Jeremy

DFI and ASUS motherboards are the absolute best ones.

Finally, someone figured out that no matter what registry cleaner you use gets rid of everything that is invalid. Every reg cleaner has a different definition of "valid" and "invalid" it seems. The best way to clean your registry IMHO is: Use one that removed MRU's, broken shortcuts, invalid file associations, dead file locations, uninstalled program leftovers, stuff like that. Then go into your reg and manually look through: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE for anything the reg cleaner missed that you know for a fact is useless. Windows Registry... what a weird thing that is, eh?

Nothing? It's weird. I can log into MSN using Miranda... but still not MSN/Trillian.

I recently got our second PC back up and running. For the last few months it's just been my gf's PC. Now it's both of ours. Anyway, I recently got a DFI 661FX-MLV Rev. C mobo that has a SiS 900 Fast Ethernet Controller. My gf has a Broadcom 440x 10/100 Onboard Controller. I updated my onboard ethernet drivers, installed vanilla XP, reset the D-Link DI 604 router, tried dynamic, static, reset. I can download 1 MB/s from DFI servers and can connect to MSN/Trillian on my gf's PC but if I try to do it on my PC, it won't work, yet I can surf the net. Both our PCs are connected to the router. I used MSN to test the connection settings and they all say connection success, but can't sign-in... Does anyone know how I can fix this? I'd like to be able to do all the things you're supposed to be able to do with an active Internet connection. Edit - I can log into Skype. I still can't log in to MSN on my machine using Messenger or Trillian.

MSN has this thing where it blocks "potentially harmful" extensions. Files that *might* contain viruses. There's a patch for MSN Messenger that lets you remove dozens of unwanted parts of the GUI and change settings you normally can't do within the provided options. There's a Mess Patch (www.mess.be) and A-Patch (google it). It removes/changes the code in the MSN Messenger EXE, then remakes it, makes a backup of the original and asks you if you'd like to launch your new customized MSN. Cheers.

That makes sense.

You're welcome. My pleasure. Compliments to Zxian for his vast knowledge and recommendations of great software. I learn a lot from him from time to time. Hehehe.

You could also use nLite and RyanVM's Update Pack v1.3.1. All Post-SP2 updates.

I highly recommend Sygate Personal Firewall. You'll ne notified where all the bandwidth is going, and then you can disallow it. Also, you should: Not use IE (Firefox, Opera) Get a router, the D-Link 604 is popular, is what I use. Use Ad-Aware, Spybot, M$ AntiSpyware. Also, CWShredder. If you have a lot of the CoolWebSearch, you might as well reformat, they are spyware gods. Once you reformat, install Sygate and FF/Opera immediately. The router acts as a natural hardware firewall which is 1000x better than any software one. It's good to have a software one even though you have a router because anything you might be foolish enough to open from e-mail attachments or downloaded compressed archives from bad p2ps might try to send outgoing, which your software firewall will notify you about. The good thing about Sygate (dunno if other firewalls have the same feature) but it has the ability to block ALL inc/outg traffic if you stop the Service. So, if you were to play games for a few hours and didn't need to use the net for that duration, you could just block all and be conscious-free. Cheers.

You're quite vague. More details needed. Can you post a screenshot? http://www.imageshack.us/ is great for uploading pics and posting the link, incase you needed that.

I only use CCleaner to do exactly what its name says, clean temp/cache/MRUs. All-In-One programs do not do the job well. They have to be devoted 100% to a task in order to do it right. To 3/4 clean and 1/4 regfix does not appeal to me. JV16's RegSupreme Pro, now that's a reg cleaner! And about reg compacting, I have a program called Registry Compactor that does that. When you delete something from the reg, it leaves behind a bit of empty space. A "gap" in the reg that just stays there. Think of it as boxes that are beside each other but aren't touching each other. So the total length from the first to last is longer than it could be. Reg Compactor simply pushes all the reg back together, thus removing the empty/vacant filesize and thus lowering the actual size of those regs. I'd only use it once a month or so if you are a hardcore installer and uninstaller, making shortcuts, deleting them, installing massive software that installs its own Services, etc, etc. The most I've ever had in fragmentation of the reg was 14% and when I compacted it, it saved 800+ KBs. The entire reg is about 15 MBs. They say there are speed benefits to compacting the reg because it improves disk access to needed sections of the reg. I've noticed maybe a few milleseconds worth, but nothing that would make me microwave soup for 1:15 instead of 1:30.

Download VirtualDub-MPEG2, extract to a folder. Open auxsetup.exe and Install Handler. Open VirtualDub and open your source video. Go to File > File Information to see what the average bitrate for the video is. After you figure that out, go to File > Start Frameserver. Give it a short name and name the next thing as video.vdr.avi. This is a "dummy" file which bridges a connection from VDub to TMPGEnc. Open TMPGEnc/TMPGenc Plus (for unlimited MPEG-2 encoding if you're encoding a movie) Use the template wizard, select NTSC (North America) or PAL (Elsewhere), desired resolution (are you playing on a DVD Player or just on the PC?) leave everything else alone. When you reach the bitrate settings, put in something similar to what VirtualDub told you. If you;re fitting it on a CD/DVD, use a bitrate calculator and then enter the resulting number in TMPGenc. Give it a filename and encode. Now leave the PC alone for however many hours it will take. I hope I remembered everything. I haven't encoded in almost a year. Video making on the PC is my main interest.

Very creative.

None of them. I favor the PC.

PS2 Slim with one game (WWE Smackdown VS Raw) wanted it last XMas to play with a friend who had the game and he's no longer my friend and I'm a master at the game pretty much, unlocked everything, boring. It collects dust now. The PC is the power house for me now. Half Life 2, Call of Duty... pwnage.

Overall I like FPS. Call of Duty, HL2, Clive Barker's Undying (old one), etc... RPGs are good too but I sort of left that genre back in the N64 days... Anyone still love the NES, SNES? I have ALL the NES, SNES ROMs, and all the Game Boy, Game Boy Color if anyone wants them. This is not warez because they are like... a decade old or something... lol

Amen! Despite my already having the perfect girl for me. B)

Been using this config for many months, last time I formatted and installed everything, services were set to that. There are other Services there that nLite doesn't remove that I don't have any use for, so of course they are disabled. PerfectDisk functions fine. I keep very little in nLite so you probably did some manual removal which is causing PD not to work.

Happy 21st Birthday, Corone.

Uhm, you'd only need to activate it again if you reformat your HD. Changing hardware doesn't affect activation. And I recommend nLite because it's useful on many levels when using XP. Dozens of threads about performance and filesizes all over these forums explain that.

Then use Home Edition and nLite it. Hmm, you don't like the activation... sounds like you are afraid of M$ finding out you use a pirated version. My assumption could be wrong but it's applicable...

My Services You can compare this with yours.

Refer to post #269.

The only Service other than the 2 PD installs that you have to have running, I think is DCOM Server Process Launcher. PD is the best one. I just defragged 2 drives; 0 files left fragmented on both. Before Defrag On Drive 2 After Defrag On Drive 2

Maybe... wait a bit longer. Until then, challenge yourself... Funny how nothing will happen to you cause you're a mod... With a regular user, ban. lol