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You can probably find two budget 19" LCDs for the price of Dell's high end models. I like Sceptre monitors a lot, for the money.

I'd recommend a 4:3 monitor for any monitor you're going to be using for actual work. 16:9 = a ton of extra scrolling.

I suppose it makes a difference if you have one of those bargain-basement Dells with 128MB RAM. Vista basically creates and uses the thumb drive for swap space.

It's not helpful to you in Nova Scotia, but I buy lots of things from Cableconn.com. Recently they switched policies, though, and now they don't do free shipping for $20 orders any more, which makes me a sad panda.

Northern Indiana Public Service Company. Who, by the way, are even worse. There's no civic entity like Chicago to keep NIPSCO in check.

If you have Vista 64-bit edition, that's one hell of a lot of extra memory.

I do believe that's an architectural limitation of your system chipset. IIRC the limit for AMD64 is actually slightly lower. Basically, you need a "server" chipset if you want to see all 4GB of your RAM on a 32-bit OS.

About a half hour ago I had the gob-smacking realization that the last time I paid a power bill was early May. So I hastily called up the local power monopoly to find out what I need to do to make sure my power stays on. Turns out, they had grossly overestimated my "budget billing", and I...

Nope. Isn't the Discovery Channel the one that likes to pretend that Ghosts and UFOs are "Science" topics?

I had no idea who the guy was. But apparently there is video of him actually removing the barb from his heart. I imagine that'll be on the internet in a week or so.

Yes, but taken in combination, the sound projector is a better deal than buying a HTiB kit. And for what it's worth, it DOES have real speakers. About 30 of them. As I understand it, there's a longish setup process where it figures out where to point each of the speakers to maximize echos and...

I can think of maybe a half-dozen DVDs that have 6.1 soundtracks, let alone seven. Did you look at that Yamaha sound projector?

The version I have came from a torrent site. It's one of the more stripped down releases. It's slightly annoying for defaulting to the UK keyboard layout and language setting, but that's easy enough to fix.

I like cellphoneshop.com. They had the battery for my phone at a literal 80% discount from what the local Verizon store wanted to charge. I've bought other people data cables and face plates there. They identify phones by the manufacturer. In some cases you have to figure out the actual phone...

AC97 is its own special category of horrid. As a techie it offends me. As a music enthusiast it repulses me. The main issue is that in an AC97 implementation, all sound is upsampled to 48kHz, processed and then output back to whatever quality you've selected for playback (almost always...

You just made my list, bucko. :P

Wanna know a movie that's cool to look at and listen to, even if it's not really that good? The George Clooney version of Solaris. It's a great test disc for a home theater system.

TinyXP FTW. I put it on two ~300MHz Celerons with 64 and 96MB RAM respectively, machines that I would not want to see running Windows 2000, let alone full-blown XP, so that some nice people could actually use the USB printers they bought. It runs better than Win98 on that hardware. What this...

Sort of Tangental to the audio issue, this is a comparison between PC-based video playback and a number of standalone DVD players. Stuff like this is why I <3 my HTPC.

It's cool enough for me to shut off one of my air conditioners tonight. My apartment is quiet for the first time in about four months!

C, I still think you should buy a DVD Audio disc or two, just to hear what you're missing. :)

Home Theater in a Box setups are usually pretty anemic. If you're LUCKY they rely on the bass module to deliver decent sound. Which, come to think of it, is just like computer speakers. I use a set of Acoustic Research AR-HC5s for the audio rig in my office. The center isn't as good as I'd...

$109 MSRP. So probably $80 or so.

A DVD full of 128k MP3 files will hold about 70 hours of music, Stereodude. That would be one logical reason to be interested.

Oh, and on the experience of hearing your favorite music out of better equipment than you've heard before: Fully expect to hear things you've never noticed. Picks sliding across guitar strings. Tapping feet. Soft sighs of breath. More cowbell. That stuff was there all along. If you're really...

I concur on the subject of headphones. Being an adult and having my own living space means being able to listen comfortably. But, on to more constructive comments: You are making a mistake by ignoring surrounds. The addition of discrete surrounds from stereo sources is one of the prime...

Sounds like a pretty nice setup, really.

Who's the joker who gave this a one-star rating?

You might try buying a more modest receiver, something in the realm of $300 - $500. Something like an Onkyo TXSR674, maybe (just as a suggestion; I've never heard one, but it has an appealing feature set). Your Klipsch speakers are REAL speakers IIRC, they have real speaker terminals to be...

Try a different DNS server. 4.2.2.2 is a pretty easy one to remember. Another likely possibility is that two top-tier telcos have stopped talking to one another for whatever reason. It's happened before, and can result in a similar set of conditions.

I'm certain that GaryH is the guy who knows more about the actual electronics than anyone here. Also, down the path to better sound lies utter madness. I'm serious. Stereophiles are as bad as drug addicts. One of my brothers has $12,000-apiece mono amplifiers driving single speakers worth...

Just to be more clear (it's 2:00AM!), the difference between DVD-Audio and CD is pretty substantial... if you're in an environment where the noise level is fairly low. Driving around in most cars is not going to give you that experience. For anyone else who is curious, PowerDVD 6 and WinDVD can...

There are programs that can create proper DVD Audio discs, and there are car stereos that support DVD Audio, but that's not the same thing as being able to play a DVD full of CD-spec audio. Frankly, unless I was in an electric car or one that was wall to wall dynamat, I probably wouldn't be...

The difference is that they're using a different audio chip that supports DDL/DTSI, and there's an onboard digital input. I was desperate enough to try getting the Hoontech digital I/O daughterboards that will work with the X-plosion that I tried buying them from a computer store in Sweden...

Generally, Hugh Hefner maintains around six "girlfriends" at a time. They are essentially paid for their status with magazine and newsstand-special (e.g. Playboy's Voluptuous Vixens) appearances and with the added media exposure of being seen in public with Hef. There's an annual turnover of...

I'd perfectly happy to swap six piddly little 250GB drives for a 1TB unit. I'm having to hold off on consolidating my PCs at this point because the drives that I own are simply not dense enough. I'm having to keep extra drives powered on, generating heat that I have to get rid of, blocking...

The Marvell LAN chip on that board should be fine under Linux. I can't say I've tried that specific board, but Marvell's chips have been supported very well. Linux doesn't really have "drivers" for LAN hardware so much as loaded kernel modules that are precompiled by the distro's management. I...

1. I was right, even down the the correct number of women. 2. Hefner only has one F. 3. Die in a Fire, Captain Sailboat. :P

My profit... I mean video cards came today. Are there quantitative tests for suckiness that I can do, or should I just estimate the suck from the weird green design on the translucent neon-green fan?

I got my first batch of Antec NSK4400s today. I was shocked and delighted to discover that beneath the classic black and silver exterior is the exact same chassis as my beloved Compucase 6812. I haven't seen a new one in over two years. With the Antec name on it, it was ~$12 more than I was...

DD probably started his day with a menage a' trois, moved on to Dom Perignon on his sailboat and right about now he's probably enjoy a Kush fattie. And having another menage a' trois.

WD is a four letter word. Buffalo Terastations are essentially painless to set up. I installed one to use as a network backup device, once. You could also look at the extremely flexible Linksys NSLU2. My biggest complaint with SOHO NAS devices: Out of the ones I've used to date, they ALL seem...

Vista Prices? Nonsense!

1. That's basically it, man. Decent CPU utilization and SNR. It's not going to be perfect if you're using an analogue connection like a headphone jack and an internal sound device, but you're obviously not an audio snob so I doubt you're going to care very much. :) 2. There are USB-based...

You guys are going to make me feel extra-guilty about my lab full of X2/4800s with X1900XTXs, aren't you?

I can't stand wearing headphones myself. The earbud type aren't noted for sound quality and closed-ear 'phones are REALLY uncomfortable with my glasses. Plus I hate to think what headphones might do to my hearing - I'm still able to hear a 19.5kHz test frequency at age 30, and I'd prefer to keep...

Hm. $120 + shipping for the set? Would that work?

I got one of the cheap ones. HDA-X1 or something like that. It was like $430. I bought it just so I could watch Serenity in all its glory. I've been through all the HDMI troubleshooting I can do. I'm under the impression that my TV (61" Samsung) just didn't get finalized HDCP support. My...

If you have a DVI-capable monitor, why not just use the VGA cable for the secondary PC and use the input select on the display? If both the PCs are fairly close, you can just set a second keyboard and mouse on top of the PC when you aren't using 'em. :)

Most new motherboards and cases support front-mounted audio ports. That's not the province of Creative Labs any more. Many new motherboards support onboard sound hardware that would've been on premium add-in cards a couple years ago. Midrange and better Intel Branded motherboards do Dolby...