CoffeeFiend

Not only this seems like plain old copyright infringement, but Vasansoft is previously banned member Vasan, which also did this kind of shady stuff and more. Banned & topic hidden.

That's pretty much the going price. What did this mean? What I understand that I can connect more RAMs to the processor itself, did I get it the right way? That's not what it means. Honestly, it means very little that matters to you. They just picked some parts that may be of interest for gamers. I really wouldn't want to blow $200 on a gamers' video card like they did personally. While I'm no fan of nvidia cards, premiere will make special use of them (CUDA) so that's probably a good option still. Anyway, it's not a bad build per se but 4GB only on such a high end CPU (with small 2GB sticks) isn't much, and 500GB only for video footage probably won't cut it either. Both are excellent.

Photoshop can definitely do this (resize, preserve transparency, etc) in batch mode, and it's pretty easy to use too. You create an action (there's a record button for that) that resizes & saves the pic. Then you go File > Automate > Batch and select your action. Very much like this. If you don't have Photoshop then I'd try imagemagick first. Photoshop makes it easy to automate more complex things with reusable actions and what not, but imagemagick should easily handle this simple stuff.

You can totally hand solder such chips (QFPs and such). We do this everyday around here (and much worse, like QFNs) I definitely wouldn't. We don't typically solder one pin at a time with such a chip. Nowadays we do drag soldering with a knife tip (which isn't exactly small) But this takes some experience. If you're new at soldering, this isn't what you'd start with. You need to know precisely how much solder to use, how to use liquid flux (preferably the no-clean type), how to use a temperature controlled soldering iron, how to un-short pins on a chip when it happens... I would very much recommend learning on simpler devices (like a SOIC8) and moving on to something more complex as you gain skill and experience. If you try to do this as your first job, you're pretty much guaranteed to destroy it. As for a half-decent how-to video, try but there's tons of them out there if you search.

1h45 1h35 There are gains, but they're nothing like going from 4h down to 2h (like from your existing rig to a i5 2500k). An i7 2600k is still mostly affordable but the 6 core definitely isn't worth the money IMO. For an hour of footage that takes 15-18 minutes to encode on a Q6600, I'd expect it to take about: -8-9 minutes on a $220 i5 2500k -7-8 minutes on a $320 i7 2600k -6-7 minutes on a $600 i7 980x

I wouldn't call that disagreeing necessarily. I was talking about the i7 2600k vs the i5 2500k which both have 4 cores and gives ~10% extra perf for about ~50% more money. The 6 core i7's are quite another beast. They're not really obsolete yet, but they're of the previous generation and are heading there soon. And they're pretty expensive for the performance they deliver. For example, look at this x264 benchmark, where the results are: -i5 2500k (a $220 quad core CPU) gets 100 fps on the first pass and 28.7fps on the second pass. -i7 2600k (a $320 quad core CPU) gets 94.9 fps on the first pass and 36fps on the second pass. -i7 980x (a $600 six core CPU) gets 87.1 fps on the first pass and 46.1fps on the second pass. To encode an 2 hour movie, from 24fps source material, at those speeds, this means waiting times of: -i5 2500k completes in ~2h -i7 2600k saves you about 15 mins for about $100 extra -i7 980x saves you an extra 10 mins for about $600 extra His current box with the same settings & source material would take 4h. The i5 2500k basically doubles the encoding speed for not too much ($400) whereas a 6 core beast will reduce the time a bit more for but quite a lot of money (comparatively speaking). And it's not always this clear cut either. Sometimes the i5 2500k is faster than the 6 core i7 980x too, like when encoding to WMV9 (the i7 980x is ~10% slower). That's totally YOUR call. You can either: -spend $400 on an upgrade kit that will be 2x the speed of your old box (what I was recommending) -spend $1000 on an upgrade kit that will be 2.5x the speed of your old box but with older parts (what allen2 is recommending) -spend $1000+ on a new pre-built that will 2x the speed of your old box (Dell or similar) We can't make that decision for you. I wouldn't buy a i7 980x if I had $1000 to spend, but allen2 would.

It depends on your budget, or if you want to reuse parts from your old PC (upgrade it) or buy a whole new PC and so on. Lots of possibilities. The performance of a i5 2500k self-built or pre-made is that of a i5 2500k. As for the price, parts selection and parts quality it's quite another story. Dell's cheapest model with a i5 2500k is a XPS 8300 which is $899, with half the RAM I was talking about, which is still more than twice as much money as a similar upgrade kit. Or 3x as much if you upgrade the RAM to match it. Here's a decent upgrade kit: GIGABYTE GA-P67A-D3-B3 LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80623I52500K 2x G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT $412 total. Or $368 if you cut down on the RAM to 8GB. Dell's cheapest offer, the XPS 8300 with a i5 2500k and 16GB (a very similar machine) will set you back $1259 (or $899 at 8GB, compared to the $368 upgrade kit), and still doesn't have some features the upgrade kit has such as USB 3 ports.

It's a good value, for sure. You can easily get a decent motherboard, an i5 2500K and 16GB of RAM (4x4GB of DDR3) within $400. The i7 2600k is $100 more and not 10% faster than the i5 2500k in those benchmarks. Not really worth the extra money for that purpose IMO. Extra RAM won't increase your encoding speeds whatsoever. Overclock. Heat Sink/Fan -- what sits on top of your CPU to cool it.

Another set of nice benchmarks at anandtech over here. The not so expensive i5 2500k is ~75 faster than the Q6600 in most video encoding tests and the i7 2600k a little bit more. If you OC it at all it would be even faster. But if you plan on OC'ing and doing lengthy video encoding sessions, you will need a good HSF and airflow for sure.

So you just need to rename blindly, but just not blindly? The scripts posted earlier won't check or care if connections are of any kind, they'll just rename the one connection with a specific name to another. If you want a script that will automatically figure out which connection you'd like to rename it's a bit trickier. Yes, you can look for physical adapters, or those with an IP address and such. But having more than one network card (especially if you include wifi) is quite common. No matter what you do it will sometimes rename them not quite like you'd want it do.

Honestly, that looks like a rather poorly thought script. Quite the hack job! Lots of pointless registry parsing, only then to rely on command line tools to do the job. The Shell.NameSpace Method lets you access special folders like "network connections" by their CSIDL (find the full list in ShlObj.h) or known folders starting with Vista (values in KnownFolders.h). Once you set your "source folder" to that, you only have to iterate through them and set their names very much like you would normally with the FileSystemObject: Const NETWORK_CONNECTIONS = &H31& Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application") Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace(NETWORK_CONNECTIONS) Set colItems = objFolder.Items For Each objItem in colItems If objItem.Name = "Local Area Connection" Then objItem.Name = "LAN" End If Next Code shamelessly copied from the scripting guys blog from MS here (yes, I am lazy!) jscript would be just as easy, it's mostly just adding an enumerator instead of the "For Each"... Or if you're into powershell at all, try this 2 liner: $shell = New-Object -comObject Shell.Application $shell.Namespace(0x31).Items() | where {$_.Name -eq "Local Area Connection"} | foreach {$_.Name = "LAN"} It's that simple. Unless you somehow need to do more than blindly renaming it (Local Area Connection -> LAN) and need to choose the connection.

There's all kinds of them. Amazon is fairly popular. Microsoft also has cloud services. There's dozens of smaller players. The thing is, we have no idea what you need, so there's no way we can even try to recommend something. Do you need a Windows server, a Linux box, a cluster of some sort, just disk space somewhere, or raw number crunching power, hosted mail or whatever else? There's options for everything. Without more infos we have no idea what you need. It's like asking for a "good vehicle", without knowing if you plan on using it in a demolition derby or for delivering parcels. Not that I really care much for these services myself but for some people it might be worth it.

I never boot in WinPE so I can't say for sure. Please note how that question was posted by Tripredacus and NOT by me. Oops. Must've been a copy/paste error of some kind! One of the great dangers of posting past one's bedtime...

I do know Win32_Battery definitely works. I'll have to try Win32_PortableBattery sometime. But when one doesn't work the other most likely doesn't either (like if the device isn't detected or such). But either ways it's ridiculously simple to add that extra check. I can't say I've ever tried that. Nor did I try before chipset drivers are installed (it might not be detected yet, maybe). You'd have to try to see. I never boot in WinPE so I can't say for sure. Either ways, batteries may not be detected in some situations. But the other 2 classes get their infos from SMBIOS tables which works regardless of drivers. So long as the tables were filled properly by the OEM of course (that's not so much a problem today as it was in the Win2k era). I personally wouldn't rely on the battery check(s) alone.

That's a pretty strange restriction. That works if you have a limited range of models in use at any point and also have the manpower to maintain the lists. I'd personally call this more of a "last resort" solution... Especially when there are plenty of standard & effective ways to do exactly what he's asking for. Anyways. There's 3 fairly standard ways to do this using WMI: You run a select query on the Win32_SystemEnclosure class, and see if the ChassisTypes property of instances returned (it's not uncommon to have more than one item in it like 8 and 12) is either 9 (Laptop), 10 (Notebook) or 14 (Sub Notebook), and perhaps 12 (Docking Station) too. The PCSystemType property of the Win32_ComputerSystem class returns 2 (Mobile), but that only works on newer PCs (Vista/7 -- not XP and below) so you can't rely on that alone See if running a select query on the Win32_Battery class returns anything They all depend on the vendor's support (properly implementing WMI support) and sometimes driver installation too. So it's a good idea to "combine" these checks together. It's fairly trivial to do in vbscript, jscript, powershell and several .NET languages like C#. I'll happily provide code for any of these if it helps.

As stated by Kelsenellenelvian, read the forum rules. Consider this your first and last warning!

It never was about stability. It was just a "make sure everything works 100%" thing, where we test every possible combination. The tool itself is pretty simple so it's quick and easy to write, it's the testing that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work to find different files with different version formats, NE executables (executables with a version but without a PE timestamp) and so on. Only then to make dozens of variants from them by hand (editing both timstamps and both version tags) so it can be fully tested. Either I would have to do all the work using a hex editor, or I would have to write another program to generate the numerous variants (from various suitable files you have to find first). Also, as the files in both directories have the same filenames, sizes and so on, you have to use hashes to see which one is kept. So I would have to make lists of the different versions of the source files and their specific infos and hashes so the results can be verified by hand. It's boring, tedious, mind-numbing, repetitive, error-prone work that would take hours and as such I haven't worked on it since. At least if I had a list of files with different "formats" to start working from. I can't say I feel much like spending all Saturday afternoon browsing through system32 hoping to find what's needed to get started... Especially when I have absolutely no use for the tool. Edit: and without the testing then it's mostly worthless. There would be no point in using a tool that "hopefully copies what it should", not being able to trust it. Nor is there a point handing him a tool that hasn't passed basic tests yet.

Did you run powershell elevated? You need to do that to change these kinds of settings on your computer. Otherwise, did you get an error message of any kind? Because that's a standard, built-in cmdlet to do it so I'd be surprised if it didn't work.

More superior in the incompatibility department, yes. Very much like taking a standard file format then tacking on DRM or such, while parading with the same extension as a standard file to confuse everyone. That sure was a great idea! That's 3 versions newer, and if you can write off: -plenty of new handy panels -new symbol libraries -more default styles, patterns and textures -tons of new blend modes -working with more formats -improved slicing -improved image compression -improvements to many tools, including the vector tools -a new lorem ipsum generator -9-slice scaling -slideshow creation -hierarchical layers -smart guides -exporting as interactive PDFs -importing from photoshop and illustrator -much improved compatibility/interoperability with Flash and the rest of the suite -working far more with CSS at every level and more stuff as "just minor cosmetic changes" then I'm not sure how familiar you really are with it Not that I ever cared for Fireworks in any way. I'd happily opt out of having it if that shaved off a single dollar from the suite's price.

It tells the browser "how bright" it is. If it writes a bad value, then the result looks too dark or bright. Most likely Photoshop is aware of that particular problem (bad values) and ignores incorrect settings (replaces it with a sane default value) That would be photographic alright! It's not a MSFN-specific thing (and yes, it's perfectly ok by the forum rules) but rather a overall "think of those on slow links" rule that mostly everybody on the web obeys. I'm not on dialup myself but my DSL is pretty darn slow sometimes... 10-ish KB is definitely better than 40-ish KB if that's possible. Don't give us ideas, we just might change the thread's title to that! You got it completely reversed. "Standard" PNGs don't contain vector data, and an alpha channel is entirely optional. It's an indexed-color, raster image format (again, pixels, no vectors). It's only Fireworks who tacks on its own Fireworks-only data chunks at the end in a proprietary format to pull some of its tricks aka a special "Fireworks PNG" and not a "standard PNG" (which is what you'd probably call a "flattened PNG"). Those Fireworks-only data chunks are in no way part of the PNG standard. You can think standard PNGs as an enhanced GIF basically. Either ways, I knew there had to be someone out there who still uses Fireworks

I was in a hurry and didn't look at the images. Indeed they look different. That is NOT a problem with browser support. It's actually Photoshop 5 who can't properly save PNG files (it screws up the gamma setting inside them). Like I said before, I have yet to encounter a PNG that a browser doesn't show right (and here it does too, it's the PNG file itself that is the problem). And yes, GIFs still work but PNGs are also smaller. I can't think of a single way GIFs are better than PNGs. The only thing people still use GIFs for is the animated kind. See a proper PNG, saved by Photoshop > v5: That works just fine, as expected. It looks just like his JPG but at about 1/4 of its size. Not really. There aren't that many colors as it's mostly monochromatic. Gradients don't help for indexed colors though (without gradients it would be more like 4KB). If there were even more colors then you could still save in lossless 24 bit PNG while still having the same size as your JPEG (no downsides) The degradation is only negligible because it's almost 4x the size of my PNG... Lossy compression always looks worse, unless you don't compress much which isn't what you want for web content. That's still pretty large for such a small image. Some of us are still on slow links. Multiplying the size of every avatars and such by 4 on each webpage = page loads darn slow. 50KB at dialup speeds is something like 10+ seconds worth of wait. The bottom line is: use whatever gives the smallest file sizes while having great quality. For stuff that isn't photos that's usually PNGs, otherwise it's JPEGs.

It should work just fine with modern versions of Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari and most others. I haven't come across this particular problem myself.The only PNG issue I've encountered is the lack of alpha channel support (no transparency) in ancient, crappy versions of IE. It's either caused by your OS/browser combo, or having color settings/calibration problems. This wasn't even a problem a decade ago. JPEGs are better for photos mainly, or some things with millions of colors (although 24 bit PNGs is often a better choice there too), and where lossy compression is not such a big deal (over-compression will also cause rather ugly artefacts). But it's mostly for photos. PNG is FAR better than JPEGs for images with a limited number of colors (as it's indexed, much like GIFs but a bit better). Using JPEGs for such pictures result in far larger file sizes yet lower quality. Most of the pictures on the web (apart from photos) I look at are PNGs -- including all the the images making up the "skin" on this forum.

It's very well anti-aliased here (yes, screenshot of it in Chrome/Firefox/IE9 then zoomed in photoshop up to 500% -- it's even smoother with cleartype in the browser). That's just something to do with your particular browser and OS and definitely not how it's supposed to look. The type tool with default settings actually emulates the in-browser look really, really well in Photoshop (save for very minor changes in tracking/kerning). There is nothing in CSS to force fonts to appear aliased, and modern browsers & OS'es always show them anti-aliased. Edit: attached screenshots of each in bmp format screenshots.bmp

Am I missing something, or you're just talking about the user name to the left of the post? If it's just that I'm not sure why you're going through all that hassle. It's just regular text rendered by the browser, as dictated by the cascading style sheet (css): First, in the body selector there is: font: normal 13px tahoma,arial,verdana,sans-serif; then in the body h3 selector you have: font-size: 1.1em; font-weight: bold; So as-is, you can just use the type tool with: Tahoma, Bold, 14px high at 100% zoom (just increase that if you want it bigger), and the color is #4E6A97. There's no need to resize screenshots of text. There might be some minute differences in kerning (typically Photoshop being better/more accurate) and such between Photoshop and the browser depending on what browser you use, the anti-aliasing method used in Photoshop and a couple other things that will change how it looks in a browser like ClearType settings (or possibly not having Tahoma installed, in which case it would default to Arial instead, or then Verdana after that) That's totally my new wallpaper!

No oftense, but the first thing that crosses my mind is PEBCAK. Or that you're blaming the crash on it with very little evidence to back it up. I've used it on dozens of machines (using XP Pro, Vista x86, Vista x64 and Win7 x64) for a few years, and I've had exactly zero problems of any kind. We're millions of (happy) CCleaner users and google can't seemingly find any trace of evidence of such a problem either (if it was such a PC crasher, surely there would be lots of angry people). There is no logical reason it would make your machine non-bootable, and you didn't say either what it did to your machine to make it so. Either ways, I wouldn't personally ever go back to using a batch file for this. There's just too many options that are far better (including also ncleaner, fcleaner and several others) I second Yzöwl's recommendation too. While I use CCleaner (scheduled) on desktops, I also use powershell on servers for this (also scheduled to run automatically with the AT command). Like for cleaning up a shared folder which ends up cluttered with temp files. Remove-Item is the "real" command, but you can also use any of its aliases: del, erase, rd, ri, rm, rmdir. For example, our networked copier sends scannned documents in PDF format to a file share. Every night, the script runs and deletes files older than a week: <# Script to delete files older than a week. Scheduled to run every night automatically. Or whatever else comments you want in here. #> $aWeekAgo = (Get-date).AddDays(-7) ls "Z:\Path\to\Somewhere" -r | where-object {$_.lastwritetime –lt $aWeekAgo} | rm (feel free to replace "ls" by either "dir", "gci" or "Get-ChildItem" -- it all works the same but "ls" was only 2 characters)