Blake Noble

I know we have the "What Are You Listening To?" thread, but what I'd like to see is a thread dedicated to the music snobs here, a hopefully thousand page thread dedicated to in-depth discussions of the music we listen to (without being far beyond obsessed with that analysis; there is a reason why your standard Tool fan is the butt of every joke associated with metal). I have no clue how to start this thread off, really. So I suppose I'll mention what I've been listening to a lot lately: The Avett Brothers. So far, this is the only band with a banjo that I love the hell out of. Great vocals, supreme musicianship, and Emotionalism was quite experimental in terms of dynamics and blending lines. "Pretty Girl From Chile" starts out sounding very Folksy, very Bluegrass and, by the end of the song, evolves into Punk.

"Big Jilm" - Ween I applaud your tastes, sir. For some reason, I find the music video for "Two Weeks" creepy as hell.

After the terrific results I had with Avira Antivirus today, I suggest you download it. Also, pick up HijackThis, Ad-Aware, and CCleaner. All of those programs are free. Use CCleaner at least once a week. CCleaner will clean your harddrive of tons of useless junk hogging up space and fix registry issues. I believe CCleaner was a big reason as to why I limped along with my virus-ridden PC for so long. It does help improve performance by a lot.

That worked out perfectly. Now I have total access to all of my old documents and mp3 files. (If I had to venture a guess, I did not have permission to access this stuff because I did wipe my computer clean back in November, thus reinstalling XP over what was already there.) This will also give me the chance to delete some stuff and really free up some harddrive space. Thanks, Captain. And thanks everyone else who helped me out.

I think the location is C:\USERDATA

Yep. I have the only account on this PC and it has full admin capabilities.

Blah. It still gives me an "access denied" pop-up error. Screw it. I don't need to get in there that bad. I'll do some research into that.

When you've been living with complete loading times of 10 minutes for almost 10 months, 3 minutes is a godsend.

Clean and simplistic, just the way I like it. I love my RocketDock and my auto-hidden taskbar.

Well I did come across a MacBook on eBay earlier with a buy-it-now price of $399 with free shipping. I'll keep an eye out for a deal like that. This computer, for the first time since ... damn ... December of last year I think, is finally running decently. Now it stays on the welcome screen for all of 10 to 15 seconds and is ready to go in less than 3 minutes. That was just now and my fingers are crossed it stays that way. Before, it would stay on the welcome screen for up to 5 minutes and finish booting up in 10. So, knock on wood, everything finally seems normal again. I'm still not running from getting a Mac, though. I've wanted a laptop for a few years now, so that I'm not limited to recording music in my living room. Like I said, Macs are great for that purpose. I really only use my PC for the internet, iTunes, and recording, as well as writing occasionally. I've got a 360 for games (ironic I guess; maybe Apple will build another game console, ha). Back to this, though: Thoughts? I also find it strange it shows the folder is empty when it clearly has files in there.

The one in the last link? It looks to be one of the last iBook G4s, which had a revised 14 inch screen and more harddrive space versus the G3, which is what was in the first link, that came out in mid-2005. That's how old my PC is.

Here we go: http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-iBook-Laptop-14-...id=p3911.c0.m14 Just a few bucks more, but you get a 60 gig harddrive. I think that will be decent enough. It might could use some extra RAM, but ...

I don't mind something used so long as it works as intended. As for that particular seller, most of their iBooks are going for $225 each and they were all used in a classroom setting, meaning wear and tear should be to a minimum.

Avira finished its scan and found a total of 10 detections, all of which were corrected. The grand total comes in at 12 issues, again all of them were corrected. After that, I ran HijackThis and no issues were returned. Finally, I ran CCleaner to clean up any mess left over after I uninstalled Norton AntiVirus 2005 (ancient, useless) and after Avira done its job. Fingers crossed. Oh, and I think I'll be picking this up by next month, as a birthday gift to myself: http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-iBook-G3-Laptop-...id=p3286.c0.m14 The only thing I don't much like is the skimpy harddrive space. My iPod touch has only 2 gigs less and I filled that up completely with music and only three, very small apps (a piano app, a drumkit app, and the Pandora radio app). On the computer I'm using, my iTunes checks in at almost 20 gigs alone.

Another question: how do I access the USERDATA folder? It seems that there might be some files in there I want to get to (virus scans show that there are a bunch of mp3 files in there of old recordings I made, etc.). The count, btw, is at 9 detections and counting.

Four detections and four warnings so far using Avira, and this makes the second scan I've had to do. First scan, it caught a trojan horse lurking in my OS, so I deleted that file and restarted my PC. It also caught another t-h when I opened up Firefox. Google seems to be working normally ... so far.

Windows XP SP3. Basically, the last version of XP before they brought out Vista. It's not just that I want to get away from Microsoft, Macs are great for recording music. Trent Reznor used Macs to record just about every NIN album, for example. Garageband is a great, basic recording program and it comes free with the computer. That's a big reason for me wanting to make the switch. Carelessly throwing taboo aside, I only buy porn in physical form. Free porn is the death of a PC. Anyone who has any remote form of mental capacity knows this. I'm going to follow up on some of those suggestions. Thanks, siegen.

One step ahead of you here. I've been using Firefox for a while now and upgraded to the latest version a few weeks ago, hoping that it might would fix some of the problem. Done and done. Oh, another cute little piece of info I forgot: 90 percent of all of my document and file names are blue.

I don't. Remember the asshole who totaled the Firebird? I found his username and password for one of those sites saved into my list of saved passwords in Firefox. (oh and inb4: delete system32, if anyone wanted to try that gag.)

Perhaps I should kill it with fire ... ... before I give my life to the AppleLord?

See that? That's what I'm going to do with my virus-infested PC. Anyone here have any idea why I have to turn my computer off 3 times or more in order for the f@#king thing to boot up, or why when I use Google, it doesn't take me to, say, the Wikipedia page I wanted but websites with the names of "gooooosearch.com" or "breast-site.net?" I hate Windows. I've been trying for months to fix this, with no luck. I'm going to buy a Mac next. I can't stand Micro$h! anymore.

Party: pooped. Underwear: reinstalled.

A black/gold Hurst G8. My panties officially dropped.

PayPal only. In exchange, you'll get a Firebird.

Here's a thought: how about Mr. Penske buys the rights to use the old Epslion, Theta, and Delta platforms, updates them and makes a whole new slew of unique, new, all-American Saturns to replace the Aura, Vue, and Astra? Best to sell the technology to Penske than Russia, am I right GM?