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  1. S

    PC Gaming = World of Suck

    I was a little unimpressed with Supreme Commander. Single player is incredibly slow, and it's far more easy to lose because you happened to have your commander in the wrong place (possibly out of boredom) than because the opponent actually makes a dent in your forces. Actually my number one...
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    Piracy

    The cost due to piracy, when it's being referred to in an article like the one linked it's a statistic, officially it's an estimate, and on examination it's a number pulled out of somebodies arse... I've yet to see a study with any reasonable sort of methodology actually conclude that piracy...
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    How sexy can a PC case be?

    Not to mention that your $x,000 gaming PC is merely strapped to a floating bit of metal whilst in transit, necessitating an extra few hours to solder all the capacitors back on and weep for your crushed 8800GTX...
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    How sexy can a PC case be?

    Oh that would be great for LAN parties!.. ...Or perhaps not...
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    nVidia Active Armor

    I assumed I got rid of the problems by un-installing but ultimately I did end up chucking in a realtek based NIC and just disabling the on-board in the bios due to corruption issues (System just froze sometimes accessing SMB shares)... I figure when in doubt NICs are ~$10-$20... Assuming you...
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    More Vista nonsense

    Texas Hold'em and Mahjong? How will people know what to play first...?
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    nVidia Active Armor

    My only experience was with an earlier version of it. Used it for about 10 minutes and then turned it off and removed all traces of it from my PC... Massive performance hit, no idea if it was doing any good, couldn't have been worth it though.
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    More Vista nonsense

    I agree... If an average user needs to block outbound traffic then they're already screwed. If I need to do it I'll spot the problem without a firewall in only a little less time. As far as I'm concerned out bound firewalls have almost no legitimate uses outside of a corporate network. I think...
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    This site is awesome ....

    I guess in the end this isn't a service they want people to use anyway. A DRM infected movie download for the price of a DVD is like charging the new price for a 6 year old car with a leaky radiator, clearly they have no intention of actually selling the product.
  10. S

    Network utilization when copying files on a server

    The <3 thing is a pretty common way to do a heart... It's fairly sickening for several reasons, firstly because "hearting" things is such a wanky, teenage girl, crappy t-shirt, thing in the first place... Secondly because the world just didn't need more emoticons... Actually it didn't need any...
  11. S

    This site is awesome ....

    It's O.K... I just followed your link and they seemed to have fixed one of the errors... It's impressive that browsers can kinda guess what they meant though... In a horrific sort of way...
  12. S

    Buying keyboards in bulk

    If you mean the kind that goes around a corner then quite possibly yes... I remember my first ever computer had one of those and years later when I got a keyboard with a small enter key (where both enter keys are the same size) it was really annoying. As far as I'm concerned they are supposed to...
  13. S

    I Hate Macs

    I'm always a little annoyed that Mac users insist that it's a Computer, but not a Personal Computer... Those ads should start "Hello I'm a Mac." "And I'm a PC... Which technically doesn't rule out my also being a Mac... Although in this case I'm not." I guess they did have a go at trying to...
  14. S

    Squeaking

    Have you checked your smoke alarm batteries?
  15. S

    Want to know why MS went for flash based cache in Vista

    Windows ME... Tannin has been known to rather aptly refer to it as Morons Edition, I've always thought that it was basically a stop gap. Windows2000 was kind of hyped as being NT for home users (I'm not sure if that was by MS or others), pretty much what XP ended up being. But some features...
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    Erasing your data before dumping your drive

    If your going to open the drive, and you don't need it to be a) functional or b) photogenic afterwards then a screwdriver just doesn't seem like the right tool... I'd suggest a power drill, angle grinder or oxy' torch... A plasma torch, laser cutter or large calibre firearm would be even better...
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    More than 2GB RAM under XP Pro 32-bit

    I don't think my suggestion would be quite that painful, whilst desktop machines don't seem to like letting you hot swap sata drives connected to the motherboard my laptop controller will allow me to safely remove my external drive just fine. You could just think of it as another docking...
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    Want to know why MS went for flash based cache in Vista

    I guess it all depends on how fast Vista eats flash drives as to weather it's worth it... Sounds like it'd be good for solving Tannins problem, not many reads writes but they're painfully slow when they happen... Not that it'd be worth installing Vista for that or anything...
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    Erasing your data before dumping your drive

    Isn't there a secure erase system suposedly built into the ata standard? I remember reading about it in conjunction with the hard drive password protect feature. The idea being that you can irevocably set a flag in the drive and it will refuse to function at all until it has been given and...
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    Windows/386 & crack-smokin' monkeys

    The earliest picture of a BSOD I can find is from NT 3.5 but I'm fairly certain that it wasn't the first one. So I believe that MS beat Sony to that one but Sony got it to home users first I guess...
  21. S

    More than 2GB RAM under XP Pro 32-bit

    You could optionally set up an external 3.5" drive in a SATA enclosure and hook it up via a SATA PCMCIA or Express card adaptor. Then you could just get windows to swap to that when available. I guess it would be painful to set up every time you wanted to use the thing, but I'm assuming if your...
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    Yay! I installed Fedora...now what?

    This article explains init.d and rc scripts which is what you need to use to start things at boot time. I think that the install script for vmware tools will handle this for you but the rmp package won't. I installed vmware tools on a centos VM today for some testing and installing the .rmp...
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    More Vista nonsense

    I love that official launch of Vista seems to have attracted more media than actual customers, according to this reporter the first New Yorker to buy vista at the New York launch came in about 2 hours after the grand opening. All but 3 of the people waiting in the launch queue were just there...
  24. S

    How to convey an idea

    I'm kind of in the same boat I just don't really know where to start in the dating game... I don't really see any way of walking into a bar, nightclub, or anywhere for that matter and being able to pick out from a crowd someone that I might have something in common with. The truth is I don't...
  25. S

    VNC and security

    I figure WPA2 with a 63byte AES pass phrase constructed of random(ish) junk with mac filtering is secure enough for my needs, and fairly trivial to implement and connect to (on a PC anyway where you can transfer the pass phrase on a usb key, it's kind of a bitch to punch into a Wii with a Wii...
  26. S

    It's a Dell but...

    Yeah it is, although that might be in part to some discount offer they have going on the windows free version and not on the windows inclusive one but last I heard it was about $180 the difference.
  27. S

    Normally DeAd?

    Actually I was in Italy visiting my sister for Christmas whilst the ashes were on. I haven't heard the word cricket spoken once since getting back... Not only don't they have a team that can win but I'm not even sure they'd recognize the name of the game these days...
  28. S

    Normally DeAd?

    Wow jump down my throat there Tony, I said that's what I thought Mubs was saying and then proceeded to agree with you... So we were actually all in agreement the whole time...
  29. S

    Normally DeAd?

    I think what mubs is suggesting is that you take the highest and lowest ages and add half the difference between them to the lowest age to determine the median. So technically no one would actually have to die at a specific age for it to be the median. A quick search for definitions suggests...
  30. S

    Corrupt data on USB thumb drive

    Do you get the same problem if you write the file out to a hard drive and then just copy it across? What sort of utility is doing the writing? You could try changing the settings for fast removal... I don't know why that would cause this but it seems like something that might differ between the...
  31. S

    How to convey an idea

    I can see it now, sunny day, everyone sitting back relaxing, drinking a few beers on the deck of a fabulous yacht... Sitting in the middle of bone dry Wendouree lake, a few cars drive past... Maybe there are some kids playing cricket on the rock hard mud earning dark looks from ddrueding...
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    My new system

    Much the same I imagine, last I heard nVidia were still making most of the 8800 cards for their supply partners, so there's a fairly good chance they came out of the same factory and had (slightly) different heat sinks stuck on them...
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    Eternal 500GB

    Ah nice to know that enclosure comes with an eSata cable. I wasn't able to figure it out before I ordered one today. Hopefully my enclosure and drive will arrive in the next couple of days allowing me to attach an external drive that will ironically be faster than my laptops internal drive. (Via...
  34. S

    KVM suggestions

    I did a similar thing a while back but invested in a cheap KVM for the keyboard and mouse. I guess it depends on how much your switching but if you take the monitor out of the equation then a serviceable KVM really does cost very little.
  35. S

    HD Keeps Spinning Down: How to ID?

    I guess your really just looking for any errors and listening for the clicking... If you can ensure that your controller should work in the version of Ubuntu your using and that the cd passes it's self test (assuming the version of the live cd you have has the option of testing itself) then any...
  36. S

    HD Keeps Spinning Down: How to ID?

    Maybe you should test the drive using a live Linux cd, that should tell you if it's drivers or if the firmware or hardware is at fault more easily than mucking around trying to figure that out in windows. From there I would envisage that reinstalling windows, flashing the firmware or...
  37. S

    Get rid of GRUB

    I would have thought just deleting the existing partitions and installing windows as normal would replace the MBR anyway.
  38. S

    My new system

    Surely he wants water cooling and a 1000watt PSU just for the purposes of over clocking... It seems such a shame to disappoint, especially when the video cards he wants can be obtained factory fitted with water blocks... Add say 4GB of low latency OCZ or similar RAM and you'd be onto a winner...
  39. S

    Slow WoW updates

    I'm not sure if the WoW updater actually supports uPnP, actual port forwarding may be needed... Also I'm guessing you've ruled firewalls out. If she is on the same internal network as her boyfriend then starting the update client at the same time on both machines should allow her computer to...
  40. S

    Can't play streaming MP3s

    Given that other networking components are not working as well I would suggest uninstalling/reinstalling all network devices if that is practical. It's possible that something has been messed up in your network stack and refreshing it may help. If the two things are coincidental then it may be...
  41. S

    $@!! DVD burning software

    AVIsynth is a great tool for transforming video, it's easily the best tool I've used for de-interlacing DVDs of old TV shows. It is, however, somewhat of a bastard to use, or at least it was last I checked.
  42. S

    Simple business PC

    I'm with Mercutio and Buck, putting together a simple business box shouldn't take more than an hour or so more than getting a Dell to the point of usability, but fixing a Dell even once might take hours longer than fixing a standard machine and I suspect you'll need to do it more often. I...
  43. S

    $@!! DVD burning software

    The Nero one (Nero Recode) seems to work o.k, but I've not tried anything overly complicated with it. Your problems with movie factory may be the codec the audio is encode with in the original file. Sometimes the direct sound filters used to preview will work fine and then the program will go...
  44. S

    Favourite TV series

    Quite a lot of people didn't like the last season of Andromeda for much the same reason, I thought it was pretty much the best of them, they completely changed the plot and altered most of the characters personalities in this single event in a believable way (Well believable in terms of the...
  45. S

    Favourite TV series

    I find it kind of hard to keep track of what I'm watching when there is nothing on at the moment but I guess some of my favorites: Buffy/Angel/Firefly - Basically anything from Joss Whedon is going to be really well made, Firefly would have to be my favorite though. Babylon 5 - The first time...
  46. S

    Mystery Reboots

    My next step would be either pulling out any not absolutely essential hardware (Optical drives, non-boot hard drives, sound cards, controllers for non-boot devices etc), or swapping bits if there wasn't any non-essentials (or if removing them didn't work)... Not particularly insightful I know...
  47. S

    Solid State HD next year.

    On the up side if windows stopped bloating up like this the the demand for increasingly large drives could well dry up in the business market. The need to increase the size of hard drives for business should help drive down the prices on large drives for everyone... Maybe... O.K maybe the up...
  48. S

    Laptop Drives

    So based on the posts here I'd be fairly well served by either drive. I guess it will come down to price and availability.
  49. S

    Laptop Drives

    Thought I'd revive this thread for a bit since I'm looking at getting a new hard drive for my laptop. I'm finding the 5400K rpm Hitachi that came in the machine to be mind bogglingly slow for sustained transfers (like loading in games or installing applications) and I'd like to grab a 7200rpm...
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    Motherboard/processor suggestions for new PC for my mom

    I'd say a socket 754 sempron would be just the thing. I don't think AM2 is overly likely to support AGP or DDR and you would probably be pushing to get a core2 setup for that money. You might have some luck with a socket 939 nForce3 board though if you can't find an appropriate 754 board with...
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