If you live in an area where there is actual competition between supermarkets, then perhaps Costco isn't a great deal. Where I live in the US, my choice is Safeway and Kroger. I think our local supermarkets know that they have a near monopoly, so they are happy to sell substandard product at premium prices and they NEVER compete with each other. The prices those places charge are always matching and just too high. The alternates are Whole Foods and Trader Joes on the other side of town, but the Costco is reasonably close.

When we do our Costco shop, we check the price per unit against the local Kroger and Safeway and generally Costco for the same name brands is usually 33% to 50% cheaper. The meat is also usually a good deal, and generally it's a lot better quality than Safeway,

We're one of those ingredient families, where we don't have that many pre-made meals, but we have the ingredients available to make a lot of meals.

Sure, we have to buy larger quantities, but it's always things that are shelf stable for a long time, such as canned items, or things we can portion out and freeze. We rarely have to throw anything away.

Here are a couple of examples from our recent purchases.

Bacon Crumbles (aka Bacon Bits): Costco, Kirkland Signature, 20oz is $9, so $0.45/oz. Kroger brand is $0.76/oz. Safeway store brand is $1.43/oz.
Nally Chilli: Costco is $0.10/oz. Safeway is $0.17/oz Kroger is $0.18/oz - Sure Costco is a dozen cans, but it's waaaay cheaper.
Top sirlon steak: Costco is $10/lb. Kroger is $11/lb and Safeway is $13/lb

As a UK expat, I confused my American co-workers with my flexible pronunciation of "schedule".

To me, a timetable is schedule with a soft C.
As a manager when I'm assigning hours to someone to work, that's schedule with a hard C

I don't know why its that way, but it seems wrong to do those the other way around,

...maybe if Google had actually put some effort into hangouts years ago rather than deciding to kill it because they couldn't make a ton of money off it, and deciding to begin to move it to the graveyard.

Snipes was one of the two huge time killers for me too... what a classic game.

I'm betting Seagate dropped some serious $AU to get this passed.

I run a computer lab at the University of Washington. There's a few reasons why computer labs won't go away soon for us:

1) Expensive software - if we did away with labs students would have to buy software such as SPSS, and they would need it only for a few classes. We don't think its reasonable to expect students to incur this added expense.

2) Specialized hardware - Our video editing suites will always require video editing hardware and DVD/Blu-Ray readers and burners, and having nice scanners and color printing is an added incentive to come in to the lab.

We do make allowances for students with laptops though. I've made spaces for laptops where I've added power strips and networking points for those that don't use the 802 network. We're also looking at adding groupware to our lab to make it easier for groups to work and collaborate.

We also run our help desk out of a lab and we'll help students with their laptop issues. We allow students to come and eat and relax in this lab too. We've found that this atmosphere encourages students to come back to a lab environment.

My usual check list for this is:

1) Check the hard drive, SMART, or manufacturer diagnostics
2) Get the manufacturer diagnostics, and run a full hardware validation
3) If all is clean, check for things recently updated - a bad update may be clogging things
4) Check your anti-virus/anti-spyware software. Sometimes they can switch into extra-paranoid mode and slow things down horribly.

Assuming that you have spare drives, you can use mirroring as a backup solution.

I had a huge database that I was was responsible for and we'd lock the database and split the mirror, take the drive offsite.

If the system died, we had a spare drive available for immediate recovery.

It's all in how you do it.