Do they still make mobos with AGP? I had loads of trouble finding one about 5 years ago, everything had changed to PCI.

Mod74 wrote:

I've just discovered pressing WinKey and left/right/up arrows snaps the active window to left, right, windowed or maximised. Dread to think how long it's done that and I've never known.

oh man, that snapping to left/right will prove handy.
 
Ctrl+Alt and the arrow keys is more fun though.  especially when someone does it by mistake aiming for ctrl+alt+delete.

As cool as that is, I think i could probably click the icon quicker than look, count which 'number' i want then hit the combo!
And windows + T appears to slightly pointlessly highlight each pinned item and open app in turn.

but that's enough of me holding down the windows key and pressing random keys!

Question: Would a vpn protect a tablet if I was using it on a lot of open wifi networks? I'm planning a trip to the north of Africa starting next month and I'll probably be using both my Galaxy tab and phone to connect to wifi quite a lot, probably involving plenty of credit card and other financial transactions and I'm a bit worried about potential information theft. Would a vpn be some kind of solution to that? Advantages / disadvantages?

Yes it would!

Disadvantage, your connection is only as fast as what your vpn provides.

Advantage, confidentiality & integrity of data.

However, whatever you're doing on your phone, i.e. payments will be facilitated with a secure connection so having a vpn isn't doing much apart from securing any plain text information and hiding your surfing habits from the wifi provider and those on the same network.

The price of these guys is pretty reasonable http://provpnaccounts.com/Buy_VPN_Account-118-articles I was once paying double a month for not even a hundredth of that speed.

These days I just make sure that anything sensitive I sign into has a secure connection first which it usually does. However I understand your concerns given the location.

So Firefox has updated again, and embedded Flash is even more fucked up than it was yesterday. Bravo.

What's the most handy browser these days? I'm fed up of FF too.

Yeah, I'll head back to Chrome perhaps, thanks.

It seems that error 324 happens for some who also run 

Internet Download Manager

 on their system. Here is the info I found:

If you get "Unable to load the webpage because the server sent no data" - open 

IDM

 and go to menu bar 

Downloads > Options > General 

and 

uncheck

 the

"use advanced browser integration"

 checkbox. 

Dunno so, sorry.

VPN creates an encrypted 'tunnel' between your device and wherever you VPN to. people will still be able to 'sniff your packets', they just won't be able to make sense of the smell (data).

Not all communication is encrypted, only stuff between sites that use it.

Encryption adds a bandwidth overhead, which admittedly is less of an issue than it used to be (except on mobile perhaps). I use the SSL Everywhere plug in for Firefox that defaults to SSL when available.

Fucking bollocks; here's a good one for you all.

Whilst playing a bit of Alpha Protocol I heard a faint but distinct "crack" sound; I had no idea where it came from but it was nearby. About 1 sec later I was hit by a seriously strong smell of burning electrics and the penny dropped.

I immediately went to turn my PC off at the back switch but before I could I got my monitor's no signal screen and it began sounding a single beep, about 2 secs apart. I didn't hang around to see what happened after that and turned it off as soon as I could pull my desk out.

I took the side panels off and there was no sign of any excessive heat but I assume that it must be a short. 

I've had a good look inside (my case allows you to see pretty much everything) and I can see no scorching or burnt cables. So...

What the fuck do I do? I guess that plugging it back in and seeing what happens is probably a bad idea. I could take it apart but then what happens if there's no sign of where the incident occurred? How can I check each component without it being whole?

I'm well out of my depth; any advice would be much appreciated.

I'm definitely not an expert here, but I think plugging it back in is your only choice.

Strip everything from the motherboard and see if that comes up with a bios.

Then add the HDD and work up to see what bit has failed.

If you get nothing at all from the motherboard then I'd assume it's some part of that or the PSU, probably not repairable. If you can find out or know already what bios you have you might be able to find out what the beep code was.

http://www.pchell.com/hardware/beepcodes.shtml