Do You Need a New PC or Laptop?

[Medhue Simoni]

Today, I got an email from Best Buy. They basically said that I could trade in my 2 year old laptop and get credit towards a new 1.  I was skeptical as to how much they would give me, but I checked anyways. The laptop I tried was only 2 years old, and in almost perfect condition, but they do except older, broken or with  flawed parts, even with no battery. My credit turned out to be $145, which is not bad considering that I only paid $450 for it, but it was a crazy deal at the time.

I always try to keep at least 3 different PCs, and the 1 I might trade in is the 1 with the lowest specs, so I might do this. Usually, I just give the pc away to a friend that needs it or a relative, but I think most of these people now have decent computers, maybe not quite as good as this 1 tho.

So, yeah, I was just thinking that many people have been complaining that they have old PCs and need a new 1 for v3, especially the Phoenix people. Here is the perfect opportunity to upgrade and at least get something for that ancient pc. Plus, it is good for the environment. Of course, I've not actually taken them up on this deal yet, and there maybe details I'm not aware of.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

If you can get up to a hundred bucks for a computer you are going to junk or give away and you need a new computer to replace it, it's a good deal.  But I think it's important to remember that, in most every case, there is personal information  on that hard drive.  It needs to be completely erased before you deliver the trade in computer to Best Buy (or anyone who refurbs computers for resell......or their personal use).  Don't depend on Best Buy (or anyone else) to do that for you.  The information is not erased when you delete it.  All that deleting does is free up the space that the information was occupying so that if the OS needs the space data can be written there (the information is not gone until it gets over written with new data........and that can be months later).  Formatting the drive doesn't erase anything either.........it merely sets up the OS file system and frees up the entire disk for data to be written to.  All that information is still there until it's overwritten and, again, it could be months before personal information is overwritten.

 

You need to wipe the drive.  Wiping a drive writes 1's and 0's to every sector on the drive.  All data is overwritten and, depending on how many passes you choose to make, the data is destroyed beyond recovery (typically that's 3 passes but the US Dept of Defense wipes using 7 passes).  There are several very good free disk wipe programs you can download, and burn to a bootable CD.  They are using pretty slow..........the last time I used a free wipe program (Kill Disk) it took 15 hours to wipe a single pass on a 320 gig hard drive.  I only wanted to wipe the drive because it came out of my older Lenovo desktop and had all the custom drivers for the motherboard and such..............so the single pass was enough for what I was doing (to make 3 passes it would have taken nearly 2 days non-stop.  The last disk I wiped is the disk that is in this computer as a second drive.  I purchased a wipe program (at Best Buy, by the way) that completed the single pass in just over 1 hour.  The program is "Drive Scrubber" by iolo Technologies...........it cost about $25.  Well worth the price and it's here for my next disk wipe (I don't anticipate having to buy a new wipe program for a few years.......maybe never).  I will recommend that program.

 

Just don't ever give or trade in a computer with it's hard drive unless you wipe the drive first........take the 3 hours or so to protect yourself.  You don't know who might dig in that drive and find your social security number, credit card number and password to you online banking.  Or your address, telephone number, where your children go to school............it's very dangerous.  And I wouldn't trust even Best Buy to wipe the drive before they resell the computer.

[Deej Kasshiki]

You're singling out the Phoenix people...why?

Just for the record, my MacBook Pro is a year old and my custom-built gaming PC newer than that and neither runs v3 worth a damn. Well, I'm only guessing since they both have Nvidia video cards and well...that whole black screen thing... so I stick with Snowglobe. Sorry that you can't sell more mesh stuff Medhue (and I own one of your werewolves, I love it) but, you're barking up the wrong tree. Blame the Lab for deploying a viewer so horrible that 18 months later, after many (not all by any means) of the original showstoppers have been fixed, a huge number of people still refuse to use it.

Just goes to show that once you ruin your reputation it's damned hard to get it back no matter what good you do to make up for the original sin.

[Medhue Simoni]

I was in no way putting Phoenix users down. Forgive me, but I'm somewhat ignorant of coding type stuff, but I hear from others, and also read on the Phoenix site that many users also use Phoenix because the V3 code requires some kind of special whatever that only newer PC's have. If people want to assume that I'm saying something that I'm not, what can I really do about that?

As I've said before, I just don't prefer Phoenix, and the features are not things that I would use. I've also said that I pretty much hate the sidebar and always have, from the first day v2 came out. To this day, I seek out v2-3 based viewers, like kirsten's, and Firestorm because they eliminated the sidebar. Tho, I will say that I do like many of the new feature that LL has added to v3. I actually think my last comment about LL's viewer is that they have not put out a sufficiently stable viewer since v1.23. Every1 has different tastes.

As for me selling mesh, I could not be happier with the amount of mesh that I'm selling. Really, I would have never expected to sell as much mesh as I have. I'm not quite sure why any1 thinks mesh items are not selling. Even with all the problems with clothing, the top mesh being sold right now is a pair of jeans, lol. As soon as we have more people using mesh viewers, I would greatly encourage people to invest in a mesh avatar, especially for avatars like werewolves. I'm holding off updating my Werewolf and Lycan AOs until a dominantly awesome mesh Werewolf is made, and I can't wait to see how totally radical these are going to be. Maxtux has released a number of really good looking mesh avatars. Every1 should check them out.

If you are talking about my reputation, well, I am human, and I will slip up at times, usually cause of those dang emotions, lol. That being said, I think my overall reputation is doing just fine and most people know that I will always be around to help any1, irreguardless if you are a customer of mine or not. Heck, my sales aren't suffering, and I'm a bit worn out at the end of everyday because of all the people that message me asking for advise about this or that. My knowledge is limited to only a few areas of SL and creating tho. The people that know me, know exactly what I'm about. Come by the sim some time, I got lots of new toys to play with, and the hud to play with them is free.

[Sassy Romano]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

 I would greatly encourage people to invest in a mesh avatar

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 I am already a mesh avatar and the mesh clothes don't fit me.  There's the problem

 

[Medhue Simoni]

Actually, I'm only talking about non human avatars. I don't mean to hurt any human mesh avatar makers, but I won't be buying a mesh human avatar. In my opinion, there are way too many negatives. Plus, these don't have hand poses or facial morphs, which is just not exceptable to an animator. When LL starts working on custom skeletons, this will be a big step forward, but hopefully they don't change from the bvh format.

As far as mesh clothing on the default avatar, I'm seeing LL working on some very interesting fixes for this. I think LL is taking that problem very seriously.

[WADE1 Jya]

I'm happy mesh is working for you too Medhue. I'm seeing some good results with mesh also. When I calculate in for the factor that (according to my research) less than 60% of people can see mesh properly at all, its as good as could be expected, given the current situation.

I realize I lose instantly 40% of my customers because the mesh dome here looks like a giant pile of turds to them & they can't see any of the products in it. Given such low numbers to work with & adjusting according for that, the sales figures look better than I've seen off my recent non-mesh product launches which 100% of visitors can see

As numbers of mesh adopters climb, things should be quite good.

Strangely enough, with all these people I hear having problems seeing mesh... I can see it just fine on my oldest mac... it is very old too. Is the problems mostly with PCs can't see mesh easy? If its time to upgrade, maybe get youself a new mac.... or an old one lol