Brucethemoose

I know you can reserve track time at racetracks, but I'm 18, and want something a bit more... casual.

Does anyone know about any abandoned racetracks/drag strips/airfields or just really long, empty paved roads in Texas, where you can just drive like maniac without worrying about cops?

Let me explain.

A normal supercharger uses power from the engine to compress the air for the intake, effectively increasing engine displacement. A turbo uses a turbine to draw power from the hot exhaust gasses to power the compressor. In theory, this doesn't "steal" any power from the engine like a supercharger does.

But what if you hooked the exhaust turbine from a turbocharger directly to the driveshaft? Instead of stealing engine power to compress intake gas, like a supercharger does, it would extract energy from the hot exhaust gasses and send that power directly to the drivetrain, effectively salvaging waste heat from the exhaust to increase power and fuel efficiency. In other words, this is a turbocharger that powers the driveshaft, not a compressor.

I've heard that some trucks already use this system, but searches turned up nothing. Does anyone know if this exists, or if it is even plausible?

I'm looking for a 14" or smaller laptop with these specs or better.

AMD A10

Nvidia GT 640m

AMD 7730m.

Any 1 of those will do.

The only one I've found is the Clevo W110ER (which is rebranded by many companies), although the LG P330 pulls off this sort of performance with older hardware. Are there any viable alternatives?

Yes, I know over the ear headphones or full-blown speakers are better. I've already got that. What's the nicest sounding, most comfortably fitting, yet affordable set of ear-buds I can get for less than $70 or so? I'll be using them in a laptop and an iPhone for gaming and music, but I might plug them into a xonar sound-card just to see how they compare :). Otherwise, what frequency range / SNR / other specs should I be looking for, as I'm not an expert on this stuff.

Also, what's with all this Beats Audio stuff? It's in my HP laptop, and lots of my friends have Beats headphones. Is there any merit to the name, or is Beats nothing more than a branding gimick? Seems pretty suspicious to me...

I play Skyrim on my PC and my desktop, but unlike other games, the save games don't sync between shared computers. Is there way to get Steam to automatically sync my game saves? Or would it just be easier to set this up in dropbox with some symbolic links? I use Windows 7 HP 64 bit on both my PCs, and I have the Skyrim disk.

I WANT this.

http://sonicmaster.asus.com/GLOBAL/en/N45_Gallery....

But I don't see it anywhere in stores, even though I see it's big, heavy brother, the N55, is widely available.

Anyone know where I can get one, online or in stores here in the U.S.?

Since I have alot of friends with 360s, I'm wondering if getting it for the PC is worth it? Are the graphics that much better?

I would be playing with 2 6850s in crossfire on the PC, and on an Xbox 360 otherwise. So PC hardware isn't a problem. I'm not playing this on a cheapo LCD either, no, I'll be playing on really nice 1080p projector in a sick home theater system.

Also, is the sound quality any different on the PC? The sound will be piped through HDMI to a receiver, and to a top end 7.1 setup. If there's a difference, these speakers will show it. Is there one?

I've got a Phenom II X4 965 BE edition and a 6850 in my gaming rig now. I'll be getting Skyrim (and maybe BF3), will play on a very nice 1080p projector (not some cheapo LCD monitor), and want Skyrim to look good, so good it'll make all my Xbox 360 friends jealous (maybe converting them to PC gamers). Got an 8x crossfire capable motherboard, a good case, a Corsair TX750 that can dish out as much power as I need, and don't mind modding or installing aftermarket coolers if necessary.

The upper limit to my budget is probably $300, although I would prefer to spend as little as possible. A 6850 probably won't run either game with all the eye candy turned on, so, what should I get?

The obvious choice is a 2nd 6850, for crossfire. Reviews indicated the cards are on par with a GTX 580 when in crossfire, but there is one problem I fear: microstuttering. I hear it can be pretty bad on crossfired or SLI cards, making 50 fps look more like 20fps. Is it as bad as people say?

The second option: Get an enthusiast card from ebay. I've seen a few used GTX 480s, 6950s, or 6970s on ebay for a good price, often under $300, some with aftermarket coolers. But would getting a used card without a warranty be worth it? Would the performance boost be good enough?

I have an choice between getting a new 6850 for like $180, so that I can use 2 in crossfire, or buying a used GTX 480 online for about $200 or $250.

The thing is, my 6850 I have now is kinda funky... It plays games well, but for some reason it buzzes during the minecraft loading screen (and no-where else) and sometimes crashes during flash videos. Also, horror stories about crossfire and micro-stuttering have scared me a little. I don't care about power consumption or noise, either, which makes the 480 more attractive.

Considering I'll probably be using this PC for 2 years or more from now, which card should I get? Should I buy the 2nd 6850, and pray for no buzzing and future crossfire support? Or should I take a risk and get a used GTX 480 with no warranty?

I got the Windows 8 Preview on my laptop, and it's pretty cool. All my Windows 7 programs work the same, which makes me wonder...

Is Windows 8 just as susceptible to viruses as windows 7? I dual boot 7 and 8, and use Comodo firewall and Avast! antivirus with windows 7. Alternative, less popular operating systems like OSX and Linux are at a lower risk because the vast majority of viruses are designed to infect Windows XP/Vista/7 systems. I guess I'm really asking if Windows 8 is susceptible to the same viruses as windows 7, and if MS put in any extra security measures in Windows 8.

I got a 128gb crucial m4 SSD (firmware 0009), and subjectively, it beats the heck out of my old laptop drive!

But some benchmarks I took worried me. While sequential read and write performance is great (getting north of 400mb/s read, so I know Sata III is working well), according to crystalmark, 4k random read performance is pretty bad: 10.81mbps (2638 IOPS), as is random write. Oddly enough, random 4k QD32 performance is still through the roof (132mbps), so I'm wondering if this is normal.

If there is a problem, it's probably my AMD chipset that's causing it. While I love my A8-3500M APU, I'm not sure AMD's sata drivers are nearly half as good as intel's.

We're thinking about replacing 500gb 5400rpm hard drive in an HP Dm4x with a crucial m4 128gb SSD, and I'm wondering if it's worth the investment. I know startup times are better, but can anyone vouch for the actual responsiveness improvements a crucial m4 would bring to a laptop? How MUCH better are startup and loading times? Is it worth shelling out $200, or would we be better off just buying a Seagate momentus XT drive?

Specs: i5-2410M, Radeon HD 6470M, 6gb of RAM, and possibly an aftermarket wifi card, so the other hardware certainly wont be a problem.

Were looking at an MSI X460 slim notebook (14" 1366x768 display, and very competent Nvidia GT 540M graphics), but there are really 2 models we're deciding between: one with an i3-2310M and another with an i5-2410M. Both have GT 540M graphics, and are otherwise the same.

For relatively casual gaming (I'm not talking Crysis, more like Portal 2) at 30+ FPS, is the i3-2310M fast enough to get by? Will it be a significant bottleneck that only the i5's turbo core can resolve, or will we not even notice the difference between the i3 and i5? The i5 costs a hefty $100 more ($750 vs $850), which is already pushing our budget, so unless the i5 is really necessary, we want the i3.

We're looking at buying an HP envy, but I want to look at one (See how it looks, how big it is, etc) before I drop that much money on a laptop. Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon all have them in stock, but none of them are in stores.

Is there any way to get a store to ship an electronics item like an HP Envy for display without actually buying one?

We're looking at getting a 14" HP Envy, and I noticed that it is available with a 7200RPM hard drive AND an mSata, 80gb SSD, among other options.

I was wondering if it would be possible to pick up a 40gb mSATA SSD off the internet, and use intel SRT to use it with the hard drive. Do laptops even support ssd caching (intel smart response technology, where the SSD saves frequently used files from the HDD for faster access)? I know it has a Sandy Bridge chipset, but I was wondering if this feature is even available in laptops.

We're gonna buy a 6570 for an old HP s7712n ( http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docnam... ). While I know it will fit, and I know it's a low powered card, I'm worried about the power supply.

The PC still has a crappy HP power supply in it, rated for 6A on the 12V rail (72 Watts) and "97W max on the 12V and 5V rail". I know its crappy, but will is it enough to power a 6570 along with a Pentium processor? Or are we stuck with a 5450 if we want an upgrade?

My little sis has a pretty old HP Slimline s7712n ( http://bit.ly/nD7wPf ), and ever since she started playing a few games, it just hasn't been cutting it. I'm trying to help her overhaul it as cheaply as possible, but I'm a little worried.

I'm looking at buying 4gb of DDR3 RAM, and either an A8-3850 CPU/GPU or an OEM athlon II x4 CPU paired with a Radeon 6570, along with a compatible motherboard. I can cannibalize an old Dell computer for a 450W PSU, a good fan to stick inside, and a good 19" LCD monitor. I can use the same Hard Drive and DVD drive, and use the stock cooler that came with my phenom II X4 965. Everything seems perfect.

But I just thought of a potential problem: The PC had Windows Vista Pre-installed. In the past, with my Dell Dimension 4600, I found out that Windows XP was essentially tethered to the motherboard. The Dell branded version of XP would ONLY work with Dell branded motherboards, and I fear HP may have done the same thing.

My question is this: If I switch out motherboards, will Windows Vista work with the new hardware? Are there any HP branded AM3 or FM1 motherboards that the Operating System will accept? I would rather not pay $100 for a new Windows 7 install, so is there any cheaper way to upgrade?

I got a 35 on the ACT, with a 10 (out of 12) on the essay section. But on the SAT, I didn't get exactly what I was hoping for: 670 Reading, 760 Math, 680 Writing.

A 1430 on the 1600 scale isn't exactly great, although I will say that Ivy League schools that require astronomical SATs are way out of my reach anyway. For a school like UT Austin, is a 35 good enough? Should I go ahead and send my SAT along with my ACT, or should I hide my lesser score and waive my ACT score around when applying for college the rest of this year? Will sending my SAT hurt me, or will college admissions just look at the better of the two anyway?

I have a jailbroken iPhone 4 running 4.1, but the dang mic broke on the thing (THIS IS THE SECOND TIME!) so I can't make any calls. Left with no other option, I'm gonna have to do a complete restore on my phone, and give it to apple, who will probably give me a shiny new iPhone 4 running iOS5.

While that's good and all, from what I hear with the release of iOS 5, there's a bit of a fuss about the possible end of tethered jailbreaks in the future. I would wait for the shenaniganz to end and for a tethered jailbreak to come out, but I have a week or so before my 1 year warranty expires.

Since I'll probably get a new replacement phone, will my 4.01 and 4.1 SHSHs backed up on cydia be useless? Is there any way I can go back to 4.1? If not, when do you think the next tethered jailbreak for iOS 5 will be out?

I have a ducted fan with a 140mm diameter blade, and a 60mm central motor size. So the cross section of the fan, that is, the area that air can flow through, is

(70mm)^2 *pi - (30mm)^2 * pi = 12566mm^2 = .01256637m^2

The fan is rated at 365cfm, which is 0.1723m^3/s (cubic meters per second)

Now here's were I'm a little uncertain:

Dividing the air flow rate by the cross sectional area, canceling out appropriate units yields 13.7112 m/s, a unit of velocity.

Assuming the density of air is 1.275kg/m^3, multiplying the density of air by the air flow rate yields .21968 kg/s, a mass flow rate.

Multiplying the mass flow rate by the speed yields a 3.0128 kg*m/s^2, which is the Newton, the unit of force.

So according to this logic, the (air flow rate)^2 * (density of air) / (cross sectional area of the fan) = Force exerted by the fan.

Considering this is an 80 watt fan (which is a hell of alot for a little 5 1/2 inch fan), does this seem reasonable, because this doesn't seem like very much force. I haven't bought the fan yet, but is there any way I can very roughly estimate the force this fan exerts given some data?