Jeremy

Too expensive for some.

I use anyDVD to bypass the protections and DVD Shrink to remove everything but the video, audio. I also remove the beginning / end credits.

Good for you. Yeah, I had the game crash on me once last night turning slightly to the left after coming out of a house, apparently it was a sound iddue, but the SB Live cards are said to be excluded from the list of problematic cards, the Audigy's and so forth.

Just get a VGA Silencer and AS5 and your problem is solved. I used to have that card, now it's my gf's card. She plays Sims 2 (expansions) and has no problems other than the not-so-high FPS.

IE = Indescribably Evil

might want to check the defanition of F/OSS @DigeratiPrime - the differance between IrfanView and XnView is that the latter is primarily geared toward graphics only, where Irfan does audio and video as well. To hell with the technicalities and politics of "free" and "open-source". You don't have to bloody pay for it, I've said this a dozens times now... c'mon. Yes, it does audio and video, but you can select only image formats to be associated with the program and then disable the audio and video plugins aftwards. Man, I hate it when someone brings up a bunch of gobbly goop just because they want the last word of a discussion. I suppose it's the whole pride or male ego thing. Anyway, I'm like that too, but when it's as simple as being free, why bother creating more frustrations?

You can't just be so prejudiced towards AVs in general, though. Norton is bloated and slows down PCs that have less than 1GB of RAM. NOD32 and Kaspersky are awesome. Like I've said before, the fact that an AV is free / open source or takes up 50 KBs of memory aren't factors for a proper evaluation of it to be based on. And yes, most of us have AV for that sense of security, but it's just a good thing to have incase you ever download a RAR file, for example, from Shareaza or whatever and want to make sure it is safe to open. You may have your ports blocked and router and software firewall, but if you intentionally download a file that potentially contains a virus, a router won't do anything and a software firewall will only prevent outbound traffic for the virus. With something like NOD32 and Kaspersky, you can just disable the GUI from start-up and have the Service itself running in the background, so you can then manually open the GUI and update, then run that when you feel like it. When you're done, you can shut it down and be on your way. How much better can it get? I tend not to trust most freeware anti-virus programs because think about what goes on at the companies of these programs. For Symantec, there are thousands of people just sitting there writing up innoculations for these viruses. At one point Symantec laid off ~1900 employees. If you're laying off that many people, obviously you've got thousands more to sustain that level of productivity. See, Symantec shares the innoculations with other companies, Kaspersky for example. It's a business strategy. Now, with open source, you've got one guy from this country, another guy from that country, a few here and a few there, and obviously they aren't going to have nearly as much work done as a major corporation. You basically have to see behind the scenes in a sense, to further determine which AV is best to use. For me, personally, the top 3 are: Symantec AntiVirus Corporate 10 (not the Norton family) Kaspersky NOD32

See, there's your problem asking people what the best video encoder to use is. Everyone gives you a different answer. VirtualDub, TMPGenc, CinemaCraft Encoder, StaxRip, etc etc etc etc etc. You'll just have to try a few out and see which one you like the most. www.videohelp.com and www.doom9.org are the main sites to help you out.

TMPGEnc

This is a good point if you're a spiritual advisor bringing people to Enlightenment, but when it comes to defragmentation software, it has nothing to do with religion or spirituality or whatever. You're dragging this way out of context. When it comes to the industry and the software that comes out of an industry, you just can't cry about how things should be, you have to bloody deal with how they are.

You fail to see the bigger picture by far. Having IE integrated into XP is part of the reason people are so lazy to try alternatives, scared to ditch IE, and clueless of alternatives altogether. 80-85% of users don't know what an alternative browser is. These are the people that if you put Firefox and Opera icons on their desktop and remove the IE icon, they say "Where's my Internet?" M$ issues security fixes for IE once a month, often making users wait a very lengthy period of time regardless if there's a 0-day extremely critical exploit. The code for that exploit commonly shared among hackers or crackers or whatever you call them. With Firefox and Opera, if there's a security hole, it's patched with a new EXE ASAP. Even still, IE security holes are more dangerous than the next leading browser's extremely critical holes simply because IE is so tightly integrated into XP. With things like trojans and CWS, if IE is sick, so is Windows. Your point is?... Once again, as I said above, because IE is integrated into the OS. By using what's already preinstalled on Windows by various manufacturer's, dare I say Hewlett Packard, Dell, Compaq, etc... is exactly how and why users spend more time whining and complaining on forums and to tech support about freeze-ups, constant stutters in performance, pop-ups, spyware, viruses, etc, than actually using their PC. By having it made easiest to users, it's easiest for them to just surf to some site with lots of cute jumping jack ads, which equal spyware, which equal tech support, or their stolen financial information from that "bank info.txt" file on their desktop. Resources, this is a completely different issue from a web browser and isn't as applicable, but I'll respond to it anyway. Open 10 IE windows on your taskbar and 10 tabs in Opera and see which browser takes up more memory. More resources = nLite. IE is evil. If people didn't have freeware alternatives, we'd all be screwed. Remember, Opera was once payware, and now it's freeware. To me, and many others, that was a miracle. try to see the bigger picture. It's not just you, it's everyone else, too.

NetLimiter is awesome. Thanks, guys.

Ending them in Task Manager only takes a few seconds, I'm not that lazy.

No, actually, I set both of them to Manual and the program runs when I open it.

When it comes to computers, I don't do things based on how things aren't. Applications aren't more efficient. Thankfully, the biggest step we can do to getting the most out of our RAM, is by nLiting Windows. Hence, nLite. As for normal everyday applications, msconfig (strun.exe from Nirsoft for me). Services? services.msc (or serviwin from Nirsoft for me). We're getting off-topic, by the way. As I said before, I have less than 20 processes running at any given time (with the exception of gaming). If you have 512MBs of RAM and have 20 programs installed, I can obviously understand why you might do things differently than myself. I like to be in complete control of which programs are running and when they are running, so no scripts or automation for me.

Teqguy, you remind me a lot of that Mastertech guy. The magic word started with "P" and ended with "H". Everyone, shush. LMAO Good points, though.

Ah, they got rid of the article, bastards. it worked 2 days ago. I should have saved it. Oh well.

As for usability, being any easier than opening it, selecting drive, clicking the button and specifying whether to just defrag or place intelligently, and then go to a friend's house for example, dunno how easier it can get than that.

Yeah, WMP10 sucks. I use 1By1 Directory Player myself.

Dude, it's been solved now for a while. Read the post about the DLL files. Anyway, I uninstalled FEAR, didn't even like it that much.

Low resource usage, big deal. I have 2 GBs of Dual Channel, you think I'm worried about resources? I have less than 20 processes running at any given time. Prejudice? You can be black, green, blue, orange, multi-colored and have 4 horns and a tail for all I care. But when you say you think SmartPlacement is a marketing gimmick, but yet you say you have PD installed, which verifies visually that the files are placed intelligently as opposed to typical defragmentation, just doesn't seem too bright... (your reasoning, not your intelligence).

Have you ever heard of Torrents? BitComet / uTorrent + http://torrentsearcher.filesharingplace.com/ ISOHunt and TorrentSpy are the best ones. There's one called TorrentLeech but it has a limit of 1000 users and accounts last a few weeks if you don't keep them updated, and it's only available through invite.

IPod, sorry to hear that. IPod requires ITunes, and ITunes requires QuickTime, otherwise it won't open. All that just to transfer your MP3s to your player, ridiculous. I'll stick to my 1GB MP3 player, removable storage detected by Windows, that's the way it should be.

Well, I do use it, but the .M2V file I tried to play, MPC says "could not render file".

SmartPlacement is not a marketing gimmick. You can either just defragment the files and leave them where they are, or actually place them in certain order from the beginning of the disk outward, depending on how often they are accessed. If you even used PD, you'd see the visual display of the data and the difference between normal and SmartPlacement. You're getting too wrapped up in this whole discussion, I think. Also, I think you need to actually use all the software before continuing because it seems like you're trying to tell me how Italy smells and tastes without actually going to Italy.