Posts by Joshua Long

Hey everyone,

just another one of us prepping for the Congressional exam this December.

Is it still just multiple choice questions?

I've got an old Allstate study guide from January 2009—is that actually still useful, or am I wasting my time?

If anyone has scans of recent practice exams from around the US or similar, please shoot me a DM.

Thanks in advance!

I'm looking at buying a car as an individual—though I'd probably take out a $40 loan to cover the down payment. My banks, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, only offer auto loans in dollars, so I'm wondering if operational or financial leasing with a residual value makes any sense here.

Any advice? A loan seems like the cheapest route, but since they're only offering them in dollars, I'm getting a bit twitchy about currency fluctuations given everything happening in the USA lately. Worried about depreciation.

Can someone please explain how dioxin ended up in animal feed over in Germany? Because—surprise, surprise—nobody on the news actually bothered to explain it.

I was on 5mg for the last three months. For the past two weeks, I stuck to 5mg every other day—then just stopped.

What kind of symptoms should I expect after coming off an antidepressant?

I was on Lexapro for about 8 months—finally stopped roughly 10 days ago after tapering down per my psychiatrist's advice.

Lately, I’ve been feeling wiped out, sleeping constantly, and I'm pretty irritable (not anxious, just easily annoyed by everything)—plus some brain fog, like occasional lightheadedness.

Is this normal when you stop?

Michael Phillips4 said:When I tried installing MSN on Windows 7 beta Build 7000, the whole thing just locked up—rebooted, and then back to square one. Didn't even feel like hunting for an error code...

What actually happened? Did you get an error message? On my second attempt—after installing Microsoft Office, Norton, and MSN Live Messenger—I kept getting those "corrupted files" errors on the partition where Windows 7 was sitting.

Couldn't uninstall anything or even run System Restore, so I just wiped the partition.

A week later, I reinstalled Windows just so I could get back to experimenting.

Has anyone actually installed Nero yet? And if so, which version did you go with?

For me, the Windows folder ends up being about 3.5 GB after the install.

I went ahead and installed Avast Free 8 and it’s working fine—even Windows is actually suggesting Avast, Norton, or Kaspersky.

The thing is, I’m having some audio issues; I can hear it cutting out while playing stuff in Winamp. It's AC 97 audio, which installed automatically, but when I tried using the drivers from the motherboard CD, nothing happened—I barely managed to get out of there via Safe Mode.

Which antivirus did you guys end up going with?

I'm leaning towards Avast Free. Thoughts?

Not sure where you guys are getting those Windows 7 prices from.

It can't be that high—unless we're talking about Ultimate—it’ll probably be similar to Vista depending on whether you grab Home, Premium, or Ultimate...

By the way, the official final version should be out sometime after summer.

What you saw on TV was just a teaser for the beta release. That version happened to leak online before the official reveal. So, anyway—did anyone actually install Office 2007 yet?

What kind of partition type do I need for Windows 7 to actually work? I used Acronis Disk Director—I've got Windows XP on my C: drive, which is set as Primary and Active, while I marked the other one as Primary and put the Week on it.

No idea why they blocked me then—maybe it's an issue with the old node version, or maybe Microsoft Office 2007 messed things up. Anyone else here install Office 2007?

Can we please stop the constant fighting over XP vs. Vista vs. 7? Let's hear from those of you who actually installed 7.

So, I decided to mess around with Beta Build 7000.

I had XP running on two partitions, so I carved out a third one just to throw the Beta 7 on there. Everything went smooth—took about 20 minutes. All my drivers (sound, graphics, LAN, WLAN) snapped right into place, except for the Skystar 2 card.

The rig itself is basically a relic from 2002 (Windows XP, 1 GB RAM, ATI 9800 XT, 250 GB HDD). Surprisingly, everything ran great—animations, Aero, browsing, all that stuff.

Then came the part where I started installing software to see how it handled the load. I tossed in Office 2007 and NOD32 antivirus, version 2.70.39.

After the reboot—disaster. Scandisk triggers before Windows 7 even loads. It finds some errors, wipes some tmp files, and finally boots into Windows 7, only to immediately warn me that the partition holding the OS has "Corrupted Files." I tried to install something or save a file to that drive—nothing. Tried to uninstall Office or NOD—no luck. It wouldn't let me change a single thing; it just kept begging me to run Scandisk because of the corruption. And get this: I couldn't even run Scandisk from within Windows—I had to restart, which just triggered the Scandisk loop all over again. A total cycle of deleting and "fixing" things. I even tried a System Restore—not happening.
I hopped back into XP, and it immediately flagged that Partition E (where the 7 installation lives) was acting up. Eventually, I just formatted the partition, scanned everything, fixed the boot sector so XP would launch properly, and finally put an end to that whole headache. The entire saga took two full days.

Anyway, that’s my experience. If anyone else has dealt with this kind of madness, feel free to share...