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  1. Mercutio

    SR user forums

    SR's forums are created by those that frequent them. If everyone who now posts here had posted instead on SR's, it's possible they wouldn't be in the state they're in now. Not that I think it's a problem worth fixing.
  2. Mercutio

    Utility needed

    NTFs, as a journaling file system, shouldn't NEED to be chkdsk'd . Unless there's some kind of truly massive corruption, the data structures builtin to NTFS should be able to repair themselves... and if you've got corruption like that, you're probably better off worrying about how long a restore...
  3. Mercutio

    Windows Media Player 9

    WMP9? Aren't the DRM restrictions in WMP8 bad enough?
  4. Mercutio

    Video of the War on Terror

    stileproject is a very interesting multimedia web site, largely focusing on only the most purile content imaginable. Porn, photos and video of medical oddities and gruesome injuries, news footage and, inexplicably, normal people displaying the message "Stile Sucks". For all that, however, it is...
  5. Mercutio

    How bloody long should an XP domain logon take?

    Nope. But since I'm not so dedicated as to spend my weekend trying to fix it. :)
  6. Mercutio

    How bloody long should an XP domain logon take?

    Yes, but you lose all the goodness that comes from having clients authenticate on your domain - management with Active Directory, needing PITA additional user security configuration on your clients. XP Home is a communist plot. EVERY OTHER Microsoft OS since DOS 3 can authenticate on a domain.
  7. Mercutio

    help me decide which case to get

    The table in the middle right of that same image is close to what I'm thinking of. Maybe a little bit taller? The interior of the case could always be lined with metal as an additional insulator, both from fire and from RF. And hey, case mod: One of my tables has a stained glass top. That'd...
  8. Mercutio

    Divx 5 and long movie files

    Fresh installed a fairly vanilla PC. XP1800 + 256MB PC2100 + Epox 8KHAL+ and Win2000. Installed Vdub 1.4.7. Installed divx pro 5.0.2. I'm encoding a 2 hour and one minute MPEG1 of a blue screen. No audio. Compression is set to a paltry 400kbps, default quantizers (min 2 max 12), no GBC...
  9. Mercutio

    help me decide which case to get

    One idle thought and suddenly it's all anyone can talk about. Sheesh. :) blakerwry, do you know what "mission style" furniture is? You can do a google image search as well as I can, but the basic description is generally unadorned, functional wood furniture that typically uses wooden slats...
  10. Mercutio

    Neverwinter Nights

    My revised opinion of NWN: It's a great game, except when it's crashing. Which it does, every once in awhile. Can't imagine how bad it was BEFORE the current patchlevel. The best part is re-playing all the fantastic 1st edition ad&d (White Plume Mountain, Tomb of Horrors) modules that have been...
  11. Mercutio

    new (used) sound card

    Hardware voice support is used to play back multiple waveforms at once. In regular daily use, this means being able to do things like listen to an MP3 and play back a video file with sound at the same time, while still getting the "dings" and "clicks" the OS normally makes. In general, I'd say...
  12. Mercutio

    ATI Radeon 9500 modifications can be done by software.

    Benchmarks I've seen for the 9500Pro put it to within a hair of the speed of a GF4 4600. The GF4 is generally described as "spanking" the 8500 in fanboy graphics card reviews, so it's safe to say it'll be quite a bit faster than your 8500LE. If only ATI had done a 9500AIW... sigh.
  13. Mercutio

    Divx 5 and long movie files

    WTF?!? I'm going to have to try a fresh install of everything on one machine or other now.
  14. Mercutio

    help me decide which case to get

    One of these days, if I ever figure out how to work a tool more complicated than a screwdriver, I'm going to make a mission-style oak chassis, to go along with all the furniture in my living room. None of the traditional or non-traditional colors that computers come in go well with wood grain. ;)
  15. Mercutio

    How bloody long should an XP domain logon take?

    I'll admit that I haven't looked at my DNS setup since about 20 minutes after I set up my 2nd DC (er, the PC on my desk, running 2000 Server precisely so I can take the big guy down if I have to), but I can't see that one being a problem, either. I'll check anyway. But blakerwry is right: If...
  16. Mercutio

    Divx 5 and long movie files

    Looks like fiddling with the quantizer settings will resolve the immediate issue, but it doesn't explain why I'm having to do this with divx5 when earlier versions happily made predicatably small files at low bit rates. 2 hours seems to be the starting point for unpredictability.
  17. Mercutio

    How bloody long should an XP domain logon take?

    My DC is the DNS server that my clients get from DHCP. It'd be a piss-poor DNS server if it didn't have a record for itself, wouldn't it? :)
  18. Mercutio

    help me decide which case to get

    Observation on my part suggests that steel cases make quieter PCs.
  19. Mercutio

    How bloody long should an XP domain logon take?

    I know my DNS setup is good, since all our DNS stuff is forwarded through the DC anyway. Most of the local infrastructure has been in place for years, but Win2000 clients (the same machines!) take less time to log in, and those machines have roaming profiles configured.
  20. Mercutio

    The state of overclocking

    I'd say "No wonder" but you probably wouldn't believe me. Pretty much all the Super7 boards had a lousy AGP implementation to begin with, but the Voodoo3 at least basically treated an AGP slot like a faster PCI slot, instead of using all the other crap that AGP is supposed to do. And I think...
  21. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    1. As a moderator (someone who DOES have an edit button), I'm more than entitled to tell you, Honold, to be more respectful to Mr. Wilson. 2. Via's QA area bears an uncanny resemblance to my computer room.
  22. Mercutio

    The state of overclocking

    It was a wonderfully stable board. They were fantastic when combined with Permedia2 or Voodoo3 cards. I'd rate the VA-503+ as by-far the best of all socket 7 boards (this after endless exposure to PC Chips, Shuttle, DFI and Asus SS7 boards). Excluding PC Chips, I think my worst experiences have...
  23. Mercutio

    Why do I lose my posts?

    Hint: We both have avatars. Even if I can't see mine.
  24. Mercutio

    Why do I lose my posts?

    IIRC, the default session time is something over an hour. Not that I remember. Anyway, if you autologin, that problem goes away, or maybe if you ask Handruin nicely he'll make it longer.
  25. Mercutio

    Why do I lose my posts?

    Whether the back button works for that depends on your browser, I think. I used to have that problem when I used Netscape 4 while on SR. mubs, do you ever walk away from your PC for a REALLY long time, and does your browser auto-login to SF? I think your cookie for your SF-ing session is...
  26. Mercutio

    Thanks Merc: Speeze CPU cooler

    I've got four of them now. I really like the design. MUCH quieter than AMD's retail fan, and they run my CPUs cooler, too. I'm glad someone took my word for it.
  27. Mercutio

    The state of overclocking

    I have an almost permanent interest in low-cost but reasonably high quality PCs. Probably more than others here, because of the area where I live and the markets that I serve. Oh, and the fact that my hobby is basically paid out of pocket. The last time I could really put together a great $350...
  28. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    AMD has socket A. Intel has Socket 370, 423, 478. Happy?
  29. Mercutio

    Divx 5 and long movie files

    I know I'm not the only person here who encodes video. Has anyone else here noticed that divx 5 seems to have a floor for file size when encoding at low bit-rates? When I encode single files longer than 120 minutes, even with no audio, using vdub or tmpeg or even Premier, I end up with a file...
  30. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    blakerwry, Intel had been making statements that RAMBUS was to be the future of PC memory technology for several years before a RAMBUS-based Intel PC became available. As far as anyone knew, Intel (major investor in RAMBUS, after all) was going to ram RDRAM down everyone's throat. There was...
  31. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    Maybe I have a bit longer memory, but I remember many, many knocks at Via prior to the Athlon CPU. I can recall hobbyists bitching and moaning about Apollo Pro (which was a great chipset, As far as I cared), and I'm sure if I could remember clear back to the 486 days, when about 20 different...
  32. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    Upon reflection, everybody remember the stunningly long life 440BX had, right? I think Intel (largest producer of motherboards) learned a lesson from having a single product outlive its planned product lifetime by 18 months (12 months at the very least). What followed BX? Alphabet soup. i810...
  33. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    It's kinda nice when you have piles of PC100 chips laying around. Remember when 256MB SDRAM DIMMs were $15 each? Someone who bought an MSI K7T two years ago can stick a pretty up-to-date XP1800 on it (and probably faster than that. time's Soltek is an even better example). The guy who bought...
  34. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    ...But if you had purchased an 845G four months ago, you'd be really upset right now. :)
  35. Mercutio

    Re:Intel Builds In More Built In Obsolescence

    There are at least two KT133A boards out there that'll accept a 1600+. Of course, a 1600+ with SDRAM is a slightly depressing prospect. Architecturally, the KT133 probably *can* handle a tbred. Why someone would want that is another matter. ... and the fact that an XP CPU of any sort is...
  36. Mercutio

    The state of overclocking

    Yes, but XP1600s are even cheaper and really very nearly as fast. :) ... and my momentary infatuation with P4 Celerons as overclockers OR budget machines lasted until about mid-way through the article on the front of the news page. Sigh.
  37. Mercutio

    The state of overclocking

    $50 P4 Celerons sure do look like they'll overlock nicely. $50 Celerons + $50 'boards might be a nice combo for a budget box. At least, they will if RAM comes down a bit (speaking of, when the hell are new Durons gonna come out? Socket A boards are dipping below $40 in some cases but I can't put...
  38. Mercutio

    The state of overclocking

    Is anyone out there still overclocking? P4s or XPs? Is it all overclocking based on FSB or are there tricks to unlocking the newer chips? At one level, I have to wonder "why overclock?", but on another, there certainly is fun to be had trying to build a stable, cool, quiet overclocked PC...
  39. Mercutio

    Neverwinter Nights

    I finally went out and bought it this weekend. It is a cool game. No doubt about it. Runs OK on a 128MB 9000 Pro - not so well when there are 15 or so monsters on the screen. I'm going to try to solo it through the single player game.
  40. Mercutio

    Happy Birthday to StorageForum

    On or about this date, 2002, the site that would become storageforum.net was first set up. Looking back at the dates on the earliest registrants, it appears that January 12th is the actual, magical day, but the core of the group - Tannin, Flagreen, P5_133XL, Clocker, adcadet, Groltz, time, NRG...
  41. Mercutio

    How do you get rid of the stupid Macromedia Flash pop-up?

    Pradeep was/is hosting mine. Maybe he's not hosting it any more? Or maybe someone is trying to tell me it's time for a new avatar? Too bad. I think Bill Gates with pie on his face is funny.
  42. Mercutio

    Mozilla crashes!

    I know the effect you're talking about, but Moz DOES have its limits. I can reliably crash mozilla by having around 70 tabs open, each tab having loaded a page with 10 or so 640x480 images (and I'll restain myself from saying where I go to do that). After about the 40th open tab, Moz stops being...
  43. Mercutio

    Mozilla crashes!

    Moving between tabs in Moz, use CTRL+PageUp and PageDown.
  44. Mercutio

    Exactly how much does AC97 suck?

    Catalyst 3/DX9 is bad news. I upgraded my vidcap machine to it and ever since then I've gotten hard locks within a couple of minutes of starting a capture. That machine is getting ghosted back to older drivers this weekend.
  45. Mercutio

    Exactly how much does AC97 suck?

    My customer has a machine I sold about three months ago. XP1800 on a GA-7RX. 512MB DDR. RealTek AC97. Radeon 8500 (I integrated this machine around his "old" graphics card). A pretty nice machine. I happened to see if today at the local mega-bookstore. Asked him how he liked his new PC... and I...
  46. Mercutio

    Old (but good) stuff pricing interrogations.

    Putting aside my immense dislike for nvidia, the TNT2 is almost three years old. Having the "Pro" on the end of its name makes about as much difference as a pretty bow on a pile of dog crap (er, maybe I couldn't set aside my immense dislike for nvidia after all). If your hardware is older, it'd...
  47. Mercutio

    Exactly how much does AC97 suck?

    Anyone use AC97 audio on a gaming machine? Anyone have a rough idea how hard it hits the CPU? Just trying to help a customer...
  48. Mercutio

    Old (but good) stuff pricing interrogations.

    My rough guess (in USD) would be around $175 for the 500MHz, $450 for the 800MHz. You'd probably do better piecing out the SCSI controller and drives. I'm basing this on the fact that I can buy lease-returned 500MHz machines for $150 all day long. Your machines gain points from having more RAM...
  49. Mercutio

    from hotdealsclub.com: Free copy of SystemWorks 2003 (NFR)

    Bleh. I've found I can get OEM copies for $10 anyway (which is a staggering deal, since Ghost Enterprise versions are about $12/seat).
  50. Mercutio

    Win2k problems with USB Storage Device

    I've had it work when Fast Repair didn't, particularly on 2000 Server installations.
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