CornOnJacob

Slick's mom is going to get tired of Slick being forced to work all day with no sleep, and then she is going to stage a coup :) Slick'sMomTechTips, anyone?

Your partitions may not be aligned correctly. I don't know what OS you are running, but it is worth checking if they are. http://lifehacker.com/5837769/make-sure-your-partitions-are-correctly-aligned-for-optimal-solid-state-drive-performance

Regular glass itself is actually a liquid though. Just look at old stained glass in cathedrals--the bottom is thicker than the top because the glass is flowing downwards veeeeery slowly.

I would recommend this Sager NP2650. It is marketed as a multifunctional laptop (besides Connor being in the main picture). You could upgrade the TIM and get 8GB of RAM for about $830. If you only show your friend's dad the configuration page, he won't even know about the gaming aspect of it.

I would look at Sager laptop online (XoticPC has some good deals). They have a very plain aesthetic with good components.

I'm wearing a shirt from Thinkgeek with that comic printed on it as I type this :)

Let's be honest, everything else about Windows 8 aside, this is very similar to what Canonical has done with the Ubuntu Dash integrating with Amazon. Of course, you can turn that off, and I doubt MS will let the user change anything when they have money to gain from it.

do you guys know if Shadowplay is supported by laptop GPUs (e.g. the 765M)? Supposedly every GPU with a built in H.264 encoder can use Shadowplay, but nobody has mentioned the laptop GPUs, or whether they have the encoder built in.

Sorry about that. I don't know what backend they had, but we used individual logins for everything except yearbook/graphic design class and electronic music (which ran Garageband on old macs). We couldn't login before 8 am, so they set that up too. I did not explain this well, but we basically had 4 different interactions with computers. There were the two IT people (locked in their air conditioned room monitoring the school network, etc., the computer class teacher, who was anything but passionate. I think she should have introduced kids to things like open source software, and get them excited about computers. But that's just the enthusiast in me screaming, "How do people not find this interesting?!?!?" :) We had the computers dedicated to graphic design and electronic music, and last, we had the various PCs scattered around campus. There were 16 people in my entire grade, so I am pretty sure I knew where all my classmates stood. One example--I was trying to explain something (I can't remember what) to a girl in my class because she was having trouble with the concept. She cut me off in the middle of my sentence by saying, "I don't do computers." Even my friends who were somewhat interested in computers didn't know much at all as far as how things worked. I guess I'm just tired of people being amazed by the fact that I know how to take off a side panel. When I suggested to the yearbook teacher that we install a card reader (by taking off the side panel and screwing it into one of the computers) so we could actually access the pictures we took of the campus, she almost had an aneurysm. It seems the IT people actually did know what they were doing, but nobody else did. I didn't really make that distinction in my first post.

That is my computer exactly, but it's only 2.1 Ghz. I'm really sad now :(

You know what they say about programming: The computer never does what you want it to do, only what you tell it to do.

They must have had fun making this. A bit unprofessional, but it was funny. I liked it.

lol, how backwards is that?

As far as your original problem, Joel, good luck. I hope you got some ideas for how to deal with the situation. If you decide to take a stand, tell us how it went. I'm sure the community would like to hear :)

I don't have any links, but I just got my Pi a week ago and I ordered it from Allied Electronics. I got the case for it from Adafruit, and the cables, etc. from Amazon.

The Pro has MLC while the regular has TLC, and that might make a small difference. It has more of an impact on the lifespan, but it could still affect performance.

In the "Save As" dialog box, you have two options: .txt and All files. Choose All files and then for the filename, write "filename.bat" (without quotes). This should manually save it as a bat file.

You could put a .bat script in the Startup folder (look in the start menu > all programs/folders). In the script put something like this: echo off shutdown -t 10 It *should* run at startup, and schedule a shutdown for ten seconds from when it runs. The echo line stops a window from popping up when it runs the script. To fix it, boot into Safe Mode (I think you hold F8) and delete the script. To make it, just type the script into notepad and save as a .bat, instead of a .txt. This is a lot better than the other plan I had :)

PC probably won't boot without it/crash on loading windows. You would need to reinstall to get it back. You could install any Linux distro and do some CLI tricks to impress them. It doesn't really show that you know how to fix a PC, but it will impress anyone that can't understand what you're doing.

You don't need to know how to program to SERIOUSLY mess up a PC. Depending on how far you want to go, you could do anything from downloading a virus to deleting C:/Windows/system32.

Hi everyone, I made this thread for people to share stories of bad IT people at their school or workplace. My school, for some stupid reason, buys copies of Windows 7 Professional for EVERY SINGLE COMPUTER. They leave them idling for 95% of the time, and only ~8 of the PCs are actually used for content creation (graphic design lab). The others could be replaced with RPis, for all the use they get. Rather than running Folding at Home, everyone gets their own school account, and the PCs are kept logged out, so nothing can run in the meantime. Our Computer Class is an absolute joke. It is great for learning to touch type (I'll give them that), but every single thing I learned was self-taught. After 5 years of class, nobody has been taught the difference between a HDD and an SSD, a bit vs. a byte, or that Linux even exists! We spend half the year learning about Internet safety (Don't get kidnapped by some random person you met online, kids!), and the other half doing ridiculous tasks in Photoshop (which we relearn if we work on the yearbook). Rather than use the new LibreOffice, we are forced to use MS Office 2003, which works fine, but has a different UI from the newer versions and is obviously not forwards-compatible with the documents we write at home. Luckily, I just graduated from that school, and I'm looking forward to taking Programming classes at my new school. Sorry for the rant, and share your stories below :)

Here is a summary from what I gather: 1. You can't approach your parents because they won't listen/they will yell/they will agree with you but wont' actually let you do anything. 2. Your family (grandmother in particular) dislikes N + C because they don't really help, but they still ask them to do things for some reason. 3. If Nick or Chris find out that you want to take their places, they will beat you up. Wow, this is one messed up situation. The quiz that Frix suggested sounds like a good idea, but make sure you can prove that you know what you are doing. You don't want Nick and Chris to lie, and convince your family that you are wrong. Prove them to be the ignorant a**holes they are.

I know it is not great to be vindictive or mean, but doesn't seem like anything will get fixed if you leave it up to your relatives. Leave it that way. When your family doesn't know where to turn because your relatives f*cked up their computers so badly, THEN you fix it for them. Step in and be the hero. You just need to get your foot in the door, but right now the door seems to be locked, boarded up, and guarded by Nick and Chris. (great metaphor right? :P)

If you disconnect it from the wall socket, it cannot discharge your static to the ground, since it is not connected to anything but you. So switch it off but leave it plugged in.