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I'm seeing no increases in CPU usage between Flash 11.4.402 and 11.8.800, which I currently have at hand. Both hover at 40% on my sample video from above with DXVA. CPU is consumed only when the video window is visible, other times the usage is around 10%, which suggests that not the decoding but the composition is the slow part in Flash video. If enabling acceleration in Flash settings already decreases CPU usage by half on HD videos (allowing the card to handle most decoding but not composition), a video card upgrade will not give further improvement. (But Flash 11.4 is 9 MB and Flash 11.8 is 16 MB, which almost double the size in memory in such a short time.)

I tried installing GIMP. It loaded the graphical representations of all layers correctly (no text, no adjustment or fill, or blending effects), which is good enough. Its resampling appears to be identical to IrfanView's. (slightly more ringing in the left image) GIMP can also load PSD files with transparency and save them without apparent loss. I think I can use it in place of IrfanView now. The version I got to run (2.4.7) doesn't have as many options for text processing though. And the GTK gui looks kinda ugly.

I have Adobe Photoshop 7. When I perform resizing, either of the whole image canvas or by choosing Edit -> Transform upon the current layer, there is always sharpening being done during the process. I rather wish this didn't happen. For example, 0. Original 1. Downscaled to 67% (doesn't have to be a screenshot) 2. Downscaled to 67% in IrfanView I sometimes export the picture to IrfanView, resize it, and bring it back into Photoshop for further processing. This doesn't work for layers with transparency. I understand why one would sometimes apply some sharpening (usually less than Photoshop uses). But in like in this example, I might want to blend the Windows logo with some background and photographed/scanned text, where the sharpened edges of the logo look too jagged in comparison. Are there versions of Photoshop that have customizable resampling methods, so that sharpening can be avoided?

I'm considering getting a Seagate hard drive for a tower system that is operating 24/7. The new "NAS HDD" model line (STx000VN000) looks appealing since it was built for reliability. However, there was this issue with head parking after short periods of inactivity, which produced a relatively loud scraping noise, much like that of a floppy loading ("chirp"). In the current SV35 series (VX), head parking could be disabled by forcing the drive to remember the Advanced Power Management mode, and recent drives even came without this function at all. Seagate states that for the new NAS HDD: "NASWorks provides 24×7 operation profiles and advanced power management modes to help drives go into the appropriate sleep or standby mode; this maximizes power conservation, minimizes time-to-data and improves overall reliability and performance." So I fear that APM might be back. Can any owners of a NAS HDD report if the drive does head parking? (Loading "drivers" for a HDD to get rid of APM is not an option. It must be able to remember the APM mode, or lack of it.)

A Kingston DT111 (ven. 0951, dev. 1666) finally arrived. It's working well with PIIX4 and ICH1 with USP3. Everest on the old computers identifies the device as USB 2.1. I'll order a couple more of these. I'll keep in mind that I can try a hub for newer devices. The purpose of these media is only file transfer. We still have a couple Pentium III office machines where I put the unofficial service pack on (but replacing the computers is not my call), and I own a retro gaming machine with a Mendocino Celeron.

I see USB 3.0 flash memory on sale and it's been replacing USB 2.0. Most of the models state compatibility with 2.0, as expected, but few mention 1.1. I am in need of USB drives that work in old Win98 PCs. Are all new drives backwards compatible down to USB 1.1?

I want it to be fanless. I could get a 620 locally, but have no way of telling if its cooling is sufficient beforehand, and if I can draw more power from this motherboard. Do twice as many CUDA cores also approximately double gaming performance? Edit: I replaced the 610 with another card of the same type, and the computer has so far always booted. :-)

VEVO uses a different transport protocol (RTMP), so their videos can't be played in generic players as easily. That is great if your program works, because VEVO has higher quality content, which seems to be further transcoded when uploaded to YT. I think Flash video is so slow because it must overlay semi-transparent annotations and occasionally some controls on top of the picture, which can't be done if the video is hardware accelerated. The picture is probably always converted to RGB. I find that I can also always capture a video frame played in Flash video with Print Screen, but cannot do that from fast video players. Still, FFdshow with conversion to RGB only uses about 80% of CPU on this sample. If I open a semitransparent OSD in the program, it uses more and cannot be played. But Flash operates in the slow mode all the time (the Play icon fades in and out, annotations, menus launched from the bottom bar). If Adobe "fixes" the player, they will probably only accelerate it on new OS using some new window manager technology. XP is just "not supported".

I'll use your second opinion and replace the video adapter before giving the PC away as planned. The system appears to be stable when using integrated video too. I was confused when the entire computer didn't freeze or reboot upon the error as usual.

I have had trouble playing 1280 pixel videos with higher framerate on a Pentium 4, comparable with the speed of the machine in the OP. There are two reasons: 1) the webpage is ridiculously fat with scripts that get executed if the user runs the mouse over any controls, 2) the Flash plugin is slow to decode and especially to render any video. I am still puzzled why people like sites like this. Which process in the task manager is causing increased CPU usage when the slowdowns occur? If VLC can stream your videos without interruptions and consumption of disk space, watching them outside of the website will deal with both issues, and also improve color quality (Flash player doesn't upsample chroma correctly). I use this extension for Opera, which presents all available video formats in a compact menu (usually 720p MP4 or 480p FLV are the best). Add an item to the context menu (standard_menu.ini) to all links, enabling to pass them onto a media player. --------------------GhostItem, M_INSPECT_ELEMENT = Inspect elementItem, Open in MPlayer=Execute program, "d:\apps\mplayer\mpui.exe","%l"The average CPU usage of this 720p@30fps video: in MPlayer – 44%, in browser – 90% (with large peaks while not interacting with the page), in browser with DXVA – 37%, in MPC-HC with DXVA – <5%. (single core Conroe CPU at 1.6 GHz). Not quite what you asked; but this method works for me well to watch single videos. I suppose VLC and MPlayer are about equal. MPlayer can set variable cache for streamed content; the default of 1 MB works well for me.

My bad, I forgot about AHCI. I fully agree that Ivy Bridge is the last fully functional platform for XP. NT5 has been with us for over a decade! Relevant to good existing sound cards is also the absence of parallel PCI in Haswell chipsets. I specifically picked my board because it had PCI, but I have not yet tested it with a soundcard as it will not be used with one at the moment.

"Support" usually boils down to whether there are drivers for each individual component. It may be easier for the manufacturer to say that an application is "not supported" than to explain that one or more features of their product don't always work. So far it seems that all key components, except USB 3.0, do have drivers. I'm sure someone will release a "native usb driver" when the 3.0 speeds become relevant. I also successfully installed Windows onto a Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H, which has the new shiny BIOS, without doing anything particular. The BIOS has all the crucial compatibility/legacy options, in particular IDE emulation for SATA, and comes with the pre-set in compatibility mode by default. The OS initially didn't boot, but I suspect it had to do with XP failing to write the boot sector properly on the drive partitioned with GParted. After I refreshed the boot sectors with BootICE, the system booted fine. XP with the latest updates was fully functional initially. Installing the Intel chipset INFs, hid the unknown USB device, among other things. Realtek generally sounds good. It is also present on this board. Their biggest deficiencies are lack of precise control (you can't pick the sampling rate, and set signal routing), and the ridiculous size of the control panel that does so little useful work. The quality of Realtek has definitely improved, as it no longer appears to switch as eagerly between mic/headphone/speaker when jack sensing encounters unexpected impedance. Realtek does offer stereo mix as a recording source. Recording works fine, but only at 16 bits. Realtek can also finally output 2 independent audio streams, but only to the rear and front, without other routing choices possible. Audio playback is stable under load, and doesn't interrupt.

I finished building a new system and encountered a problem with video. The video card would occasionally hang and continue displaying the picture that was on at the moment of the hang. To get it to respond again, I must reboot. In some cases the computer will not be bootable as if it had no graphics card (will fall back to integrated video, or beep if IGP is disabled) until I remove and reattach the VGA cable to its DVI-I port. Subsequently the D-Sub works again. After I assembled the system, I proceeded to configure the BIOS (graphical mode) and then test the system with memtest and hdat2 (text mode). In both cases, the display would sometimes hang when I just touched the PC, such as ejected and loaded the CD tray, or if I removed the video cable during a prolonged test to work on another computer. After I reattached the monitor, I could see the screen where it hang. Software could then still cause disk activity, make sounds through the PC speaker, and the computer could be soft-rebooted via Ctrl-Alt-Del. I tried re-seating the card in its slot, and adjust the speed of the PCI-E slot in BIOS, but this didn't solve the problem. At this point no drivers or OS are installed. I inserted another video card, an old Radeon X550, and the system appeared to be stable during installation of Windows XP, and remained so after I installed drivers and launched a game. Both cards should have comparable power consumption (<30W), with the replacement maybe slightly less. Upon inserting the faulty card in another computer, it initially failed to boot and went into a reboot cycle. It began working again after I, with power removed, switched the video cable to the other port, without removing the card itself. Video card: Asus GT 610, 1 GB Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H (uefi bios) Power supply: Fortron 500W CPU: Ivy Bridge G2030 Memory: 4 GB DDR3 What can I do to diagnose if the card or another component of the new system is faulty?

This works for most of the updated DX9 DLLs. None of the d3dx9_NN.dll need to be fully installed by executing the installer.nVidia Control Panel v3.4.772.10 / ForceWare 263.09 works well for me together with driver 314.22; all essential functionality is present, including custom resolutions and game profiles. The most recent Control Panel didn't install for me, but apparently there is significant forwards compatibility with this software. The driver indeed has an image quality issue; by default the driver will output studio range colors (16-235) with different contrast for green, unless changed using the Control Panel to full range (0-255). This manifests as reduced "washed out" contrast overall. I'm not sure where in the registry this setting is. It seems to be stored for each monitor output separately. REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Video\{558F4A7D-61A5-48E1-B29E-4E2A1A28D53C}\0000] "_User_SUB0_CRT1_XALG_Color_Range"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "_User_SUB0_CRT1_XEN_Color_Range"=hex:01,00,00,80

Thank you for the good reference, Tripredacus, which cleared my doubts. MSFN is a trusted source, and usually critical of Microsoft if there is a reason. I feel that the question's been answered. These are two video games, which I am not proud to admit. One of them didn't run (Sports Car GT), and another one kept losing keyboard input (Half-Life), which may or may not have to do with how keyboard layouts are switched. They worked fine under SP1 on the same computer, set up similarly by myself. Discovering the underlying mechanism is beyond my skill level. I've used SP3 for only a month now, and have not too much experience with it. I guess the same question could be asked in the Win2000 forum, since XP is a subversion of the same OS line... My main XP SP1 system is still holding up well, even after upgrading the video adapter. I've successfully installed the nVidia driver, which initially failed due to DecodePointer. With the above patch, the most recent Opera browser, and Media Player Classic are working, to give a couple popular examples.

More and more recent software doesn't run under vanilla Windows XP and SP1 because of unimplemented functions DecodePointer and EncodePointer in KERNEL32.dll. I have found this 64 kB patch (mirror), which enables most applications to work again. They still don't work under Windows 2000, because of other dependencies, which makes this question unsuitable for the Win2k forum. I trust XP SP1 because I've ran it stable with great uptimes, and have also encountered software which doesn't work correctly under SP3 and reportedly also under SP2. Overall, my experience with this OS has been better than with Win2k even, which is why I want to continue running it on machines that are capable of that. This function appears to be security related. According to Microsoft, encoded pointers can be used to provide another layer of protection for pointer values. But is the real reason why it exists to sabotage older OS, and force an upgrade?

Thank you BlackWingCat. I got them installed now. Also: nice, compact direct downloads of the Flash plugin.

I was trying to apply the Extended Kernel update to install the recent nVidia Driver. But Extended Kernel failed to install due to missing "MS12-052 (KB2722913)". The download for this that I was able to find was 3.3 GB, which is excessive. Could you list links to all the required components part of the update in your first post?

Is it possible to add a vertical scroll bar to the control containing BeginPrompt text to display more text in it than fits in the dialog (description of the archive contents, usage of the software in it, etc.)? I am considering migrating to SevenZip from WinRar to use a larger compression dictionary, and need this functionality that's present in WinRar SFX modules (both old ones and new ones that call a MSIE window to show the text). Sample screenshot

Thank you for your work. The Version 9.8 driver worked well for me. It even managed to to run a legacy DirectX game "Tonka Space Station", which didn't run before. However, I also received the dialog box with an empty list of Models. But it occurred only after attempting to install different versions of Catalyst and subsequently removing them. This appears to be a problem with Win2000 because I've never seen it on XP. I resolved the situation by selecting any built in driver (Match64 in my case) and installing it. After a reboot the driver obviously fails to start. But it now became possible to "Update" it with the correct version of Catalyst, and the exact same INF was now read correctly and the Models described in it were shown. I do not recommend this unofficial update for Radeon R3xx for which support existed in Catalyst 6.2 because of inferior OpenGL performance in 16-bit. I tend to agree, however, that choosing Win2k over XP has more disadvantages than gains. Anyone desiring to avoid the "fatness" of NT 5.1 should also consider the applications and other drivers, which are just as bloated graphically and code-wise these days. (For example this driver, that of Intel graphics or Realtek audio.) The "support" and "security" updates offered by Microsoft are not of direct concern, but the general perception that updating is essential has created a situation where 3rd party software stops being compatible and tested with older OS versions. Even when applications are not by any means graphical, they tend to link to uxtheme and gdiplus for no reason other than planned obsolescence... The set of software that works on NT 5.1 is considerably greater. I still chose Win2k today as a secondary OS.

It appears that aligning the partition is completely unnecessary for FAT, and the more compatible partition boundaries of 63 sectors can be used instead at no penalty. The aligment seems to always be mod2 with regards to partition start and depends on the exact size of the volume, but can be shifted forward or backwards using the "reserved sectors". I've recreated the file system on System with mkdosfs just to see how it's done, and now I have a 4k aligned partition with reserved sectors 38 instead of the default of 32.It didn't help that.... It neglected to write one bit to indicate that the file system is not on a floppy. The floppy drive would buzz, and the boot sector would print "Disk error. Press any key to restart." Where on the whole disk do I have an error!? To make the partition bootable again, besides boot code, I had to write 0x80 at 40h of the bootsector.

The problem has been SOLVED by editing the boot sectors. All files are still there, and the Extended partition is now on sector multiple of 63. Elegant solution, and much quicker than booting into Gparted. Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250058268160 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488395055 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xa129a129 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 8386559 4192256 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb2 20980890 488392063 233705587 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sdb3 8388608 10502143 1056768 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb5 20980953 225793574 102406311 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb6 225793638 488392064 131299213+ b W95 FAT32 Partition table entries are not in disk order Now, after I get the other System out of the way by removing the other disk, I'll get Programs as "D" in all operating systems. Win98 doesn't complain about having more than one primary partition. I wanted the swap file (also shared) out of the way so System can be easily backed up. I'll research that next.Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

I read up about Extended Partition on the web and understand the situation now, but still not the step that caused it. But that's ok. I have a "nested" extended partition with unused space. The first sector in extended is pointing to it+1 (that's odd), which contains "swap", and then points directly to "files". I have about 5 GB of unused space between "swap" and "programs" (that may have confused XP setup when it attempted to "activate" its partition). http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88902520/misc/st250_lbas.zip Let me fix this myself. Is it acceptable to edit the partition structure from within running Win98 without it crashing? Would Disk Management later corrupt the extended partition of an existing disk if I used it to modify a new/another disk? Probably not, in that case I consider it "safe enough".

Thank you for your response. I read the articles about disappearing partitions. So, XP can't work with logical volumes that are not aligned to cylinder. I didn't know about this. I chose the default 1 MB alignment in GParted, because that's supposed to be the new standard format, although it doesn't matter with this old HDD. I thought I'd be prepared to clone the system onto a new drive if needed. To the compatibility issues between XP and Vista, I can also add that Win98 setup crashed with Stack Fault in SUWIN, if asked to install to a non-cylinder-aligned partition. Here were the steps I took: 1. Copy Windows 98 files onto the new system partition. 2. Write "msdos" Partition Boot Sector with BOOTICE (shouldn't in theory affect the MBR). 3. Verify that Windows 98 boots correctly. "Swap" receives drive letter F. I did not investigate further why. 4. Install XP onto the same partition as well (without formatting). It may have broken something here while updating the boot record. But it should only write the boot code to the partition as well. 5. "Swap" now receives drive letter E, indicating that something happened during installation and first launch of XP. (System is a primary partition on the other physical HDD.) Somehow the volume "Programs" has become the primary partition 3 and overlapping with the extended partition 2, which originally contained it. This explains why there is unallocated space within the extended partition. I think FDISK considers a "block" to be 1 kB here. I believe that is internal to that Linux system somehow. So I need to recreate "Programs" back in the extended to unoverlap them. I can use a hex editor. But I don't understand the Extended records. current_mbr.txt

The actual capacity is about 233 GB. GUI GParted, which is the exact same version I first used, now refuses to recognize the drive, complaining about "overlapping partitions". I guess the partition table should be cleaned up, but I am not sure how to proceed with it without losing data from "Programs" and "Files". fdisk -l /dev/sdb omitting empty partition (5) Partition 5 is deleted Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250058268160 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488395055 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xa129a129 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 8386559 4192256 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb2 8386560 488392703 240003072 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sdb3 20980953 225793574 102406311 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb5 8388608 10502143 1056768 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb6 225793638 488392064 131299213+ b W95 FAT32