f13.net

Here. A thread for quick questions. Idea stolen from another board.

Great for things like: What graphics card should I buy right this moment? or Why r my power supply turning sparkly colors?

Anyway, my question:

Photoshop seems to not let me type in lower case anymore, anyone else ever run into this problem?

That's an odd one.  Some font sets don't have lower case, AoC installed the Hyborian font on my computer and it is all upper.

Times New Roman, Arial, etc - only upper case.

You'd think that with all your decades of PC experience that you'd be able to troubleshoot a simple CAPS LOCK problem  :uhrr:

I could soooo work in tech support.

OH MAN CAPS LOCK WAS ON.

No.

I guess there are options in the paragraph and character palette pop ups that force all caps, one of the little icons.

not super familiar with photoshop but in CS3 if you go to the text properties section there is a setting for all caps, sounds like you have that on. pic inc.

(http://www.devotia.com/img/pscaps.jpg)

also shouldn't this be a board instead of a thread... Call it EBKC Troubleshooting or something

edit: and my question:

Is there a desktop FTP widget (or even a folder on my desktop) that will automagically upload files I drag and drop into it to a prespecified folder on my ftp server? 

Even better is there something like the above that provides immediate feedback in the form of a url for the most recently dropped file (for example just copying and pasting to a forum)?

It's annoying to fire up filezilla, connecting to my site, navigating to the img folder and dropping an image in. 

There's tons of drag-drop FTP programs. There was one I used for awhile a few years ago, but I don't remember the name anymore. Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=ftp+drag+drop).

sweet, before I hand over my FTP login information to randominternetprogram01 anyone have a recommendation that they have used? 

I use Fire FTP now.

Chicken. I hope anything sensitive on an FTP server is behind your firewall anyways.  :awesome_for_real:

You mean my $15 a month web server that I have no real control over? 

Not quite sure how much good the firewall would be against someone having your username and password and using that info to illegitimately create legitimate traffic...  I suppose IP restriction on FTP requests but that isn't a very good solution for roaming and/or masked IP's.

There isn't anything critical on that server but it might be slightly embarrassing if it was hacked and loaded with malicious content.

Fire FTP looks okay but i'm not really looking to replace Filezilla, ftpdropper (http://www.stilleye.com/ftpdropper/) looks about like what I wanted.

Yah there's not much you can do about that. You get what you pay for.

FTP is notorious for being easily hacked/cracked, even without the help of suspect FTP programs. Most organizations (such as the one I work for) do not allow FTP outside of the internal network, blocking all external traffic on the common FTP ports. Heck, I think everything is blocked except for the VPN connection.

Here's my question:

What's a good app to use to configure dual monitors in Windows Vista? Such as having your taskbar in both windows?

Ultramon.

Ah ha! I knew one of you knew the one I knew I was looking for.....         Knew.

While on the subject of dual monitors, can anyone confirm that vista sp1 remote desktop supports viewing both of them?

So what graphics card should I buy right this moment? I'll be replacing an NVIDIA 8600. Want to spend $300-$400.

4870

Yeah, but there are so many. :ye_gods:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814129113

Sweet, thanks Schild.

Kinda a tech question, but does anyone here have inside info on when Newegg plans to open in Canada? Their "teaser" site went up a month ago.

No, but I've been using 1click2computers.com, and have had only good experiences so far. Not as polished as newegg, but fast service and good prices. Based out of Mississauga.

There's also directdail.com in Canada. I've heard good things about them, but I haven't used them myself.

Thanks! I'm right next to Mississauga, so that works out better.

pc800 Ram, i hope for at least a gig (2 x 512)


Cheap? Suggestions on where to buy? Snarky comments?

http://www.pricewatch.com/system_memory/pc800_512mb.htm (http://www.pricewatch.com/system_memory/pc800_512mb.htm)

Ditch the rambus based board and buy something not so OLD?

If you live in Australia I've got some 256 sticks you can have.

I'm looking at buying a wireless keyboard and mouse to use with HTPC.  Ideally I'd like both to have cradles for recharging and a keyboard without the numeric key pad.  Small and dainty would be nice but I ain't paying double to get it.  Budget (since Trippy always wants to know) would be ~$US100 but 20 bucks over wouldn't kill me.

the wireless keyboard and mouse I have by Logitech doesn't hog batteries very badly. Have to replace them every two months or so. Its not worth cutting down your options just to have them be rechargeable.

I'm almost embarassed to ask something that probably seems so obvious to most of you, but...

I have Comcast cable and an HD DVR in my family room.  In my office I have, obviously, my PC and other equipment (consoles, projector, etc.).  I am looking for this particular piece of advice:  What is the best/cheapest/easiest way for me to get full blown HD cable via my PC?  I know I could rent a new tuner from Comcast, but I'm thinking that it probably isn't cost effective.  Will any old HD DVR or HD Tuner card hooked up to cable ultimately net the same effect (and same channels)?  Note that I do not want to sign up for any new subscriptions to make this happen.

Already did, but i can get at lest another year or two of gaming out of the Rambus one, if i can find more sticks.  :grin:

Just don't get the Logitech bluetooth dealios. I have one, and truly regret it.

Best/cheapest/easiest are all mutually exclusive so you need to pick one. And actually as far as I've been able to figure out so far there is no "easiest" either.

The simplistic answer is that there are number of solutions out there that will allow you to capture QAM cable (i.e. unencrypted digital cable) including HD QAM channels, assuming they are available in your area. In theory with a QAM capture device and the appropriate software you can capture said channels. However as I've been discovering in practice it's anything but straightforward.

If you want to capture encrypted HD programming (like, say, HBO) that's a whole other area that I haven't even bothered to look into yet but would presumably require being able to capture component output assuming your cable box can even output that.

If you have a couple hundred bucks to spend you could try messing around with something like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Hauppauge-1192-HVR-1950-External-Recorder/dp/B00198MYB0

There are cheaper QAM HDTV capture devices out there but it's less likely one of the popular 3rd party PVR software programs will support the hardware, unlike the Hauppauge stuff which is really well supported.

Expect a lot of pain and suffering, though, if you attempt to do this. I'm still suffering through getting my Comcast Digital Cable setup to work acceptably and I may never actually get to that point. Which is unfortunate since my previous ATSC (over the air) HDTV setup worked really well for the channels I was able to receive.

I knew that, was just being deliberately thick.  Based on what you're saying, and upon some of the reviews I've read, I may just re-consider renting another box from comcast and hooking it up directly to my projector.  I'd frankly be pretty pissed if I had to spend 150 bucks to find out it didn't work for shit.  And to be fair, the HD box from comcast is decent enough....it's more the long term cost that gives me pause.

I don't know if this changes anything, but I don't do premium channels, so I assume all the stuff I am getting is unencrypted.

Edit:  come to think of it, that is probably a poor assumption, since it isn't simple basic cable that I have.

Nope. The only digital channels the law requires the cable company to send unencrypted are the local stations (local affliates of FOX, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc.). Where I am I get those (in both SD and HD) and a ton of other crap SD digital channels like the shopping channels in QAM. I don't get any of the "Starter Package" HD channels in QAM, at least as far as I've been able to determine so far.

I have had some dicey luck with wireless kb/mouse combos (all logitech).  In my experience if you want to go more than 4 or so feet without problems you have to go blue tooth.  For my conference room at work I bought a logitech cordless desktop (mx1000 laser mouse+keyboard)  this wasn't bluetooth and the lack of range made it suck.  So I brought it home and while the keyboard still sucked (lag) the mouse rocked.  For work I then purchased the logitech bluetooth bundle, the mouse isn't as good as the mx1000 and there is still some keyboard lage but the range is pretty impressive, unfortunately it still has the smallest bit of lag.

Now the dell bluetooth kb/mouse bundle (pretty much include it for everyone who asks me to order them a laptop) are pretty snappy (no lag) but the mouse feels a little light and they take batteries instead of having a built in charger.

Thanks Trippy, that clears it up for me quite well.

Guess I'd better elaborate. I also have the mx1000. My problems are

• Periodically, the keyboard disconnects, reconnects 5 seconds or so later. That behaviour is totally incompatible with gaming.
• Occasional monster keyboard lag
• Occasionally, on boot up, mouse and keyboard aren't recognized at all, need to reboot
• Finicky connector between mouse and charger
• Ferocious battery use on keyboard.

I won't be buying another of these.

Those sound like problems with Bluetooth to me.  I had that with my PS3 controllers for a while, but seems to have cleared up now.

Well um, yeah. :grin:

But I'm using Logitech's bluetooth tranceiver and Logitech's bluetooth stack, so there's really only one source to blame.

Pretty much same experience i had with it, i gave the wireless keybard to my 2 year old and went out and bought a g15 (should have bought a g11).  The mouse though is hands down the best mouse i have owned and has held up well to 3 years of abuse (1 of it's lil glide pad/feet wore off though). 

Too bad they replaced the mx1000 mouse with that newfangled piece of crap that is 2x the size and seems to weigh half as much.  Maybe it's just me but my brain and hand don't seem to be evolving fast enough to keep up with the logitech pace for adding new scrollies and buttons.  I seem to recall a similar feeling when they replaced my easy to click middle button with a hard to click wheelie a decade ago so I guess I'll eventually evolve enough to make a thumb wheel indispensable

My school uses XPRINT for printing. I had an issue with it last year because of a non Dell install of XP being on my laptop which was fixed with a format and Dell install. I re-formatted again and used the same Dell CD and now XPRINT refuses to work again. Any ideas?

Be more specific.

This section needs elaboration.

My sub woofer has burned out or something. I am running XP (32) Creative sound card. I am a deaf man but I miss my lump ba dump ( deaf people like bass) . Please to be recommending some speakers with big sub woofers. Current system was surround sound and i think that a satellite with subwoffer is preferred.

I get the error "\\xprint - The network path was not found" when I type \\xprint in RUN.

I know nothing about xpring but how is Windows supposed to know what network resource \\xprint maps to? Is there some sort of directory service that maps that name to the actual device/resource? Or do you have to add an entry to your hosts or other network config file?

No idea, to be honest, but I'd assume it has to do with us being connected to the school network when it finds XPRINT. There's 0 documentation through the school, and google knows nothing of XPRINT.

Not sure how big you need to go, but I have this Klipsch 2.1 setup that seems to be pretty good bang for the buck (can be had for under 150).  In a relatively small room, I get a pretty impressive bass response.  It is only a stereo set, mind you. 

Are you saying that this works when you are on the school network but does not work when you are not?  I'd have you check the name to see how you are reaching it when it is working... possibly you are not resolving the name anymore and if you can determine the IP it might help.  After that, though, you need to see if you can actually hit the IP.  I'm not really a network guy, or a Windows guy, so I'm going to be of limited help.

I need a solid workstation for my wife.  My old gaming rig just crapped out. 

I'm thinking that putting one together isn't going to be that much cheaper than just buying a Dell, plus they get to deal with the headaches when she breaks it just by looking at it. 

Anyone know who is putting out solid, simple (cheap) workstations? 

I'd get a Dell for that, assuming she isn't doing the pee-pee dance for The Sims 3.

HP/Compaq.

Trippy, what's the story there? My experience with HP/Compaq in the past has been dubious. Have they cleaned up their act?

It's more that Dell has totally destroyed their once stellar support reputation by outsourcing it to India. I.e. they've fallen to the level of other companies like HP.

I've bought a number of HP desktops for the guys here at work over the last years, and have had no problems with them. I cannot comment on the quality of their service, since we haven't needed to use it.

Thanks, all.  I'll price check all three.

XPRINT error fixed! They have us register our laptops (my program is a 'mobile' program where we all have to have laptops) and because I originally bought my laptop before we actually had to they decided to undo my registration. Yay! :awesome_for_real:

What the hell is XPRINT?

Dual core Or core 2 duo?

Price seems to vary a good deal...but whats the difference?

Give some examples.

You don't know what XPRINT is?! ... Neither do I. Wiki has a cryptic entry though (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xprint)!

I have a strong suspicion that you are using some other XPRINT, partly because that link is for Xprint, not XPRINT, and also I really don't think you are using X11.

(http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31tpiMvNldL._SL500_.jpg)

It may depend on the level of support you're talking about. I have to replace failed Dell parts on a nearly weekly basis here at work, and their Dell Chat system works like a charm. It doesn't matter if the dude is Indian on the other end of the line, as long as I can explain why the component is truely dead and the machine is still under warranty, I get a replacement within 14-20 hours of the conversation.

Now, I've never had to make any tech support call where I had to actually troubleshoot an item, or had to have a replacement sent for a 'home' purchase I've made, so I can't speak to that, but at a business/government level, they are bar none the best I've ever worked with.

Ok, what i am doing is ditching the idea of upgrading the old DELL (RAMBUS!!!1!).

Now, i need a processor for my girls machine, but i am confused as to what Core 2 duo, and Dual core's differences are. I will link some from new egg.

Dual core (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010340343%201051707842%201050729314&name=Dual-Core) Search refinement.

Core 2 duo (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010340343%201051707842%201302820275%201050722265&name=Core%202%20Duo) search refinement.

Now, i realize Mhz are Mhz and some are just faster. BUT! some of the dual core CPU's are not that far behind in Mhz, but the price difference is large.

Now, what i need is a decent CPU for my girls machine, something that will allow her to play games like LOTRO and WAR...and what ever else, she doesn't ever have a want to play anything as intensive as oblivion ETC..

So, is dual core a good CPU for the price? or should i spend a little more for the Core 2 duo.

The Core 2 Duo's are still two cores, not 4.

The only difference I see is that they aren't making many Dual Core's anymore, and the Core 2 Duo's have 2mb cache instead of the 1mb cache that Dual Core's have.

edit: some of the Core 2 Duo's are 45nm instead of 65nm, but those are the really pricey ones (200+). The ones down at the bottom of $100 (say, $120) are about the same as the Dual Core's but with twice the cache.

Yeah, i know they are still two cores, hence my confusion, And what does the cache mean to me? (other than more is better)

More cache = more data processing at once, so if you are doing things with large files (ie: playing intensive games, editing videos, etc) then more is better. Personally, I would splurge and get at least one of the Core 2 Duos, if not one of the 45mn ones. For your gf the Dual Core is probably fine, as the real bottleneck is going to be the graphics card for LOTRO. A lot of the game stuff uses the video cards GPU instead of the CPU now days, so the CPU is becoming less important for video games.

It's always best to get the best you can afford, so you aren't upgrading as often. So I would start with what you want to spend then work backwards and see what you can afford. I start with the most important piece of hardware then move backwards:

Video Card
CPU
Mobo
Memory

So if you are doing a total upgrade and you want to spend $1000 or less, see what you can get in the first slot that's 1 or 2 slots below "The Best(tm)" then work it through and tweak as needed or you see deals.

YEah, thanks for the advice, but i have already done that part lol, right now i am trying to get the overall price down. As far as video card, i had already chosen This one. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130318) (I currently use this on my new machine i bought about 2 months ago)

I may just list the whole machine as a public wish list, and let you guys go over it to make sure i'm not buying stupid things. But, what i was thinking is, buy the dual core, and upgrade it later (the slot allows for it)


EDIT: I need to figure out how to make it public, lol.

Feel free to post the whole thing, at least one of us will be bored enough to go over it.  :grin:

"dual core" is a generic term meaning 2 CPU cores inside a single package. "Intel Pentium Dual-Core" is an Intel brand name for their low-end Core 2 Duo CPUs. Why they went back to using the Pentium name even though it's really a Core CPU I have no idea.

Isn't the i7 coming out in a month or 2 at a reasonable price? 

Depends on what you mean by reasonable and what Intel launches with.

So, your recommendation is... Get the core 2 duo over the dual core?

Depends on your budget. The "Pentium Dual-Core" is a Core 2 Duo (if you say "dual core" that's too ambiguous, you could be referring to an AMD CPU for all we know), it's just on the low-end.

Will it be up to the task of running the games i had listed? I know i can upgrade later, but if the chip is ass performance wise (Even if Hrtz match), then id rather spend the extra 40$ for the better performance.

I am choosing from the Newegg lists i posted.

Well it's hard to say since the usual sites typically don't bother benchmarking such low end CPUs, at least not in a way that's useful for comparison to other more expensive CPUs. Tom's probably has the most extensive CPU charts here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2008/benchmarks,16.html

but they don't benchmark the E2200 or the E4500 (i.e. the E2200 with 2 MB of cache). On the TH charts probably the closest equivalent to the E2200 is the Intel Core 2 Duo E6400.

It's also going to depend a lot of the resolution she's going to run the games at and the video card you are getting.

If it was up to me and I was building a budget system and I wasn't going to overclock and I had to get something right now I'd spend a little extra and go with the E7200 over the E2200.

OK, quick question :

Where do you start?

I have a recurring and really annoying bug that survived a window reinstall,  I'm guessing it's an hardware problem but I can't determine which part is broken.  I don't think it's my videocard, it's the first I returned but the bug stayed with a new card.  I'm thinking about switching my motherboard.

I can try to describe the problem for your amusement, it's a weird non repeatable bug but after 1 year of tolerating it I think I found a pattern.

My machine :
Motherboard : M2N-SLI deluxe
CPU : AMD Atlhon 64 x2 dual core processor 4200+
RAM : 2,21 GHz, 2 GB
videocard : nvidia geforce 7900 GT/GTO

The bug/problem :

Videoflash image freeze when I watch a movie, it unfreeze if I right click anywhere on the screen, the whole screen goes black for 1sec and the video continue like nothing happenned.

I think I freeze too much when I play videogame. I get tons of crash to desktop in spore, complete crash in bioshock, complete crash in Team fortress.  The weirdest part is when I reboot my computer after a complete crash, I get an infinite loading screen for window, starting in safe mode doesn't work.  Sometime I get a : can't find disk error press ctrl + alt + del.  If I wait 5 min before I restart, everything is fine again...  I think I have decent cooling, my case is top notch.
An other weird part is that a game only run normally the first time, if I close it I have to restart window before I play it again or I get glitches and a flickering screen in game.

I tried to get some solutions from random google question but nothing work.  I haven't even found a single thing talking about the videoflash problem.


What would you do?  Is it worth the bother of changing my motherboard has a blind shot in the dark?  Any suggestion?  This kind of problem will probably cost more to fix by a professional than a new computer.

I've seen/heard many horror stories about the m2n-sli deluxe. Seems Asus never really got all the bugs out of the design. And the onboard sound appears to have a number of issues.

Check (a fingertip will work) heat on the heatsink on the mcp, and mosfets after it crashes. With the computer shut off but before it has time to cool. The cpu isn't the only thing that can cause heat problems.
Also check to see what voltage your memory requires, and how much you're providing to it. And run memtest86.

Hard to track down stuff like that. First thing I'd do is disable the onboard sound via the device manager.. see if that helps any. Also make sure you have updated drivers, etc. Voltage to memory is also important, especially if you have cheap memory.

Might be worth it to buy a new mobo and pay attention to the return policy. You could try a new one see if it helps after running some stuff hard (TF2, etc) and return it if it doesn't.

Might try a BIOS flash, but that should come after other ideas and before "buy a new mobo".

I flashed my bios today, it said it couldn't complete the flash but all the hardware autodetected after a reboot and the updater is now telling me I have the new  version.  I'm not seeing any noticeable change.

With the setting I posted above, anyone could recommend a stable motherboard?  Throw in the price tag if you can, I'll google it otherwise.

I haven't done any hardware stuff beside changing a videocard and adding some ram.  I'm guessing I should go to a computer store and pay for an install?


It's too bad Vista is such a POS.  I was waiting on it to double the ram and fix my problem.  That would have been easy, cheap and in my skill range.

A friend of mine was having weird problems with his computer (random shutdowns and weirdness when playing games) that was fixed (so far) by replacing his memory modules with better quality sticks rather than bargain basement ones. Might be something to try, it would be pretty cheap to buy a new set of mem.

Thx. Worth a try, and I can return them if it doesn't work.  It might be a RAM problem since a memory optimizer program has a direct impact on my problems.  Any suggestion?

what is this 'memory optimizer' program? That sounds wonky to start with. I also vote for ram, or video memory. How many sticks of ram do you have in the board? Use one, run memtest86 on a bootable CD, then if that passes, swap it out and use the other.

this one (http://pc-system-utilities-software-review.toptenreviews.com/advanced-system-optimizer-review.html)
I didn't reinstall it after my window reinstall, the impact wasn't good enough.  It did prevent my from having to right click my mouse everytime videoflash bug.

I'll try that test memtest86, looks hard to do.

not really. its a sinch.

http://www.memtest86.com/download.html

download ISO. Burn ISO to blank CD. Boot to CD. Run test. Buncha lines start flowing as it runs some test. If the bottom 2/3rds of the screen fill up with screaming red columns of numbers, your memory is kaput. Most bad memory sticks only take a minute to discover, if not seconds. Rarely, memory problems are more subtle and take hours for memtest86 to discover.

I have always had good luck with ASUS mobos and I have stuck with them for a few years, so I don't know.  If you memory test comes clean, I'd still suggest ASUS.  If you need new RAM, the recommendation is always Crucial.

I've been lucky enough to recieve a small bit of money recently so I can now most likely get a new PC like I had been planning to for a while. The last time I looked about and got some advice here was a few of months ago from memory. I'll be looking to get the PC before the end of October (end of Uni and Fallout 3) and was wondering if much has changed recently and if waiting a few more weeks would have any influence on price and the like.

My plans back in early July looked like this: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=12985.msg473043#msg473043

Prices don't seem to have changed much since then here in Australia. I can probably spend a little bit more if it represents significantly better value for money.

Depends if you want to wait for Nehalem.

Ok, so I ran the test, my memory is perfect...  I did both stick at once.  I figured out I could do one at a time if I had any error.  I hope it's a valid reasoning.

I'm reinstalling again, I'll try it with out any window update. 

All I could see is late 2008, 4thQ 2008 and such. Which I assume means it won't be here in Australia within the next couple of months. So I guess I'll just go for the same as earlier.

Last I read it'll be available sometime in October. Dunno what sort of delay that translates into for Australia.

[emphasis mine]
It's not. At the very least, remove your sticks and reverse the order to retest. And passing Memtest86 doesn't mean your memory is good, it just means it passed memtest86.

Mind explaining rather than proclaiming from on high? Memtest86 sends data to all memory areas on a stick, in various patterns that cover just about every which way an OS reads and writes to memory blocks. I'm prepared to hear of a way that an OS taxes memory in a way that memtest86 can't reproduce within reason.

From the FAQ:

Basically the longer you run memtest with the widest variety of tests and get no errors you asymptotically approach 100% certainity that your memory modules have no defects but you can never be 100% certain of that fact just from running memtest itself since memtest itself does not exactly simulate your machine under (ab)normal working conditions.

Ya, I hear you, but really, what are the odds of the exact part of memory that's broken is precisely the part that holds the bios/cpu data?  It also is probably a very very small amount of memory space to boot.

I mean, I guess everything is possible. I've seen file structures on a hard disk trashed and made to look like failing clusters when all that was going on was a failing block of video ram on a card that was mangling the living ell out of the data sent back to the GPU, which was in turn writing borked data to the disk.

I've seen an entire network multicast in Ghostcast server server crawl to 50 MB/min simply because some idiot (me) used a Sun network cable instead of a generic Cat5 cable on an entirely unrelated computer that happened to be plugged into one of the 8 switches in the network.

computers r hard mang

If you have two sticks you can swap them around to handle the BIOS/memory being used issue. The bigger uncertainity is this:
E.g. can you be certain that memtest replicates every timing condition in real-world operation?

While I don't doubt for a moment that there are occasionally memory defects that only show when the sticks get to x temperature and the specific bad chip get hit with a specific pattern coming from a very specific type of data stream requireing a timing response that memtest86 can't duplicate, I would have to guess that they have to be rare.

At this stage, in relation to Aez problem, I would go back to Rattan's original suspicions about the motherboard. I'd check BIOS updates, and turn off on-board sound altogether. I would also perhaps check to see if there are any GPU ROM updates.

In a complete WTF outcome, simply removing and then putting back my RAM solved 90% of my problems...I didn't even switched them.  I hadn't moved them since I got the computer from the store.

WTF?

Dust, corrosion, electromagnetic migration, elves.

Could be any of those. Reseating/reconnecting is never a bad idea when troubleshooting.

Reseating sometimes is all you need.  Mazel tov!

So I was looking at the rewards points on my credit card, and realized I had enough points to get an HD TV and a PS3, and still have points over. So the TV's I'm looking at are small (30"). Conventional wisdom seems to be that getting 780p is fine for that size - that you can't tell the difference between that and 1080. But I'm really more interested in whether there is a downside to having that TV resolution for hookup to a 360 or PS3. I'm sure there are people here who have very strong opinions on this matter. :why_so_serious:

I dare you to get a 780p tv. On that note, whoever says the difference between 1080p and 780p (or even 720p  :why_so_serious:) is noticeable, period.

Yeah, here I'm sitting in an airport bored out of my skull and taking snark from schild.  :awesome_for_real:

Anyway, had trouble parsing that last sentence - you're saying 720p is fine for connecting to a 360?

I'm saying given the current prices of TV and the fact this is costing you FAKE MAGIC MONEY, get a 1080p tv if they offer it. There is a difference, it's noticeable and the only people that say there isn't have only seen shitty 1080p tvs.

What TVs are they offering?

I think at smaller sizes (up to 32") there's not a huge difference between the 720p and 1080p sets, but it is noticeable. It becomes dramatic at about 40" for me.

I'd get a 1080p just for clearest image on bluray, which is still the primary use of my ps3.

I think the people saying there isn't much difference are arriving at their conclusion by comparing 720 media upscaled to 1080 to 1080 media played at 1080.  The results there are much closer in quality than plopping a 40" 1080 set down next to a 40" 720 set and making the comparison.

I've been having a problem with my USB ports lately. My motherboard is an old ASUS P4P800s with USB 2.0 ports. In the device manager it shows 4 USB 1 ports and a fifth USB 2.0 port - and this is apparently normal.  All of the ports are supposed to be fast even though some show as the older type.

Unfortunately, about 1/2 the time when I stick a memory stick reader in I get a message saying the USB port is slow and I should use a different port. Sometimes if I uninstall and detect the ports again it fixes itself, sometimes it takes a reboot. Sometimes both.

Has anyone had this problem and found a real fix for it so I don't have to dick around anymore?

uhm, I don't presume buying a new motherboard, cpu and ram (and probably video card) is an option, is it? Cuz that's some ancient hardware, bro.

As to how to fix that, I'd see if the motherboard manufacturer's site has any BIOS updates. It may be a known problem with the board.

Well, it works and so far it's let me play every game that I want to play. There's just no justification for an upgrade until then.

You could try sticking a powered USB 2.0 hub on the USB 2.0 port if you don't mind using up the extra electricity. I'm not sure a non-powered one would be enough to keep the 5th slot always in 2.0 mode but you could try that first if you can get one from a  place that has a good return policy.

The one I was looking at is a Samsung LN32A450 (http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/detail.do?group=televisions&type=televisions&subtype=lcdtv&model_cd=LN32A450C1DXZA). They do offer 1080p's, but they're much bigger TV's (and won't fit in the space we have), and are also double the cost.

You didn't mention that you'd have to put money towards a 1080p tv or that you had limited space. >_>

I have a slightly older version of that TV, it's a great set. Not too big but not at all small. Crisp pictures, looks awesome with DirecTV HD. Get a Harmony remote to go with it. :)

OK! it finally posted as public.

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=13007347

Thoughts, comments, recommendations ETC....

Get a DVD burner. Make sure you get a fan for hard drive cage -- that rotated cage really sucks for air flow. For power supply I would recommend something more along the lines of this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817103940

uhm...pink?

fine. destroy my hopes that Mr. Bloodworth was secretly female, bringing our total count of women on this board to, uhm, what, 4? 5?

<shakes fist>

That build is pretty close to my current setup.  I've been able to play everything I've wanted with it and generally at max settings.

Seems i need to choose a new Vid card, as that one is out of stock. I don't pay attention enough to know if its been discontinued or if they are just out. Maybe i can find a cheaper one =)

Seven regulars and semi-regulars, if I'm not forgetting anyone, plus another half-dozen or so less frequent posters.

We can double that once some daughters get old enough to post here.  (Could be many more, but I'm assuming any sensible parent will be blocking the f13 domain until they're like, thirty.)

children historically will not touch a parent's hobby with a ten foot pole, on account of how uncool it is. F13 daughters will in all likelihood end up in the SA forum, or maybe even FoH.

I will not cyber with you, stop PMing me!





 :why_so_serious:


Fan for hard drive cage?

How about this one? Seems to just take a HD bay.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835119010

Call it a vice instead of a hobby then warn them never to come here, they will register in droves.

Been having some issues with one of my harddrive partitions recently.

It is slow transferring files internally on the drive, and PC performance often begins to chug during intensive file activity on the drive.  For example, it took me almost 3 hours to run the installer for the current WoW patch, and the installer failed after that, where as after i copied the WoW directory to a partition on a different drive everything went smoothly, and install was done in less then 20 minutes.

Also, after checking the system log, I noticed that i am getting a large amount of the following entry, flagged as a "Warning":

'An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.'

Wondering if anyone with experience in HD diagnostics might be able to tell me if this is an indication of imminent harddisk failure, or if it might be related to drivers, or possibly just that specific partition.  It only seems to occur on that partition.

If you need any other info, let me know what to look for and i will dig it up.

Get a utility that can display the SMART stats on your hard drives.

What's the actual Error ID reported in the log?

Do you have an anti-virus program running?

How much RAM do you have on your machine?

What's the Page File Usage history like on your machine?

Where's the Page File located?

Is it a fixed size or allowed to dynamically adjust itself?

I've got a new one.

AVG (free, 8.0) won't update on this PC any more. It connects fine, pops up box with update details, I click "update" and it starts, then receives 0 bytes from the update server. If I go to the AVG webpage and try to manually download the updates the same thing happens - firefox just won't get a single byte from their servers.

All 5 of the other PC's and laptops in this house update fine. What I've been doing is manually downloading the updates on PC no.2 and putting them on the NAS and then updating this PC from there, but that's a pain in the arse with daily updates.

I've tried disabling my firewall (Sunbelt personal one) and I've looked in my hosts file but that's as far as my technical knowledge gets. I've searched t'web but not come up with anything.

Anyone got any ideas?

Do an nslookup and tracert on the machine that's working and not working and compare.

If they are the same download something like wget or curl and try to grab the download URL from the command prompt.

OK, they're different!

PC that works:

PC that doesn't work:

What the hell is going on? Some kind of DNS issue?

I'll suggest you have all of your machines use the same DNS server, preferably the one that the working machine is using.

Personally I use OpenDNS instead of my ISP DNS, but I cannot recall why I switched.

How do I make that happen? I've never knowingly dicked about with DNS settings on any of them and don't really understand why they seem to be using different ones!

On the PC you can change DNS settings in the TCP/IP properties for your ethernet connection.  You will have a similar section on your router, if you are using one.  I'm not at home right now, but I believe my setup is for my router to use the OpenDNS IPs and my PC does also, but I might have my router doing DNS for my PC.  Can't recall.  In your case, though, I'd check Network Connections -> right-click your ethernet -> Properties, choose TCP/IP, click Properties, etc.

I'm configuring a new laptop.

Any advantage or trinkets that make it worth going for Vista 64 over the 32 bit version?

It's 64-bit, that's enough of a trinket if you ask me.

Cool, thanks, will go and try that next time I can get upstairs.

Fixed! Somehow my main PC's TCP/IP had a specific IP and DNS set, when I set them back to "Obtain automatically" and set my router to OpenDNS it all started working fine. No idea how or why this PC had those settings, I have no memory of doing that.

Many thanks guys :)

Having a static IP on your PC isn't a bad thing, it was just your DNS settings.  I set a static IP on my PC so I can do port-forwarding to it, and also so I could give it a name in my wife's hosts file so she could more easily map the shared drive.

Yeah.  It's entirely possible after you had set it, your provider changed their DNS address, or where ever you had it set to did.

This is probably why I went with OpenDNS.  Likely avoided some fun times when AT+T bought BellSouth with that decision.

Any big provider really.  I've had all my ISPs change at least once or twice over the course of my service with them due to their own internal network upgrades.

I want to tack semicolons to the end of my lines using Perl.

In Perl, s/$/;/g  behaves oddly.  I get expected results from s/a/;/g but the end-of-line match is being a pain and it seems to substitute ;\n; instead of just ;.  Anyone have any experience with this so I can shortcut my learning experience?

Need to see your code. Best guess at this point is you are adding an "\n" in a print somewhere but not chomp'ing before hand or your input file has screwy line endings.

Contrary to popular belief the "$" metacharacter in Perl regular expressions does not signify "end of line" -- it means "end of string". Depending on how you've slurped up the file you are trying to edit this may or may not be what you want. If you really want $ to mean end-of-line you can use the "m" flag.

Something like this should work if you are dealing with standard Unix text files:

Pertinent code:

I precompile the matching regex using qr//, so for $ the var $orig is (?-xism:$) instead of just a literal $, so it should do what I want.  However since it behaves perfectly well when using something other than $, I need to look into that bit.  I might try to manually deal with the newlines and see if that helps.  I'd rather not write a special case for this situation since new situations could come along that I have not thought of.

What is $new set to? You aren't chomping anything either. Are you getting an extra "\n" at the end of your lines? There's also "\z" that can be used to match end of string instead of $, if you think that's messing things up.

Trippy, you gave me the tipoff since the fix was

 :drill:

EDIT for dorkiness:  $new is, in this case, a ;.  The trouble was, indeed, my misuse of $ in this case, or just something funky with <> that I never noticed before.  The input file is a regular file with no embedded newlines, so... it works now so I'm having a hard time being interested.

I'm worried about malware for the home.  We run XP boxes with AVG and MSFT security panel on (fw and antivirus).  I also occassionally put up ZoneAlarm.  Any recommendations for good malware detectors?

The safest thing to do is to turn your normal user account into a non-admin account. That way the malware can't (usually) install anything even if you somehow inadverently click on something you shouldn't have in your browser.

I don't know anything about the "real time" protection some of these products provide.

I just had to deal with my dad's computer getting a massive malware infection. The online scanner from MS at http://onecare.live.com is remarkably good. It's far far better than that Windows Defender piece of crap, though it does run quite slowly. It even runs properly when booted into Safe Mode with networking turned on.

Unfortunately no single program can detect everything out there so you end up having to run a bunch of different programs and pray that they've found everything important. I also used Sophos, the online scanner from Panda, AVG, and some other ones.

So.  I lost a hard drive this morning.  Came in and the computer wouldn't boot because the hard drive is making a funny clicking noise.  Turns out it won't boot as long as it is plugged in.  Not *overly* a problem, it was just the music drive with 10 years of MP3s (5% I don't have CDs for anymore due to attrition).  I had all of the music on several iPods, so it's not like the data is gone, just going to be a major pain the ass to rename 10,000 files from AFDD.mp3 and whatnot (ID3 info all intact).

I did notice that this is a Western Digital drive, of which I have had multiple people ask me about recovery on over the past few years.  Is there anything to be done about said drive once it is borked without shelling out to those expensive data recovery centers?  I don't think so, but it's been about 5 years since I was in the IT field and pickings were slim then on options.  Is there something about WD that means they have higher failures?  All of the drives have been of varying size and the failure is the same - spins, kind of, then clicking every other second or so.  WD's site is pretty much no help here.

If it's a mechanical problem you are basically boned without taking the platters out and putting them into another working casing. If it's a bad sector problem there are utilities that may be able to read some of stuff off of the drive.
 
No.

Thanks Trippy, it was Windows Defender I was looking at.  Sorry Selby.

I figured not, but listening to people bitch about one brand or another (especially some of the lesser known names) made me wonder the question.

Now the next question is does anyone know of a file renaming program\ID3 library for MP3s or do I get to rename all the files by hand?  All of the ID3 tag info is there, so if I can read that I can rename the file to whatever I want and restore a directory structure that is useful to me.

I use TagScanner for that sort of thing.

There is always the standbys of Ad Aware and Spybot.  If I think a machine has something, I like to run several as each one seems to catch something the others don't.

Spybot also has TeaTimer for constant protection, but it's annoying as hell as every change in the registry pops up a dialog box.  Due to Microsoft's genius, there are a lot of legitimate changes happening there.

(http://www.housemd-guide.com/graphics/house_board.jpg)

The symptoms:

After upgrading my hard drive to a SATA, my IDE DVD Rom tends to give up the ghost.
I used to think it was a hardware problem, either with the drive or the cable, but this is now happening to my external RW CD Rom when I try to plug it in.

The hard drive indicator light and the drive light will come on and stay on. This is a very helpful  :uhrr: indicator as to when it's on the fritz.

Whenever I tinker with it, messing with drivers or system settings or the master/slave switch on the drive itself, it will go back to normal and play nice for a few hours or a few days. And then the problem comes back.

I'm very sadf, especially since most games have to be in the drive to play. *Insert snarky DRM complaint here*

I'm running good ole Windows XP SP3 on a M2A-VM motherboard system.

If this is your time you've used your SATA controller check for MB BIOS updates, check for IRQ conflicts, and try some of the other SATA ports on the MB.

Also, uninstall your IDE controllers and let them be reinstalled at reboot. I've seen this problem before with Dell Optiplexes that have both IDE and Sata. Under Device Manager, the entries you're looking for are the Primary IDE Channel, the Secondary IDE Channel, and the Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller.

Well one would assume your external CD-ROM drive is USB, so both your IDE and USB drives go on the fritz which you can identify by the HDD indicator light (the little led on your case I assume) being constantly on.

Have you tried to plug in your external while your internal was unplugged?  If you have then we know that it isn't anything to do with the internal drive.

Is your old IDE hard drive still hooked up?  If so you might be taxing your power supply which could cause all sorts of odd problems, though chances are small an extra drive pushed it over the edge.

Updated BIOS today. No effect.

I couldn't... identify where the IRQ settings are. The CMOS set up screen shows PCI plug & play IRQ's, but the drives are startup stuff. Maybe I'm reading it wrong?

Have tried plug 4 and plug 1 for the SATA HD. No change.

Just now tried uninstalling the IDE controllers and letting them reinstall on bootup. Looked good until I put a CD in the drive... at which point the drive failed.

Old HD is no longer in the computer. (Did a mirror of the old drive's contents when I installed it, and then removed the old drive.)

Will try unplugging the internal and using the external only later. My last fix took two whole days to fail though. So it can take some time to troubleshoot.  :sad_panda:

P.S. The drive lights symptom usually only happens after Windows loads up. I mean, when it's happening it never takes effect until Windows has loaded.  When the problem is happening, I can't even open the drive to insert/remove a disk. But I can open the disk tray before Windows loads.

Do you have the StarForce?

Or a dvd copying program such as CloneDVD or some such? Sometimes those programs will do a CD/DVD device mount (virtual mount) that can lock up your drive.

Also, when the drive fails, do you get any exclamation marks or Xs in the Device Manager? Or does it just suddenly poof?

Poof. It disappears from the drive manager altogether.

I don't think I have any DRM like Starforce. And I don't have any DvD copying stuff.

I did do another pass with uninstalling the IDE controller. Took both the ATI IDE controller and the dual channel controller out, and then rebooted. It's being good again (played some Guitar Hero 3) will give it a while and see if the problem returns.

I figured if you installed something on purpose, you'd have checked it out, like Daemon Tools.  I'm left thinking it must be malware.

First check the device manager for the drive controllers and look at their resources. Easy way is to select View -> Resources by Type -> IRQ. Your ATA controllers should all be on separate IRQs and they also shouldn't overlap with your USB controllers. If there is a conflict there you'll have to fiddle with your BIOS to turn off auto-assignment of IRQs and manually reassign them.

Got another failure tonight.

Pictures!

(http://www.angelfire.com/ak4/ratman/IRQ.jpg)

I see the primary and secondary IDE channels on IRQs 14 and 15, yes?
I see a lot of the USB host controller sharing IRQs all over the place. ?

One other thing I did is get a new case. It has two USB ports on the front, in addition to the USB ports on the motherboard. I connected the front ports up for game controllers.

I'm not familiar with the AMD 690G chipset but it looks like your computer thinks your SATA ports are acting as standard IDE. I.e. the "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller" entry does not look right and your SATA drive is probably being accessed in legacy parallel IDE mode and that may be causing your problem.

See here for any example (not saying this solution will work for you but this is an indication of the problem):

http://gammu.org/wiki/index.php?title=HydePark:Nx6325#SATA

The plot sickens.

I did some googling on Trippy's last post. Most likely I installed the drive in IDE mode. I found a post on a tech board about converting it over to AHCI mode.


I'm hoping I can create the driver floppies (need to throw a floppy drive in the computer, I haven't needed one until now) change the hard drive to AHCI mode and do a repair install of Windows XP and not have to do a clean install.

Thoughts?

Sure.

Question for Trippy:

Is the ISA designation left over from back in the day when we had ISA slots, or does it stand for something else now? Also, how would one go about changing that? Do you manually assign a PCI IRQ to the device in question, or can you do so via Windows managed IRQ assignment? I mean, I know its possible to switch the assignment from automatic (the defualt) to manual, and monkey around with the devices IRQ numbers, but which is the better way?

Ratman, I think you may be able to change how Windows identifies your hard drives by upgrading the drivers for them from IDE to AHCI via a reinstallation of HD's drivers. To quote Trippy's link:




Note, this is for a specific ACHI controller, namely the one from Silicon Image, but the drivers for your particular controller should be out there too. However, it may be more complicated, since it seems that there needs to be some modification for the .inf file, and who knows what it would be for your particular device.

I just tend to shy away from rebuilding the OS. It leaves a lot of orphaned registry entries that clog systems, and you have to re-register windows update once or twice to get all your patches up to snuff. You will also have to reinstall IE7 if you're using an install disk that doesn't include it.

The former. It's mostly legacy now and there's an ISA IRQ<->PCI IRQ handler within the PCI controller that handles converting between ISA-style interrupts and PCI ones.

Don't know which is the "better" way. If I had to do it I would muck with the BIOS first, but that's just me.

Yep. That's why I posted for opinions before doing it. I'm in no huge hurry, so I'll poke around some more and see if I can just find the driver tweakage info somewhere.

*Edit to add*

I got the AHCI drivers from the CD (had to use Slyfeind's computer to access the CD, grrr.) ahcix86
Had no luck finding anyone who's tweaked the drivers for a hot swap to AHCI mode though.

Man. I'd settle for IDE emulation mode, if it weren't for the conflict problem.

It might be worth installing the drivers (as in, run the installer, even if the drivers do not 'attatch' to anything yet), then uninstall the SATA drivers and rebooting. Maybe they will automatically be reassigned to a new IRQ and take up the new drivers (now available in /system32). I've seen stranger things happen.

Another way maybe would be to delete the IDE controllers rather than simply uninstall the drivers. However, this may also require registry deletions so that the change is really forced, rather than simply a reassignment process. This gets into nutty territory, tho, and I probably not do it myself without an image to restore to in the event of complete OS vaporization.

There was no install or setup. Just raw drivers.

Well, I found a thread

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831&page=4

One guy in this thread just changed his ATI Dual Channel drivers and bing! Mine wouldn't take the AHCI driver. :(

Another fellow claims to have followed the instructions but changed the registry edit file for an Asus with the ATI SB600 chipset (the same one on my motherboard) That seems like the ticket, but I'm wondering what I have to change between his registry edit and my system. (using the 32 instead of 64 is obvious, but what else is different?

I'm concerned I'm getting in over my head here.

I finally bought the rest of the parts to upgrade the two computers I have, was wondering if you all think I could put together a cheap machine that runs CoX and WoW for a couple of people I know.  Cheap as in less than $500 if possible.  I have cases and dvd players, but the rest I'm researching.  Oh, it would be good stable stuff that will last, not something that requires a lot of fiddling with.

Okay I'm confused. Did you download the RAID/AHCI drivers from here?:

http://support.asus.com/download/download.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=M2A-VM

When I look inside the archive I see setup programs for the drivers.

Well thanks to the Microsoft Tax, it's going to be a stretch at $500 a piece but it's doable.

From Newegg:

$_59.99  AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor Model ADO5000DOBOX - Retail
$_69.99  BIOSTAR TForce TF720 A2+ AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA nForce 720a ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
$_64.99  EVGA 512-P3-N954-TR GeForce 9500 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail
$_36.99  CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-6400 - Retail
$_59.99  Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
$_99.99  Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit English for System Builders 1pk DSP OEI DVD - OEM

$391.94  SUBTOTAL

That leaves you $100 for a monitor, if needed, and other misc. items like mouse and keyboard.

These are the drivers that came with the mobo CD. I did download the AHCI/RAID stuff from Asus, and the setup programs say "Installation Failed" when I try to run them.

Ah, okay :ye_gods: :uhrr:

Does the system Event Viewer utility show anything after it fails?

Nothing that I can tell.

One has to assumed the installation failed because the devices (the hard drives) are already happily ensconced in their own PATA settings.

My next step would be to go into BIOS and reassign those two PATA IRQs in ISA mode to the higher end PCI IRQs. Change PRimary and Secondary IDE from 14 and 15 ISA IRQ to PCI 23 and 24. Worse comes to worst, you can go back into BIOS and change them back.

No that doesn't make sense because you would never be able to install ACHI drivers under XP if that was the case.

No you don't want to do that either. 14 and 15 are the proper IRQs for the parallel IDE controller.

But I thought the whole issue was that you didn't want them in Parallel IDE drives, but in SATA ones, which would mean higher, unused IRQs? Maybe I lost the thread of the arguement.

The "Primary" IDE controllers at 14 and 15 are, in fact, parallel IDE controllers (that's the standard IRQs for them). It's the hard drive controller at IRQ 22 that I believe is the issue. It's not showing up as an SATA controller when in fact that's what it is. The IRQ assignment itself is fine cause it's not being shared by anything.

Gocha, I got confused when I saw 14 and 15 assigned to Primary and Secondary IDE, but also saw IRQ 22 assigned to that other IDE controller, which I though somehow was tied to the the other two, and hence that was the source of the problem. If I understand it correctly, 14 and 15 are just fine, since they are the ones actually tied to the CD rom drive that's failing.

So now, if I understand this correctly, the working theory is that by having 22 assigned as an IDE controller, its mucking up the actual IDE controllers at 14 and 15. By chancing 22 to an actual SATA controller, rather than IDE, it would stop gumming up the devices at 14 and 15.

No. My current hypothesis is that the fact that the SATA drive is currently running in PATA-emulation mode (cause the SATA controller is running in that mode) is somehow mucking up the other drives in his computer. There's no IRQ issue that I can see.

That's what I was saying, just using IRQs as lables to differentiate between the actual IDE drive, the CD rom, and the SATA drive, currently assigned to IRQ 22 and using a PATA emulation (And I do understand now that IRQ assignment has nothing to do with the problem)

The drives on my machine:

1 SATA hard drive running in IDE emulation mode.
1 IDE DVD Rom running correctly in IDE mode.

In case you thought I might have any other drives. The external RW drive is a USB guy, and is usually not plugged in unless I'm burning CDs. And I don't even have a floppy drive installed ATM.

I would be perfectly fine keeping the SATA drive in IDE mode. It's the possible conflict that's the issue.

It's possible to install the SATA drivers at OS install. Since I put the drive in IDE mode when installing, no SATA controllers or drivers are installed.

This is what Engels wrote:

You have a chicken and egg problem cause you have to turn on and off PATA emulation mode in the BIOS. But you can't boot off an AHCI controller (i.e. emulation mode turned off) and drive unless Windows has a driver for it. If you can't install AHCI drivers "after the fact" (i.e. other than slipstreaming them at OS install time) then none of the solutions you've been reading with installing drivers "manually" or using a setup program would work at all.

Ah. I was under the impression that these guys had managed to load the drivers somehow during the registry tweak and enable AHCI mode after the fact.

So I'm probably looking at a fresh install or somehow resolving the conflict with the SATA in IDE mode then?

No you have it backwards. I'm *disagreeing* with Engels ("No that doesn't make sense"). If he's right then you couldn't install AHCI drivers after the fact. I think he's wrong and that you can.

I think it has to be possible as well, but I am not expert enough to know how. One would have hoped that that installer would have done the trick, but I bet the installer expects you to have installed the OS using the f6 option of loading the drivers at installation time, and the installer only 'updates' or puts a few packaged software bundles around it.

I don't know if you've tried this, but listing the Devices by type, can you right-click 'update driver' and then go through a manual installation where you navigate to the folder containing the unpacked driver files, and select the correct .inf file? Do the 'Don't search, I will chose the driver to install' option, then select 'Have Disk', which lets you browse directories for the specific file.

I think I may have been misunderstood when I said earlier that the 'drivers are happily ensconced in their IDE emulation role'. Its not that one can't change this, but that Windows may not see that you're trying to change the very type of drive, and hence fails. Windows may have to be forced to accept the entirely different hardware profile by doing it manually. It may even send out large warnings about how this isn't the driver required.

I'd be hesitant to do it, however, without a backup of necessary data, since it may make your OS unbootable.

Yeah, tried that. It fails to load the drivers.


Yep. Looks like I might have to live with it until I get fed up and then I'll just do a complete reinstall of the OS instead of doing it half-assed and possibly just creating more problems.

Well, thanks for the input guys. And if anyone has any bright ideas about resolving the IDE conflict itself, lemme know.

*Edit for update*

I installed the most recent southbridge chip drivers from ATI today, and it's held up to some decent stress testing. Swapping games out, rebooting, etc. So far so good.

Still no conflicts. If it makes it to tomorrow, I'm going to call it fixed.  :grin:

Just curious; when you updated the southbridge drivers, did it change how the PCI controllers are listed? Did it change them from parallel emulation to something else?

I was going to say "No", but I took another look just now, and it did make one change. My floppy drive (IRQ 6) is no longer listed.
(Which is correct, as I have never had a floppy in this computer.)

Ok so here's a (possibly) quick question. The house I'm living in right now has a wireless network set up on a Thomson TG585 v7 with WEP security and I'm having problems connecting to it from my desktop. Specifically it's not assigning an IP address, I also can't access the router setup through it. I've got a Linksys WUSB54G adaptor and I've tried repairing the connection, messing with the settings (specifically trying to set a static IP address on the computer which didn't help).

Basically it seems my computer can see the router but the router can't see it, presently connected fine with my laptop. What's weird is that I had this problem before with it using the Linksys Monitor to connect and when I switche over to XP's default program it worked fine. Had been for a couple of weeks then yesterday it went poof again. I've not changed any settings it just suddenly decided my computer was invisible again. Any ideas? I've got something of a physical limitation in the if I want to connect it to the router physically I need to take my desktop down two floors or get a very long cable. I'd rather not do that unless absolutely necessary.

You probably already covered this, but are you able to connect to any other wireless network with that computer? I ask because sometimes there's a battle between the wireless card software provided by the manufacturer and the Windows software, and switching between them can sometimes 'unclog' the problem.

I'v tried switchin back and forth, doesn't seem to make any difference. I've also tried connecting in Ubuntu on the same machine that didn't work either but wireless networking in Ubuntu is dodgy anyway (as I've heard) so I'm not sure what that shows. But yeah, same problem using Windows or the Linksys program.

I've had some sketchy experiences with wireless on both my router and my dsl modem. I've found that redoing the WEP (to exactly what you had before, if you like) can unclog it too. My particular trouble has to do with my iPhone at home rather than a computer, but in most cases, its the router that's munging things up, not the computer.

Bleh, that will involve talking to whoever set it up. I don't know the other people I'm living with that well, guess it's an excuse for another awkward 5 minute chat where I get to know some of them a little more.

you don't have the admin password to the router? cuz the IP should be pretty easy to get, since chances are its just your default gateway. That is, unless, you have another router in between. But even then, looking at your router you should be able to see the forward looking IP the router gets from the uhm, neighbor's router.

One other thing you could check before bugging the neighbors is seeing what protocol the laptop is using, a/b/g/n etc. See if you can force your desktop to use the specific protocol the laptop is using.

On checking, I've got admin access to the router, little hesitant to play around with it right now since there seem to be a couple of other people on it but I guess I'll try and see if I can mess about tomorrow. Looking at the setting though there doesn't seem to be anything that would block my desktop from connecting. The router's set to b/g and I've got a g adapter. I also tried setting the desktop IP, DNS, etc. to the settings the laptop was using, it made Windows happy that everything was fine but the router wasn't buying it.

Looking at the router's setup page, my PC claims to be connected to the wireless network but the router clearly doesn't see it at all, it's not listed under connected devices.

is the router running mac filtering,

Nope, my laptop can connect without issue and my desktop did connect for about two weeks. I've tried accessing and pinging the router for shits and giggles with the desktop (in limited connectivity mode) and cannot access it, disabled firewalls, etc. Tried reinstalling the software for my adapter but that didn't help. The fact that it did work for a couple of weeks and then stopped without me doing anything makes me feel it's unlikely to be on my end (also Engel's opinion for this sort of problem generally).

So seeing as the settings before seemed to work and my desktop seems to be the only PC having issues connecting to it now an suggestions as to what settings I should flick around with that may help? I've also got a niggling worry that it may be some sort of clogging with mutiple programs trying to run the adapter since the Linksys adapter needs the linksys program to work at all and I could only connect before when I switched to Windows. It says the Linksys monitor is turned off, I just don't know if I trust it.

If you think it might be running, you can check for sure with Process Explorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx).

So according to processor explorer it's definitely still running but isn't taking up any CPU resources when windows tries to connect. Killing it however kills the connection entirely so it's obviously doing something however it doesn't seem possible to run this wireless adapter without it and it isn't able to connect to the router itself.

Is it possible I'm seeing some problem between the windows wireless and Linksys monitor in terms of talking to the router? Seems weird that it would work and then just stop but seems like it could make sense. Any ideas on how I could test this or better yet ways of fixing it if it's the case (would rather not just buy a new network adapter except as a last resort)

There is a setting somewhere for having windows manage the connection.  You could try turning that off and letting just the Linksys app run or vice-versa.

I've had similar issues before but the Windows driver has always been sufficient for running the connection so I just kill the vendor app and take take it out of the startup routine.

Ok I've managed to solve it. The adapter wouldn't work at all without the vendor program running so I nuked it from orbit, had to go and find the install CD again since windows wouldn't recognise the drivers I'd downloaded for it. Put the CD in without installing and then plugged the adapter and let XP handle everything, seems to have taken care of it. Thanks to everyone for chipping in with what turned out to be a simple fix that only took me a whole day to think of.

Trying to find an easy to fix something really dumb in an Excel sheet. Someone at work designed a report that includes nifty little checkmarks and X's.
The report is online, and I needed a copy of the data, so I cust and pasted the whole thing in to Excel. Problem is, it put every one of those checks and x's in as a picture inside the cell. As a result, the whole sheet is slow as hell.

There doesn't appear to be any way to search for pictures in a cell, so I can't find/replace them to replace them .

Any ideas?

Select all, copy, Paste Special text only into a new excel sheet? No idea if that's feasible or if it will work though.

Yes copy from the web, "paste special"/text into excel then if you are lucky you might get the alt text for the images in the appropriate cells.  If that happens you can search in replace, if it doesn't then you lose all the information represented by the images. 

Alternatively if the online report was truly created in house you could nicely ask the person who did it if they can add an export to excel/csv feature.  Not sure what web tech was used for the report but exporting a csv is generally not that hard and how to do it is easily findable on the web.  I do this in php all the time.

That's about what I figured. The images don't register as even being in the cells, so paste special isn't going to work. I worked around it by trimming the sheet down to just Florida data, since I'll be using it at a Florida tradeshow and won't need any other states 95% of the time.

After nearly two weeks with no drive issues, the problem resurfaced this morning. I am beginning to suspect DRM on Hellgate: London is the culprit.

Which is sort of ironic.

If by ironic you mean stupid, then I agree.  :x

On the plus side, it'll only be a problem until the end of January.   :awesome_for_real:

Actually I usually play offline. Online you don't even need the CD in the drive.

Heh, how stupid is this one?

I have a PDF. I need to add text to it.

How?

Without pirating something, please.

If it's something someone gave you to fill in, like a contract or form, you should be able to add text in the adobe pdf reader. If it's not allowing such writing, it's meant to be printed and filled out - or they fucked up.

That said, there's no such thing as working with a PDF unless you pirate or buy something.

Lame. It's just something I need to add my damn name to before I email it.

You could hack the PostScript :awesome_for_real: (assuming it's not encrypted...)

Properties say there is no security on the file. Assembly, commenting, signing, and Creation of Template Pages is not allowed. Not sure if that helps at all.

There's just a line asking for my name in a blank spot, and I want to add it....damnit.


edit: Just to be clear...I'm not trying to do anything dishonest here. It would just be a Lot more convenient if I could type in this bit of into and email the form to whoever I intend to mail it to, have them print it out and fill in what they need to fill in, and return the paperwork to me. I'm trying to save myself a trip to physically deliver a single page to someone.

http://www.foxitsoftware.com (http://www.foxitsoftware.com)

Specifically  http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/pe_intro.php (http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/pe_intro.php)

I think it is still free. 


edit:  Looks like they make you jump through more hoops than before though for the demo or trial.

Downloaded their editor...and when I saved, it adds red "evaluation purposes" nonsense into my doc....ugh.

That sucks.  They used to have a small, unobtrusive watermark on their demos. 

That was my best shot for a .pdf editor unless there is a way to find the evaluation text within the program and remove it.

I guess I'll just ask the recipient to fill in my name when they print it. I was trying to avoid this, but it's such a small thing I hope they don't think much of it.

Can't you just take a screenshot and draw your name in with Paint?

Illustrator can modify pdf's not free or cheap but you probably know someone who has it.

The screenshot thing works too, once you are done just print it to a pdf writer to make it a pdf again (i personally use pdf redirect and it is free).

Ah, good ideas. I'll have to see if anyone I know has Illustrator.

MS Word 2007 can write PDF, just can't read it.  Might work for you.

Suggestions that would have taken less time than you've invested so far:

• Retype the form in Word
• Print the form, write in your name, put it in an envelope, mail it

Just sayin'.  :awesome_for_real:

- Form has goofy graphics, tables, and shit. PITA to reproduce.

- Snail mail takes too long. I'd be better off walking it there.

Fax it. Every copy shop has a buck a page fax service.

I have an old Compaq Presario 2200 laptop I needed to reinstall XP Home on (been a few years and the computer had many ghosts in machine). I want to back this thing up periodically though to prevent what's turn into about 10 hours of work moving back and organized files. However, I can't find even the default Windows Backup program. I assume it wasn't included under XP Home.

So, suggestions? I'll take anything competent and free, though all I really need to do is back up the entirety of My Documents.

If the only thing you need to hold is My Documents, can't you just use a compression program?  I use WinRAR, but there are several out there.

Sorry, I should have added more details.

I want to back up the folder to a different volume on my network. And I want that to recur weekly. And I want it to happen automatically at around 1am.

I have rsync scheduled to do my backups.  It requires mapping a network location to drive letter or a machine which can handle SSH, and a bit of fiddling, but it works alright.  If you want, I can give you my scripts and the programs to download.

Use SyncToy (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c26efa36-98e0-4ee9-a7c5-98d0592d8c52&displaylang=en), it's a free Microsoft PowerToy.  Works great for me.

Thanks!

Goofy question, and I don't have a lot of time to research it.  Our fiscal year is ending in about 24 hours.  :(

We have a art room in our library and we're thinking about putting a LCD TV in there to show a power point presentation that simply rotates through its panels all day.  We found a 19" Samsung LN19A650 19" High Def LCD TV w/ USB 2.0 port.

Is it possible to use this like a digital photo frame, where we don't need a PC but can put the power point on a flash drive, install that into the USB and let that run all day?  I'm thinking it won't work... as the LCD has no way to recognize what a power point is.  But I really have no idea, and don't have enough time to research it. 

Looks like the TV only recognizes mpeg/mp3 and jpeg.  You might be able to convert your .pps into a mpeg video and see if the TV will loop it though.

Awesome, that's a step in the right direction.  Thanks a ton.

Or maybe a slideshow of JPGs if that fails.

My PC is having seisures, wondering if anyone can shed any light on it.

PC's about two years old.  It's always been a bit flaky (some inconsistent error messages regarding the system fan), but I haven't had any real problems with it until last summer, when it died and I had to reformat the hard drive.  Since then, it's gone from "kind of quirky" to "needs to be rebooted every two hours or so".  Disk scan has picked up some bad sectors and things, but it doesn't seem to have helped much.  Virus scan just shows the usual ad cookies and things.  Just installed some new RAM, too.

Problems I'm having are kind of diverse.  A lot of programs crash frequently.  Warhammer has random crashes to desktop, and odd "file missing" error messages.  Flock keeps "encountering an error and needs to close", as does Fallout 3.  World of Warcraft keeps giving weird "file corrupt" messages, even after I run the repair.  Sometimes the system just reboots itself when I'm in the middle of a game.  I'm getting some weird issue where things like my internet and e-mail icons disappear from my Start menu.  The computer occasionally boots up into strange diagnostic modes (e.g. checkdisk, or it'll start telling me that windows has recovered from a critical error).  I'm hoping I won't have to chuck this thing, but it's really going downhill fast.

Anyone have any advice?

Sounds like a slowly but increasingly failing hard drive. You're probably getting growing bad blocks on the drive. It often manifests itself by complaints about missing files or full system/program crashes when the needed file is corrupted.


First thing to do is to check your Event Viewer: Right-click on My Computer, select Manage, then Event Viewer, then System. Check for either Warning or Erorrs with the source as disk or something similar. Even if there's nothing noted there, proceed with a disk check:

Double click on My Computer, then right-click on your hard drive and select Properties. On that window, select 'Tools'>'Error Checking'> Check Now. Select both boxes; it'll say it can't do it now, but only next time you reboot. Let it reboot.

A full scan for bad sectors and recovery will take a LONG time, so leave it for overnight.

In the morning, log on, right-click on My Computer, select Manage. There, select Event Viewer and then select Application.  Sort through the events via the time stamp on the to find the report that indicates the results of your scan disk. I forget exactly what the source is called (You'll know what I mean by source when looking at the event viewer). If there are bad blocks, it should be pretty obvious.

If you find that you continue to have errors, it means that your hard drive is progressively degrading, and its time for a new hard drive.

No you can't expect to put an app like PowerPoint on a card and expect it to run on a non-computer. You could get a TV that can read image files like JPEGs and convert your slides into said files.

Yeah, that turned up a bunch of stuff, thanks.  Probably have to get it replaced soon, but at least it works better for now, I was going nuts there for a while.  Thanks a million :)

Glad to help. Make sure you back up the data you don't want to lose.

Wife's computer died the other night.  Her screen just blinked out and gave the no signal error.  Upon restarting it everything spins up and seems to be working correctly.  I suspected the video card so I swapped it with mine (and my computers hard drive then died in an unrelated problem  :uhrr:).  Still no video, tried a different monitor, still no video.  It was then that I noticed when you turn it on you get NO post beeps at all.  So I'm suspecting cpu or MB. 

How do I determine which though?

I disconnected everything except for cpu/mb/ram and still no beep at all when I power up.

It does get power, but no video?  So lights on the board (if any) and fans all turn on?

If it doesn't post at all then I would rule out a CPU issue.  I'd say PSU or MB.

Everything turns on, fans, lights, drives.  But no video at all, tried multiple video cards and monitors.  Don't have any alternate cpus of the right socket type around to try though.


PSU is fine as far as I can tell, so MB it probably is then!

Maybe someone can enlighten us with the facts but you would think a MB+PSU would post a code saying WTF without even having ram, cpu, video card or hard drive installed.

So on a related note then, will installing a new motherboard require a fresh install of windows?  If it's the same model of MB?

If it's the same model, nope.

Because mostly they do?

Award BIOS Beep Codes:

Beeps	Error Message	Description
1long, 2 short	Video adapter error	Either video adapter is bad or is not seated properly.  Also, check to ensure the monitor cable is connected properly
Repeating (endless loop)	Memory error	Check for improperly seated or missing memory
1long, 3short	No video card or bad video RAM	Reseat or replace the video card
High frequency beeeps while running	Overheated CPU	Check the CPU fan for proper operation. Check the case for proper air flow.
Repeating High/Low	CPU	Either the CPU is not seated properly or the CPU is damaged. May also be due to excess heat. Check the CPU fan or BIOS settings for proper fan speed.

   

There are many more ERROR codes that aren't ties to a beep.  If you have a good motherboard you can still access those codes, for example my motherboard has an 7 segment LED display for showing POST codes in hex.

Edit: Reference - http://www.bioscentral.com/

Really very dumb question. Or, more like, seeking knowledge on the why of things.

For years I've managed to get my various computers to talk to each other on the Network. Trouble is I'm not exactly sure how it works. And every time I look up "how does a network work", I get all sorts of crazy cisco/IP/router wierdness. What I really need is layman's explanation.

I've got three laptops and two desktops. I configured Windows Firewall on each to accept connections from computers on the network with IP addresses in the range of .0 - .10. The router automatically assigns these as the computers turn on. Magically then the Network windows on each computer can access the shared folders on the other ones. And I can do fun VNC stuff with the server that I still need a monitor for (really pisses me off when it crashes and I have no idea if the BIOS/did-not-shutdown-right screen is up) because my kids need Christmas more than I need a cheap monitor right now.

Am I doing this right? I always see this thing called "Workgroup" that I always put the same value in on the computers. I would think that doing that would negate the need to configure Firewall to leave the port ranges open, but that's mostly because I have no idea what the purpose of Workgroup is.

Also, because I mentioned it, is there a place I can go to get fab deals on monitors. The cheapest I can get on Dell discount is $100 and none of the local Circuit Citys are closing (and the ones that are don't have anything below $150 from what folks have found out for me).

I do not get networking. There is something I am not doing

Seems like you have most of it down. Basically, with Windows, it is doing the heavy lifting for you. As you noted, when you put all local computers on the same Workgroup, they can tend to talk to each other and share their folders. It's not exactly secure, but it's very easy. Your firewall probably doesn't need ports open to allow this, but it depends on what apps you use (your screen sharing app may need access that being in a Workgroup doesn't grant).

There are lots of permutations of this that get more complex, but basically each computer identifies itself to the network whenever it's turned on. It says 'Hi! I'm Computer In the Kitchen, part of the Darniaq's Workgroup workgroup.' And all the other computers stay 'Hi Computer In the Kitchen! I'm in Darniaq's Workgroup too!'. And then they merrily pass packets back and forth, allowing certain types of file sharing to become available automagically.

This is enabled by the fact that they are all on the same router. If you put another router on your network (say you could connect two routers to your cable modem), the computers connected to Router 1 wouldn't be able to talk to the computers connected to Router 2. That is how we segregate computers, so their talk and traffic doesn't affect computers that don't care about whatever Router 2 computers are talking about.

Well hopefully that's a little helpful - throw out more questions if you want details on something in particular.. there are very large books out there that can tell you everything about networking, I don't want to rewrite those here. ;)

Viin that was awesome, thanks. So the best way to ensure computers can talk to each other is first by having them on the same router and second having them in the same workgroup?

No. If this was always true there would be no Internet. The entire purpose of routers is to connect separate networks together.

It is true that Windows Workgroup networking was not designed to span multiple subnets so if you wanted to do that you would have to jump through lots of hoops to get that to work properly.

How do I get a second router to talk to the first one? I'm not sure if buying a better router or a second one to extend my wi-fi range is the way to go.

You setup a route between the two of them.

Let's say Router 1 is the one that has the WAN connection (DSL/Cable/Whatever). Normally in a single router setup with a single "Internet-facing" IP from your ISP all your PCs will have their gateway setting set to Router 1's internal network IP address (a 192.168.X.X address). Router 1 has its own gateway address which is your ISP router address on the other end of your WAN connection. So when a PC sends off a packet with an IP that's not on your local network it first goes to Router 1 (since it's the gateway for that PC) and then Router 1 sends that packet off to your ISP's router since that's Router 1's default gateway.

If you want to add another router you'll need to create a new subnet and make Router 2's gateway the internal address of Router 1.

Let's say on your original network your internal IPs where in the range 192.168.0.X. E.g. Router 1's internal address was 192.168.0.1 and your PCs were 192.168.0.100 - 192.168.0.104 (for 5 computers). If you don't want to fiddle with Router 1 then for Router 2 you would set its "WAN" gateway to 192.168.0.1 (the internal address of Router 1), set its internal address to a new subnet such as 192.168.1.1 (i.e. the new 192.168.1.X subnet) and then configure its DHCP to pass out addresses to your PCs in the range of 192.168.1.100 - 192.168.1.104 (or you can set them manually if you aren't using DHCP).

So now your outbound IP packets on your network will take an extra "hop" going through both routers before they get to the "outside" and you did that by setting up Router 2 to pass its packets to Router 1.

However...

If you are just trying to extend the range of your wireless network, you can just get a wireless "access point" or run a wireless router in "access point" infrastructure mode (assuming it supports it) and you don't have to worry about segmenting your network since the access point acts as a "bridge" and not a "router" so everything stays on the same internal subnet.

Ah ok cool Trippy, thanks. I actually understood all of that.

You are right, I wasn't clear. My point was that, by default, two computers on different routers can't talk to each other. Once you establish a route between them, then of course you can, but that can require extra work/configuration.

While we're on the subject of networking, does anyone know if a 20m CAT5 cable is too long? Will I have problems at that kind of length?

I ask because the 10m cables I have at the moment are a real stretch from the router to where I want to put my (soon to be delivered) PS3 and I've had all sorts of trouble with wireless in this house.

No. The spec allows for cables up to 100m.

I have a 35m CAT5 ethernet cable in my closet for emergencies.  Works great.

Awesome thanks folks, 2 cables ordered, girlfriend looking forward to a living room that looks slightly less like a LAN party  :awesome_for_real:

While I'm here, can anyone recommend a NAS enclosure? I've currently got a 2-SATA drive D-Link DNS-323 which, to use the technical term, sucks monkey cocks in Hell. I'm after something cheap that can take 2 SATA drives (pref. in a RAID array) and that I can safely and easily use to stream media to my shiny new PS3.

Forget that, worked it out, crappy D-Link NAS working fine with PS3. I am happy bunny.

Here's something odd: I go to add another device to my MAC filter list and I get a dead-page error from the router. The heck? So I try going to a few other places on the admin page (Linksys, WRT54G v8) and while I can go to most areas, any changes I try and make can't be saved because the pages being accessed no longer exist. I just tried upgrading the Firmware and even that conked out because the page it tried to hit is no longer there. Going to try a factory reset, but I wanted to put this out there in case these are my last words ever.

Edit: factory reset did reset all settings. But nothings being saved. Is this router hosed?

sounds like agressive browser caching. try a different browser?

Jeezus, you're right! (the shock is not about you being right but yours being the answer). Chrome was "Aggressively caching". IE7 worked fine. Wish I had the patience to wait for your reply :-P Ah well, wanted to take advantage of the gigabyte cards in my two desktops anyway...

Futzing with my WRT54GL is the only time I recommend IE.  Haven't tried Chrome but Firefox doesn't really work.  I actually set my home page in IE as 192.168.1.1. :awesome_for_real:

Yea. Until yesterday I only ever needed IE for webmail for work's Outlook (since it works with MS Office, I can format emails whereas under Firefox, Chrome and others, I can only do ascii). Now I have two tabs that open automatically: webmail and the router page.

OK, I take it back, this NAS is rubbish and is causing me much hassle.

Can anyone recommend a decent NAS enclosure that won't cost me a fortune?

My experience with cheap NAS recently has led me to the conclusion that you are wasting your time.

Get a mini case, MB, cheap processor, linux distro and use that instead.  It will cost (MUCH) less and work (MUCH) better.

I got an Ipodtouch. This thing is taking over my life. I now need wifi in my ghetto. Please to advise a wifi setup. Money is not a huge object but lets not get stupid. I have DSL a 4 port router ( 2 puters an xbox connected) . I can not think of anything else you would need to recommend so please to be asking if I left out anything. Probally upgrading main box soonish so that could be an option though I would like a slap it on and go if that is a do able thing. Thank you in advance for your responce.

Damn. I can really do without that kind of hassle atm. Especially since I'm an utter linux noob.

The DNS-323 works most of the time, but occasionally just has a freak out and needs rebooting or the UPnP media server refreshing, which annoyingly only seems to happen 5 minutes before the end of a film  :mob:

I'll stick with it until (workingness - annoyances) < 0

Edit: can't even get fake maths right!

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=14149.msg556241#msg556241

So, I'm looking to upgrade my LCD monitor. What I have is a 20 inch widescreen NEC 20wgx2. I love it, since it does both gaming and video well. I get fairly good color reproduction, good response time, and more crucially, very good video quality for DVDs etc. But I want a bigger monitor. 24" or more. However, its very hard to actually find any monitors on display, and you have to go by reviews, both user and professional, that often leave me with several questions unanswered.

I'm considering this NEC MultiSync LCD2690WUXi (http://xtknight.50webs.com/lcd26/). Its expensive, and an H-IPS type rather than a TN varietal, so although I'm unconcerned about video quality, gaming quality may suffer. Anyone have experience with that type of monitor, the IPS kind?

If you like your current TN I would stick with that - the H-IPS will give you ghosting and other issues with fast moving games. EVE would probably be fine, but COD4 would get annoying. Not worth the extra money, IMHO.

The 20WGX2 is an S-IPS panel.

Ya, that's why I'm wondering about H-IPS. My current S-IPS has no ghosting or motion blur at all. If it has to compromise on anything, its color fidelity. I have an older NEC that my GF uses that has just staggeringly beautiful colors. Games like EQ2 look like entirely different games on hers than on my 20wgx2. Then again, video looks like caca on hers, so we've been content with the 20wgx2 as a multi-function screen, since it excells at video, does well at games, and has 'decent' color rendition.

But heck if I know how a S-IPS is different from an H-IPS. I can read the technical explanations till I'm blue in the face, but till I hear someone who's had one, and describes it a bit to me, I don't think I'll really 'get' H-IPS.

TN is crap, other than cheap there is no longer a reason to specifically want a TN panel.  Ghosting on IPS panels was more or less resolved with the introduction of S-IPS and H-IPS is supposed to improve on that.  There are a few nitpickers out there that scan at superhuman speeds and swear they still see ghosting on on S-IPS panels, you said you used an S-IPS and thought it was great then you probably aren't one of the few who prefer TN.

Either way buy it from some place that has a no questions asked if returned within xx days full refund policy and you will be good to go.

I have heard excellent things about the Dell 27" (2709W) and my personal experience with the Dell 24" (2407W) has left me with 0 complaints.

For reference here is some easy to understand information on panel types:

Excellent pre H-IPS post on Hardforums (http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1039222)

Some great Wikipedia info (covers H-IPS) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFT_LCD#IPS)


edit: my Dell 24 is a S-PVA panel (not sure what they use now), I also have a dell 20" (S-IPS) that sits right next to it, I prefer the color/contrast/brightness of the 24" S-PVA but part of that may be from a better backlight.

Out of curiosity I looked up what the 2709W uses and it is also a S-PVA panel (6 ms g2g response time).  Also this is a pretty cool site for looking up what type of panel is used in your monitor: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/ (http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/)

For some reason I thought my Dell wide screen LCD was TN, but it's not!

Dell 2007WFP   16ms or 8ms G2G   20"WS LG.Philips S-IPS (LM201W01) or Samsung S-PVA (LTM201M1)

So nvrmnd about the TN. From that site, the article on monitor types:

More info:

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/panel_technologies.htm

I was looking at that Dell ultrasharp 2709wfp, but I'm hearing reports that the dot pitch is just too big if you're sitting at a table with it. The 2408 gets some pretty mixed reviews, especially in regards to color saturation, so I'm a bit skittish about it. I am just a princess with a pea when it comes to this stuff. What's the point of blowing hundreds on a video card if your monitor looks like crud. Its like buying a villa with a splendid set of bay windows looking out on a dump if you don't.

Question for Excel Gurus:

Here's my situation: I have a worksheet to calculate a percentage of a credit applied to part of an order. The sheet works great. Once it calculates the appropriate refund though, I want to give the users a nice simple summary of the calculation that they can copy and paste in to their notes. The issue is in the formatting.

Here is the formula I am using to create the "calculation":

="$"&A3&" - ($"&A3&" "&B3&" / $"&A10&" total order = "&C3&" X Total Credits of $"&E3&") = $"&G3&" prorated pricing"

Here is what is displayed in cell C3: 48.02% and for cell G3: $1.32 on the worksheet. Those cells have had thier formating adjusted to "percentage, 2 decimals" and "accounting, 2 decimals"

However, here is the result of my formula above:

$60 - ($60 MS / $124.95 total order = 0.480192076830732 X Total Credits of $-122.21) = $1.31572629051621 prorated pricing

I have attempted to adjust the Formating for the cell that my formula is in; I've set it to Numbers, with two decimal places, but it doesn't change anything. Anyone have any idea how I can get my formula to not display 15 decimal places...

I'm not an excel guru at all though we do use it for some things.  I think I would make another cell that displays the value after it's been rounded/truncated to 2 decimal places.

Your values will stay accurate but the one for the customer will be an 'estimate' (in your example something has to happen to that half cent).

I tried using another cell set to =c3 for example, but I still end up with a result as shown above. It would work if I took c3, copied it, and then used "paste special" in to another cell, but I don't know of any way to automate that.

No, I was specifically saying to use the ROUND or TRUNC functions.

I'm going to guess because the cell contents is "$x.xxxxxx prorated pricing" that it is treating it as text.  Can you put the "prorated pricing" in an adjacent cell and see if that helps?

Missed that earlier... ROUND worked perfectly, thanks.

I recently picked up an IOMega StorCenter NAS. I'm very very happy. It was cheap, has 1 TB storage with RAID, and basically just works when you plug it in. I priced out rolling my own, and concluded that it was pretty hard to beat this building my own.

EDIT: Just checked, $299 for 1 TB storage including NAS enclosure (http://store.iomega.com/section?SID=fff8331ed86aabb14eab68252150cde5725:4760&secid=40399).

That looks great, my only problem with it is that it's fixed drives, i.e. it's not just an enclosure. I want to be able to swap out the drives in a couple of years time when Gb per £ has dropped to half it's current rate, as seems to be the rule  :why_so_serious:

However, since I upgraded my D-Link NAS firmware and told it to auto-refresh the uPnP media server twice a day 99% of my problems with it have gone away! Many thanks for the link though, it's appreciated.

No worries, glad you fixed your problem!

I'm re-settng up a Win XP box to serve up music and movies, and like that my X360 can pull content from Windows Media Center. Unfortunately I do not have Media Center on XP. And now that I found an iPhone app that can control Media Center, I'd rather go that route than use iTunes and the Remote app.

So, how can I get Media Center for XP?

Something very strange is happening with my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-111DBK . Beside SecuROM raping, I think the "burner" part of it is totally fried, and the system think everything is messed up.

Now, I'm no hardware expert and also I still have to try to replace it with another one (will do it next week) in order to see if the problems listed below still happen, but meanwhile I would like to know your opinion.

BIOS  (AmiBIOS) recognizes it fine; the Windows Vista (32-bit, SP1) Device Manager recognizes it fine and it says it works correctly, no code error or yellow exclamation mark. Now, the latest firmware should be 1.29, September 2006. But here's what is happening:
----

Device Manager:
- When I look up at the properties of the DVD and click on drivers, there is just the generic Microsoft listing, with the date of june 2006 and the driver version of 6.0.6001.18000. So I tried to check automatically for drivers, to no avail, it said it was already updated. So I went to the Pioneer website, downloaded the above mentioned 1.29 firmware, unzipped it correctly, ran the program, but it doesn't work, it says "available target is not found". (yes, I'm sure it's the correct firmware). And yes, I also tried to download an earlier version of the firmware.

If I look at the "details" of my DVD, in "ID Hardware", it says this:

IDE\CdRomPIONEER_DVD-RW__DVR-111D________________1.23____
IDE\PIONEER_DVD-RW__DVR-111D________________1.23____
IDE\CdRomPIONEER_DVD-RW__DVR-111D________________
PIONEER_DVD-RW__DVR-111D________________1.23____
GenCdRom


Is that the latest firmware version installed? And why it doesn't show up in the "Driver" section?
---

Nero:
Also, If I load Nero SmartStart and I try to check the speed of my DVD drive or test it altogether, there is a pop-up window saying "impossible to find the CD Rom unit". Also, if I try to create a Data DVD with Nero, in the "current burner" section it just says "Image Recorder" and the DVD Rom is not listed.


Gaming:
By the way, the problems I'm going to mention were *already* present without Daemon Tools (installed yesterday, trial edition)  and Nero (which I reinstalled yesterday).

- Autoplay runs fine, installation of games runs fine. I only had a problem with the installation of Fallout 3, something a lot of people experienced, looking at the official website.

Currently, I can play Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout 3 and Pro Evolution Soccer 9 with a No CD crack. Why? Because if if try to run the normal exe (through the game launcher or forcing the exe from the game directory), it keeps me asking for the CD even if it is already in . Like I said, this problem was already there even without any cd burning or whatever program installed (regarding nero, with the previous installation I also made sure of cleaning the registry).

Well, that's about it :(

Nevermind. Looks like Windows Media Player 11 effectively does the same thing, at least insofar as the X360 showing stuff is concerned. And there's a few iPhone options for controlling that (will be experimenting with IntelliRemote first). Now I get to see just how much I can push from this ancient PC :wink:

My new PC is coming on Tuesday with Vista 64 installed. Is there anything important I should tell them about how to install it or can I change any badly chosen options once I get the computer without having to reinstall?

If you don't want to shell out cash for an XP license or Media Center you can easily set up a linux box that can serve videos and music to an XBOX 360 (or PS 3) using a UPnP Media Server.  I use UShare (http://ushare.geexbox.org/), It won't transcode from one format to another, like Trippy was looking for earlier, but if you have fairly standard formats (.avi, .mov, .wmv, etc...) the XBOX 360 will play them natively.

It's easy peasy setup, don't cost nothing, other than hardware, and works great.

I think there is something wrong with your DVD drive. :awesome_for_real:

Firmware and drivers are not the same thing.  Firmware lives on the drive unit, and if you cannot flash it then there is a hardware problem.  Drivers live in the operating system and let softwares talk to hardwares.

WMP 11 works just fine, it sets up the required service when you install it. Just don't try connecting through the media center area on the 360 dashboard. Go to "my videos" and connect through there.

I currently feed media from an old P4 that I slapped a half TB drive in to via wireless, and it works great. Other than when my router decides to spontaneously reset itself...

Folks -- what's the criteria for choosing a good case? 

I plan to start a new PC build over the next few months and  I'd be willing to pay <$325. 

Depends on your needs. Quiet? Cool looking? Small? High end (hot) components going in? HTPC?

Some guidelines are nice.

I'm building a new forum style for my guild board which just went to phpBB3. However, just like when I did one for phpBB2, I had to hack my way through it. So I'm learning all over again.

I have the style loaded up and it works (incomplete though it is). I can upload new images just fine and they will appear on the page when I hit refresh. However, no matter how many times I change and upload a css file, none of the changes appear to be made. So while I figure out what else I might have screwed up, is it possible that I need to uninstall the style from my admin panel and reinstall it so that it reads the new css file info?

And yes, someone who actually knew what the hell they were talking about would probably be able to ask that question the right way.  :grin:

Edit 1: Wierd. Ok, so phpBB3 Admin Control Panel lets you edit html and css files within it's own UI. And that works ok. But I cannot work offline and then upload/replace the data on the server. Maybe I DO need to uninstall the style and then reinstall. But that's a pita, so I'll probably just do all code adjustments in the phpBB3 UI. Unless someone tells me otherwise

What's the board URL (assuming it's public)?

When you edit things like stylesheets the changes don't always get reflected when you refresh because of page/element caching. To force a reload without mucking around with HTTP headers and forcing people to constantly clear their caches you can append a changing query string on the end of the URL which tricks the browser into thinking it needs to reload it. It's possible the UI admin tool does something of that sort for you.

Ah, yea, so, like, complicated then :-) It's working well with the Admin CP so I'll just keep doing that. Much faster too.

just name your new css file with a version number and every time you upload a new css go into the admin tool and load it.  Most forums let you point to a custom css file.  Once you think you are finished just remove all the old versions.

Sorry.  Quiet and cooling, which I realize may be exclusionary.  Full tower, I guess.  I am hoping for moderately high-end components. This is for gaming, not HTPC.

Basically, I don't care what it looks like or how heavy it is, I just was hoping people were opting for 1 or 2 models.  I have no clue what's best at the moment.  Thanks.

I was using the Cosmos (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119138) case until recently. Huge Full tower, quiet (with Scythe s-flex fans) and cool, except not the best harddrive cooling. Not terrible, especially with the alternative fan-shroud placement. But it is very big, and very space age looking. I stopped using it as when I rebuilt my desk, I ended up about 1.5" too shot for the case to fit where I wanted it. The Antec p180/p182 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129025) is also another big, heavy case. I retired one of those due to heat issues, but it was with 2 very hot video cards. Not as quiet as the Cosmos, even with quiet fans, and the hard drive air flow went to hell if you closed the front door. I'm currently using a HAF (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119160) for the gaming machine, and an Elite 330 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119115) for the server. The 330 is small and quiet, the HAF is huge, very cool, and moderately quiet (again, with Scythe s-flex fans) The loudest bit is the 4870.

The other cases I've used recently are the Antec Lanboys (meh) the Antec 900 (loud, annoying to replace big fan) Antec Sonata (meh) and a Lian-li midtower I wasn't impressed with. Too flimsy.

If you need quiet and cool start with http://silentpcreview.com/

Can anyone recommend a good free online storage site?  I have a colleague who is driving me crazy about his computer problems.  Basically it sounds like his OS is pooched and he has 5 years of family digital photos on the computer that he needs.  A usb key won't work, burning to CD won't work, home networking to his laptop won't work. I am avoiding having to take his hard drive and slave it on to one of my computers.  Apparently he can get online, so I thought he might be able to transfer to his laptop via a storage site.  Any help would be much appreciated!

Can he not buy himself a terrabyte drive and slave it inside his own machine?

No he is completely computer illiterate, that would require me to go to his house and install and slave it.  Just trying to avoid that option, just looking for a quicker solution.

An external USB drive?  Plug it in and copy everything over?

Edit: An internet storage site is probably not going to work for transferring a large amount of data simply because your friends 'unlimited' broadband connection probably actually has a limit.

1 TB USB external WD ($119.99):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136321

If it's actually not that much data he could use gmail accounts for storage...

edit2: http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/01/how-to-use-your-gmail-account-as-a-personal-file-server/

Dropbox! You'll have to be careful though.

Careful of what? They don't steal my pictures do they?

Well, he was said to be computer illiterate. I don't trust illiterates with even the most simple of computerized actions.

That's true - if he's really illiterate than you are pretty much screwed and will have to do it yourself.

Seems to be a space limit on dropbox.

Hmmm, thanks for the suggestions...

Problem with USB storage device is apparently his USB ports are not reading anything at all.  He tried a couple of USB storage keys and other USB devices to no success.

Drop Box, seems to be alright, but he also indicated that he tried to install AVG to run a test on his comp and it wouldn't let him install anything and drop box has a client install.  He has indicated about the only thing he could do was basically get online.  His OS (XP) seems to be completely borked.

It just looks like I am going to have to bite the bullet to slave it.  The help is much appreciated though.

it's getting to the point where computers are cheap enough and people are ungrateful enough that when they get themselves into these situations i just tell em to go buy a new pc.  Slave the old hard drive into the new pc and copy all the needed files over.  If you fix it then it will just be your fault when he malwares his ass into a corner again.

I wonder if a bart pe disc would make a USB drive accessible or if he screwed up some hardware.

Wow, I remember using that bert a long time ago....never thought of it again.  That may work, not to get the pc working, but just get those pic files off.  Great suggestion.

Time to do a bit of early spring cleaning on my computer and do a format/reinstall.  I have an unopened XP Pro 64 case sitting on my desk, looking at me longingly with sad eyes.

Computer is Q6600 @ 3.2 Ghz, 4GB RAM, 8800GTS G92 512 in SLI.  Gaming rig.

XP Pro 64 vs Vista Home Premium. 

WWF13D.

(what would f13 do)

Is your Vista Home Premium 64-bit or 32-bit?

64 bit.

Go with Vista.

Huh.  That's surprising.

How so? Half the Vista-rage out there is from folks that can't handle any sort of a change. At first it was somewhat justified, since Vista had some issues, but they've been ironed out. Vista is a problem for older hardware, but on good hardware, it runs well. Especially 64 bit. Besides, XP driver support for 64 bit has had problems, many left mouldering unresolved. From what I hear, Vista 64 bit has good driver support.

To be honest, the only issue I've had thus far with Vista Prem is the error on install that occasionally pops up if you have more than 2GB of RAM.  Other than that, no issues. 

My new gear in my old case (mid 90's inwin crap) was overheating so I decided to take the plunge, I wanted something affordable, quiet, cool , tool free and didn't look like it belonged in a pimps car.  Ended up with this: Cooler Master Sileo 500 (http://www.amazon.com/Cooler-Master-Sileo-Tower-Black/dp/B001NABWZI).  It is insulated for sound, has front and rear fans, and other than the mother board and psu you can add/remove all the hardware sans tools.  I also upgraded my stock cpu heatsink/fan to a Zalman 9500.

Only been a few hours but I had both cores pegged to 100% for most of those 2 hours and my temp has hovered between 46-48 the entire time (seem to hover at 42 when the pc is at rest).  It is noticably quieter than my last case/cpu fan.

XP Pro:
+ Got remote desktop support. You have to pay for ultimate in Vista to get that (But I did. The other shiny features like VSC, Encrypted folders are pretty nice to have too)
+ Lower memory footprint (but hey, that's where the 64-bit support comes in. Get ram while it's cheap, 4-8G)

Vista:
+ Shinier. The graphical framework supports fancy stuff, but the built in [win]+[tab] is meh at best. Get switcher the osx expose clone from http://insentient.net/
(http://insentient.net/Files/Screenshots/switcher-2704-tile_t.jpg)
+ Way better driver support. Everything I've bought in the last 2 years just work. No one releases xp64 drivers anymore.
+ New Kernel, better scheduler (cycle delta counter), better memory management (memory priority). SP1 backported the Windows Server 2008 kernel to Vista.
+ Better application support. Some installers like the MSN 9 just breaks on XP64.
+ Execution context for GPU. Think CPU & Memory scheduler for CPU/RAM, but for 3D stuff. Is a big deal when you run multiple clients (WoW :P) at the same time.
+ No more users running around as root. Sudo setup.exe's (via UAC) or Sudo su (open an administrative prompt) before you can mess up your pc.

Same:
- Stability. I never had a XP or Vista crash because of software errors, any instability is always traced back to hardware faults.

For awhile I was a bit confused by this feature, thinking I wouldn't be able to remote desktop to my work machine if I had XP or Vista Home editions at home, come to find out they are talking about the ability to recieve remote desktop connections.  Since I never remote desktop to my home machine (only from) this is pretty much a non issue.

Vista Business, the equivalent of XP Professional, has Remote Desktop Support too.

Does anyone know if there is a flavor of VNC that supports Vista well?

Do you just need a viewer or do you want to run a VNC server on Vista?

Run the server on Vista.  I looked at RealVNC (Which I use at work) but there was grumbling in the search results about it's Vista support.

I'm not really asking anyone to do research for me.  I'll google around, I was just wondering if anyone had already gone through the effort and had some insights.

I've only used the RealVNC viewer to connect to a VNC server running under Linux.

Wireless security: MAC address whitelist is totally awesome, right?  Even without WPA?

MAC addresses can be faked, so it offers some protection but by itself it won't necessarily keep out a determined hacker.

How determined would a hacker have to be in order to nab one of my MACs?  Sure, they can be faked but it might take a while to guess the right one.

I'm not so sure about a wireless network.  I don't know enough about how they figure out who to talk to to say yes or no.  Routers build an ARP cache of MAC addresses of the computers that connect to them (MAC is the physical device, IP is the logical address, you need both to talk to someone) and I don't know that someone with a wireless device wandering around collecting handshakes can't grab MACs.

pretty sure kismet (http://www.kismetwireless.net/) can grab MAC & IP addresses out of the air.

hmmm shouldn't this read as 2997mhz (333.00 x 9.0) for the frequency?  I didn't adjust any clock settings when I set everything up shouldn't the chipset (mboard: ASUS P5Q SE PLUS 775 P45/ICH10) autodetect the proper setting for the CPU? 

(http://www.devotia.com/img/coretemp.JPG)

Did I get a bogus proc or is the mainboard automatically setting itself to the correct freq expecting too much?

It might be the BIOS, too.  Mine had to be flashed to read my Quad correctly.  I still need to do flash the newest one (stupid comp not allowing a USB flash boot ><) to get better compatability.

Went into the bios and it was reading correctly there, saved and launched the os and it is now correct there as well.  Never actually flashed the bios but I may not have gone back in the bios since installing all the motherboard and chipset crap in windows.

A System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page) comes in very handy for these kinds of things.  It has bailed me out of huge messes more times than I can count.

The newer ones can mount NTFS partitions as well.

That looks like SpeedStep kicking in. Try disabling it in your BIOS and see if that bumps the multiplier back up.

nah fixed now, speedstep was never enabled i just thing the proc was initially misread by the bios, or maybe i never gave it the chance to be set.  I recall going into the bios after setting everything up and everything looked fine i may not have saved after that.

HomePlug.  Somehow I managed to forget all about this technology but it could solve my LAN problem.  Has anyone had any experience with this?  Gotchas?

I have a problem that is DRIVING ME NUTS.

My Mom bought a laptop around November last year. Everything was working fine, but for the past week or so, every time she logs into the network, everyone else has repeat drops. It makes it impossible to do anything except read web pages. No setting have been changed on the router, or the laptop (according to my Mother and Step-Father). The only difference is that she has recently been using her laptop in the spare bedroom (right across the hall from my room).

What could be causing this?

Well your post is very vague so I'm going to assume we're talking about some sort of wireless network here. As such it could be a bazillion different problems but if I had to guess I would say her wireless adapter is set to a different protocol/configuration than the other computers. E.g. hers is set to B and everybody else is on G or vice versa and your/their wireless router is a POS and can't handle a mixed network properly.

Being a Parent and all, she could also have a worm that is flooding the network.  Router difficulties are more likely, but if it only happens with her machine being plugged in, something is going on there.

I have a XHTML doc and a CSS that work great.  I move these to another location on the same web server, and now only some of the styles seem to be working.  Most do not.  Since at least the font-family style works, I'm going to assume the .css is in the right place and perms are fine.  Mrh?

I would assume that somewhere in the document you have absolute links instead of relative links.

I do/did use absolute links when defining the .css location in the .html.  The bit where it would use the correct font was throwing me off since a bad path should mean I get Times instead of Arial.

Anyway, I changed to a relative path and now it's not even reading in the font-family style.  I cp -p the .css to the same dir as the .html, changed the link to both "./gla.css" and "gla.css" and got zero style.  I'm going to have to suspect Apache at this point because it works just fine in the other dir structure, and also I don't have any other ideas.  How about a related question: is there a place where such errors are logged?

EDIT: The problem was in meat instead of code.  Never trust meat, especially if it is someone else's meat.  Basically the CSS file did not have the contents I expected.  All is well now.

So here's something for you...

Recently reformatted my HD.  Clean install of Vista Premium.  Everything updated, all drivers, etc.  Reinstalled a few games from Steam, the SOE launcher, and that's basically it.  Here I am trying to run Ventrilo, but it keeps crashing due to a problem with the Skype add-in for Internet Explorer.  I don't have Skype.  I've never had Skype.  I don't have the add-in in IE. 

Vent crashes because of it, IE crashes because of it, SOE Launcher crashes.   

Free and clear of viri, malware, etc.

Also, trying to log into gmail is an excercise in frustration.  All it does it refresh.

Double You Tee Eff, mate?

uhm, what's saying that its skype? And what does the Event Viewer say?

(in case you don't know, you find the Event Viewer by right-clicking 'computer', selecting 'Manage', then looking under Windows Logs in Event Viewer. There look at both System and Application

When it crashes, it gives you the option of closing the program or checking online for a solution.  Clicking online for a solution brings up this page:


Here is more crash info:



Here is the Event Viewer says specifically about the Ventrilo crash:
Faulting application Ventrilo.exe, version 3.0.4.0, time stamp 0x49186cdc, faulting module ntdll.dll,
version 6.0.6001.18000, time stamp 0x4791adec, exception code 0xc0000374, fault offset 0x00000000000a6e97,
process id 0x83c, application start time 0x01c97d46ce212322.

I have what seems to be in the hundreds of error messages for DistributedCOM, that pretty much all say the same thing:The machine-default permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{BC866CF2-5486-41F7-B46B-9AA49CF3EBB1}
 to the user NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE SID (S-1-5-20) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

All I know to do is do a fresh install of Vista .

If the problem is with a add-in in IE just disable the Add-in.  You should be able to go to Control Panel > Internet Options and disable the Add-in from there, or at least see if it's loading.  You could also download Hijack This! and disable it that way if it's doing something in IE it shouldn't.

Uhm, I think he's already said that there is no skype, and there is no identifiable add-in. I think that Vista is confusing the vent module with skype. Its possible that they use some of the same .dll files and hence Vista thinks its Skype.

For starters, I would uninstall Ventrilo, then run CCleaner's registry 'fixer'. Be sure to back up the registry changes (the program lets you do that). Restrart the machine.

Also, for the heck of it, go through the add-ins in IE and see if there are any unneeded add-ins active.

Finally, reinstall Vent and see how it goes.

Did a reinstall of vent, but no luck.  I'll check out the CCleaner registery fixer and see what happens. 

Something hasn't been right with the install since the beginning, so I'm thinking about just redoing everything this weekend and seeing what happens.  Vista only takes about 30 minutes to install, and about 2 hrs to update so, won't take long.

Edit:  Thanks for the help, btw.

What's the best way to calibrate your monitor? Just got my dell monitor, but it's 50 on all settings and looks terrible.

I use AVIA and DVE, along with a set of filters for color. Just set it like I would an LCD tv.

I'm beginning to think DVI isn't that good. It locks out auto-adjust, colour settings and the other settings (clock, phase..etc)

On my Vista re-install, do I just need to do the Windows Update, or would it be better to download SP1 and run it after Vista is installed?  Then do whatever updates I need to do?

Only bad thing about re-installing is having to yank 2GB of RAM since it fairly always causes a crash if I try and install with 4GB.

In general, its safe to apply an SP right out of the box, but then again, this is Vista, so...not sure. You could run WU, and if the first update to install is SP1, cancel out and run the update from your previously downloaded version. If not, and it wants some prior updates first, go that route.

I'm also trying to remember why your installation of Vista would balk at 4 gig. XP before SP2 would indeed barf, but that's another matter.

Early (or early-ish) versions of Vista would get a BSOD and 0x00000000E or something error after the first restart when it was installing.  Google 'vista premium 4gb install problem' and it wil give you plenty of info if you're at all curious. 

There's a hotfix for it, and is also covered in the SP1 release.  Doesn't do me much good on install however so 2GB has to come out.  :oh_i_see:

Edit:  Re-installed Vista, everything is peachy.

Depends on your need. If you're wanting to do proper photo work on it then I'd strongly suggest a hardware calibrator like a Huey or a Spyder. Otherwise then you can just use simple tools like Adobe Gamma.

Good page on basic calibration here (http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/monitor_calibration.htm).

What's the longest DVI or VGA monitor cable I can get? Ideally it's like 10-12'.

5 meters is the dvi spec, though I've used 25' with no problems. For vga, I've used 12' cables with no problems.

Cables from http://www.monoprice.com (http://www.monoprice.com) specifically.

Need to pick up a DVD-RW drive, any specific brand to look for or avoid?

Lite-On is the largest maker so many of the "name" brand drives like HP and some of the Sony's are just Lite-On drives. I have a few (as Lite-On drives and rebadged drives) and they work fine though I haven't been trying to make copies of copy protected game discs these days so I'm not sure what people recommend for that application these days.

Ok great, thanks. Never been to that site either. Good source.

Ok, new problem:

I have a Creative Sound Blaster X-fi card on the below machine. A few months ago I went from WinXP to Vista Ultimate. Prior to switching, I on occasion I'd use a headset for gaming. Been awhile though, and trying again today I've run into nothing but trouble.

1. Finally getting behind the box, I see I have two different sets of ports. Turns out my on-board sound supports surround sound, because I've got a number of ports for that. The X-fi card though only has four ports, and into one goes the headphone part. The other seems to pull double-duty between Optical In or Microphone. I assume it knows how to recognize the difference.
2. I tried launching the Creative Audio Console software; however, while it has three modes (Entertainment, Audio Creation, Gaming), it only allows me to launch into one of them (Audio Creation). If I launch either of the other modes, I get the message "The console for the current mode of your audio device cannot be launched. The console may not be installed, or may not be installed properly".
3. Even in just the Audio Creation mode, "The recording device cannot be used."
4. Thinking the drivers were out of date, I downloaded newer ones from Apr 2, 2008. When the actual installation begins though I get an error that the audio device is not recognized.
5. So I google'd up a separate set of drivers, found a link on some trade journal to a different (and more recent) version, downloaded and installed. That installation went fine. Had to uninstall the old drivers, install new ones, uninstall the audio console altogether, install a new one.
6. I quit the entire Audio Console just to see if that was causing a problem with the mic. Using Sound Recorder, I get nothing. Using the Speech Recorder wizard, I get nothing.

None of this solved the problem. The only mode I can use is Audio Creation and it still doesn't recognize the mic.

Specs:

Motherboard:  Asus P5N32-E SLI nForce® 680i SLI Chipset
Memory: Corsair XMS2 Xtreme 2x1024mb RAM
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6600 (2x 2.4GHz)
Power Supply: NZXT PRC-550 550W Power Supply (SLI-Ready)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
Sound: Creative Lab Sound Blaster X-Fi
Hard Drive: 250gb SATA-II 7200rpm

I'm not familiar with the X-Fi cards, but that seems really strange to me. (Edit: having a control panel to activate the ports is the weird part, you should be able to do what you want without a SB specific control panel, just the Windows Sound applet).

Can't you use your onboard card instead? Just put your headset in SPEAKER and mic in MIC? Then, if you really want, pipe your "normal" sound through the SB card to your desktop speakers.

Which X-Fi is it?

Edit: I do see that they recommend OpenAL drivers for Vista (http://www.soundblaster.com/products/gaming/article.asp?articleID=62367&categoryID=13), so check those out if you haven't.

This is somewhat of a tech question, I think.

Anyway, turns out my computer problems are directly related to the combination of my video card and my motherboard. Neither of which can be returned now, so whose tech support should I be hounding over this? I'm leaning towards Asus (Motherboard) because I've always thought mobos were compatible with all video cards.

What's the problem? I would blame the video card first.

A couple of things:

The universal color for the mike jack is red. It should be so colored on the back of your x-fi card, next to the green for the headphones/speakers jack.

Secondly, does your case have a front panel with a mike/headphone connection? Open up the box and see where that cable is going. Its probably hooked up to your motherboard, so you should disconnect it from your motherboard and plug it into your sound card (somewhere on your sound card should be a bank of pins, 2 rows, that fit the 'plug' of your front panel audio inputs)

Once you have that set up, try the headphones again, but this time using the front panel. See if that fixes it. You may have a defective mike jack at the back of your sound card, or, alternately, having the front panel hooked into your mobo (if that was the case) could have been causing some internal confusing. Now that you have it hooked into your sound card proper, the confusion may disappear.

Hmm, good questions.

So, I have a headphone and mic jack on the front (bottom right side) which I'll trace the wires for. I also have the X-fi card itself (four ports) and then another card above that which appears to be onboard because on the inside it's just a tiny nothing card with a white wire to the board.

I also get three options for sound in WoW: System Default, Regular Speakers (X-fi), SPDIF Out (X-fi). I have no idea what that third one is.

Finally, if the wires thing doesn't solve it I'll go with Viin's AL driver link.

It's hard to say. No one really knows the exact problem, but from what I can gather there's a feature in the P5Q mobo that drops the voltage on the video card slowly causing it to kill itself.

A very detailed explanation from one person here (http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20080713214821640&board_id=1&model=P5Q&page=1&SLanguage=en-us). Some people say turning off half the energy saving/performance features fixes it, but it's brutal having to reboot and wait for the system to lock up again. It took about an hour last time.

The problem being is that one guy reported his video card breaking from the voltage issue, so I don't know if mine is broken or if it's fine and I can keep trying all the bios option fixes.

Edit: Probably the video card. Problem is, even if I do RMA the card, they're only going to send me another one that won't work.

I have used a 50' VGA for a projector, worked great but being a projector the resolution wasn't all that high (1024x768)

You have $200. You want to buy an ATX motherboard that is SLI friendly. The computer this board will support exists only to game. What do you buy?

Just to be clear do you want SLI (NVIDIA) or Crossfire (AMD/ATI) support?

"SLI" is used by many people as a generic term for multiple cards.

I suppose maybe!

Well you probably weren't old enough to remember the Voodoo SLI setup :awesome_for_real:

Pfffffffffffft.

I had SLI'd modems. It works for everything in pairs, rite?  :grin:

Did a bunch of poking around this morning. It appears the front jacks are not connected (looks like they never were, which I guess makes sense). The onboard card also doesn't work, so I'm guessing it was turned off at assembly (iBuyPower). That onboard card does have the standard red port that Engels talked about though.

It's just an X-Fi Audio card, no special pre-/suffixes like Fatal1ty nor Extremewhatver. I downloaded your OpenAL driver and installed it. I don't know if that's the exact thing that fixed the mic, but plugging the microphone wire into the optical/mic port works.

I still can't get the Audio Console to switch from Audio Creation to Entertainment nor Gaming modes, but honestly I don't care. My computer is in the living room and I'm using just-ok headphones so I can still talk with the wife when gaming anyway. I'll get fidelity someday when I build my game room in the basement :-)

Question: if my onboard sound has been disabled (presumably to prevent it conflicting with the X-Fi), how do I turn it back on? I poked around the BIOS but nothing jumped out at me.
The X-Fi optical/mic port pulls double duty. I downloaded you

Options like that should be in the BIOS, but it might be hidden in a sub-menu.  It's also possible the board is smart enough to automatically disable it because you have the X-Fi card installed.  On board sound doesn't tend to work if you have a card as well.

Ok I'll look in the BIOS again. When I pulled the X-fi out, Vista didn't see a sound capability at all.

Using Firefox 2.0.0.20

For some reason, a while ago my download manager stopped working. I can open it, but anything I download is done "in the background."

Also, I can't save pictures through the browser. As in, when I right-click and go through the dialog of picking a place and naming and saving the file, it does not work. I can open up an old version of IE that I never use and save just fine.

virus/spyware scans turn up nothing.

Have you considered going to Firefox 3? 2.0.0.20 is pretty old :-)

Yeah, but there was talk awhile ago that Ff 3 sucks ass. Has this changed - is the browser acceptable and such now?

Just test it out. If it 'sucks ass' (although I can't see how a mozilla browser can illicit such scathing criticism. Safari, sure, but Mozilla?), uninstall it and reinstall 2, which you can probably find somewhere on the FF site, if nto elsewhere (Twocows prolly still hosts a copy).

Who said FF3 sucks ass? The memory management in FF3 is much better than that bloated POS FF2. Also FF2 is no longer supported (December 2008 was the last month) so if any security issues come up on FF2 you are on your own.

People here were complaining about it when it first hit, so I stayed away. I guess I'll give it a shot myself.

EDIT: Not surprisingly, upgrading to the newest version fixed the problem.

One annoyance though - every time I download something, it's immediately scanned....any way to turn this off, or at least set exceptions?

Sorry for the delayed response.

I want SLI = nVidia. It's a personal thing, but I prefer their cards.

I'm thinking this would be good (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3523225&csid=ITD&body=MAIN#detailspecs). Anyone know of a reason I should not buy it?

What is doing the scanning?

I wasn't happy with the mcp/mosfet/etc cooler on that board, it's one big, long set of heatsinks/pipes, and if you install the (needed) fan, it defaults to blowing the heat from the mcp directly on the back of the primary video card. And evga's response to me was to suggest I lap the bottom of the heatsink system, and bend it until it fit better, while cautioning that it may void the warranty. Would have been workable, but I was annoyed enough to go for an DFI x38 board instead.

You wouldn't happen to have a link to the DFI x38  board you went with would you?

Probably for someone like me running to a home theater, it's a digital out.

Unfortunately, on the X-Fi, you can't get surround sound on the spdif out, you've got to pony up for their breakout box (http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=720&subcategory=736&product=14191).

Speaking of the X-Fi and Vista, whatever became of the issue of hardware sound acceleration in Vista?

I went with the LP LT x38-T2R, there's an x48 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813136046) equivalent that wasn't out when I upgraded. However, if you really need sli you'll need to go with a 780i/790i for core2 or x58 for CoreI7. None of the 780i boards I've looked at seemed laid out well, and the 790i would be over the $200 mark. But if you've already got chip/memory/etc that will point you toward a few specific boards.

I was quite happy with my evga 680i and an evga 680iLT, sli worked fine, no issues. Bit long in the tooth these days though.

What does it allow you to do? Control your components from the computer?

And feh, my freakin' on board sound supports 5.1 Surround (not uber, but it's there if I ever start caring again) and the X-Fi doesn't?!

X-Fi supports 7.1 analog surround sound out of the output jacks on the card. Sky is talking about digital surround output.

I think the whole point of SPDIF is so that you get a clean unprocessed digital signal.  Not something that's already been dorked around with so that you can use a really good piece of equipment on it.  I think the assumption is that the DSP in your multi-thousand dollar audio reciever is a bit better than the 1 dollar part used for the board build in.

Yes you would think.

In theory I think it's because many if not most people that are hooking up a surround sound system to their PCs are doing it directly via the computer rather than through a receiver/integrated amplifier first (i.e. their computer is not a dedicated HTPC system). Given the low end nature of the typical PC-centric surround speaker system I don't think they could even tell the difference between analog and digital outputs.

In reality it's just a way for Creative to make a little extra money since they have such a dominate market share they don't have to care if their competitors offer that feature without making people pay extra.

Oh, ok, that makes more sense.

And I agree with you that there's probably a lot more people hooking up those 5-in-1 Best Buy box deals of speakers/subwoofer directly to their computer than their Harmon Kardon pre-amp across the room  :grin:

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/default.aspx

The DFI LanParty X38 boards use the Intel X38 chipset which means they have CrossFire not SLI support. The DFI LanParty site is here:

http://www.dfi.com.tw/portal/CM/cmproduct

but it doesn't look like they sell any Intel CPU/NVIDIA chipset motherboards in that line anymore.

Good motherboard to get since the P5Q has issues with EVGA cards? Preferably without any silly "green" power saving options.

Firefox itself.

I didn't know it could do that... what is it looking for?  Virii?  Maybe it is an add-on.

Are you sure it's not your virus scanner working through Firefox?

Straz is talking about a default feature of Firefox. It automatically does some quick scan of everything you download when it finishes.

No Firefox isn't doing the scanning, it's integrating with any virus scanner you have installed:

http://blog.kaizeku.com/ua/firefox/how-to-disabled-firefox-3-dowload-manager-automated-anti-virus-scan/

Nothing. It just sits there. But it's the only way to get digital surround sound to my receiver.

I got spoiled with the old Soundstorm chip, that was the best onboard sound evar. DD5.1 hardware on a mobo? Hell yeah. When that died, I tried running an Auzentech X-Plosion, which was based on the Soundstorm setup. The drivers were god-fucking-awful, Oblivion was unplayable due to a (still) unresolved sound bug that cropped up in a few other games. I finally bit the bullet and went for the X-Fi, then had to scramble to find the way to connect it digitally to my setup.

Pain in the butt and cost me $$ (the linked box was more like $100 a couple years ago, plus the X-Fi), but now I have great sound, so it's worth it in the long run.

Murgos brings up the main problem, though I haven't really seen any tangible effects: It's D/A to A/D rather than a straight digital signal. Fucking Creative.

Trippy, thanks for that link. Very informative! (and thanks for not letmegooglethatforyou'ing me)

That seems like a silly limitation. What it you wanted to have a speaker that is playing real-time sound from another area. You'd need a Listener for the main actor and a Listener for the microphone feeding the speaker.

Answering my own question for the benefit of everyone.  It's really cool, assuming your outlets are actually connected.  Summary is that my 360 and PS3 are now wired, and my DirecTV receiver will be as well once I put in the IP config.  I got the ZyXEL PLA-470 (four port brick) from newegg.com but I had to get the PLA-401 (one port wall wart) from somewhere less awesome since newegg only has the 470 for some reason.  Unfortunately my remote equipment just disconnected and I'm not sure what's up.  I can see both MACs from the local side (router/DSL/rig side upstairs) but the PS3 isn't getting connected after some great downloading.  I will try a few things, such as going back to DHCP, before I get angry and punch a cat.

Can anyone give me some simple advice on connecting a TV, PS3 and surround sound system?

I've got a Sony Bravia (http://www.sony.co.uk/product/t32-w-series/kdl-40w4500) TV, a PS3 and a Sony Home Theatre (http://www.sony.co.uk/product/hcs-cinema-surround-kit/ht-ss1300) all-in-one thingy and there's so many connection options that I'm confused.

I presume that just an optical cable from PS3 to the HTSS will do for that bit of it, or would HDMI be better? And for the TV do I want an HDMI for audio output from the HTSS to the TV and an optical cable for TV output to the HTSS (i.e. for broadcast channel viewing)?

Does that sound reasonable or would there be a better way?

HDMI from everything to the HTSS.  HDMI out from HTSS to TV.  Done.

Optical cable, despite being called optical (it means fiber optic) is often only a digital audio transport.

edit: Let me rephrase before Trippy corrects me.  Optical out on Home Theater/Audio equipment is generally only used to transport digital audio and not digital video (although it could, I guess they don't due to DRM issues).  HDMI carries both digital video and digital audio.

edit2: wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK

HDMI carries video and sound, and makes everything easier. toslink is just for sound.
hdmi from the ps3 to the Home Theatre, hdmi from the Home Theatre to the tv. If your television signal is from an antenna using the tv's internal tuner, then optical out (sound only of course, the pics already on the tv!) from the tv to the htss. If you're using a cable/sky/plus/whatever box for tv signal, hdmi from that to the htss. That's pretty much how I have my system set up. hdmi for everything except ota sound, which goes from the tv to receiver, so I can watch the occasional program over the good speakers.

Awesome thankyou guys. So all I need to get is one more HDMI cable and I'm good to go. Right.... off to Argos then  :why_so_serious:

 :heart:

Just because your back is better doesn't mean you have to travel to Greece just to get an HDMI cable. If you do, say hi to the Darkfall guys for me!

Ok, so between these video cards, which one would be the best bang for my buck:

Sapphire ATI RADEON HD 4850 (http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=018942&cid=999.243.272)

Asus EAH4850 (http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=018957&cid=999.243.272)

XFX GeForce 9800GT (http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=019957&cid=999.243.390)

Asus EN9800GT HYBRIDPOWER (http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=019656&cid=999.243.390)

Once again, EVGA is not an option.

The 4850 is the faster GPU (the 4850 is actually a match for the 9800 GTX/GTX+). Only you can decide if that's worth the extra $20.

Eh, what's $20. Anything wrong with Sapphire that you know of? Reviews check out, but I've never really seen a terrible review.

Sapphire used to make ATI's "reference" boards. Dunno if that's still true post AMD acquisition.

Anyone know a tool to test video card RAM the same way I would test system RAM with Memtest?

I suspect my video card is on the fritz. I re-installed XP over Vista64 (thinking it was a driver issue) but I still get the same weird behavior. I don't have a spare video card to throw into the mix, so I need to find a way to test it out.

When I had an ATI board, it was Sapphire. Partly for the reason Trippy mentioned, partly because it was a great board. This was a while ago, though.

Trying to add two more 1gb sticks to my computer. Mobo is Asus P5N32-E C2D E6600. I bought it with 2gbs already installed (two sticks of 1gb DDR1). So I purchase two more sticks from Newegg, the same type (Corsair XMS2) and install them.

The first time I did that was a week ago. Computer would crash right before the Vista login screen. One stick would work (for 3gbs) but not the second (for 4gbs). Figuring a bad RAM stick, I return the bad one. Then I get told I needed to return both, so do that.

Today I get the new set and install. This time the computer won't even get the Asus screen. And I cannot enter the BIOS setup menu. Just hangs, no matter how long I leave it. So I pull out one of the sticks and it works fine, albeit with 3gbs. Some guesses:

1) Is it possible I get ANOTHER bad RAM stick? This would be extreme for me. I have never ever received bad RAM, in 20 years of mucking with the innards of computers.

2) Could I have a bad RAM slot? That would suck but I'd live with it, probably return this RAM and buy two 2gb sticks. If I understand the manual correctly, since this is dual channel, whatever I put in the left two slots I need to match in the right two. So if one slot on the left is out, to get 4gbs, I'd need to remove all RAM and just put in to two 2gb sticks. Question here: can I go to 6gb down the road by adding one more 2gb even if I leave the last (broken) slot empty?

3) Could I be missing something in the BIOS? There's an option on the Extreme Tweaker tab at the bottom called "Memory Config" or something like that, but it is greyed out.

Sounds like you need this (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=91672c7c-614b-404c-850c-377541e93c18&displaylang=en) update from Microsoft.  Take out the additional RAM, download the update and install.  If it prompts you to restart, go ahead and do so.  After getting back to desktop, shut it down, install the RAM.  Then power back up.  Bing badaboom badda bing.

Also, there's some setting called Extended Memory (I think) in the ASUS bios that you need to enable otherwise it won't recognize the additional 2GB.  At least there is on my ASUS P5N-D 750i SLI.

Hmm. That seems to only apply to 64bit Vista. I should have mentioned I only have Vista 32.

I think it was the Extended Memory thing in my BIOS that was grayed out. I can't remember the last time I updated the BIOS. Maybe that alone should inspire me to?  :wink:

I don't think Vista 32 supports more than 3GB of RAM.  Might be your problem?  A quick google search revealed quite a few people that seem to have had the same problem.  Anyway, according to this (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929777/en-us) page, that same KB929777 update works for both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Bios updating?  Eh, I don't update unless I start having problems but that's just me.  Same for drivers.

Then again, it might be worth removing what your old RAM that you know is good, and trying the new 2GB you're not quite sure about.

I had 4GB of RAM in my 32bit Vista install no problems .. are they the same speed/type as your originals? (DDR2 800s maybe?) Do both new sticks by themselves work?

Yes on them being the same as the original. I'm going to try and swap them tonight. I didn't realize KB929777 would work for Vista32. That'll be step two.

I would say 'step up to Vista 64', but W7 is around the proverbial corner.  So, meh. 

But yeah, get that update and you should be good to go (assuming your RAM is, in fact, good).

Thanks, trying that in a bit.

Separate question: Charter is going to cap my tier of cable modem speeds to 100g a month. What program can I get to get a sense for how much bandwidth I use?  I think in way far south of 100gbs, but I want to be sure.

There's a widget gidget gadget thing for the Vista sidebar that keeps up with it I believe.  I know Schild uses something that tells him how much bandwidth he consumes.

If they're capping you don't they have a webpage you can visit to check?

My ISP has one but it's broken about 50% of the time and when it's broken they don't enforce the caps  :drill:

Web browsers on linux.  Which one is the easiest to get up and running and will display at least 90% of what I surf to?  Alternatively, maybe I want a codex pack for Firefox 3 so video.google.com doesn't make it go catatonic?

I'm using RHEL and ubuntu that come default with Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6 and after installing flash, it runs just fine. Can you define catatonia? This is on an old P4 with 512 ram and a Radeon X600.

Catatonia = hangs up, at least when I'm trying to use video.google.com, requiring me to either wait some indeterminate period or terminate the process.  It occasionally works but is choppy, perhaps due to CPU?  It's a AMD XP 3000+. There were three choices for swf player, seems I chose poorly?  If it matters, this is Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 8.

I think I picked the, what, 3rd option down for Debian linux (Ubuntu)? But I think your problem may be slightly different. Sometimes Ubuntu doesn't really install the 'real' device drivers for your vid card and fudges it. Then flash will run like crap. Can you see if its running the right drivers? ATI cards, for example, have 'restricted' drivers that are not installed by default by Ubuntu and need to be specially 'authorised' by you to download and install.

I installed the "restricted" drivers for the vid card.  Those might still be the problem, though.  Stupid linux.

Yeeeah, I've had touch and go luck with ATI. Its so odd how ATI drags its feet about Linux.

So, today one of the department heads decided it was time to clean out a back storage area filled with soil samples and ancient equipment. We discovered some ancient IBM PCs, so I am now typing from an ancient Model M IBM keyboard! Schild was totally right that this thing is the BOMB to type on.

Here's a few pics:

Tried this finally. Didn't work. Said I didn't have the right configuration for it. And this was after I went to the page that said this patch was for "Windows Vista" generic. I also moved the RAM around. It's not the RAM slots (thankfully). I think the schmucks sent back to me what I just returned to them. I really can't calculate the probability that the second version of the same SKU also had one busted RAM stick. I'm trying to find a subtle way to mark these so when I return them I can see if they do it again. Wish my local Circuit Cities still had RAM left.

@apocrypha: Good point. I can't find it at Charter.net, so will probably just call once I receive the official notice about this policy.

You found SOME IBM PCs?

Get me another one plz.

Are you using a 64-bit version of Ubuntu?

I want to play DoW II. But my old X850 only supports up to Pixel Shader 2.0b and DoW requires 3.0 or higher.

I was more than happy with my X850 for playing Fallout 3. ( the newest, most system testing game I own ) And if it were not for the fact that DoW won't even run under PS 2.0 I would not upgrade.

But anyway, tl;dr: What's the best bang-for-your-buck video card around the $80-$120 range?
I have been using ATI for my last two cards but I an not adverse to Nvidia. I'll do some of my own reaserch, but you guys are always helpful snarky so figured I would ask here.

Fake Edit: Do we still do strikethrough? I heard green was out.

Cheap vid card?  You could always buy one or both of my 8800GTS G92's if I decide to sell them  Lifetime transferable warranty, never overclocked, aprox 1 year old, like new!! :grin:

Which brings me to...

Thinking about buying one of those snazzy GTX295's.  I'm currently running the aforementioned GTS's in SLI (x16 at each slot) at 1920x1200 resolution.  Am I going to see a measureable increase in performance?  Or will I see a bottleneck at my proc (oc'd q6600 at 3.2ghz) or my RAM (4GB 4-4-4-12 Ballistix) that will limit those gains?

If you want to stick with ATI then if you can find one on sale or with a rebate for ~$120 get a 4850 otherwise get the 4830.

Ah, there were only 2 keyboards, and one of them has the old keyboard connection, not the ps2 kind. I'm not even sure this second one works.

5 pin din to ps2 converter (http://www.restockit.com/Belkin-Pro-Series-Keyboard-Converter-Cable-Keyboard-Adapter-6-Pin-PS-2-M-5-Pin-DIN-F-6-In-(664044).html?source=froogle&Bvar5=100F1&Bvar6=100F1&Bvar7=100F1)

Yep, in fact, in the detritus of the college's basements there is probably a drawer full of them. Unfortunately, my duties prevent me from a full archeological expedition.

Bitmeter (http://www.download.com/BitMeter/3000-2381_4-10398686.html)

So my computer has just been having more and more problems lately and it's acting up again now and I'm having a tough time pinpointing whats causing the issues.  As most of it is pushing 3 years old I'm way overdue for an overhaul.  But $$ is a bit tight.

Do you think I can do a decent upgrade for <$500?  Or at least something close to that without buying no-name crap parts.  The case, monitor, hard drives, dvd drives should all be good still.  Currently I'm running -

Windows XP
GeForce 7600
4gb DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) (Yes, I know)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+

I'm assuming I'll need/want new MB, CPU, PSU, Memory and Video Card.  Whats the way to go right now, Intel or AMD?

I'm not looking for someone to spoon feed me an exact setup (unless they feel generous) but I haven't been keeping up real well on my hardware lately so an idea of what direction to look at would be great.  :oh_i_see:

Pretty sure I am not.  I think the AMD XP 3000+ is 32-bit?

I just did this, new p5q mobo, core 2 duo, 4 gig PC8500, Radeon 4850  came in at $480ish after shipping and tax, so if your current PSU can handle it you might be okay.

Fair warning I did end up dumping another $150 on a case and cpu fan 2 weeks later due to some heat issues (thinking my 12 year old single fan case couldn't keep up with the ATI card).

here is sort of what i went with:
mobo $97 (seems like it was cheaper when i bought it) (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131347)
E8400 CPU $165 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115037)
4 gig ram $52 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104097)
ATI 4850 (asus branded) $165 (was $150 w/o rebates when I bought mine) (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121272)

I left out the mail in rebates for the above but seems like there were about $50 worth all told.

Yeah the Athlon XP is 32-bit only. Shouldn't be so hard, then, to get Flash working.

I think that its not so much flash as that the ATI drivers for Ubuntu blow goats. A while back I managed, finally, to get Ubuntu's graphic drivers for ATI to work as expected, but I had to do some pretty in depth research to find the 'right ones'. This was about two years ago, I must say, so I can't be certain that the solution would be the same. However, that it still doesn't work right doesn't surprise me much.

Ok.  Bought the Zalman CNPS9700 LED fan/heatsink.

Probably should have asked this before I bought it, but will it be able to utilize the mobo's (ASUS P5N-D 750i SLI) automatic fan control or do I have to use the external fan speed control?

The fan in the 9700 supports PWM control so it'll work with your motherboard fan controller.

Thanks, man.

Intardnet question...

I've got Comcast as my service provider, and my plan is the 8MB down / 2MB up.  I rarely break 1MB down, usually averages about 800kb/s.  Occasionally on the start of the initial download I'll hit 2MB down, but it lasts about 2 seconds.  Is there *any* reason I should use the 8MB over the 3MB service?  Is this a problem with Comcast throttling their own download speeds, or is it a problem with my neighborhood size (about 50 houses - unknown how many have broadband, but guessing all of them).  It doesn't matter what time of day, it just seems that my DL speeds are capped awfully low for the service I have.  It seems about the same speed as my old 3MB down service.

Speedtest (http://www.speedtest.net/) will give you an idea of what you're getting. Comcast does different stuff in different places, where I am they're still borking torrents, but I get ~20M down 3M up most times (less between 5pm and 7pm) on a 12M/1.5M plan

I have a pretty basic plan, and the speedtest swears I should get 10m down. I don't think I've ever seen anything close to that, but I am willing to bet a big part of that is on the other end of my download.

Make sure that you are comparing apples to apples.

Sometimes your DL speed will be reported in bytes and sometimes in bits and it can be confusing to see which you are getting.

Also, as someone who actually works with the transmission of bits on a wire there is even more ambiguity there than you are aware of because it usually takes ~10 bits to encode 8 bits of information for transmission and there is other overhead as well (preamble, header, crc and other info you never see, etc...).

So, if you have a connection that is physically capable of moving 10 Mbps you cant really expect it to move a 10 Mb file in 1 second.  So what does a 10 Mbps dl speed really mean?

Hell if I know.  Was hoping you could tell me.

10Mbps just means "this is faster than 5Mbps".

Sad, but true.

Rarely will you ever get the full capacity of your bandwidth due to intervening networks and overhead.  Mostly it means your chances of having a decent download speed are better.  With luck it might also mean better equipment is used so you tend to have a lower latency.

I can't seem to find any backgrounds that are up to what I would deem to be decent for my MSN messenger wallpaper. Would anyone have links to a site?

So I like having a quasi-media server PC, but we don't use it nearly enough to justify having it on all the time. What's the best solution:

1) Have it go into Standby mode. Can I wake this up remotely? How? Be accessing a shortcut to the server volume or through my RealVNC connection?
2) Find a method to remote-boot it. Is this software based or hardware?

Thanks.

Wake on LAN might work, but I'm not 100% sure how that works. If it works in that any device that tries to access the computer over the LAN "wakes" it up, then it should work for you.

What's a good video card diagnostic program?  Nvidia 8800 GT.

I've never heard of one, to be honest. What is the symptom?

Edit: You could download and install nTune (http://www.nvidia.com/object/ntune_5.05.54.00.html) or Riva Tuner  (http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner) to check the temperature on the GPU, but I don't think they do much more in terms of troubleshooting. NTune has a 'stability test' that you can run as well, but I'm not sure it'll tell you what the problem is if it is a GPU problem. Riva Tuner also says it has a diagnotic ability, but I am not familiar with the program.

Usually graphics corruption followed shortly thereafter by a crash.  Typical "dammit my vid card is acting up" stuff, but I'd like a little more to go on than educated guesses and instinct.

Temp is my first concern.  I'll see what nTune tells me.

I know there are programs that check VRAM much in the way MemTest checks normal RAM. Can't quite recall any programs, Sorry Lanty!

I was just thinking that I have that same vid card, the 8000 GT, and I had to switch out the cooling fan for an after-market one. The one I got was this Zalman (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835118001). It dropped my GPU temp very significantly.

The issue was that the factory cooler had a solid plate of metal as the heating conductor for both the GPU and the ram chips, and just a small piddly fan for all of it. The temps were high, around 70C at idle, hitting 90C at the drop of a hat. With the Zalman, the temp dropped to ~50C at idle, top temp of 75C, well within safety thresholds.

Now GPU heatsink installation is kinda scary to perform, but I found that this particular model was not difficult. The one plus/minus with this particular heatsink is that the fan speed is manually regulated. This is great in terms of noise control, but you sorta have to remember to crank it up during strenuous game play. Its not that loud, but if sound is a factor its something to consider.

Of course, it may be too late for your card if you're already seeing artifacts, but if you don't wanna plonk down a few hundred for a new card, this might be a troubleshooting option.

My card has heatpipes, a giant heat sink, plus two fans which are running fine.  I do need to look it over more carefully, but I'm more worried about the failed nVidia board problems catching up with it than it needing a new cooling solution.

I had a similar problem once and it turned out that the fans were clogged with dust.  You can't tell while they are running but if you look at them when they are off it's pretty apparent.

I just cleaned 'em out with a cotton swab and the card was fine after that.

The fans are the secondary cooling, so I'm not to concerned with how gunked up they are.

Here is my card. (http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1284/3/ecs_geforce_8800gt_accelero_s1_512mb/index.html)

Ya, that heatsink is actually considered one of the best on the market for the 8800 GT. That said, if you have old and crusty thermal paste, not even the best heatsink in the world is gonna cool the GPU properly.

nTune showed the fan set to cool at 33% speed when running a 3D application and being 46°C with basic windows tasks.  Seems a little high for essentially idle.  Cranking it up to max fan speed for 3D kept it at 54°C while playing and I didn't have any graphics glitches at all.

Given all that I'm guessing it is a heat issue and I'll just need to make sure everything is clean and maybe reapply some thermal paste.  Thanks for the help.

GPUs run very hot, even when not doing 3D. My 7800 GT is running at 46C right now just in windows and I can't remember now what the shutdown temp used to be on my GPU (stupid redesigned NVIDIA control panel) but it was above 100C (think maybe 115C?).

46 is very respectable for the 8800 chip. That one's pretty hot by nature. Keeping it at 54C while under stress is nothing short of a miracle, really.

That's why I chose that card.  But since I've had to change my fan settings (unless multiple upgrades and downgrades made a bad tweak) when it used to work without problem, it had me worried.

I wonder if I can play Mass Effect without it crashing now.  Guess that's a test for this evening.

My 8800gtx will crash with crysis at max (hacked for "dx10" effects in xp) at 1280x720. I think it runs around high 80s or so. Mid70s is normal, but it runs fine in most apps (except for mumbly mumbly EQ2 cities mumbly texture crash). I've thought about getting another heat-sink, but I just don't play Crysis instead. I do have rivatuner set the fans to 100% on it, because I can barely notice the difference in sound.

My color wheel in the DLP otoh....considering doing surgery to replace that. Been getting loud this year.

You might want to consider just cleaning whatever dust you may have sitting in you PC. I was getting consistent EQ2 client crashes recently. Opened up my case, and cleaned out the HSFs of my video card and CPU, and cleaned out my case fans.

Runs quieter and flawlessly....well, as flawless as I can get out of a 6+ year old PC.

No, it's always done that in a couple zones with max graphics. I can understand Neriak, Kelethin and Gorowyn, the head-scratcher is Pillar of Flames. Doesn't bug me, I've got a good profile saved for those zones, takes about 2 seconds to swap. I do dust my pc and it has filters at every ingress.

Quick and stupid question.  What is the other dimension of 1080p on a TV?  I am about to connect my wife's new computer to the 52" LCD. :grin:

1920x1080

I'm heading over to Japan for work for a week.  I think I can use my laptop safely (transformer brick will handle 100V 60Hz), but can I similarly plug-in other things like a phone?

Basically, would small appliances have built in conversion for 120V->100V and from 60Hz->50Hz (I think that's correct amounts).  Thx.

Check your power cable.  My phone could handle Asian voltages, however I still needed an adapter.

So is there a clear cut "this is the one headset/mic to rule them all" product I can purchase or do I have to read a bunch of reviews?  My current headset's right ear is dead, it's a sennheiser which I've been pretty happy with.

anyone ever hear of "backing" up the original adobe cs4 disks causing the originals to become no good (ie wont read in the dvd drives at work)?

No, but given the fucking rootkit copy protection installed with that stuff it wouldn't surprise me if somehow, someway it actually did fuck something up.

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6bd8d?14

I think it's a coincidental combination of crappy adobe disks+ancient cheap dvd drives at work.  After thinking about it a bit Adobe seems to rely more on authenticating you cs4 session every time you launch the product than it does on protecting the install files.  Laptop was able to read the disk as well as one of the mac's at work, just all the old Dell's had issues.

Ok, I somehow got a virus that un-formatted one of my harddrives, (I'm pretty sure all the data is still all on it...) anyone know the easiest way to get it off/format it with losing all my porn data?

Put your porn disk into a linux machine?  If possible, cp things off, wipe the disk and replace porn.

I just had to install SP2, I guess my drive has a newer standard of NTFS than what plain XP handles.

Looking for a bit of help here.  I've got a Logitech G15 keyboard that recently has been acting up.  The issue is that the keyboard will, at random, turn off (keys go blank as does the LCD) and sit idle for roughly 30 sec.  It will then "reboot" and work for as long as 10 minutes; then repeat the process. 

Windows has quit recognizing it as a G15 and now refers to it as a Compatible HID in device manager. 

I have uninstalled the old drivers, and reinstaled new drivers from the logitech site (3.0.180 I believe).  No change.  I've tried different USB plugs, that doesn't seem to make a difference either. 

Is a BIOS update an option?

Windows Vista 32 bit
ASUS P5K-E
Intell Core 2 Duo
8800 GT

They are up to SP3 now, hoss.

Mortriden: Those keyboards are not made to last. Mine lasted about 18 months then just died. LCD stopped working first then one day it did pretty much what you're describing. Throw it away, it's fuct. Cheap crap painted up pretty and over-priced tbh.

Good to know its a POS. I was tempted, and considering my current logitech wireless has lasted 4 years, I thought it would be worth it. Sigh, how the mighty have fallen.

Yeah, but it started working after SP2. I installed SP3 after posting.

Only thing I'd recommend it for is something like EVE with Ventrillo. Shows you who's talking on vent on the LCD, which is just fucking awesome  :awesome_for_real:

Quick tech question. e6600 on a P5W DH Deluxe mobo. Better to run the RAM at higher speed or lower latency?

800 4-4-4-12

or

1066 5-5-5-15

1066 5-5-5-15

Is the answer if the memory can handle the speed. Despite the latency, faster clock gives a potential of 200 million more memory operations/second. Those refresh values mean in practice the period between the refresh current is run through the chips and doesn't matter read or writespeeds drastically.

Recommend an audio card.  150 USD max.  Usage will be gaming 80 percent of the time, music 10 percent, and movie/video 10 percent of the time.  Used exclusively with headphones.  Would LIKE to have USB output option if possible.  Vista 64 compatible.

Thanks.

What do you mean by "USB output"?

My headphones have USB thingies that they plug into - that then plug into the computer's USB ports.  Not married to it, but that's now the signal is processed in the Plantronics 777 (http://www.plantronics.com/north_america/en_US/products/computer/pc-gaming-headsets/gamecom-777) and how the virtual surround is processed in the 770's (http://www.plantronics.com/north_america/en_US/products/cat640035/cat1430032/prod5870007) (though this is used on my 360 primarily, so it's not a consideration).  In it's own right, they act as their own sound card(s). 

If need be, I can buy a different set of 5.1 surround headphones down the road - and just go with the 'regular' settings.  But I don't think there's a set with 5 seperate plugs for the 5.1 is there?

Windows only allows a single sound output device to be active at a time. You will have to choose between your USB box or the sound card. You can't plug your USB box into a USB port on your computer and then somehow redirect the output of the sound card through it. Nor are there sound cards that have a USB input/output for connecting to such a box. Basically if you want to use a sound card you'll have to unplug your headphones from the USB box and plug in the mini-stereo jacks directly into the sound card bypassing the USB box.

There are also tie-ins on sound cards that allow you to use the front jacks on most computer cases. The 'out' or headphone jack, and the mike jack are fairly common. That still doesn't allow you to use the USB port, but it alleviates the hassel of having to plug in headphones into the back of your box by switching out the speaker jack and plugging in the headphone jack.

That's not what I'm looking to do. 

If the card supports 5.1 and has a USB output = awesome.
If the card doesn't have a USB output, but still supports 5.1 = not quite as awesome.  But workable.

Like I said, I'm not married to the USB dongle thing for the headphones.   Would be nice, but not a requirement.

Basically, just want a nice sound card.

I may be out of the loop, but are there even cards with USB jacks at all?

Like I said above you can't do that (and that is what you are looking to do since you've said it twice so I'm not sure why you said that you aren't).

Most cards these days support 5/6/7.1 output.


No. And even if they did they wouldn't do what SnakeCharmer is trying to do.

Trippy - I'm not trying to run two different sound sources on the same card or from one card and one of the computers USB outputs or trying to run sound from the sound card to one of the computers/mobo's USB ports. 

Once more....

The headphones connect via a USB dongle thing (or rather, they have that option).  If I can connect to a sound card via the USB thing, awesome.  If not, not so awesome, but still doable.

What I *want* is a sound card that sends the 5.1 (6.1 or 7.1) signal via a USB output ON THE CARD ITSELF - NOT ANOTHER USB PORT ON THE COMPUTER/CASE.  No other ports on the card are going to be used.  Not any of the mini jacks, not the digital output, nothing.  [

b]Just the USB output on the card[/b].

Again, there is no such thing.

USB headphones do work just fine though, there is no need to connect them directly to the card.

But you won't have that surround sound stuff, I'm guessing.

What I am wondering is how that thing works at all? Does it have all sorts of fancy drivers that work with the dongle, since use of the dongle means you don't need a dedicated sound card besides the integrated sound? Or, does it just fake the surround sound?

Once again, no.

Though now I'm curious. What would you want to do with the USB output on the sound card (if such a thing existed which it doesn't) if you aren't trying to connect your USB dongle to it? Your headphones have regular stereo mini jack plugs when not plugged into the USB dongle. You said it's not necessary to use the dongle and yet you are insisting the sound card have it's own USB port. What you would be plugging into that USB port?

It uses Dolby Headphone technology to create surround sound.

Because the 5.1 headphones won't be 5.1 without the USB dongle.   

Unless the soundcard can broadcast 5.1 from one minijack...

Okay so I was right, you are trying to pass the sound card output into the USB dongle.

But you don't need to connect the usb headphones to a sound card to get 5.1 sound so why do you want to do that?

The whole 'plug these into a Dolby compatible USB soundcard' looks like to be a bad translation or badly written marketese. From the information I gathered at Dolby website and the earphone manufacturer, the headphones already have that USB Dolby 5.1 chip in them - and for getting the surround sound, you just have to plug them into any available USB-port in the machine.

No need getting a dedicated card, if you are happy with the headphones.

Ok so the RAM problem from a few weeks back persists. I think some of you were correct: will need Vista 64bit. Should I get it or survive on 3gb of RAM until Windows 7 comes along? And will Windows 7 support 4gb?

So uhh, what's the deal if one of my fans (pretty sure it's the GPU fan) all of the sudden revs up really fast for like a half a second and then goes back to normal and repeats the same behavior.  I had this happening in the Empire: Total War campaign map but it never happened during the battles or anywhere else (or on any other game). 

what vid card is it? If its Nvidia, download nTune or Riva Tuner so you can manually set fan behavior. I'm not familiar enough with ATI to have advice

8800 GTS.  I have RivaTuner just because nTune liked to reset it's fan setting after reboots.  I think it might be that the version of RivaTuner I had wasn't yet updated to the version of nVidia drivers I was using.  I'll try tonight. 

Just to reiterate one thing - have you upgraded the bios? For example broken ACPI can cause funnies when you have the exact amount of RAM which processor can address. Another question is your processor, does it support 64bit addressing mode (make/model)?

With 4 gigs I'd go for 64 bit OS, whether it's Vista or W7, unless you have hardware that doesn't have 64bit drivers, although Vista does better job with 4 gigs without running through the loops then WinXP in 32 bit mode. Our mediacenter has been very stable with 32 bit Vista and 4 gigs of ram.

Speedwise the worst option would be running in 3 stick configuration - most of the speed with ram these days is gained by 'striping' them as a pair, and having 3 stick would drop the whole memory bandwidth significantly. So if at all possible solving the issue somehow would be optimal.

Good questions :-)

Power Supply: NZXT PRC-550 550W Power Supply (SLI-Ready)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6600 (2x 2.4GHz)
Motherboard:  Asus P5N32-E SLI nForce® 680i SLI Chipset
Memory: Corsair XMS2 Xtreme 2x1024mb RAM
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
Sound: Creative Lab Sound Blaster X-Fi
Hard Drive: 250gb SATA-II 7200rpm

Whenever I've google'd this, I see posts about 680i having the kind of problems that only Vista 64 seems to fix. I have not updated the bios. I bought this in April 2007.

Okay, your processor is 64bit capable, so grabbing a copy of 64bit OS isn't a problem on that front.

I'd start by updating the bios first, in case it fixes the apparent addressing issue. I think the thing you are dealing with in there is the fact that basically a 32bit addressing mode can only see and use 4 gigs of memory, and that memory includes all the addresses needed for display and other peripherals. Something causes your MB to report some addresses wrong and later OS tries to access those as regular ram.

If bios upgrade doesn't help, then it's time to check the 64-bit readiness. Only a few programs have issues with it, but check in any case that everything you'll run can handle it. And check your hardware too, there are peripherals without 64-bit drivers.

At present I'm mildly sceptical in upgrading to 64bit Vista, because it seems that W7 is making a good progress out of the door and the reports I've heard have been mostly positive. I'm almost certain that you cannot just upgrade to W7 cheap, even if it is published soon. Of course there is always the option of downloading the beta and giving it a shot. Thus keeping Vista 32 for now, if at all possible, and upgrading to W7/64 later would for me seem like a better alternative.

Cool, thanks rturja. I'm going to start with the bios update. If that doesn't do it, then I'll wait for 7.

The first and only time I got my computer to boot with all four sticks, it registered in Task Manager that I had 3.2gb of RAM, which according to various places is typical of Vista 32 not being able to see all four gigs, and usually followed shortly thereafter by a bsod and inability to successfully launch back into Windows. Which then proceeded to happen to me :-) That seems in line with your addresses/OS access comment.

I'm in no rush. Not doing much more than playing Dawn of War II these days and that's already maxxed out.

Yup, that 3.2 gigs is expected. Hopefully the bios upgrade sorts out the rest!

I think I might be joining the 3.2GB bandwagon (XP32). To my bafflement, I think I've had the first stick of crucial RAM go tits-up ever. I guess it didn't like being pushed to its rated speed after a couple years of running at 800. Been getting all kinds of crashes, culminating in lots of bsod friday night and yesterday.

Last night I pulled a stick and didn't crash for a couple hours. Blah. Looking at crucial's site, I may as well drop the extra $20 on a 2x2GB setup.

Sky, are you using the machine for music related things, like as a multitracker or sampler? Windows XP has a bit different memory allocation schema compared to Vista, giving only 2 gigs of ram for applications at most, unless tweaked a bit.

2 gig allocated is better than 2 gig total  :awesome_for_real:

So, it's finally time for me to pick up one of the current gen consoles, I didn't think bumping a 4 month old thread, derailing a ps3 thread, or starting a new one was worth it for these few questions. From what games I've seen and my type of play, it's clear that I want a PS3. I have a ps2, but one of the models with backwards compatibility would be nice. That said:

If I find one of the older ones that has backwards compatibility, will I lose out with lesser components in other areas on the old 60gb? I've been looking at the PS3 page in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3) and see the 60gb had 4x usb and a flash card reader, whlie the newer 80/160gb versions only have 2 usb. Are the PS3 accessories taking advantage of the extra usb that would make me want that (I thought the sixaxis and Dual Shock 3 controllers were USB), and if so is it enough to pay the price of an old 60gb compared to buying a brand new and warrantied 80gb?
Since I'd drop one of my extra HDD in the system anyways, I don't think the flash card reader would be all that beneficial, but was there anything else that utilized that port? Any specific model number I should look for that would be better then another model for the backwards compatible and the non backwards compatible?

Or am I putting too much value in all these options the old 60gb version had, and I should just shut up and buy the current 80gb version as I won't really notice the difference and drop a new HDD in it?

Fake edit: Sorry, post is much longer then I thought it would be, bleh.

You could always get a new PS3 and keep the PS2 for playing the PS2 games.

Personally I don't think you'll miss the extra USB port if you got an older one though - I only ever use 1 USB port at a time to charge up whichever controller needs charging. Everything else is either bluetooth or comes through the ethernet cable, but there are plenty of accessories you can get if you were so inclined.

One other thing about getting an older one is that it'll be older and therefore maybe have a shorter lifespan. At least if you get a new one and it fails then you'll have a warranty.

End of the day I'd say it depends on a) how much you'll actually play the PS2 games and if so then b) how much of a hassle would it be to keep the PS2 for that.

Thanks, that definitely helps quite a bit.

If it makes you feel any better, I have 2 60GB Launch PS3s and neither has shown any sort of notion that it will stop working. No strange lockups (except those KNOWN in any game - Re: GTA4, Ar Tonelico 2, etc) or anything.

Do you use, or find a lot of reason to use, the extra USB ports? I looked over the accessories for PS3 (http://www.us.playstation.com/PS3/Accessories#fbid:0yzQMLDOnX6) (which I should have done in the first place, durrr ><) and see there really are only a few devices I'd use besides two controllers unless I'm missing something. Head set and memory card adapter seem about the only things to really take use of the USB. Any other suggestions I should consider or that aren't on that site that I should look for? 

I have a launch 20 gig, and I only use 3 ports as I'm too lazy to remove the GH3 and Rock Band dongles, and leave the drums plugged in. Though I can't remember the last time I used any of that crap, I have a charging base on my desk for the regular controller.

Can someone email me the Helvetica and HelveticaNeue TTFs?

For iPhone mockups.

That was fast, thanks.

what do people think of this spec?  I'm asking because I'm trying to understand current non-professional upper end and then what I can economize on. 

(hint: it's Valve future internal spec) (http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/02/21/valve-shares-their-pc-rigs-specs/#comments)

EVGA X58 3X SLI Intel Motherboard
Intel Corei7 940 2.93GHz Quad-Core Processor
12GB PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz ram (Crucial Ballistix, Kingston ValueRam)
1 x NVidia GTX285 1GB - OR - ATI 4870 1GB graphics card
1 x 250GB 7200RPM SATA HD (Seagate, Western Digital)
1 x 500GB 7200RPM SATA HD (Seagate, Western Digital) Lian Li P60-F Case
Intel CPU Cooler
850W Antec power supply
1 x Dell 3008FPW-HC 30" LCD - OR - 2 x Dell 2001FP 20.1" LCD monitors
Windows Vista 64bit

Strange setup.

The RAM I can sort of see but that still seems a bit high. If you have a level editor, a separate 3D package, Photoshop, and the game itself running all that once that might take up 6 - 8 GB of RAM so I guess if you have some other crap running plus the OS you might get close to 12 GB. However they've screwed themselves in terms of future RAM expansion by filling up all 6 RAM slots with 2 GB boards instead of going to, say, 16 GB but only filling up 4 slots. Math is hard.

The hard drive setup is pathetic for a dev machine. 10K drives in a RAID 0 or 0+1 (or 1+0) config would've been what I would've expected. Given the amount of money wasted when a dev is sitting around twiddling his thumbs waiting for stuff to compile/generate/etc. getting more/faster drives is a small price to pay.

A pair of 20" monitors is a joke compared to the 30" in terms of price. I would've offered a pair of 24" or the 30".

Those are dev machine specs. I wouldn't presume that those are the requirements for future Valve games.

thanks. 

What of this?  Worth the investment?

That CPU is kind of pricey still. The slower 920 is a better value, especially if you know how to overclock. The X58 is needed if you go with the i7s cause of the new socket/motherboard design (i.e. integrated memory controller and new bus design).

Those are pathetically small and slow drives given the rest of the machine.

If I was building a monster system it would have at least 1 SSD for my OS drive and considering the cost of the rest of the system it certainly wouldn't be out of place.

So I managed to put my new PC together today.

It boots, and Vista starts to install off the DVD, but it's sat doing nothing now (after I told it I was in the UK and to Install Now please) for a really long time. Like 10 minutes now saying "Please wait..." with an hourglass symbol.

How long should it take? Will I know right away if I've fucked up the CPU/heatsink bit or will it wait until it gets hot before exploding?

Hold me, I'm scared!  :uhrr:

That's scary. Is there mouse activity or isn't there supposed to be any at this stage of the install?

No idea on the Vista install stalling (don't use it). For the CPU/heatsink you can just touch it yourself to check. It will shut itself down if it gets too hot so you can't really "fry" a CPU from too much heat like you could in the past.

Awesome thanks Trippy.

While you were replying Vista came to life and carried on installing, I was just being a girly wuss  :drillf:

Most BIOSes these days have their own hardware temp monitors. You can check there before the OS if you're worried. Also, they may be a bit more accurate about temp reporting than 3rd party apps you download.

Grats on the new build, btw.

Did you hook up a network cable to it? It might have been trying to make a network connection with a really long timeout timer.

So. I rearranged my monitors. Ventrilo is launching off of the primary monitor space. Right-clicking on the icon bar brings up things I can't use (like move and resize, there is no maximize option). How can I get that window back onto a monitor?

Have you tried hitting move and dragging it in random directions with the hope that it appears on your monitor(s)?

Failing that, set your PC back to displaying onto your primary monitor only; then open Vent (it should open visibly since it has nowhere else to do so; doing this lets Vent know where to open. Might want to drag it around a little just to make sure it saves its changed position). Then close it, and re-setup your multiple monitors.

Nah, I got it. Alt+Space+M then use arrow keys.

Discovered it, cheers :)  It also has a thingy that give me a browser, IM, email and all sorts of other stuff before even loading the OS if I want. Nifty! These newfangled doohickeys, what will they come up with next!

Yeah could have been something like that, when Vista did finish installing it wasn't happy with the network for ages until I decided to actually put the CD with the motherboard drivers in  :awesome_for_real:

Hrmmm can anyone recommend a good, free firewall for Vista 64? I've used Sunbelt for ages but it's 32-bit only  :sad:

I'm happy with Window's Firewall on my home machines as long as I have a good virus scanner and am behind a router.  (My work machines don't even have the router and they're on a university network and do fine.)

So, i upgraded my laptop, i went from 2 sticks of 1gb, to two sticks of 2gb. However in the properties panel, it says there are only 3gb installed. The video card on the laptop is a x1400 (ATI i think) and says it can use up to 512 ram. (shared of course).

However in the bios, i can't change the list amount of memory, and there is a listing for the Video cards allotment, its set to 128 mb. I can't change any of this, cant even use the arrow keys to get to them. The laptop is running Windows XP.

Any suggestions? More info needed, is so, what?

Thanks.

That's your problem.  You need a 64 bit OS - either XP Pro 64, or Vista Premium.

I'm 99.9 percent sure on that.

If you're wanting to stick with XP Pro 64, I've got an unused copy at home you can have for way cheap.  Let me know if interested.

I was hopeing this wasn't the issue. Its only a dual core laptop, not sure if i care enough to upgrade its OS right now. The video card allotment is still in question, and a problem.

So XP only does up to 3 gigs? That's an odd number.

Trippy will come to the rescue and explain everything.

Your 32 bit OS wants you to upgrade.

What's the laptop model?

XP Pro 64 actually has no value, so I find your offer intriguing. :awesome_for_real:

Acer Aspire 5670. Intel Core Duo 1.66 (i think), 2gb ram (was)  ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 512 MB (this is what it says right on the sticker i never took off, bios says 128) 120gb HD. Its about 2-3 years old, and has been a great laptop, even now. I beta tested Vanguard on it (on rather high settings too), and my girl uses it for LOTRO. That's the main reason i was trying to squeeze a bit more out of it.

Not sure how well this works on mobile GPUs but run this (or something similiar) to ID your GPU:

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

You might actually have the Mobile X1400 that has 128 MB of dedicated VRAM instead of shared RAM. Check the memory type. If it's GDDR3 then it looks like you have the dedicated VRAM model.

I will check, but that would be contrary to what i bought if true. Unless it has 128, but can pull down another 128 if it wants to from system. If that last bit is the case, then i guess all is well, other than the missing 1 gig system memory.

Thanks, ill post back when i get the datas!

Thinking of upgrading for no other reason than to do it.  Currently running 8800GTS G92's in SLI.  Considering going with a GTX 260 OC, possibly even SLI'ing that.  Resolution is 1920x1200.

Thoughts?

Do you have more money than sense? If so, it's a good plan.
At 1920x1200, 8800gt sli should just about max out in everything.

If I only had a nickle to my name, I'd have more money than sense...


It comes close.  I suppose that if I wouldn't see an anecdotal 50 percent improvement in quality and framerate, I wouldn't do it.  FWIW, the proc is Q6600 (oc'd to 3.2Ghz) and 8GB of RAM.

Just kinda curious. 

isn't there a significant difference between a GT and  GTS in the 8800 series?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It really seems to vary with the test:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/benchmarks,30.html

If you're buying a new card you haven't got to spend much more to get you up to a 9800GTX+ or a GT250. The Radeon 4830 or 4850 would be good choices around that price point too.

The Best Graphics Cards For The Money: March '09 (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-radeon,2218.html) article on TH is pretty informative and brief.

This is just a public service announcement.

I noticed over the last few weeks that my machine's fans were going into over drive when I was playing high processing games. I checked my temps, and sure enough, my CPU was idling at ~48C and approaching 67C under load! This was vexing because when I first installed my heatsink and fan assembly for my CPU, the temps were ~34C idle and low 50s under load.

This morning I undertook the hidious process of removing the heatsink and discovering a lot of dust and even dust bunnies accumulated between the fins. I also reapplied thermal paste. I put it all back together and lo and behold, the temps are back to the original ones.

So, in essence, it may be a good idea to reapply paste and check the grime on your CPU heatsink fins every 6 months or so.

I always have massive dust problems with my PCs. Two cats in the house, our cavalier attitude towards doing housework and PC cases with plenty of huge fans means that they hoover up metric fucktons of fur and dust.

Reminds me, I need to find a cheap source for compressed air cans in the UK....

I've got filters on my intakes. Still get a bit of dust in there, but nowhere near the evil den of bunnies I've had in the past, and now I've added a cat to the equation.

On video cards: check the pipe widths. Even when I built my pc two years ago, there were a lot of cards with wimpy pipes (128bit) out there. For reference, my 9800pro had 256bit pipes. It made a huuuge difference. I see some with 512bit, that's gotta be pretty sweet. My 8800gtx is 384 or something, runs pretty sweet. Though at this point, 1280x720 for the max settings win.

Using a cat as a filtration device runs counter to conventional wisdom.  Do you shave it first?

No, I added filters to the cat.

Guys, do you know of any article talking about the next wave of Nvidia graphic cards? Meaning, what's to come after the 2xx series? Just wondering 'cause next Xmas (yeah, I like to plan ahead) I'll probably make a total-global-ultra upgrade of my beast and since I still have a fantastic 8800 GTS 640MB (bought it at the end of 2006 and it is still rockin') I want to stick with Nvidia. Thanks :)

There's this (it basically likes up with your timeframe):

Leaked GeForce driver hints at GT212, GT215, GT216, and GT218 GPUs

Leaked ForceWare 185 drivers provided by German site Hardware Infos hint at several upcoming GeForce GT2xx GPUs. According to ATI-Forum.de, GT212, GT215, GT216, and GT218 GPUs are all mentioned in the driver device list. All of these GPUs are expected to be built around TSMC's 40-nm manufacturing process, with recent rumors suggesting GT212 will replace today's 55-nm GT200b GPUs, while GT216 is expected to displace G96 and GT218 will replace G98 for the entry-level segment.  The unknown here is GT215. This is the first time GT215 has surfaced anywhere. GT214 is expected to be NVIDIA's G94 replacement, but no one outside of NVIDIA knows how GT215 relates to GT214. While previous rumors have suggested NVIDIA's first 40-nm GPUs could arrive during late Q2 or Q3'09, their appearance in a leaked ForceWare driver could suggest an even earlier arrival.

Anything about newer GPU's would probably only be the result of a blatant NDA violation. ;)

You know what would rule? GPUs with smaller transistors like this 45 nm so that I wouldn't be able to slow-roast a suckling pig in my case.

The GT300 is the one you want to check in on in about 6 months. It's their high end DX11 card core that's supposed to be out Q4 09.

Edit: that's a core not a card.

Is dx11 going to be anything? I got pretty pissed about the dx10 thing being 'vista only' and then patching my crysis demo to get all the "dx10" effects in xp. At this point I'm only interested in features, not raw speed, being res-locked to 720p. I see this as a good thing, better effects and fsaa/af and shadows and normal mapping and whatnot.

DirectX 11 is mostly a performance update. It'll better support multi-treading and have an API for using GPUs as general purpose CPUs (GPGPU). Some of the enhancements like some of the multi-threading stuff will work on non-DX11 specific cards so it's not clear yet what a DX11-specific card gets you over a DX10/9 card. Windows 7 will ship with DirectX 11 and it'll be available for Vista as well.

I'm looking for a new GFX card 512mb+ I only got about $200 to spend anyone know what's the best bang for buck around at the moment?

I found this link to be a good read, although there are a lot of ties:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/benchmarks,30.html

Found this scored quite high on Tom's benchmarks and works out about $210.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-114-OK&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=927

I don't know how quick this will be, but my wife has trouble with USB hard drives.  She has had at least two PCs at her desk and managed to go through at least 4 USB external drives in record time.  Sometimes I can plug them into my PC and they work, sometimes they don't and never do after that.  Last one was a very new WD MyBook that required some repair when I plugged it into my machine.  I gave her the disk and the USB cable I used, but it would not even spin up at her desk.

Currently the only thing I can think is that the power at her desk, or perhaps entire office, is the culprit.  Let's assume no one wants to rewire the office during these uncertain times, what might be done here?

You can get a clean source of power by using a UPS. I used to have very flaky power in my old flat from the 40s and using this guy  (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842101004) helped solve that straight away.

That said, it may be either your or your wife's power supply itself.

If you mean the PC PSU, she has different ones due to having different PCs.  If you mean the wall-wart that comes with the USB drive, she says she uses the one that comes with it each time so there is no commonality there.  Also I don't have this issue.

I was hoping I would not have to suggest a UPS, but then I won't be paying for it so I might as well.  Turns out that everything at her desk connects to one electrical outlet and I'm not entirely sure a UPS will fix something like an overtapped circuit.  If that's the issue, I fear I'm looking for a bandage when I need a limb replacement.

Edit for clarity.  It is probably not apparent that her office is not in my house.  It is in the ramshackle tinderbox that passes for her place of business.

You could try a maxtor mini, draws all of it's power via the USB ports, I really like mine as it is fairly compact and I don't have to lug a power brick around with it.

UPS: It's been a 4-5 years since i checked but last time I was in the market for 1 most of these were passive which probably wouldn't solve a dirty power problem much more than a power strip would.  Now if you can find an active UPS that may prove to be helpful, although it won't magically make an overloaded circuit start delivering more juice, it will convert shitty power (lots of fluctuations) to clean power (pure sine wave).

How much equipment is she running off her single outlet?  A full system (cpu/monitor or 2/printer/wireless router/cable modem) can easily run off one of the workstation level 1000/1100va UPS's for at least 30 minutes.

This actually is an excellent question, regarding active vs passive. My perhaps misinformed understanding is that APC ups have two type of outlets: one bank with is just a surge protected passthrough, and another bank which is actually battery supported. My understanding is that the battery supported outlets actually provide the clean power source, whereas the passthrough ones are just protected against bad surges. Any info you guys have would be very much appreicated.

Yes in a nutshell, active (i believe tripp lite calls theirs interactive) essentially puts the battery between you and the power source, where passive only switches (very rapidly) to battery power when the power source is not available.  Looking at the tripp lite site it appears that you can get an active 700va interactive (http://www.tripplite.com/EN/products/model.cfm?txtSeriesID=665&EID=13901&txtModelID=23) for $250.  Nothing here against APC (I had 2 smart UPS 3ks in my server room that were rock steady) but the last few personal UPS's I have had were tripp lite and I am simply a bit more familiar with them.

Edit: 700va should be enough to run your core computer components off of for 30-45minutes (cpu, single monitor and cable modem) but you are mostly interested in power quality so that is just icing i suppose.  Also, you may want to investigate the other reason I am more familiar with tripp lite, Costco looks to have a great deal on a 1500va interactive UPS (http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11234507&search=UPS&Mo=2&cm_re=1_en-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&lang=en-US&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Sp=S&N=4001486&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=Text_Search&Dr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ne=4000000&D=UPS&eCat=BC|84&Ntt=UPS&No=2&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Nty=1&topnav=&s=1)

If you are worried about the power coming out of your wall you don't want just an UPS, you want one with "Automatic Voltage Regulation" (AVR). AVR UPSes generate a steady amount of voltage instead of just kicking in when the voltage drops too low which is what Salamok is referring to.

Also, if you really really concerned about your power and you believe the marketing hype (which I don't) get a UPS that generates a sine wave instead of a square wave for it's power.

hmm the target audience seems to have changed since i last reviewed specs for UPS's they used to all shoot for a half hour of battery backup, looks like the UPS's i just posted are geared more for clean power and just enough backup power to get you shut down (3-15 minutes depending on model and load).

I'm either too smart or too stupid to believe this makes a difference, unless it's that the sine is worse.

I don't know how much juice is on that circuit she is using but my educated guess is "not enough".  Fluctuations could be from "bad power" or from devices firing up, like a printer.  She has too many things for a single outlet, I know that, but she won't be able to have the office rewired until her brother is convinced.

Consensus seem to be that power fluctuations toward the low end can destroy a USB disk.  I'll see about the low-power ones, since I'll be buying yet another one anyway.

Sine is "better", it's what's coming out of your wall socket and the form of power your electronic equipment was designed to. Many UPSes, however, generate something closer to a square wave for it's power, presumably cause it's less expensive than generating a pure sine wave.

I'd kind of lean more towards the negligable benefit of having a pure sine wave.  The main benefit has to do with power loss over a large distance (which is why this is what the electric co sends you in the 1st place), combine this with the operating envelope of pretty much all consumer electronics and the benefit to the end user is pretty much invisible.  The square wave coming off a UPS is still going to be filtered to the point that it will stay within the peaks and valleys of a pure sine wave and that is probably the important aspect.

You don't think the sharp edges might cause extra wear on the electronics? :oh_i_see:

I think that is what they are saying.

Thanks for that it totally helped and the GTX 260 is in the post only thing is I now need to upgrade the power supply which should be fun.

Is there any way to connect a PS2 to a monitor that has a DVI-D and a HD15 connection?       

You need an S-Video/Component to VGA converter box. I don't have mine with me at my new location so I can't take a pic of it and show you what mine looks like but that's what I used to display my previous gen consoles (PS2/Xbox/GC) on my computer monitor.

Edit: here are some examples (http://www.ramelectronics.net/audio-video/video-converters/s-video-to-vga/c10000-c11200-c11205.html?sorter=productname-en-asc)

Gracias.

edit:  Checked amazon a saw a handful of reviews bitching about loss of picture quality.  If you have decent monitor/converter is that an issue or is it just the nature of these things to have some visual degredation?  Curious if text would wind up blurry.

I'd think that component-to-vga would give the best picture, but I have not tried this.

Component would give the best picture but S-Video works fine as long as the converter is decent enough. Mine "upscales" to 1024 x 768 and the text is fine (I played stuff like FF XII through it).

Edit: also to clarify, things typically aren't going to look the same even if the converter did a "perfect" conversion job. PS2 games are "calibrated" to look their best on CRT TV-only displays. CRT computer monitors don't follow the same design specs as CRT TVs so material created for CRT TV displays don't look the same on CRT computer monitors. The same applies to CRT TV-designed material being shown on other types of computer displays like LCDs. With HDTV materials things converge more but even then there are differences.

In my previous setup the PS2 images on my Sony CRT TV are quite a bit brighter and more the colors more "vibrant" compared to what is shown on my Sony CRT monitors.

So, DivX plug in has started crashing Firefox, IE and Opera and crashes in Chrome whenever I have a DivX movie try to load. It's just started happening after I moved into University halls so possibly being on their network is causing it but I'd have imagined that would result in error messages rather than the plug-in crashing any time it tries to play. Seen a few things on it having browser specific issues but this seems to be DivX itself. Anyone else seeing anything similar? Or have any ideas what it could be?

Last few releases of Divx have done nothing but piss me off, like they sold out to the competition and tanked their own product.

Divx's own MPEG-4 codec stopped being relevant a while ago when they were no longer able to compete with the work the Xvid guys were/are doing as they spent more time taking features *out* of their products instead of improving them. They are trying to be relevant again by buying out MainConcept and going with the H.264/MKV combo which has become the standard for HD reencodes.

I have a honeypot on one my work computers, all traffic is normal except for UDP port 1434.  Random computers are sending a packet to it that is 02 in hex.  There is no way the honeypot requested it (it's low interaction) so I'm trying to figure out why the aforementioned random computers are sending 02 to it.

Found this on the internets. Not sure if its of any help:

http://www.websecurity.mobi/computer-security/692-firewall-reports-attck-udp-port-1434-a.html

Btw, what the heck is a honeypot?

A computer all dressed up in drag waiting for someone to come screw it.