I have a fire safe with a 2 hour rating, typical exposure time for a house fire is 30-60 minutes. If you live in an apartment/condo the fires are much bigger, so offsite is your best option.

I occasionally throw a copy of the important stuff in there, along with important documents like passports, SS cards etc. Wife stores her jewelery in there too after she had a couple of nice pieces go missing.

The online services such as mozy.com / carbonite.com are a good option for some.

Anyone ever test the backups and do a restore? You'd be amazed how many times clients of mine "thought" they had a good backup, only to find................

Speaking of backups, online storage is also very worthwhile, and has become stupid cheap.

Intel X25-M for the desktop and Crucial SSD for the laptop! :D
I still have the RaptorX for apps, games, digital audio recording/editing, and some video editing. I disabled paging for the X25-M after the fresh install, so Win7 is currently eating up 10GB. Not too shabby. Hopefully it doesn't bloat too much after months of updates.

Win7 got rid of SuperFetch? Sweet... no wonder it felt so nice. I bought 2 sets of G.Skill 2x2GB DDR3 1333MHz memory for around $140-150 total. I'm currently RMA'ing one set. Once my graphics card arrive, then I can do full blown memory testing. It's nice to be able to boot up and test the build with 1GB of memory!

Nice. I'm running a Gigabyte i-RAM, it's about 2 yrs old...time for an upgrade one of these days. Works great with WoW and video apps, though. Yeah, baby, who needs paging! Meh, 10GB these days...:tup:

I had it about 8 months ago when they were just looking for it. On top of that I have been working on computers for over 12 years and now going to school for it. Ya I own a mac but that is my personal computer. Considering I do not like working and worrying about catching viruses from other computers or hard drives I work with I use a mac for that purpose. I still will not upgrade to 7 even though the system resource usage has been cut down a lot. Also that is all it is a service pack smaller foot print and better graphics. :p

How do you like the ddr 3 as apposed to ddr 2? I was hearing that the ddr2 is actually faster to a point.

DDR2 vs. DDR3 | NordicHardware

DDR3 is still early in its life, i7 should take advantage of DDR3 nicely but 2010 will see the jump from DDR2 to DDR3 in solid testing.
If you really believe it is just a service back I am sorry, but your 12 years of working on computers might need to be reevaluated on what you know.

Ya I think with the quad core possessors and the new SATA tripling in speed and even faster graphics cards comping out we will see the full potential of ddr 3 and 7. Windows released this instead of a service pack just to put vista behind them. I look at it as being a cut down version of vista. Call it what you will but it is what it is. When I have 3 teachers all saying the same thing I have to agree with them. Than working with it first hand ya that is all it is. But I will agree too disagree.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/fea...nology_preview



"A service pack?
But what is Windows 7, exactly? A service pack for Vista? Well, yes and no, says Barnicle in a phone call I had with him Tuesday afternoon. “This is an evolution of Vista rather than a revolution,” says Barnicle. In his opinion, many of the things they chucked from Vista are showing up in Windows 7. Hmm. Sounds like a service pack."

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1182...a-service-pack

IMO, unless I'm trying to break overclocking world records, RAM speed doesn't matter much to me nowadays. I don't even notice a speed difference. So I try to get the most economical mainstream RAM (i.e., low price) with decent speed ratings. For my Core2Duo setup, it was DDR2 800MHz with decent timings. For the i5, I grabbed DDR3 1333MHz. I don't plan on doing much overclocking. In fact, I'm thinking about UNDERvolting the CPU since this is a quiet HTPC setup. I think I notice more responsiveness with faster hard drive or SSD than I do with RAM. ;)

SATA II is definitely getting saturated with SSDs getting faster. To get the full bandwidth, one must resort to external controller cards (i.e., Fusion-IO :drool:).

I wouldn't under volt your CPU it will not be as efficient as it would be with the standard or required voltage.

Ya the SATA 2 is going to be sick, that and usb 3 "drool"

For a HTPC it does not matter as much, your goal is quiet, cool, and GPU ready. CPU power is not a huge requirement, it usually falls on the GPU and memory, and depending on other items it could be transfer speed (Both HDD & network).

SuperFetch is one of the things that makes Win7 feel fast. Superfetch learns which apps you use over time, then the OS proactively caches them in RAM. This prevents/minimizes hard faults when you access your frequently used applications. It just does it better than it did in Vista.

If you don't believe me, just try turning it off and see what happens :-)

Win7 in general also makes much better use of RAM - you will see more RAM in use for caching purposes - which is a good thing. The more memory that's on the modified or standby lists, the less the system hard faults to the hard drive, which is slow as dirt.

Huh? I suggest you learn your tech before spouting off, you're just talking baloney now.

Not really the cpu's are made for a specific voltage by going UNDER that you are starving it for power. You are not going to get it's full potential that way. It is like putting a really small intake on a hemi you are going to starve the engine.

You are half righ big well 90% right. By starving the CPU of the required voltage and what it was made to get, you are not going to get the max performance. But it will still be able to be ran. You are also going to void the warranty by doing this.