the Windows graphic settings to the minimum helped improved the performance even more. I defrag my laptop HD every couple of months and even my ipod the odd time just to keep them working as quickly as possible. One time I somehow ended up with about 10GB extra free space on my laptop HD which was a bit strange.

Yerp.
Another useful tip is to open up services.msc from the run console and disable (or set to manual) any services that are not needed. It's remarkable how many there actually are, running in the background and eating up ram, that don't need to be.

When doing this, it's helpful to google for a guide to the operating system's services and what they do, and whether or not they're critical.

Startup programs is another one that usually needs a good pruning after a system has been at the hands of an average user for any length of time.