I have to admit that I had a bit of a wry chuckle after reading that Intel, one of Microsoft's most staunch allies, decided to eschew a corporation-wide upgrade to Windows Vista. For the longest time, I had nurtured well-reasoned suspicions that the two biggest players in town controlling the world of personal and corporate computing were in bed together. Some pundits, in fact, have resorted to calling their relationship "WinTel," the portmanteau signifying the union of Microsoft's massive...

txtmstrjoe

What makes something "a classic"? To me, a true classic inspires great admiration from the moment it sees the light of day, and every day thereafter. Something that is classical is beautiful, with a beauty that transcends conventional definitions of aesthetic success. Moreover, a true classic is something that defies time, worthy of admiration even after the sheen of newness has worn off; a true classic seems to become more beautiful, more worthy of admiration, as time goes by.
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txtmstrjoe

The human memory system is a funny thing. If you're blessed with one that's ultra-reliable, then you seldom forget great moments that you've lived. However, if yours is anything like mine, then you probably have very poor recall of even the best parts of your life.

That's one of the great blessings bestowed by modern computing technology for which I am so thankful. Tonight, as the first step of reallocating my systems and deploying a couple of them to different tasks, I backed...

txtmstrjoe

At my job, I've acquired a bit of a reputation for being a tech-head. I built a machine for a co-worker's son last year, and they were quite pleased with it. Apparently, because of this, word spread that I know a little bit about PCs and how they're put together and how they work.

So imagine the (good-natured) ribbing I took when, whilst working on some proprietary purchasing software, I lost a huge (90+ line item) purchase order and had to redo everything.

(Doing...

txtmstrjoe

By and large, PC enthusiasts are a very spoiled, greedy bunch. Many of us expect our machines to forever be at the top of the mountain when it comes to performance. Perhaps because we put so much into our machines -- money, time in research, effort in making tweaks -- we expect plenty in return.

If we use our machines to play games, we want every single last FPS we can squeeze out of it.

If we do media encoding, we want to get the job done in the very shortest time...

txtmstrjoe