Here is the place for you to ask questions or offer advice/tips on computer hardware related issues.

Whether you own a PC, a Macintosh, or a Cray Supercomputer this is the place to talk about hardware.

Also, another thought to leave you with before we begin asking questions and getting advice.

The only dumb question is a question that wasn't asked.

Keep the Lev!

-Bryan

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

Welcome, Friends. Feel free to ask of me any computer-related problems. I will help you to the best of my ability, and if I cannot, I certainly can get somebody else who can. I have a very large network of computer techs and network administrators who can help you. So, as the old adage says, "Ask, and ye shall receive."

By Reflection Surprise Terror For the futur (Smokeduster) on Unrecorded Date:

okay

Here's the first question

Where can I get a Cray super computer on short
notice?


--Darren

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

Well, for starters, you need to work for Microsoft for about ten years as a major developer. Then, you need to become close enough friends with Bill Gates to learn his personal security code for his safe. Then, once you get some of his money (He won't miss it) you can go out and purchse one through normal channels. But then, you said "In short notice." Hmmm... I'm sorry Darren, but you cannot legally accomplish this task. For assistance in the 'nominally legal' department, send me e-mail. Next question, please... J

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

So, like, what's the biggest Hard Drive? And how much? What's the biggest AFFORDABLE drive? What's all this I'm hearing about terabytes and quadrabytes? How much is that? And can I have one?

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

THe industry standard for hard drives nowadays is between 8 to 12 gigs. I have not as yet heard anything about tera- and quadra- byte drives. You can, however, go out and get a good 6 gig drive for right around 150 bucks. It increases by about 25 dollars per gig from there. The largest drive I've ever personally seen is the almighty 100 gigabyte drive. It was in a web server. It was very expensive--and this was last year. I'll talk more later. Cya!

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

I found this on the web:

Data Powers of Ten

The following list is a collection of estimates of the quantities of data contained by the various media. Each is rounded to be a power of 10 times 1, 2 or 5. Most of the links are to small images. Suggestions and contributions are welcomed, especially picture files or pointers to pictures, and disagreements are accepted at roy@caltech.edu.

The numbers quoted are approximate. In fact a kilobyte is 1024 bytes not 1000 bytes but this fact does not keep me awake at
night.

The etymology of these words used for very large numbers is explained here.


Bytes(8 bits)
0.1 bytes: A binary decision
1 byte: A single character
10 bytes: A single word
100 bytes: A telegram OR A punched card
Kilobyte (1000 bytes)
1 Kilobyte: A very short story
2 Kilobytes: A Typewritten page
10 Kilobytes: An encyclopaedic page OR A deck of punched cards
50 Kilobytes: A compressed document image page
100 Kilobytes: A low-resolution photograph
200 Kilobytes: A box of punched cards
500 Kilobytes: A very heavy box of punched cards
Megabyte (1 000 000 bytes)
1 Megabyte: A small novel OR A 3.5 inch floppy disk
2 Megabytes: A high resolution photograph
5 Megabytes: The complete works of Shakespeare OR 30 seconds of TV-quality video
10 Megabytes: A minute of high-fidelity sound OR A digital chest X-ray
20 Megabytes: A box of floppy disks
50 Megabytes: A digital mammogram
100 Megabytes: 1 meter of shelved books OR A two-volume encyclopaedic book
200 Megabytes: A reel of 9-track tape OR An IBM 3480 cartridge tape
500 Megabytes: A CD-ROM OR The hard disk of a PC
Gigabyte (1 000 000 000 bytes)
1 Gigabyte: A pickup truck filled with paper OR A symphony in high-fidelity sound OR A movie at TV quality
2 Gigabytes: 20 meters of shelved books OR A stack of 9-track tapes
5 Gigabytes: An 8mm Exabyte tape
10 Gigabytes:
20 Gigabytes: A good collection of the works of Beethoven OR 5 Exabyte tapes OR A VHS tape used for digital data
50 Gigabytes: A floor of books OR Hundreds of 9-track tapes
100 Gigabytes: A floor of academic journals OR A large ID-1 digital tape
200 Gigabytes: 50 Exabyte tapes
Terabyte (1 000 000 000 000 bytes)
1 Terabyte: An automated tape robot OR All the X-ray films in a large technological hospital OR 50000 trees
made into paper and printed OR Daily rate of EOS data (1998)
2 Terabytes: An academic research library OR A cabinet full of Exabyte tapes
10 Terabytes: The printed collection of the US Library of Congress
50 Terabytes: The contents of a large Mass Storage System
Petabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
1 Petabyte: 3 years of EOS data (2001)
2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries
20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995
200 Petabytes: All printed material OR
Production of digital magnetic tape in 1995
Exabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings.
Zettabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)
Yottabyte (1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes)


I should note that as numbers become larger, there may be some disagreement about the proper prefixes to use.

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

You know how Microsoft's Pentium III tracks your every move? Well, my question: do all the CLONES do the same thing? An upgrade to P-III may be possible if you accpet a clone.

Now, they called it "Pentium" because, well, 286, 386, 486, Pente- means "five." Does that mean that the Pentium-III is essentially at the same level as a Pentium, and that we haven't reached the Sexy-ummm level yet?

By Bryan (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

It's marketing Sol, thats all. Long ago the courts ruled that you could not trademark a number. So intel went to using brand names.

There is no inherent meaning to the use of the name pentium for processor chips.

In fact, intel makes a chip called the Celeron
processor which has the same chipset and speed range as the pentium II. The only difference was the amount of on-board cpu cache.

The reason the other chip manufactureres still use
the numbers for their chips is because people still identify with those CPU numbers as intel
clones.

So when AMD came out with the K6 (or 686) it was thought to have the same chipset as the pentium II
series.

I'm sure we will soon see AMD and Cyrix come out with a 786 chip which will map to the pentium III.

But again, other then marketing uses the numbers really have no special meaning whatsoever.

I'm really suprised actually that chip and computer manufacturers haven't gone to the method
used by auto makers.

"Oh, your using a 1999 Intel Pentium SE Limited Edition? Cool, look at hard drive on that baby! I bet games really kick arse on that thing huh?"

So no sexy-umm for now. :)

-Houdini

By Bryan (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

Terabyte hard disks?

Cool science!

By Rigel (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

Cool beans... Neato!

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

I want my terabyte now! Uh wait I want my Pentium IV now! Then tereabye, no 2 terabytes. Yeah

By Rigel (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

(Me terabyte)

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

50,000 trees made into paper and have stuff printed on them: 1 terabyte


see my prev post!

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

Yeah, I was thinking about storage the other day, since I have an entire BOX of disks and they are starting to fill up! Oi! A lot of my programs are taking up more than 1 disk as it is, and I am getting tired of it. Jeff brought me an article about the dreaded "Click of Death" that happens with ZIP drives, and there seemed only 1 better solution:

Super Disk Baby!

This seems like a better and better idea. I mean, it holds 120 Megs which is 20% more than ZIP. Also it is the exact same size as regular disks which means I can replace my current disk drive with a Superdisk and lose nothing. Finally, no click of death! At $8 per disk, the price is nice, and I don't have to worry about data loss so much. It is an exciting possibility! I like this idea a lot. Comments? Superdisk has been around for about a year now, so it is here to stay, how exciting! I could store a HUGE archive of info on a Superdisk... back up MY whole hard-drive on just 4 disks!

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

What's a Celeron chip?

By Bryan (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

Sol, read the post I made in this topic on
Monday, April 5, 1999 - 09:36 am

It explains Intel's chip naming strategy, including the celeron processor.

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

oh so it is a Pentium 2?

By Bryan (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

Basically, yes. It uses the same instruction set,
and the celeron chips run at about the same
speed levels as the pentium II series chips.

The difference?

Go to http://www.intel.com/

It lays out the differences...

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

Egghead.com says I can have a modem/soundcard for just 30 bucks. Both are on 1 board, so I only need 1 slot. Sound-Blaster + 56 K modem. Is that good? It sounds affordable...

By Bryan (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

yeah!

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

I was seriously thinking about it... $30 isn't that much. Is a 56K the best?

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

not anymore, plus it depends on if it's Flex or K2. Modems just keep getting faster, but the faster they get, the more dedicated data-lines you need. ah, well. For you, Sol, a 56K is EXCELLENT.

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

I'm getting it! I figured this out... if I buy it after the 22nd, it will go on my JULY credit card bill. So that's what I'll do. Can't interfere with the Big Loan Payoff, after all!

Sol

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

THE RIO MP3 PLAYER

The Rio MP3 Player is a device like a walkman which allows the user to download MP3 files from the net into the Rio and
take it on the go. It is small—less than half the size of a walkman—and light, weighing only seventy grams. Once the music is
stored in the memory of the Rio it has one major advantage over other methods of portable music storage: no moving parts.
What this means is that no matter how you shake the thing, the music will not skip. The Rio plugs into a PC via the (parallel)
printer port, and includes a pass-though connector, so you don't have to be without a printer to be able to download to your
Rio without swapping cables.

Anyone who enjoys music will appreciate the quality of this hottest audio file format. MP3 stores audio files on a computer in
such a way that the file size is relatively small, but the song sounds near perfect. Typically 1 MB is equal to one minute of music
or several minutes for spoken word/audiobooks.

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

I want to know - does anyone have any experience or stories with the new 250 Meg ZIP drive? I was thinking of getting one. Are they reliable? Do they still succumb to the evil "Click of Death?" Will they work on a 486 like mine? I would get an external (of course).

Sol

By Rigel (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

I haven't seen the click of death happen to drives unless they've been through some severe wear and tear. I know people who have never had any problems with zips. Its a problem at RIT on occasion because the equipment gets constant use. So I'm assuming the 250 zip would be spiffy your you to get. Just make backups in case.

By Tony (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

Yeah, I did get the ZIP250. It's true! Plus IoMega is giving $20 back if you buy one. I got one at the computer show for a mere $150 ... Comp USA sells 'em for $200. I figure it'll be only $130 after rebate, and since Jeff stayed 2 weeks longer than expected, he paid me an extra $120 for it, and that brings my new ZIP Drive down to ...

$10

Now that ye cannot beat!

By Who yo Daddy? (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

Choufie! We upgraded our lab here at ER elementary, and put in new Hard Drives. Kool! I was also told that I could have one of the old 1.2 gig HDD's. Spiff! Oh, I wish I could fit it in my computer... but alas, no... this part will merely sit on my shelf until I can make use of it. Maybe I can put it in Angie's computer...

Say, that reminds me, does anyone want to buy Angie's 386? She'll sell it to you for a fair price... it even comes with a printer, and the moniter is VGA... even Comp Renessaince sells these VGA monitors for $50 ea, and Angie'll give you the whole thing for less than that, I'm sure. Comes with Donkey Kong! Also has a tape backup drive. Hey, buy it before she moves (this weekend) I'll bet she would chop the price down a little more for ya!

Sol

By Funk Sol Brother (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

Ha! I was able to tweak my monitor to a higher resolution today (isn't that a KMFDM song? The resolution?). Glorius 600x800. Now my banner for NetZero will be smaller! I tried to tweak it even higher, but since I'm not sure what kind of monitor I have really, it could take a long time.

I will also have to stretch my background pic of battle angel to fit the new screen. Opinions? If I do this, do you think I'll be able to lower the res again if I want?

By The Great (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

You may need to have two versions of the background. One for
640 x 480 and one for 800 x 600.

By Funk Sol Brother (Sol) on Unrecorded Date:

That's what I thought. I'll just stow the old version on disk then!

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

Go to this site and gaze upon the wonder of the Fujitsu Lifebook which will soon be mine...

Fujitsu Lifebook C-series

I'm getting the C-5235. Check it out!

By Bryan Cummings (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

Fred is the man with the hardware!

Naughty!

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

Woo hoo!

My co-worker directed me to a site that advertized dual mainboards for socket 370 chips which also have 4x AGP graphic card slot!!!! YAY!!!!!

I really want to buy one, but he told me that if I wait a few months they'll come out with boards that use DDR ram instead. I have no idea what DDR ram is, or what the difference is. So could anyone enlighten me? Should I wait, or spend my moolah now on one of these tasty dual motherboards?

Fred- I poked around and couldn't find the dual AMD Athalon boards you were talking about.

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

www.circotech.com. Build your own AMD or Pentium Barebones system... You can find dual-processor mega-boards there. (Yes, I KNOW I said mega. Bite me) ;>

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

I checked out circotech and I did not find any dual processor boards there.

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

No? Huh. I swear I saw them lurking there, in the "Build Your Own Barebones System" area. Oh well. Sorry. ;>

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

I'll forgive you just this once =)

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

Woo hoo!!!

Victory!!!

My co-worker directed me to a company that makes dual p3 socket 370 motherboards! That means BUBBLES IS SAVED!!! Umm, well, at least within another paycheck ot two... Then I have to get another chip... Maybe some more ram too.

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

Duuuuuuuuude, check out this monitor! I REALLY, REALLY WANT ONE!!!!!!

DROOL!!!!!!

Seriously, take a look, there's no use in describing it with words =)

By Bryan Cummings (Houdini) on Unrecorded Date:

Wow. Although the price tag is a little too steep
for me. It would be cool to win one.

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Unrecorded Date:

Well, yeah, it is overpriced =) But it is nice to dream...

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Unrecorded Date:

buy 3 monitors and use windows 2000 video splitting components and you get the same thing.

For significantly less money.

But the actual monitor does look kinda neat, yeah.

By Subcriminal (Nat) on Tuesday, June 12, 2001 - 02:24 pm:

Mkay people, Nat wants advice.

I'm gonna be getting a new mini-tower because the one I have is a little crowded.

But my question is about the power supply. I've currently got a 250 watt supply. Is that enough for all the stuff I got under the hood of my computer? I have four drives, presently one p3 processor (soon it will be 2 processors), video card, sound card, modem, and I think that's about it. So is 250 enough or should I get a 300 watt power supply with my next PC case?

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Tuesday, June 12, 2001 - 05:13 pm:

hmmm, as the old proverb says, "wider is better," so I would go with the higher wattage power supply. Besides which, you could look at all your technical specs for what each piece of hardware requires, and base your final judgement on that, allowing for slight increases due to sheer power usage... Also, some good words to live by are "More Power!" ;>

By Vengence is Mine (Knight_Hawk) on Wednesday, October 09, 2002 - 09:42 pm:

Hey guys I need a little help. I put together a computer this weekend and I'm having some problems.

List of stats to help then I address problem.

P4 1.5 GIG processor
P4 compatable motherboard
758 MB of SDRAM
13 GIG harddrive
40 GIG harddrive

Now my problem lies in the 40 GIG HDD. I added the 13 GIG to check the problem. See, when I ran the system Bios it recognize the HDD as being 40 GIGs. However after instaling windows 98 it only recognized it as a 2 GIG HDD. When I called the guys I brought the stuff from they said it was probably a problem with the partitioning.

Now here's the problem: I DON'T KNOW HOW TO CHANGE THE PARTITIONING.

Any help would be appriated.

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Thursday, October 10, 2002 - 10:58 am:

there is a utility called FDISK which does the partitioning. There are other utilities, but FDISK is part of Microsoft's built-in arsenal of disk tools. Anyway, if I remember correctly, windows pre-2000 did not recognize large HD's and so would automatically assume the drive was 2 Gig's (cuz really, how much more memory could anybody ever need?). So what you need to do is actually run FDISK and partition the drive tu use the maximum possible disk space. Also, you must enable large disk support in there or else 'naughty' microsoft will still only see 2 gigs of space. I think there is also an option in windows 98 itself that asks if you want large drive space enabled, but I'm not sure. The trick is, if you do this, it's starting from scratch with the software installs. Hope I helped ya out. If you want me to look at it sometime, lemme know, I'll bring my thinkin hat along.

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Thursday, October 10, 2002 - 12:43 pm:

why in gods name are u running 98? =D Go for something better =D

By Vengence is Mine (Knight_Hawk) on Thursday, October 10, 2002 - 06:38 pm:

Cause I didn't feel like shelling out $500 more for the the XP edition. Besides 98 is what was installed on my old drive and it works fine for me.

Thanks Fred will try it out now. And thinking back when it asked me that question I thought it meant that Windows would use up more space. (shrugs) silly me.

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Sunday, October 13, 2002 - 12:13 pm:

I'm running w2k, seems okie to me. Give it a try sometime.

By Technomage (Houdini) on Monday, January 13, 2003 - 07:31 pm:

Mmm.. glow in the dark backlit keyboard.


I want one.

Anybody want to give me a $3,000 grant?

http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index17.html

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Tuesday, January 14, 2003 - 08:57 am:

Yeah? How about a $3000 grant for MY toy?

http://www.fujitsupc.com/www/products_pentablets.shtml?products/pentablets/st4000a

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Tuesday, January 14, 2003 - 09:00 am:

Or perhaps a $4000 grant for THIS toy:

http://webshop.fujitsupc.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildseriesbean.do?series=CL

By Who is the (Knight_Hawk) on Monday, November 29, 2004 - 01:39 pm:

Well I just put in a new motherboard processor and ram. I bought a ASUS p4p800 series motherboard with a 800 mhz bus, a 3gig p4, and 2 sticks of 512 ddr ram. It runs real nice and I can't wait to see what it does for the load time with SWG.

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Monday, November 29, 2004 - 02:51 pm:

Gratz, I tend to like Asus MB's too, excluding the time I got a defective one. My computer is in dire need of an upgrade, she used to be a pretty kick-ass machine back in her day- but that was 4 years ago! I currently meet the bare minimum sys. req. for SWG.

By Who is the (Knight_Hawk) on Monday, November 29, 2004 - 03:02 pm:

yeah I built my comp 2 years ago and replaced the origanal MB about 6 months later /grrr. So i figured it was about time to update it.

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Tuesday, November 30, 2004 - 09:39 am:

In my case I wouldn't have a choice but to upgrade a ton of crap. I need a new video card, and the MB I have is too old to support anything over AGP4x. The newer MB's take different ram and processors so I'd have to get those too. Sooo lets see, that makes the list" MB, RAM, vid. card, chip. That's gonna get expensive for my sorry unemployed butt.

By GCM2235 (Norm) on Saturday, December 04, 2004 - 10:58 pm:

I bought a new MB and processor when my old MB died. But then it came back to life (weird story involving plugging a hot power supply in) and I was too cheap to buy the memory for the full upgrade. But now that I have a little money, I'm thiking about a Christmas purchase. It's true, you have to buy a whole lot of new stuff to upgrade the mobo. And IBMs were supposed to be easy to upgrade.

By Who is the (Knight_Hawk) on Monday, December 06, 2004 - 11:04 am:

Well I am now back to full operating capacity after a reformating and its all looking good. It did take me over an hour to redownload every patch for Windows and then another Hour and a half for SWG. But its all good now yay.

By Technomage (Houdini) on Thursday, January 13, 2005 - 12:08 pm:

Two cool new product releases from apple this month.

The Apple iPod shuffle. $99.00 retail.

And the other is the Apple Mac Mini (I think I shall call it, Mini Mac).

A $499.00 mac that is about as big as a cigar box.


I can't wait till they have been out for a while and they start geting sold refurbished on ebay..

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Friday, January 14, 2005 - 10:34 am:

I wouldn't put my money on em working very well. Remember the Mac cubes? Their "revolutionary" non-fan cooling system that basically just let the hot air vent out the top of the little machine, and it was quiet, blah blah blah? Well, they would overheat if you left them on longer than 6 hours at a time. So, say you're in the middle of a critical document, then suddenly your mac overheats, gives you silly errors like "I'm sorry, an error of type 'unexpected' occured. Please shut down" with a little bomb picture...

I can't imagine what sort of hardware issues might arise from a machine smaller than a cigar box--unless, of course, apple addressed the flaws in their heat sink technologies.

If you get one, let me know. I'll stick with my hand-held for now...

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Sunday, January 16, 2005 - 12:52 am:

Well the Mac cube was a computer, right? the ishuffle is just the new compact mp3 player. That's why the size shouldn't worry you because they're supposed to be small and they're making them itty bitty now. But anyway.......

I've been window shopping for a new MP3 player since my old Lyra has kicked the bucket and I'd like to add my 2 cents

ishuffle?........

Pfff..

It sounded good to me until I found out about this:

Zen Micro

Zen Micro is a 5 GIG mp3player (ishuffle only gives ya 500k on the $99 model, 1 gig for their $150 model), about the same size as the ishuffle (but a teeny bit wider), comes in more colors, syncs with MS outlook so you can keep track of appointments (Contacts, Calendar and To Do List), sleep timer and alarm, voice-memo recording, customize your UI, USB compatible, rechargable battery, removeable disk storage (not sure if this is a flash card or USB thingie), am/fm radio.....

Once I learned about the Zen Micro, it basically left the ishuffle in the dust. Of course it's about 100 dollars more than the 1 gig ishuffle, but you get 5X the memory and a million times more bells and whistles you can actually use since it can sorta double as a stripped-down palm pilot you can sync with your computer. If you're not the kind of person who needs something as decked out as a pocket PC, the Zen is pretty freaking nifty.

Not that the ishuffle is bad or anything, everyone I've known who has an ipod loves it. The ishuffle is just the new version of the old ipod- it holds more and is smaller, cuter, sytlish, etc.. But the Zen Micro just kicks ass! It's PC compatible only (I think) so it should give you a idea on their demographics.

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 01:24 pm:

I know Mp# players are supposed to be tiny, I was referring to the Mac Mini.

Brenna's iPod holds 15 Gigs of tunes, so I dunno where they get off making a 500K/1g versions when the regular old iPod's are 15Gigs... Crazy weird.

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 02:23 pm:

Because the ishuffle is smaller than a pack of trident gum. So take the regular Ipod and cut off 1/4 chunk and you've got your ishuffle.

I'd still go with the Zen Micro.

By The One Known Only as (Greyfox) on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 09:31 am:

not like a regular-sized iPod is HUGE or anything. It's smaller than many cell-phones on the market today, and is easily pocket-sized. Next thing you know, they'll be chip-sized and implantable right behind your ear (a-la Shadowrun/Cyberpunk). Hell, you can already get a tracking chip for your PET and have it implanted, so you can always find them when they run away. Some parents want to make this legal for their kids...

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 10:43 am:

Not a bad idea for the kids at all. It's not inhumane or anything, and the parents have certain rights to keep their children safe.

By Technomage (Houdini) on Monday, January 31, 2005 - 12:25 pm:

Speaking of expensive toys.

The Garmin ETrex Legend Handheld GPS Reciver.

Bought one yesterday.

Not as fancy as the one Darren has, but its more designed for trail hiking and stuff.

But it does ok with the car navigation stuff
since it comes preloaded with a north american basemap with major towns, highways, and roads.

What I really bought it for was its ability to load topo maps of a given region, like say, the adrondack park.

Usefull? Heh, not really. It's definately a toy. But it's a toy that will add to my enjoyment of hiking because I'll be able to track
my course, and milage. I'm hoping this motivates me to go out there and do alot more of it this spring, summer and fall.

Note: GPS's are cool but they are still not a replacement for a good paper topo map, and solid compass reading skills.

By Ms. Vice (Nat) on Monday, January 31, 2005 - 08:45 pm:

How much outdoor hiking do you do?

By Technomage (Houdini) on Wednesday, February 02, 2005 - 12:09 pm:

Day hikes, I do them frequently durring the "not cold" season. At least once or twice a month.

Backpacking -- I'd like to go at least once a year, there have been a few years where I have gone more then once and a few years where I didn't get a chance to go.

Found another fun use for my gps! Geocaching!

Ever do treasure hunting w/ a gps?

http://www.geocaching.com