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No, the receiver has to be able to handle a Dolby Digital bitstream. Which anything with digital inputs should have.

I thought the P180's weird orientation would present a problem, but at least on my Soltek board, it did not. In any case, a 24-pin ATX extension cable costs a whopping $3. I see no reason not to use AMD's stock HSF. It's quiet and effective.

Greg, The main thing the X-Mystique does is real-time encoding of stereo sources to 6-channel discrete dolby digital. To use that, the X-Mystique has to be connected via a digital coax or optical cable to a Home Theater Receiver with Dolby Digital processing capabilities (basically anything...

There isn't much of anything that goes in a 1x lane. A couple companies make NICs, Matrox has its thing, and that's about it. No modems, no sound cards (that I know of), no TV capture cards. What else goes in a PCIe slot?

I really think AMD got it right with the 754 retention system. You don't even need a screwdriver for that one. Except for the fact that, 90% of the time, when you try removing the HSF, you also get the CPU...

Er... what goes in a 16x PCIe slot besides a graphics card? Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of a 1x card, but where's the other hardware that will take advantage of this tremendous amount of I/O? OK... well, googling I find that Tekram has the ARC-1210, which is a 6-port card (actively...

Four 250GB disks at this point cost MAYBE $500. Another $350 for a SATA RAID controller. Spend the rest on a hot spare. That's $1000. What's Microsoft doing with the other $4000? As far as off site storage for disk-based systems, one of my clients uses a SATA enclosure and some extra disk...

Man, I tried to warn everyone. I really did...

Best Buy sells Westinghouse Monitors. They look exactly like Rosewill displays to me. I don't know who the OEM is.

Has anyone else tried google maps?

Like Gilbo I'd like to say in my own defense that the move to A64s has largely been for reasons of heat and efficiency. However, in addition to all of the above, there are parts to construct and additional two to four computers in my apartment at all times, and my hobby is essentially...

Pbbbt. You've gotten the last couple Linux questions.

Even if they don't, I just saw a very interesting one of MSI's superior motherboard technology. It involved space ships and sword-weilding barbarians. I have to say I was convinced.

Also, removal from the 20m thick concrete and lead "Western Digital/Donald Rumsfeld Containment Bunker" constitutes a violation of the warranty agreement.

Can't. Polish. Turd.

I've attached Hitachi SATAII drives to KT600-based systems. They have worked fine.

That seems like an awful lot for the sort of power supply that normally lives in a 1U machine. Is that a peak value or is it sustained?

I do something like xcopy /h/i/c/k/e/r/y/w d: I think there's a special command for writing to to a WORM DVD, though.

Thanks LiamC. Mostly I was just trying to refute Tannin's statement that it's impossible to befunge the KT600. It was, er, the most vivid description I could think of.

What OS? 2003 Server can write to a DVD/RW natively from the command line.

What the heck does that sentence mean?

I don't see why we couldn't change the title of the Toolbox. It doesn't get used very often anyway.

Also, I endorse Albatron motherboards with Via Envy sound chips. AFAIK they are the ONLY Athlon boards out at the moment that use something besides crappy AC97-spec audio. Albatron boards, however, don't work with Raden 9600s. Makes me wonder if they have any other weird defects, so I tend to...

No, but cheap, reliable and fast, taken together, are.

Well this won't take long or anything... <sob> I'm fully aware that most of the PCs I'm describing here are better than what a lot of people here have as their only machine. I apologize for that. Let's start with the computers in my office at my trainer job: WorkPC: Athlon64/3200, Albatron...

Would it surprise anyone to know that Asrock is the "budget" arm of Asus? Me neither. For the record, Gigabyte, Soltek and Biostar are pretty much tops in my book right now. I've bought MSIs recently (VM400s) and they were just fine, and I've bought Soyo boards (KT600s) that sucked like Jenna...

Hey, we had a heat index of 122 today. I actually had to turn off all the PCs in my apartment.

I only have AC in one room of my apartment, and a portable unit in my computer room. My bedroom, however, is several shades of miserable and has been all summer long. I can't get the temperature in the room below 88F (31C for people who like less accurate scales). Add that to my windowless...

At one time there was talk of AMD bypassing DDR2 completely for DDR3. I'd like to know what happened to that idea. Groltz, I will say that I really like my X700 Pro for a gaming card that's not utterly outrageous.

That was an unusually passsionate description from Buck. Almost as if written by an expert. :) Aren't you supposed to be passed out?

I kind of liked the ease of assembling a slot 1 system, actually. :P

Tannin, are you suggesting that I didn't know the correct voltage, or how to set the correct voltage, for CPUs made in that period? That's simply insulting. I stand by my valuation. They sucked. They were slow. They were flakey. They got too hot. In the couple years that those chips were...

It's a name. Yay. I can't help but think of crappy cars and bad real estate descriptions.

Buck, do you want a time out?

Value delivered to the end user was in effect negative. The C*rix 6x86 products are among the worst computing devices I've ever seen installed in a computer. They overheated constantly and behaved poorly when you could get them to run at all. Bad, terrible hardware for that time. Pretty much, I...

I have a student who repairs electronic novelty devices - jukeboxes, arcade games, slot machines - for a living. Apparently a certain class of these machines run DOS. Old DOS. Like DOS 3, or something. At any rate, he stops by my office and pays me $5 - $10 apiece for as many working drives as I...

I'm happy with the Inspiron 6000 that's bumming around my office as well.

What the HELL is wrong with you? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?!?

Where are our mods? Tony said a bad word and I want it expurgated! IMO there's no reason - and never has been a reason - to avoid 754. Sempron chips are nice, and the Athlon 64 is the same processor no matter how many pins it has.

Yes. You're talking about a laptop that can't run on a battery. That's not crazy, just stupid. As far as dual cores go: I think it'll be three years or more before programs start to take advantage of the full capabilities of those chips. P4s have had hyperthreading for a couple years - a...

Remember how Socket 754 was the platform that was going to be orphaned by AMD's long term support for Socket 939? Um... yeah. Turns out, early next year, the high end mainstream AMD chips will be living in a happy new 1207-pin package, along with a DDR2 memory controller. I'm sure there's...

It does everything I want as well. Of course, at home I'm as likely to use text based elm as anthing else...

This brings to mind an famous aphorism: You can't polish a turd. Not that WD isn't trying.

The only thing I've used it for is extracting boot sectors from CDs. Anyway, I'm not sure why you're making such a big deal out of copying capabilities, Greg. Unless the CDs you legally own are CDs that have copy protection, whatever burning software you have will make a perfect duplicate.

Meh. ISOBuster works too.

$2000 buys overkill on the desktop. However, I think that if you bought a modest, $700 or $800 PC, and a nice 20" LCD, that you'd be just as happy as if you blew the whole two grand. Something like a Venice core a64/3200 Gigabyte 939 board to taste 1GB RAM 200GB Samsung Hard disk ($89 at newegg...

The Big Easy is another cool movie set in New Orleans.

As I tell my students: A good computer technician should be able to swear continuously for two minutes without repeating himself.

I also still use Wordperfect 9 for linux. Every time some major library gets updated I have to spend half a day figuring out how to make it work on my machines again, but it's worth not having to deal with word and not having to retrain my fingers to do OpenOffice or something.

There's a company called "Chiefvalue.com" that appears to be a screen-scrape of newegg. It DOES NOT have any boilerplate about not warranting motherboards. I'm not sure how legitimate it is, but it has newegg's prices and shipping, and doesn't have a retarded "we don't want your bad...