Kid in a Candy Store

Where I live there isn't any electronics stores, any "real" ones anyway. There Radio Shack and then about an hour away is Fry's Electronics. Both don't have much as far as components and actually have noticed Radio Shack has more than Fry's for components.

Last Friday I was talking to a co-worker about the lack of stores and what I needed for my robot. Then he mentioned Santa Cruz Electronics. The website could use some updating but I started to get excited that there might be a place that has most things I would need. Its about 45min from the house but only 20min from work. This is perfect.

Saturday I wasn't really planning on going but we wanted to get out of the house and hadn't been to Santa Cruz for awhile. We decided to brave the rain and go for it and make a afternoon of it.

Once we found the place and went inside I immediately got excited. I was a kid in a candy store. I ended up getting a lot more than I had in mind but were things to restock my inventory at home.

They don't have everything I might need but they do have a lot more than other alternatives and if I need something quick for a weekend project or I am in the area it is perfect.

Windows tells you to hard power off?

I have repaired computers for many years and dealt with many users and I don't know how many times I have told someone its not a good idea to hard power off your computer. Fast forward to Windows 7 and now I guess its okay to do.

I usually have a lot of applications and browser tabs open so I dislike restarting and get annoyed when I forced to for updates or stability. Good thing Chrome is really good about restoring tabs! I think computers should be able to update and restart parts as need so you don't have to ever full restart. I am one who keeps my system on 24/7. You never know when you need something.

Last night my girlfriend was going to work on a logo for this blog so we fired up Photoshop and things got really slow after that and pretty much not responding. So I decided to try and kill Photoshop. After pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, this is what I got after awhile of the system not responding to anything.

I was able to do a few times, so I had to follow the directions and hit the reset button while I cringed.

Anyone else seen this before? Really odd seeing windows telling to hard reset.

Post you comments below.