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[Thief^]

Should I pay attention to which company is producing this cards? 250X I'm eying is from Gigabyte, 260X from Sapphire.

Yes, but those are both good.

[Gentlefish]

I can vouch for Sapphire. I've for an R9 270X from them and it's a superb card, if a bit bulky.

[Reelya]

Unfortunately, DBAN would not put itself on my USB no matter how many different ISO-to-USB programs I used (I tried four or five). It looks like there's a commercial alternative that they're trying to promote which does let you mount onto USB, but I didn't have that option and needed to get the whole damn thing done by this evening after having wasted most of yesterday trying to fuck about with DBAN. So, instead I used Partition Wizard and wrote over the drive 7 times with that, which I assume will be enough.

7 times? a single pass with zero write out would have been plenty.

Writing once with random bits will definitely make the data unrecoverable. There is a theoretical chance that someone could extract the data with a  magnetic force microscope, but this is only theoretical and only practical for really ancient drives that had low data densities. In fact there have been exactly zero accounts of anyone doing this on any drive, ever. So it's "possible" in a science fiction sense, but it's never actually been done and there are no labs or methdology on how someone would steal your over-written data. So, unless you have the Men In Black after your drive, ready to cart it off to some super-secret lab we don't know about using undocumented technology, one pass with random bits is plenty. Here's someone who looked into the data recovery claims closely:

http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html
Even the cops don't have access to any tech to recover overwritten data.

[Aklyon]

So if I wanted to get a well-built, relatively cheap mouse in the future I can use left-handed, would you guys have any to suggest? Right now I have a wireless Logitech M310 that works alright, but the middle mouse button died a couple months ago.

[wierd]

Waaay back in the day, microsoft made these "nothing fancy" 9pin serial mice that could work on a ps2 port with a little adapter.  They were bulletproof, and were perfectly centerline symmetrical.  Sadly, they were ball type, and had no middle button.

I havent seen any mice with that level of durability in more recent offerings though.

If you dont mind the idea of old roller balls, ebay can probably hook you up.   IMHO, one of those and an IBM model M (original) keyboard can survive even the angry german kid.

[gimlet]

I've been using a Microsoft basic optical mouse v2.0 for the last few years, and I'm pretty hard on mice/keyboards.  $12 or so.  Model 1113, it looks like there's a ton of models not all of which are ambidextrous.

[wierd]

Well, This is the kind of serial mouse I was referring to... I seem to remember the buttons being more symmetrical, but I remember that it had good "Hand feel" in both hands.

It's a very no-nonsense mouse. But again, vintage equipment, and NOT infrared laser.

Naturally, microsoft does not make these anymore, which is why it has that vintage yellow plastic shell. (They were brilliant shiny white when new. Good, hard, durable ABS.) They weigh a good 170g, Enough that if you swung it by the cord and hit somebody, you could very well kill them. (and the mouse would survive.)

The fact that these things are STILL kickin it, despite being upwards of 20 years old, should speak volumes about their durability.

[Aklyon]

So its essentially the gameboy of vintage mice?

I'd rather not go thaaat far for a durable mouse though, heh. Not sure if I even have a PS/2 port on here.

[Vector]

.

[wierd]

So its essentially the gameboy of vintage mice?

I'd rather not go thaaat far for a durable mouse though, heh. Not sure if I even have a PS/2 port on here.

Amusingly, since it is also serial device, one could put a USB to Serial cable on, then attach the mouse to that.

{no, I am not serious about that-- but it probably would work.}

That was the "Second generation" microsoft mouse. The first generation ones were so clunky, that I dont even feel the need to mention them except for how awkward they were.  Literally painful to use and hold. Terrible things.  This was the start of MS's push into ergonomic interface devices. While it does not look terribly so in the picture, think about it in comparison to........ The horror in the spoiler below.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The third generation of microsoft mice were noticeably more ergonomically contoured, but were "Too" ergo for left handers, since they had a kind of swept design.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That was the tail end of the 1990s there though, to early 2000s. After that, computers were becoming more mainstream commodities, and the desire to make 'Cheaper!' products overrode the previous market niches that computer electronics held in industrial, scientific, and university settings where investment into computer electronics was crazy expensive, and people expected good durable goods, and were willing to pay for them.  As a consequence, as things become "cheaper", they were substantially less well constructed, and that's where the garbage interface devices we have now came from.  The innards of mice from that era, and this era, are strikingly different.

These days you have those thin little reed style switches that break/jam up, resulting in the need for a replacement. Compare to the button switches found in older, more vintage devices.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Things back then were designed to last, and last a very VERY long time.  These days, "Product Lifecycle Managment" is part of the business strategy, and devices are PURPOSEFULLY made to be of inferior workmanship to earlier models.

[Thief^]

They also did these a bit later, which were 5-button ambidextrous optical USB mice:


Microsoft Intellimouse

[Azerty]

Hello!

My computer finally recovered from the infection, after nuking the hard drive and reinstalling Win7.

The CPU consumption is now at levels from before the infection - around 5% and below 25%.
Having tested Malwarebytes on another computer and installled here, I would like to know what is the better antimalware between Security Essentials and avast?

[Aklyon]

Avast will bug you about upgrading occasionally.

[i2amroy]

What you need to do with Avast is:
1) Go into preferences and click "silent/gaming mode"
2) Register a junk email and use it for an avast account to stop the unstoppable pop-ups at the low price of 1 extra click every year.

Personally I've been using Avast, and I haven't seen a pop-up in over a year now. Security Essentials is a miniscule bit faster for disk access, but that's about the only real difference. That said they both still suffer from several other problems that all antivirus software suffers from (inability to catch the latest real threats, cause slowdown, etc.). Personally my biggest suggestion if you want to make sure your computer is safe is to make a second user account without administration privileges and use that for your everyday work. It means that any time you want to install something you will need to manually type in your administrator password (maybe a couple of times, since Microsoft has made some rather stupid decisions on the running as administrator front), but short of large-scale emulation it's one of the best defenses that you can run on your computer; it will stop most of the worst things (like rootkits) in their tracks unless you specifically give them the go-ahead (which I hope you are intelligent enough to not do ).

[Azerty]

Thanks you for the advice! I will be looking to create an "Admin" account for the heavy stuff.

And could someone says me what is causing the larger than "usual" work from ventilators I am hearing?