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I'm not absolutely sure how legal it is, but the Kazaa Lite Mega codec pack (which is free of spyware and other crap - I've checked repeatedly) that's part of my standard install offers six or eight possible MPEG2 decoders. Elecard might be another option. I think their decoder is distributed...

Master File Table. The NTFS version of your File Allocation Table. It can be fragmented. Fragmented MFTs are bad because they create lots of extra seeks to get to the files or parts of files that you actually want.

Yes, it is. The thing you should be most worried about, from a performance standpoint, is fragmentation of your MFT. When an NTFS volume gets to be about 85% full, I've noticed that performance seems to drop like a stone.

Eurolander-types have a different broadcast standard for their TVs, which has a few more scan lines but refreshes a little less often. Not to worry, MOST dvd players seem to be able to handle that conversion without any hassle.

As I understand it, the X800GT is a bit faster than the 6600GT, but the nVidia card is a little cheaper. From personal experience I can say that an X800GT is fast enough stutter-free video in Doom3, Farcry and Riddick when any of the above are being displayed @ 1280x1024 at 4xAA and max detail...

I can attest that the builtin Windows 2000 defragger can defrag hardware RAID arrays. Also, never defrag a large RAID5 that you need to use anytime in the next month. I'll let someone else do the RAID0-is-usually-a-bad-idea lecture, but I will say that unless you're doing something REALLY...

The AMD64s I bought from newegg on Monday came with something called "Bet On Soldier". It looks kinda cool, like UT but with more of a military edge. The screenshots have battlemechs. That's a good sign. :)

Doug, I just checked what I have in stock, and there are a couple Soyo SY-KT600s and a couple Asus A7N8XE Deluxe motherboards that I would *dearly* love to get rid of. The Soyo boards are refurb KT600s but they seemed to work when I tested them. The Asus nforce2 boards are new and never even...

50C is pretty normal for a Tbred, I think. Just checked a Tbred 2000 and I see it's running 48C on a retail HSF.

Dust reduces the efficiency of your HSF, but generally doesn't present any other problems AFAIK. Your CPU temps are good, right? The VT600RZ is a marvelous motherboard, but I don't think it's a wise expenditure at this point. Also, your current system is an nforce2; sticking with nvidia will at...

Yup. Looks better now. The person who really needs to do cap inspection, however, is jtr. Also, just because a caps aren't bulging doesn't mean the motherboard is in the clear. :(

It may just be the angle on the picture, but the second cap from the bottom on the right side in this picture doesn't look quite right to me.

One of my students used to swear by the Logitech MX700 and later the MX900.

Storage server for Lunar Goals 1. Must be quiet (for a storage server) and reliable 2. Lunar must be able to manage the machine appropriately on his own 3. Data storage should ideally be redundant and flexible 4. Data storage should be largely internal, to avoid the 16 dozen 1394/USB2...

... I was just about to say the same thing. Especially since that's an Abit board. Weren't they bad cap central from 1999 to 2002? Maybe it's time to hook Doug up again...

Handy, do you REALLY think I'd use a browser that couldn't look at the moving picture forms of pr0n? ;) Actually, I habitually remove or change the MIME types for things like AVI, WMV and MOV from the firefox config (there's an extension called "Launchy" that can set this stuff up for you). I...

If it's a little guy and you're using DVD Decrypter, go to Mode, ISO, Write and then click "Source" to choose the ISO file you want to write. DVD Decrypter is a very handy tool.

Firefox does lots of things amazingly well. Like not crash. Like having a non-broken user interface. Like rendering web pages in the manner I expect. Like being mind-blowingly extensible. Like having same-day bugfixes when needed. Like offer reasonable options for loading images to poor bastards...

Gigabyte, Sapphire and Powercolor are the brands I normally prefer.

Article about Yahoo's support of certain adware companies. It's lacking technical detail, but still not what I'd call happy news.

You could look at their refurb stuff. Or else a different site. Allstarshop.com usually has a pretty good selection of video cards at sane prices.

There ARE passively cooled 9600s. They just aren't XTs. Try looking at the 9600Pros. I know Sapphire has one since I just sold one, and Gigabyte probably does, too. 1.5V... I don't know. I never pay attention. You're still using a P3, right? Stupid little fans are evil.

Do we need to go through this again? I mean, when the best thing I can say about it is that it has nicer crash recovery than other browsers, it's clear that work still needs to be done.

Yay destructible environments! Games are more fun when you can kill walls and trees and buildings. Perfect example: Freedom Force. I played that game a lot longer because, as my characters got tougher, I could knock down buildings and toss cars around.

I think that Opera is a flawed product, free or not. It certainly can't do things I want a browser to do.

Question: What is the impetus for choosing a 9600XT over a 9550? I'd think you would be happier with the cooler and less expensive chip, unless you were a game player.

Something like this would be spiffy. You can spend $25 more on basically the same card from Turtle Beach. The main advantage is that this is *not* an AC97 implementation. Something that starts its life @ 44.1kHz will be 44.1kHz throughout transport and output. The correct way to use an...

I am Captain Samuel Kidd. :) The Dread Pirate Samuel just doesn't have much of a ring to it, does it?

One of my customers wants to upgrade 3 PCs to 3200s. Doesn't care what KIND of 3200, just wants to satisfy the "recommended requirements" for some analysis package he just bought (which, if I'm reading correctly, is really just a complicated excel spreadsheet). As it happens I have three...

dvd shrink is marginally harder to find than it used to be. Visit afterdawn.com to get a nice, working copy.

php User Hide means never having to look at RW's posts again.

I vote Democrat. If I ever saw George Bush in person, I don't think I would want to kill him. I do think, however, that I would express my opinion with expectorate.

Windows 2000 supports hyperthreading. I've seen 2000's task manager on single CPU P4s with multiple graphs. I'm not sure about support for dual cores. It probably does, in much the same way; it can't distinguish between a logical and a physical CPU.

Arrrr!

Yes, but swans mate for life. Doesn't seem so unnatural now, does it?

Santilli, Windows 2000 Pro also supports SMP and hyperthreading (2 "real" CPUs with 2 "virtual" CPUs inside 'em), and doesn't have all the visual crap XP does. For you, and a lot of other people, XP brought nothing to the table.

I'd suggest something in a Via Envy chipset.

I think this is quite amusing.

The guns in farcry all seem pretty crappy. I've got the hang of "aim at the feet and let the gun pull upwards", but a lot of the time you can empty a clip at something, see a dozen shots connect, and then watch as they don't die.

Web Edition is made to be fairly cheap. It can be found for $350 for a full version, which is in line with the $250 a full retail copy of XP Pro costs. Several people at my day job went a Microsoft conference and came back with copies of 2003 Server Web Edition for their trouble. I got all...

I'm fairly certain I heard that from some CATO-institute talking head who was being interviewed on NPR. A check of Osama's wikipedia entry suggests "kidney disease" rather than diabetes, but the outcome - dialysis - is much the same.

I tried FarCry and Riddick last night. Riddick is clearly doing neat things, graphics-wise, but I can also tell that it started its life as some kind of console title. The controls are annoyingly imprecise, and there's a lot of "use the mouse to point at something, instead of just typing on the...

I bought a couple InWin internal 10 in 1 readers. They're really funny. If they're plugged into a motherboard with a Via 80237 south bridge, the machine won't boot. Plug them in after the machine boots, and they work fine. Of course, InWin didn't actually make that model, just sold them. I'm...

I've strongly suspected that Osama will show up about the same time someone in the current administration gets in trouble - or maybe the next presidential election. Osama bin Laden is a type 1 diabetic. He needs dialysis regularly. He's 6'6" and, while he's a brown person, he's not the same...

I've seen the .Net version of ATI's control panel screw up a few times. I've seen nLite screw up a few times. I don't know anything else that uses .Net, and it's hard to tell if those problems are the fault of a developer or an inadequacy of the environment but .Net's been around a few years now...

Honestly I do not know. My interests align primarily with disk-intensive tasks, which gaming is not. I can say it's more than credible desktop OS, that the default install seems to use less RAM than XP (around 50 or 100MB, based on the lab PCs I checked today) and lacks some of XP's more...

Well that WAS rather impressive.

Couple weeks ago I RMA'd a plain old LiteOn 52x CD-ROM to Newegg. The replacement they sent me is an 8x DVD burner.

This Albatron K8T800 does as well.

If nothing else, grab the IE6 Administrator's Kit of Microsoft's site. That will let you download the whole thing in one shot. I have a full copy of the install and yes, it does fix problems on machines that have been particular screwed by spyware.