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Posts Tagged ‘desk’

Congratulations to Teresa Stump for winning the Hotmail Sweep Photo Contest! Teresa’s photo of her desk comes with a rather sad story. As a 10 year chronic pain sufferer, she is hindered in her ability to do many of the things she loves (like clean!).

I am an over 10 year chronic pain sufferer. I had a badly failed neck fusion (by a rather inept Dr) and then had to have 2 more surgeries a few years later to TRY and fix what the original Dr  (and I use the term Dr here loosely)did. My life is pretty much like … [Read More...]

Does the world need another iPod dock? Probably not. Still, the Soundfreaq’s inaugural SFQ-01 “sound platform” (hint: it streams music too) is not only nice to ogle, it also delivers surprisingly good sound at super reasonable price.

The entire front side of the Soundfreaq — or ‘the Freaq’ as I’ve grown fond of calling it — is dominated by one grill. Tucked behind this sonic drapery are two balanced, Kevlar-reinforced drivers that provide ample oomph for a small-to-medium sized space — think bedroom or office, not living room. That space will also look a hell of a lot better thanks … [Read More...]

Here at Wired, we take things very seriously. Correction — we take protecting our desks and planning sneak attacks on our coworkers very seriously. We put some different office warfare gadgets to the test.

First on our list was the USB Thunder Missile Launcher ($36). Download the free controller software, plug in the launcher to your Windows laptop or PC via USB (a Mac update is in the works), and use your mouse or arrow keys to aim and shoot. Since the launcher doesn’t include a webcam, ballistics are a trial-and-error affair. But it’s surprisingly easy — my first shot … [Read More...]

This morning, Western Digital officially announced (and started shipping) the next generation of its VelociRaptor hard drives, and we’ve got tasty benchmark numbers for you. 

The new VelociRaptor with its top off.

The new Velociraptors are SATA 6Gb/s-enabled and come in 450GB and 600GB flavors (a 300GB bump from the previous-gen’s 150GB and 300GB). Like their predecessors, the Velociraptors spin at 10,000rpm and desktop versions are mounted on IcePack heatsinks that let them fit in standard 3.5-inch SATA hard drive bays. IcePack-less 2.5-inch models are available for enterprise servers, but at 15mm high , they won’t fit in your laptop. 

The much-needed … [Read More...]

Now with fins!

Evaluating successive generations of HP’s TouchSmart series reminds us of shopping for a new car. If you fall in love and buy this year’s model, you must never, ever visit the showroom to look at next year’s model or you’ll be hit with a bout of buyer’s remorse faster than you can say “planned obsolescence.”

We’re not suggesting that HP is intentionally designing these machines to have a shorter-than-normal useful life or that it’s been adding frivolous features to new models; it’s just that the company’s engineers keep making design improvements that are significant enough for us … [Read More...]

Why Wipe Data Securely?

Whether you are preparing to reuse a hard disk for another operating system, clear off your junk shelves by passing along outdated drives to a friend or relative, donate an old PC to a charity or school, discard a too-small USB drive or flash memory card, or repurpose an SSD, you don’t want to leave any information on the storage device. With stories abounding of identity theft aided by information lifted from discarded storage devices, you want devices you no longer plan to use to have no usable information when they head out the door. … [Read More...]

Why

I’ve recently hopped aboard the Windows 7 train, using Microsoft’s latest OS on a new PC build. Right away I found that the day I’ve long feared has arrived: Microsoft has removed all features allowing for a toolbar you can dock to the side of your screen.

I hate the start menu. It takes 3 clicks (on average) to launch any application. To say nothing of the time you spend scrolling or searching your start menu for the thing you want to launch. The desktop is better, but everybody knows the mess you can cause by stashing shortcuts there (though … [Read More...]

This tip is geared towards servers, but is applicable to desktops as well in certain cases.

Whenever you shutdown Windows, a “stop” command is sent to programs and background services which are currently running. Typically programs will respond to this quickly and close, however services are a different animal which can take a while to quit (i.e. Exchange Server).

After waiting for a specified amount of time, Windows will simply force the program to quit in order to continue with the shutdown. To control how long Windows waits before forcing the service to quit, edit this registry entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\WaitToKillService

Note, … [Read More...]