Super User 
Author Archive
Super User Blog Has Moved!
This weeks question of the week is another meta one, this time from Jeff Atwood!
The Super User Blog – now officially blessed!
Great job on the blog! After a call today with Ivo, we decided that the Super User Blog is now sufficiently awesome to be highlighted in the footer! You’ll note that the blog link in the Super User footer now points to And it will correctly update to flag [new] posts (or it should, anyway).
The “King” of drives!
It’s finally here, Super User’s test comparison of the SSD, HDD and Hybrid drives! All thanks to Kingston’s SSD donations.
Overview:
We took one Kingston ssdNOW V 100 series drive and recorded read/write speeds and boot up time benchmarks and compared the results to a Seagate Momenus XT 7200 rpm Hybrrdid Drive, and a Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm Hard Disk Drive.
Setup and Procedure:
Computer setup:
A Dell m1530 laptop with Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T7500 @ 2.2 GHz was used to test all three drives. This laptop had AHCI already enabled. Fast boot was enabled in the BIOS. This laptop has 4 GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz of ram installed as well as a 256 MB GeForce 8600M GT video card. The stock hard drive, a Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm 250 GB drive had Windows 7 SP1 64-bit installed. Further programs where also previously installed, including, but not limited to (bold programs were startup programs):
- Office Professional 2010
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer 9
- Mozilla Firefox
- Rockmelt
- Python(x,y)
- iTunes
- Evernote
- MATLAB
- dropbox
- syncplicity
- Steam (with Half-Life 2 and HL2DM installed)
- Game Booster
- Sophos Anti-Virus
- TortoiseHG
- Adobe Acrobat
The HP CPU Assassin!
Super User Question of the Week [21 Febuary 2011 – 28 February 2011]
If you’ve got an HP laptop and noticed that it overheats often, don’t just write it off as unfixable. You might be suffering from the CPU Assassin!
A little bit of background. Sathya had a problem with his laptop. As a super user, he uses it all the time and keeps it on 24/7. However, it keeps over heating:
At the end of the day it’s really annoying to have my thighs burnt because over overheating.
So he posed this excellent question:
Why does WMI Provider Host (WmiPrvSE.exe) keep spiking my CPU?
The overheating seems to be a result of WMI Provider Host ( WmiPrvSE.exe ) spiking the CPU utilization to 25% every few minutes. Any ideas why this is happening ?
Hate the “Google Search Spam”? There’s an app for that…
Super User Question of the Week [14 Febuary 2011 – 21 February 2011]
Google’s search results have been well… under the spotlight recently, including our very own Jeff Atwood. Lifehacker did a poll recently and discovered that nearly 77 percent of their readers think that “Google’s search results are less useful”. But whether you agree that Google’s searches are pure crap, God’s given searching manna from heaven or something in between, there are always sites that you just don’t want popping up in your searches.
This brings us to our question of the week by Sathya:
Is there a browser add-on to filter Google search results?
Is there a way to block specific sites from appearing in Google search? I’m looking for a browser add-on (preferably Google Chrome) – I don’t want to create custom search engines or what-not.
Did you know that IPv6 may include your MAC address? Here’s how to stop it.
Super User Question of the Week [7 February 2011 – 14 February 2011]
With the roll out of IPv6 and IPv4 addresses quickly running out, there will be soon a greater migration over to IPv6. But there seems to be an issue, your computer’s MAC address may be included with the new IPv6 address. In comes Arjan’s great question:
How to avoid exposing my MAC address when using IPv6?
On my Macs, each IPv6 address includes the MAC address of a specific computer (not of my router). Sites such as ipv6-test.com not only show it, but even tell me it belongs to an Apple computer.
This feels like a super cookie, and might apply to other operating systems as well. How can I avoid my MAC addresses from being exposed?
The modern marvel of the SSD
With the SSD’s on their way from Kingston, I decided to go a little bit more in detail on the what, why, and how’s of SSD’s. 
SSD stands for Solid State Drive. This "Solid State" is a term for the fact that the drives themselves do not have any mechanically moving parts. A typical Hard Disk Drive (HDD) uses rotating disks where data is stored and read.
Meet the New Moderators!
Hey everyone, the news is out and we have three new moderators! Congratulations to Sathya, DMA57361, and studiohack!
I have asked each of them to give an introduction as they pleased (well with a few probing questions). Here are their answers:
Is my Linux getting a cold?
Super User’s Question of the Week [31 Jan – 7 Feb]
If you’re a linux user you typically know what you’re doing and what to avoid when it comes to attracting virus’s on your pc. But there’s a growing crowd out there that’s integrating Linux into their everyday lives, and they aren’t your typical hacker or programming enthusiasts. They’re average users. This brings up the wonderful question posed by ykombinator:
How is Linux not prone to viruses, malware and those kinds of things?
The Starting of our SSD journey
Super User’s Questions of the Week [24 Jan – 31 Jan]
This weeks question of the week is actually two and one comes from the Meta.SuperUser site. Before we begin we need to give a little bit of thanks and history. With a simple Tweet, I asked our friends over at KingstonSSDNow if they would be willing to help us in testing out the new SSD technology. They agreed!
SSD stands for "solid state drive". SSDs use solid-state memory (similar to flash drives) to store data, and serve the same function that a hard drive does in most computers. Because they have no moving parts, they are much faster than regular hard drives, but solid-state memory is currently more expensive per-gigabyte than hard drives. We’ll have more posts soon about the details of the technology behind SSDs, and some of the interesting hybrids between traditional HDDs and the new SSDs.
So that means we’re getting an SSD drive, and we want to know what you want us to do with testing SSD tech, hence our first featured question of the week:
What do you want Super User Blog to test with SSD technology?
Spammers Beware! We’ve got your number (for now)
Placing your email publicly on a site almost always means instant doom for the Spam folder.
So what do you do so that you can have an email address that is shared with your friends and fellow blog readers but not adulterated by public spammers? One technique found is to change the email address:
foo@bar.com ==> foo[at]bar[dot]com or foo(removethis)@bar.com, and more.
But does this obfuscation really work? That’s exactly what Kyle Cronin asks:
Does email address obfuscation actually work?
The typical rationale is that this kind of obfuscation prevents the email address from being automatically recognized and harvested by spammers. In an age where spammers can beat all but the most diabolical captchas, is this really true? And given how effective modern spam filters are, does it really matter if your email address is harvested?
akira gives us the answer:
Yes, (in a way) email obfuscation works.