Jaqie Fox

This is a small review of a freeware program some of you may already know about, Spacemonger 1.40, available at their official web page, www.sixty-five.cc. The program is freeware for Windows 95 and higher operating systems. This is their last free version, there is a new pay-for version available at their new website, with many more features. Without further ado, here are the screenshots. Please note: any downsized image is clickable for the full-size image Ever wonder where all the space went on your drive? What file or directory is hogging up how much space? Do you have a huge file somewhere with a copy and just don't know about it? Or just want to see visually how big every file is on your system? Then spacemonger is the tool you will wonder how you ever got along without! As you can see in the screenshots, it shows visually the file structure on your drive, and can be configured in many ways. Turning off the 'free space' allows you to see what is taking up the space in more detail, and double clicking on a directory 'shell' zooms in so you can inspect just that directory instead of the whole drive, allowing you to get down to see the size difference in even the tiniest files in an arcane subdirectory in your system. A single right click will yield a delete ability and several other handy functions. The only real drawbacks are the clunky, clowny look to the interface, and that it will not auto-update the directory structure - which the new version does. If you delete many files with it in one operation, it has a tendancy to crash, as well. Despite the problem with crashing, it is still a very much worthwhile program which is one of the very first programs I install and I simply can not live without. My rating for it is definitely 4 out of 5 stars. What are your thoughts?

This is a small review of a freeware program some of you may already know about, Panorama32, available at their official web page, www.ivory.org. The program is freeware for Windows 95 and higher operating systems. Without further ado, here are the screenshots. Please note: any downsized image is clickable for the full-size image This handy little program loves to change your background image, and it is very much like a good dog, eager to please, and if you tell it what to do, it will. Easily customized with it's myriad options and still fully functional in windows XP, it dutifully does whatever you tell it and nothing you don't. It can change yoru background color, auto tile the image if it is smaller than 1/2 your desktop size, auto scale if it is more then 1/2 that size, auto-convert and dither jpeg images to windows-standard bitmaps (remember it is compatible with windows 95 which does not use jpegs for backgrounds), and much much more. The program is pretty well laid-out and thought out as well, the options are easy to understand and clear. The only real problem with it is it's look is a bit dated, but if it ain't broke don't fix it. This is another of my daily run programs. My rating for it is definitely 5 out of 5 stars. What are your thoughts?

This is a small review of a freeware program some of you may already know about, Glass2k, available at their official web page, chime.tv. The program is freeware for Windows 2000 and higher operating systems. Without further ado, here are the screenshots. Please note: any downsized image is clickable for the full-size image This little beauty of a program lets you 'glassify' (turn transparent) any process which has a window, in windows 2000 and higher operating systems in 10% increments from 100% opaqueness to 10% opaqueness. It has several options outlined in the screenshot, and key shortcuts which allow you to change the transparency of the active window with a simple keystroke. It remembers window settings by the program name, so if you glassify one instance of explorer, the other instances change to that transparency when they become active. Even the taskbar can be changed via the standard methods or the slider-selector in the main window. The program is also very small and has a very small footprint in memory. There is no installer, simply copy the EXE file to a spot on your hard drive and create a short cut where you want it. The only 'nag' of this program is a short splash screen (shown in the center of the screenshot) which shows for a few seconds when the program starts. The main problem with this program (besides using a lot of video card resources for you with non-gamer video cards) is that some 3D accelerated games seem to have problems when it is running, which vary from stuttering to low performance to total failure. This is not an issue if the program is shut down before you run a 3D accelerated game, however. Despite the 3D app problem, this is a gem of a program that I am happy to run on my computer, and enjoy using daily. My rating for it is definitely 4 out of 5 stars. What are your thoughts?

My point and why I got excited was that I had never seen anything stating that windows 2003 server's RAID was 'supposed to' work in Windows XP Professional, let alone across different architectures and controllers - without a single bit of user intervention in software. It went from a sil0680 PATA card in a dual PIII machine to an nForce4 PATA controller in an athlon64 x2 machine - and from Server 2003 to XP Pro. That is the first time I have seen RAID that is capable of going from controller to controller let alone from architecture to architecture, OS to OS - let alone with zero user intervention.

First, this seems to be a grey area in the forum rules, so I would like to know if it is allowable - and in what forum or forums. It does not quite fit any category I see. Second, is it possible to add a new subforum for this? I guess I should explain more. Say someone knows a certain program, game, or whatever very well and finds themselves recommending it to forum users several times... but does not want to go through the hassle of setting up a webserver, forum, etc etc all on their own just to post a mini review they make pointing out the features shortcomings and such of a program they know and use well. Would it not be a good idea to have a subforum for mini-reviews that people can write about software? it would be a great "Bazaar-like" place for sharing information on programs that are available that relatively few people know about. To that end, this idea could concievably be extended to other things then free software available on the net...

Correct. That is the dawn of the Geode project IIRC. But IMHO the turion64 makes a much more promising solution to the OP's wishlist.

jcarle is correct. An addendum to his information - if it does not swap to a SMP HAL, go here and swap it yourself by using the good ole change drivers dialogs. (left image) While you are at it, turn on DEP. (right image)

The first time I ran linux, when I was a total noob at it. I logged in remotely to my dialup ISP which ran BSD on their server. Their setup was very insecure and stupid - which was a good deal of the problem. I did not realize I was still logged into their machine instead of mine... I decided to have some fun before I reformatted and installed DOS again on my machine so I did a rm -R * I watched for a while... then saw it deleting account directories of people I knew in town... I could not stop it in time, as soon as I realized, the SSH session terminated at the other end and I was without an internet connection soon after. I was still in high school when I did this... this was the days of windows 3.11 and DOS. Their sysadmin thought the system just had a hardware failure and replaced the entire system... set up prettymuch the same. I never had the heart to tell them it was me... The admin eventually got fired for incompetence. that was far from the only time the system caused an outage of dialup internet...

Some people here prolly saw them before, but incase some haven't, they are pretty good.

I saw the original of that when it first came out at deadtroll. hilarious and spot-on! http://deadtroll.com/video/helldeskcable.html the original. much better, IMHO.

God that was funny. Dumb as hell but just as funny. Thanks Did anyone else notice the much more subtle second punchline in there?

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/posting.php

QFT. I was going to post the exact same setup (minus the combined codec pack, I am picky as to what codecs I install and have a list I go through upon reinstalls). The only thing this setup won't play is .ratDVD (which is a very dodgy standard). That i use moopeg for playing when I come across one (which isn't often anymore).

You may not believe this, but I actually have and AdLib card sitting around right now... I remember playing wolfenstein 3D with it, what a riot!

usually labeled PrintScrn or PrtScreen or such, just to the right of F12.

Or you can use media player classic - set it up to render it totally in software and you can simply take a printscreen of it. Screenshot I highlighted See it in action here

Similar but backward situation here (only with one HD instead of two) my nForce4 non-ultra chipset is sata1 but the drive is sata2 which has NCQ in the standard. I haven't done the homework on this but I assume that NCQ is supported in this situation. could definitely be wrong.

To install SATA support (including SATA RAID cards) in XP you must have a floppy with the SATA RAID drivers for your SATA RAID card on it in .inf form. There are probably readmes on your driver CD for how to create that floppy if it didn't come with the floppy already.

[x] 10-20 -- Whew. too many! Hardwired (host) OSes I run on my various machines: Windows XP Professional SP2 RTM (32 bit) Windows XP Professional x64 Windows Server 2003 Standard SP1 (32 bit) FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE i386 FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE amd64 MS-DOS 6.22 DD-WRT (for my router) OSes I run inside a VM: *most of the above plus Windows 2000 Professional Windows 98 SE Windows 95B Various flavors of linux (at least four, change all the time) OSes I run on boot-CDs Windows 98 SE (just the boot portion) DOS 6.22 DR-DOS Knoppix 5.01 DBAN Linux *many more I just can't remember off-hand

I have been a 'gibson hater' for a long time now. Take a look here and you will learn verifiable truths about him. The guy isn't just stupid he is a con artist.

If your camera can take a removable flash device, my advice would be to just get a flash multireader. I found a cheap usb2 based one at tigerdirect when I went into the local outlet store a while ago. I never liked the kodak software to interface with the built in flash memory for my Easyshare DX6340, and after I was forced to get a small SD card and reader I never want to use direct software again. Another point, there is at least one 'brother brand' all-in-one scanner/printer/faxer/copier that has a multicard reader in it and ethernet interface, that lets you access the card reader via FTP!

My point was the warranty shuffle, not having a lemon or failed drive. Lemons and failures are part of anything mass produced, it's a fact of life. The problem I have is when the companies get all shifty and shady on the whole issue or just hassle the crap out of you when you try to RMA something that is under warranty. To me customer service is half the purchase. It is about half of the money you spend when you buy something.

Well... their cost for one. Their power usage for another. The 320GB drives jcarle and I are reccommending are actually comparable in speed to the raptors for most things, and a lot less $$ and more capacity to boot.

Holy sh... I plugged the two drives into my XP PRO SP2 machine (demia, the one I am on now). It requested a reboot. I did so (uncommon for me, but this time I knew it was a good thing). Upon startup, there was a lot of hard drive activity... I started thinking about what that could mean, and decided to wait until it was done to check diskmgmt.msc ... When I went in, I found it had restored the spanned volume 2k3 had made and put it on the same drive letter I had it on in the 2k3 machine. Needless to say I feel a hell of a lot more secure about using 2k3's raid options than any other option now. (note: I have had high end SCSI RAID setups before, DPT PM2865U3{u160} PCI-X w/128MB cache and a 10 disc RAID50 setup before, I am by no means new to RAID, just windows' software RAID) I never thought I would say this, but Way to go microsoft!

Actually I have been super pleased with my WD2000BB. It was my WD1200JB that I got burned by. I bought the OEM version back before it was common knowledge that WD was playing with their warranty periods. It came with a 1yr warranty. About 1 year and 2 months after I got it it had serious issues, which is uncommon for a WD. I ended up roundfiling it and being very steamed. Even the newegg page when I got it said it had a 3 year mfr warranty.