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It's supremely important to me. Invoking her name should say that much. If it was ANYONE else, I'd just do a tiny amount of search and say "this one looks good", and away I'd go. But this is like building a computer for your mom (no freudian interpretation there, please). You don't want your...

My understanding of current WD RMA fulfillment is that the replacement drives carry a warranty of 30 days. Since I had A LOT of exposure to WD's RMA department in 2003, I'm certain this is true for PATA drives. If it doesn't apply to their SATA models, it's news to me.

Only until you RMA them. The replacements sure don't.

Can we get back on the important subject? It's just really important that I do this right. The dual gigabit etc is WAY overkill. She told me today they pay for multiple Comcast Cable internet installs because they don't know how to network their PCs, so I want to put something down that will...

Hard to mess up mirroring. I'd say go plain old IDE. Buy a couple Samsung drives in the 120GB range. Two for $150 or so. That's a pretty good deal and a ton of storage. Olny 3 year warranty, but the SATA drives don't really have it either (what's the warranty for the Raptor you get back after...

Because I want her to be happy.

To each his Dulcinea, whom he alone can name.

Oh, this is even worse. It's a present for Amy, and she's going to basically give it to her girlfriend (wife?). Stated purpose is to do video capture and editing with Premier. I'll be standing over here with Sancho. We're sizing up windmills this evening.

I'd say the Nikon. You might also want to look at a Canon S45. They're very, very similar according to specifications.

My work PC has a board old enough to need a sound card... and it doesn't have one. So I'm part of that contingent as well.

75GB 75GXPs were warm and loud, but they weren't outrageous in any case. I'd prefer more platters for higher areal density = better STR.

I need a recommendation for a P4 board. Let me re-phrase that The BEST P4 board. This is something I'm doing for my Amy. I absolutely need it to be perfect. Host CPU will probably be in the 2800 - 3200 range. I haven't decided yet. Anyone have an opinion on the matter?

CPU Magazine, here in the US, gave it a favorable review last month. It's probably online somewhere now, but as I recall their main argument for the board (IIRC a Shuttle) was the onboard graphics. Something that doesn't normally motivate most of us, here.

Everybody: You really need speakers hooked up to enjoy it, Coug.

Uh, shoplifting?

I somehow ended up with a 100W/ch Surround/DTS/DPL2 Pioneer receiver a while back - IIRC it was a Circuit City open box. Bought it for someone interested in an HTPC. It works (or it did when I tested it about a year ago), and it's just sitting in its box, gathering dust and cat hair, if anyone...

I like the A7N8X for my multimedia needs. It's the only nforce2 board I've found that has integrated SPDIF (several others do TOSLink, but I prefer coax). I know I keep saying this, but the only reason to do nforce2 is Soundstorm with a digital connection to an amplifier. Stereo only is...

Have you gotten a keygen? There are several floating around.

I was hoping there were denser platters in that new drive. Damn shame. :(

IMO, you get more "bang for the buck" with Onkyo or gen-u-ine Integra if you've got the cash. Marantz is good equipment - don't get me wrong, I just think it costs a little too much. Think of Marantz receivers/amplifiers as Asus motherboards and you'll be on roughly the right track. Bose is...

And, as I expected, City of Heroes is a good time. No PVP (that I've found). No stupid +2 Backscratchers or Twine of UberCrafting. No crafting. You make a hero and go out to serve truth, justice and ass-kicking. The graphics are awesome, especially. This is a game that requires a DX9 video...

Is it really a waste dreaming small? I'd rather want something that I might actually get than have a want that will never be fulfilled.

Well, it's a much better use of Flash than Badgerbadgerbadger...

Sysprep?

I've used Winternals ERD Commander to fix that sort of problem (the "very bad things happen" one), but that's not exactly a free tool.

I'd look at a low-end Onkyo or Yamaha receiver (around $225 - $250) and an inexpensive set of Yamaha or Acoustic Research sub/sats (around $100 - $150). Prepackaged 5.1 sets are very easy to find and are cheap on ebay, since lots of people buy them and upgrade.

IIRC Maxtor ships 2nd day air if you do advance replacement. They're really picky about packaging, so that's not a bad idea. You'll receive a refurb drive of the same or faster spindle speed and the same or greater capacity. They don't distinguish by performance. Most of the time I've gotten...

I meant, $50 more than you were planning to spend already, Coug, not that there's a $50 price difference between the two sets. And, as usual, it's my opinion that even a low-end receiver and set of real speakers is better than crappy "premium" computer speakers.

In XP? With an ATA drive? It doesn't.

But was there shock?

The big chains usually carry Memorex or Maxell, but very often, they'll be low speed (e.g. 4x) discs. The people in my office have gotten lots of dud discs from retail packages, too. I don't know if that's a Maxell thing or if we just bought several packages of discs, though.

I use it fairly often when I'm upgrading disks on my fileservers. It's fairly painless.

They're slow, expensive, and obnoxious for a variety of reasons. Don't bother.

I generally use Fujifilm CD-Rs. They're priced reasonably and all the high-speed ones I've looked at recently have been manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.

Well, we already own the fuxored HPs...

I mostly work with low-end Dell and IBM servers. The biggest boy I've played with in recent memory was an x225 (Xeon 2.4, 2GB RAM). I thought it was a really nice machine, but I have to say that the feature I liked the most was the slim redundant PSU and the "feel" of the case, and neither one...

Also, Handy, you don't need to buy a $50 "6 channel analog cable" if you just want try listening to an SACD; stop by a Kmart or even a Walgreens and pick up three $3 pairs of stereo audio cables (the red and white guys). I don't think I'd be insulting if I said you aren't in a place where cable...

It depends a great deal on the acoustics of the room you're in. The only thing you can do is experiment. My greatroom (kitchen/dining/livingroom) is arranged in such a way that it was easy to get something similar to the "standard" a 5.1 arrangement (center straight-on, L/R at +- 30 degrees...

Er, that's what the consumer electronics companies are SAYING. I don't necessarily believe it. I have read that there are at least a couple of high end ($3000 single-disc models) units that'll do DVD Audio over "normal" SP/DIF cables. Unfortunately, google is not being my friend right now and...

Sigh. Yup. I've even posted that link a couple times before. 90% of what we print is monochrome, and we have a couple of printers from that service (the black was only free in the sense that you get a couple free bricks for every purchase of color bricks. It isn't like they gave you as much as...

A couple of SACD suggestions. Epics - a collection of familiar movie themes. I like the Lord of the Rings bit in the middle of the disc. It's not a spatial showcase, just a pretty cool disc. It's a hybrid SACD, which means it'll play in a regular CD player if you decide you don't need to go...

Her. And we already have two. We don't let students use them. The consumables are too expensive and we tend to use them for huge jobs like printing out 200-page manuals and stuff.

Altec's THX marketing is bullshit. The newest 2.1 pair is not impressive AT ALL. All in all I think I'd buy a lower-end set like a Logitech Z640s and save some cash - that's the set I resell to people who want 5.1 speakers - or pay the extra $50 for Z680s, which have a builtin DD/DTS/DPLII...

And in a story that should be a surprise to absolutely no one here...

If it's a big deal, it'd cost about US$150 to put together a HIGHLY overclockable P4 2.4A (that's the 533MHz Prescott) + motherboard. I understand those chips reliably hit 3.3Ghz with a few tweaks to core frequency. It should be easy enough to get rid of a brand new Barton + board combo.

time, if you'd care to look back at my 5000something-odd posts, you'll find I've never used any of those stupid yellow Emoticons. This is not a new fetish by any means. :) <-- No problem with the old-fashioned kind, though. Anyway, there are no Epson printers here. Reasons cited are the...

ASP isn't a big deal, Doug. It's just writing VBA or Javascript or PHP or Perl or whatever, and having your server interpret it, rather than passing it to a client.

You can't use a digital connection - TOSLink (that's fibre) or SP/DIF (that's the coaxial version) for high-res audio. It's a form of copy protection; content producers pretty much demanded it, to keep people from recording full-quality high-res audio. If you want to listen to those sources, you...

You have better DACs on your Receiver. Your DVD player should be outputting the AC3/DTS stream unmolested AFAIK, and only doing the decoding if you're using stereo or 6ch. analog connections. By the way, if you want to listen to SACD or DVD-A, you HAVE to use the 6ch. analog. There's no digital...

XPCreate From the web site: "XPCREATE is a utility program that will combine an original XP distribution and assorted hotfixes and updates to produce an up-to-date XP Distibution CD. XPCREATE allows the user to define custon installations and setup programs, but it's main richness lies in the...