Search results

.. and that's what I get for missing the preview button. The rest of what I wanted to say: ISA/PCI slots are still at the same interval. Full AT-style boards often had 7 slots, and most mid-towers have 8 slots on the back (a lot of cases have a slot "above" where the AGP slot usually falls. So...

AT backplates for ATX cases aren't impossible to find, by any means. I've got a couple laying around. Worst case scenario is "break out the dremel", and even that's not a really big deal.

I've found that dual drives are a fairly easy sell. Most people will take the speed hit in copying CDs to not have to swap the disc in the middle of the process.

Many cases have mounting holes for both, but most of the holes don't line up between AT and ATX.

Looking back at the computers I sold in 2002, out of 39 machines, 31 had CD-RW drives. That's a damned good rate of adoption. 19 had DVD-ROM. Most of those drives went to college kids. Only one machine I sold had a DVD-ROM and no CD-RW. Seven machines had a CD-ROM for a second drive, and seven...

I like to tell people that DVD-ROM is the optical medium of... sometime in the future. Everyone responds with "But I don't want to watch movies on my PC!" Of course, when a 16x DVD-ROM costs and performs about the same as a 52X CD-ROM, the DVD is the superior choice. Yet I still get argument...

My UNIX-y opinion of VMS is that the environment is unusually verbose. I don't have any operator experience on a VMS system, but I've know of a couple of old VAX machines that probably have a half-inch of dust on them, happily whirring away, still doing whatever the hell they do. The local...

Rage Fury Pros are roughly equivalent to Voodoo3s (good enough for Quake3). Just saying "rage 128" isn't all that helpful. ATI did make about a billion different versions of that card.

Couple of my favorite MoM strategies: 1. Always play using the Jafar portrait. I $#%-ing hate Jafar. 2. Lots of White + Halfling + Warlord - slingers are nasty to start out with, but altar of battle or Call to Arms and they come out as champion units. Add Lionheart and they're shooting down sky...

Master of Magic? Someone else plays Master of Magic? What a great game. We'll have to start a strategy thread. IMO the best thing for your DOS gaming needs is an AWE64. It came in ISA and PCI versions, and it was really just about the last Creative card to have non-fuxored DOS drivers. My...

I don't remember if Nero has a builtin recorder, but it does have a WAv editor with hiss and pop removers. Plus, you already have a copy.

The lack of "+" was aught but a mere typo. Tea must've taken my "=" key. I'm not sure if nvidia motherboards are a worthwhile purchase or not. My gut says no. I have horrible problems with nvidia graphics cards overheating and doing other odd things that no one else complains about. In the...

nvidia. Need I say more?

I've said before that my opinion of Soyo isn't all that high. Until recently, they lived contentedly in the same space as DFI and FIC (low end boards aimed at resellers). Because of their recent change in focus, I view new products from Soyo with a healthy dash of suspision. That said, I'll...

Not for me, but I could use a recommendation for a decent P4 motherboard. Actually two: a "budget" vanilla model and something on the higher end of things.

It's good that you made it, but it's incredibly distressing that more IT people are being put out of work. Doubtful there will ever be so many IT jobs again that they'll all find similar work.

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.

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...

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

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...

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

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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

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. ;)

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...

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.

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? :)

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

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

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.

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...

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.

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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