Terabyte drives ahoy!

Finally, those 1TB drives are hitting the sweet spot. That's TB as in the unit of capacity, not the disease. Now if only people would ditch FAT32 for a file system that makes sense. Seriously, why should I even care about how the bits on my disk are arranged? Grumble grumble blame microsoft grumble!

scan.ie
HDT721010SLA360 - 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B, 3.5", SATA 3Gb/s, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, HDD
£72.38 + £6.99 shipping (I guess, not clear from site)

komplett.ie
Hitachi DeskStar 7K1000.B - hard drive - 1 TB - SATA-300
€79.00 + €12.50 shipping

And...

dabs.ie
Buffalo 1TB DriveStation Turbo USB2 3.5"
€92.51 + €12.66 shipping
For the record, I'm all in favour of the "naked" drives. I had a seagate 500 crash and burn on me for no particular reason other than the case was possibly a bit suspect. So from now on, I'm buying a good quality case with eSata + NAS and popping in drives as needs be. Instructions are widely available on how to do this and it is simple.

Cheap laptops at Dabs

 

So they're not brand new. So they don't have integrated webcams. But for €312.98 and €12.66 for shipping, you can have a whole lot of dual core laptop.

To that I say: more please.

Thanks to lensman.

http://www.dabs.ie/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=5DN9&InMerch=1

Hint: Search for refurb

AVG Anti Virus

I love AVG. I really do. Even though they absentmindedly borked the web when they released version 8, I still liked them (once I was able to fix the problem anyway). What I don't like is the "Invalid update control CTF file" problem I've been having lately. Luckily, there is an easy fix. Just delete the two .ctf files in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Avg8\update\download and all will be well.

This guy even wrote a VBscript for all you lazy suckers out there.

Oh, and that free 10 year subscription that's being doing the rounds on bargain sites? It is warez, made using the EMBRACED keymaker. Avoid. If not because it is the right thing to do, then because it will eventually fail when AVG block new updates to it.