Dell recently brought back its “10 Days of Deals”, where everyday there are.. well, new deals!  On the third day, they were going to have S2009W 20 in. HD monitors going for about $89.00 each.  After deciding I was going to get two of these beauties, I started to wonder how I would compete with everybody else who wakes up to orders these.  I’ve had bad experiences getting orders in for things in demand (ie. Woot’s Bag of Crap).  After brainstorming, I decided to hop onto Dell Live Chat to see if they could help me out.  To my disappointment, they said no.  Then I decided to call Dell Sales, where a kind woman was more then eager to help me with my purchase.  Apparently, these sales techs were given the green light to sell these monitors at bargain prices two days prior to the actual sale.  After a few days, I checked a random forum that popped up in my google search for these monitors.  People were having so much trouble ordering these monitors.  Somebody even said that they were told that the monitors were sold out before the sale began, which is obviously wrong, because many people were still ordering.

All in all, I am very satisfied with Dell Sales Techs, and my monitors are awesome.  They are in 16:9 aspect ratio, and may take a little getting used too.  But most movies and shows are in this ratio, and I can’t tell if things are stretching perfectly or if its just my imagination.  FYI, I went from a 20.1 in Acer Widescreen and a 19 in Princeton Fullscreen to these two 20 in’s.  Even though, the Acer is still a nice monitor, these Dell’s are way more aesthetically pleasing.

Don’t you hate it when it does that? Especially when you’re playing a game and it gets you killed. When you leave your computer on overnight to download a big file and it reboots on you.  Well, no more!

Go to Start->Run->gpedit.msc

Go to Local Computer Policy-> Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Update

Find “No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic upd…”->Right Click->Properties->Click Enables->Ok

(Click for bigger image)

No more auto-restarts! This was tested on Windows XP SP3.

CCleaner-  This is one of the best PC unclogging utilities out there.  It cleans all of your cookies, garbage in your recycle bin, unused registry keys, and much much more.

1. Download it
2. Install it
3. Run the program.

The default settings usually are perfectly fine for beginners, but if not, tweak them to your desired settings.

Now to begin the process,

1. Click “Analyze”.  After its done scanning, it will point out the amount of space that it will clean out and what it will clean.
2. Hit “Run Cleaner” and it will work its magic.

It is now time to clean the registry

1. Go to the “Registry” tab on the left.
2. Click “Scan for Issues”-wait for it to scan
3. Click “Fix Selected Issues”
4. Answer yes or no (personally I don’t back up but that’s not necessarily the right thing to do.  I’ll leave that up to you)
5. “Fix All Selected Issues”.

Voila, you’re done.

A bonus feature to this program is their Uninstaller feature (Click “Tools” on the left).  It is a easy-peasy way of uninstalling useless programs.  Another plus, is the ability to tweak your computer’s start up programs which is located underneath the Uninstall button.  Look up the program in Process Library, and determine if you really want that program to start up.   Please don’t disable any anti virus programs and/or firewall.

CCleaner makes PC cleaning easy and painless.  If you like it, consider donating.

This little 630 kb file is a life saver for people with OCD.  It allows you to drag and drop the programs that are running on your taskbar for quick reorganization.

Before:

After:

Reorganized in a few seconds.  Doesn’t this look more appealing?

This type of functionality should be defaulted with every version of Windows.  The only downside is that it does not work on my second monitor’s taskbar, which is power by Ultramon.  The makers of Taskbar shuffle wrote in their 2.5 release notes that Taskbar Shuffle does function with Ultramon, but that is not the case for me.  Oh well.

Download Taskbar Shuffle

Health Assignment- Talk about your comfort foods. This is what one of my fellow students came up with.

I like to eat granola bars and drink chocolate milk. I eat up to 15 granola bars a day, and drink several pints of chocolate milk. I am most prone to eating granola bars in the period before lunch, because I always get hungry at that time. I also eat many granola bars when I play tennis in the afternoons, because sometimes I get bored and eat to amuse myself. I like drinking chocolate milk because it is very filling. In fact, sometimes I substitute chocolate milk for solid foods. My mother tells me that this is okay because babies drink nothing but milk, and chocolate milk has extra nutrients from the high fructose sugar and artificial chocolate flavoring. Comfort foods encourage overeating because they are appetizing, and you can often eat more than non comfort foods. Eating fruits, vegetables, and drinking water would be more healthy physically than eating comfort foods. I am particularly lucky because my favorite comfort foods are extremely healthy and supplement my abundant diet. Furthermore, I can eat all different kinds of granola bars to get different types of nutrients.
I think that bariatric surgery is an excellent idea for teens. Teenagers need more nutrients than adults, because they are growing. Therefore, by having bariatric surgery, they can increase their intake of food even more. This would make them much happier and would greatly improve their mental health. However, I do not think that bariatric surgery is a good idea for anorexic people, because they already do not receive enough nutrients. Instead, it should be used for teenagers who know how to feed themselves and have the discipline to eat more food than necessary every day. They need to be exemplary eaters and go above and beyond their recommended diets.
Actually, on second thought, bariatric surgery is not such a good idea for teens. Apparantly it not only reduces your nutrient intake but also reduces your stomache size. Therefore, it will be difficult to eat more food to make up for the loss of nutrients.

Today, my sister received “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” in the mail from Netflix. And the disc was split in half! After I found out, I quickly jumped onto Netflix’s site to see what to do in situations like these. And to my surprise, Netflix had a simple and easy way of reporting damaged discs. They are sending a new copy of the DVD on the next business day.  Go Netflix for making things that could have been painful, not so painful.

Digsby IM Client is down at the moment.  Their site is also down.  So it’s not just you =)

Update From Digsby:

We are having server-side issues that brought down the service.  We are working on the problem now and will be back up shortly.  If you want to be notified when we come back online, send an email to bugs@digsby.com.

After a year of almost perfect uptime, this is the second outage in the last week.  This is completely unacceptable and we will make sure this does not become a regular occurrence!

AsktheAdmin

Digsby is now back up.

500 GB WD My Passport for $102.99 at Dell.com

Xbox 360 Live 12-Month Gold Subscription Card for $38.98 at Buy.com

NOKIA BH-801 Bluetooth Headset for $16 with Free Shipping at Newegg