@jmblackmer: Blot is right. I happened to know a little bit about my great great grandfather—his name, where he lived, and what he did for a living. A Google search on him led to his father's name and a fair bit of information about him. And that line led straight back to Scotland, before the Revolutionary War. So if…

Disabling QoS in WinXP used to fix some mysterious problems, back in the early days. Now that XP is nearly a decade old, most software you're likely to be using probably expects it to be there.

@micah1_8: Surprisingly, I can't quickly find a Century Gothic Condensed from any of the major font houses. But Futura Condensed or Twentieth Century Condensed would be close, because both of those fonts inspired Century Gothic.

@Theomeny: As is almost everything. My dirty trick in college for hitting page counts was to tweak my fonts, AND write my papers in QuarkXPress where I could play with kerning, tracking and leading to hit certain page counts. If I had a 9-page paper and my goal was 10 pages, a couple of subtle tweaks would usually get…

@jeffk: Generally speaking, yes. The trick to improve readability with a sans-serif font as body text is to increase your line spacing a bit. But then of course you use more pages.

@Daniel Lakens: There are very few fonts that pack in more words per page than TNR and its relatives. The objective behind Times' design was to strike a good balance between readability and words per page.

@CarrerCrytharis: Letter Gothic is a good option for a monospace font.

To those who are asking why use this: Many of the partition utilities out there don't do MBR repair and/or partition recovery. Or they do it, but make it difficult. (Some fixes are more complicated than booting off a DOS floppy and issuing the command fdisk /mbr).

In my statistics class in college, the professor spent a good half period one day showing us how people lie with charts. Basically, the takeaway from his lecture was that anyone who used anything other than a 2D chart that started at zero was either hiding or distorting something.

Since I was living alone when I installed it, my programmable thermostat paid for itself in less than three months. I was able to let the temperature coast for the full 8 hours I was at work, and again overnight. The savings aren't as great now that I'm married and have kids, but it's still noticeable.

I use ctupdate (Google it) to initially patch a box right after building it. It downloads all the Windows and Office updates and installs them in one sweep. That saves a lot of time, initially. From then on out, keep Automatic Updates turned on.

Nice tool. I dropped in my XP CD, plugged in a fresh USB drive, and next thing I knew, I was booting off a USB stick and ready to install.

When it comes to defragmentation, the last word (and then some) is at The Great Defrag Shootout: [donnedwards.openaccess.co.za]

The legality of this is highly, highly questionable. As long as you retain possession of the original, there's no question that you can make digital copies onto different media for personal use.

@mlhoward516: I'm going to have to try this now. I gave up on Hulu because of the jumpiness, which I attributed to my slow DSL connection (faster speeds aren't available where I live). It would be nice if a Firefox tweak fixed it (but nicer still if no tweak had been necessary).

Considering he got the records for free from a record shop, I'm sure they were scratched to the point of being unplayable and probably the sleeves weren't in the best shape.

Gotta make it optional. The ribbon is Office 2007's biggest selling point... for using something else.

Agreed, an SSD is probably the most worthwhile upgrade you can do, even in an older PC. WinXP boots in 20 seconds on my SSD-equipped P4. MS Office apps load in less than a second. Firefox loads in about two seconds. The drive is silent, runs cool, and is tiny, improving airflow.

I think the best help is keeping a list of things you need (but don't necessarily need right away) and having some idea what they cost new. Then, go to sales that seem promising. I've bought light fixtures, computer gear, and tons and tons of kids stuff for my son secondhand, and saved a fortune in the process.

@send9: I was as die-hard as they came for OS/2; I didn't switch to running Windows full time until 1997 or early 1998 and even then it was under protest. The only thing that keeps me from going back is lack of drivers for newer hardware.