zen0

Is there any way to suppress the "unsafe removal of device" message which pops up if USB devices are not 'stopped' before removal...? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help

I'm looking forward to HL2 but I'm looking forward more to what people might do with the engine over the next couple of years (in the same way as HL1 was a great game, then someone invented Counter Strike )

Mine would probably be Perfect Dark on the N64 - definitely lived up to its hype I reckon

Best place for the facts is the Steam site... CS:Source is essentially just 1.6 ported to the 'Source' engine (you'll notice Half Life 1 'Source' is also available - which could be interesting ) As it stands, I don't think it's anything like as playable as 1.6 (IMO) but give it time...) It's true, therefore, that while you might be happily running 1.6 at 100fps with your GeForce4, don't expect the same performance from Source, as it puts far more pressure on CPU and video card! This is a separate thing from the proposed 'Counter-Strike 2' which I believe will be a complete remake and release sometime in 2005...according to rumours...

I had similar problems once I think it was fixed by running in Win98 Compatibility Mode (Go to the Properties of its shortcut, Compatibility tab...)

lol at your avatar, buletov...i always used that character in gta1

tbh I think it's great - I remember the feeling I got playing the first Doom, the first time you realise you have to go into one of those dark flickering areas, and you could hear the sounds of the 'dormant' monsters somewhere, but you weren't sure quite where...and I think they've recreated that feeling very well. All the more scary when you have to actually try to shoot accurately as well

I have no experience of Jolt clan servers - on their publics I used to experience a fair amount of choke and poor reg but that was about a year ago - they have apparently revamped their servers and network hardware so they might be a lot better now. It's still all about the money though tbh

My old clan used a game2xs server, and we all got stable connections and excellent bullet reg...and now they've gone to an Alpha Networks one, as it's slightly cheaper. But check them out if you have a minute

On HL colour sprays: 1. Draw the spray you want in your favourite drawing package - dimensions are important. 144x80 is the maximum but the dimensions must be divisible by 16 to look right in the game, so 128x64 or 64x128 are the biggest practical sizes. Pure blue [0000FF] will come out transparent in the finished decal. Save the picture as a 24-bit .bmp file. 2. Go here and download Wally. 3. Run Wally, and go to Wizard->HL Color Decal, then go straight to Source Image->File on Hard Drive, and open the .bmp file you saved earlier. This will create the decal file. 4. Go to File->Save as... and save the decal in your cstrike folder. Assuming you're playing CS 1.6, the decal file should be named tempdecal.wad and saved in c:\Program Files\Steam\Steamapps\your@email.com\Counter-Strike\cstrike. 5. It's a good idea to make the decal file read-only, otherwise it'll tend to be overwritten when you go into the options in-game. Have fun

Already visited the official troubleshooting site, and really the only solution which is kind of relevant is to do with problems caused by having a firewall running (which I've already taken into account). So, reinstalled both XPSP1a and IE6SP1, and the Automatic Updates service seems to work now, but I still can't access windowsupdate.com for some reason (still no error message) And now, even though IE works fine, every time I log on to Windows I get a dialog asking me to update IE6 - if I accept this it'll tell me a newer version is installed, and bomb out. Great - but it'll do this process every time I start Windows! Anyway, cheers for your help chaps.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed I wasn't getting any automatic updates, so I tried going to the Windows Update site, and it just stuck on the message about 'Checking for the latest version of the Windows Update software...' I'm using XP Pro and IE6SP1 (which I've since reinstalled completely). The closest MS support article suggests Zone Alarm can cause this, so I tried disabling my Sygate firewall just in case this might be causing a similar problem, but no joy. Any ideas what I might try next?? Cheers to anyone that can help

Thought as much - thanks for the response

A bit of an odd one...since this morning, the quicklaunch bar has taken over the entire taskbar section (though the Start button and System Tray remain and work fine). I can still Alt-tab between applications. It seems as though the quicklaunch has been resized to far to the right, though there is no resizing bar there to rectify the situation (even when taskbar unlocked). I can use the left-hand side resize bar to drag the quicklaunch bar onto the desktop, thinking this would 'uncover' the taskbar, but instead the whole taskbar disappears completely, start button and all. So, is there a way of recovering the standard taskbar element, or will it involve recreating the user profile?