Th3_uN1Qu3

If you really worked in electronics for 25 years, you should have known that any power supply only takes as much power from the mains as it is needed to run the circuit it powers. And nobody makes 150W PSUs today, besides, do you think they would throw in the weakest no-name PSU they had? Agreed, my P1-133, 32MB RAM, onboard ATi Graphics Xpression with 2MB dedicated, 2x 3Com Fast Etherlink XL PCI, uses like what, 20W, if that. But i don't see it doing anything else than what it's been doing in the last 3 years - acting as a router. Older PCs with power consumption lower than today's low-power chips can't serve as PCs anymore.

But did you really have to reply in a 4 years old thread?

I thought this was over with but it seems it's not. I tested it 3 times on fresh installs of XP and Vista under Virtual PC. Everything worked fine. I left that project alone for some time since i had other stuff to do and things were getting more complicated, and now i've returned to it. Tried it on my dual-PIII running XP. The font is copied, if i try to copy it manually it says it's already installed, BUT IT DIDN'T WORK EVEN AFTER A REBOOT. If i delete the font manually then copy it again, or use the installer, or whatever, it works. W-T-F. Since it works now i can't recreate the issue either...

I'll show you my mobo. Gigabyte P35-DS3. A few big caps can be replaced by a lot of small caps, you know? Anyway, i never checked the values on them, will do tomorrow and come back with a photo.

It's not the PSU, it's RAM all the way. Bad RAM causes erratic behaviour, including unexpected shutdowns.

A couple google queries revealed this: http://digilander.libero.it/rareware/coa2.zip Have fun!

I have to agree with you here. Unfortunately an advertising campaign doesn't magically fix the annoying bugs and compatibility issues in Vista.

Need a bit of help right here. I'm at my grandparents' place now and here i have a PPPoE internet connection. I need to do some testing under Vista so i installed Vista 32-bit under Virtual PC. The main OS is 32-bit XP, of course. The problem is that the virtual machine can't access the internet. The Virtual Machine Network Services driver was installed on both LAN and PPPoE connections, and for PPPoE i have to uncheck everything on the LAN connection. With Virtual Machine Network Services Driver installed on both connections, when trying to visit a site i get a text pointing to my ISP's site. When i unchecked it from the LAN connection and left it on PPPoE only, Virtual PC says it can't find the network driver. How can i get around this problem? And no, i don't want a router right now.

Well, i supposed he knew why the cursor keys exist. Hitting the underlined letter of that button also works.

I used to run XP in 2GB with NO page file. All games including Crysis worked perfectly, Photoshop worked perfectly, VirtualDub worked perfectly. The only time you would need a page file with 2GB RAM in XP would be editing ultra-high resolution photos or editing big videos. Your co-worker's problem has nothing to do with the page file. It's simply bad RAM.

You can get through the setup without needing a mouse. Hint: Tab and Space. Finish installing then see if it works. And if you use a PS/2 mouse, disable USB Mouse support.

Yeah, Puppy Linux should be an option. Of the ones listed there, Ubuntu. It's the only one that worked well enough for me that i could actually call it an OS not a public beta test.

Lite-On... I have a stack of dead LGs sitting beside me.

Yes, it is normal for the CPU usage to display that way. CPUIdle's cooling thread takes up the whole CPU if it's not doing anything at that moment. But it runs with lowest priority, so it doesn't affect system performance at all.

To me knowing what's safe to click and what not is a reflex already. However, it's too bad that antivirus programs don't apply the whitelist strategy, it would be so much simpler to control viruses.

Off topic, but get rid of anything with Norton in its name. Please. And why would you need a protected recycle bin? I don't even remember what the recycle bin is used for.

I have to agree with herbalist on the above post. To keep viruses away all you need to do is know where you shouldn't click, and to not use IE.

YOUR computer works, MINE doesn't. As simple as that. I tried all Intel 10/100 Pro network drivers i could find, no change. And there is only one version of the chipset driver.

The 3870 takes a huge performance hit when using AA (anti-aliasing aka smoothing jagged lines). Even if you don't use AA you should still get the 4850.

Well it's an ALi chipset so i'm pretty sure the mobo sucks, hell, i did some RAM benchmarks last year when i was on XP and my Pentium-MMX overclocked to 292MHz SMOKED this PIII laptop in both RAM bandwidth and latency. However i had a board with a 750MHz CPU back then, running on FSB 100 and i upgraded it a few months ago to what you see in the second line of my sig, but i doubt it made too much of a difference to the RAM. Perhaps crappy chipset drivers are at fault, since i monitored GDI resources and they didn't go under 70%. But i don't know jack about writing drivers, and even if i knew i suspect the hardware itself is buggy (and the sound/video/everything stutter when i do intense network activity or write to the SD card proves this, however it somehow worked in XP) so it probably isn't worth trying to fix the drivers.

Yeah, that should work. 9x installs from HDD no problems.

Himem.sys is part of the DOS setup, so you could pull it off with just a modified boot floppy (assuming you have a floppy drive, of course).

It was definitely not the ads as it just crashed again, this time freezing my entire system, including the mouse cursor. It even froze the error box, only its title bar popped up! However Winamp continued playing music till i hit the power button.

With only 16A/18A on the two 12v rails, that PSU seems a bit on the low side. The 4850s are pretty hungry, and considering that you also have a quad, you should look for a PSU with at least 30A combined on 12v. You don't want a weak PSU dying and taking your computer with it. Edit: Definitely stay away from that PSU. As this article exposes, it only has a 350W real maximum wattage, and that with the 12v rail running as low as 11.2v - that is certainly something NOT to be desired. The 12v rail should never drop below 11.85v, nor be higher than 12.6v.

Oh, now i get that he was talking about CPU idle time in DOS. I didn't even know that kind of thing existed.