CoffeeFiend

I wouldn't even try to use batch files for this. Batch files are a very rudimentary "script" type that was designed 25+ years ago and improved very little since (added some basic things like FOR loops, and not much more) Batch files are still great for things like passing command line arguments to apps and the like (really simple tasks) but that's about it. Beyond that, there are better options. You could try using a simple scripting language (vbscript, jscript, autoit, etc -- powershell is great, but perhaps not very well suited to this particular task), or a "real" programming language -- there are several great options that are absolutely free like these. There's also guides to get you started and all that.

May seem like one, but was the answer to so many problems I've seen over the years. Like someone asking why a printer won't print, when it's out of paper (or printer is off-line)...

Happy Burfday gamehead200! Kinda nice that it lands on a weekend. I have a feeling someone's gonna have a hangover tomorrow Don't even try to out-drink Chuck! And yes, that is a typo in the title.

Windows Live Photo Gallery Easy enough a kid can use it too (some cute & nice vids there)

I was thinking he meant "command prompt" instead of MS-DOS (whereas batch files would have been more appropriate anyways) I mean, what's the odds he's using a pre-Win95 OS that's 15 years old or more?

Mostly because no one uses that piece of software to create arrays (well, it's also to monitor them). You just set it up in the option ROM that comes up after the BIOS, just like with any another RAID solution I've seen (it uses a Promise option ROM e.g. the OROM has a Vendor ID 1002/Device ID 4392 on my M3A78-EM). There's very, very little difference between that and all the other software RAID offerings (they should call it "me too RAID" ) It's licensed by Promise tech. Several DLLs installed by RAIDXpert say "Promise Tech" in their resources too. Can't be much worse than any of the others... In fact, I've seen reports of people pulling their RAID arrays from a AMD-based RAID, plugging it on a Promise card and being recognized / working as-is. The box I'm writing this on is a OC'ed C2D with Intel P35 chipset so I'm not exactly a hater. But I just didn't see the point of going with the old Socket 775 and a FSB based design, when on the AMD side, the boards were cheaper overall (mostly because 99% of mATX boards for Intel CPUs are absolute trash, and usually crippled in many ways e.g. only 2 DIMM slots), had great onboard video (more cost savings), and are going to be compatible with modern quad cores for a while (AM3 is coming though), and AMD had some nice low power chips (45W TDP). A similar Intel board would've been an extra $50 or so, and then another $50 or so for a decent basic vid card, only to be stuck with a discontinued architecture... And i7 is just too bloody expensive. As for the next box I'm building, it'll also be AMD, also because Intel cripples its non-high end CPUs i.e. no VT, whereas AMD-V is found even on $50 CPUs (Win7's XP compatibility mode and Hyper-V both require it). It's the exact same scenario as far as ECC RAM goes (supported by many $70 AMD boards, and not on most $150 Intel boards). Chipset wise, I've been very happy with AMD's offerings, just like Intel's. I only wish I could say the same about some others though (like via or nvidia). BTW, Matrix RAID seems to be pretty bad for bugs lately, see this one (annoying timeouts in event manager, PC taking forever to wake from sleep, drives not resuming from sleep, tasks that can't even be killed because of it, installers choking on the "calculating free space" stage, emptying trash bin basically not working, etc), and see also jcarle's epic fail thread. Intel makes good chipsets, but they're hardly perfect. As for Active PFC, I doubt it will make much of a change. BuyUPSOnline has some crazy deals. It just sucks having to pay the whole international shipping (and customs clearance) though

It VERY much depends on which 350W, just like Zenskas said. A lot of people go for super high wattage PSUs merely because they buy the lowest end junk, and find out later they bought junk, and then try to buy higher-powered junk to replace it (or what claims to be, anyhow). If you're unsure a all what I mean by that, then have a look at this (first page, a 650W unit dies -- at 184W load! And another 650W that dies way short of that on page 3. Those tend to take the motherboard down with them too -- misery likes company). That should put off anyone from buying low-end junk ever again. I bought a pair of Seasonic SS-350ET (last black friday for like $30), and they're a million times better than his (not just in terms of how much power it can deliver, but overall quality, throughout the whole thing, parts and design). Power wise, the 12v rail is what matters the most these days. His PSU has only one rail, which can deliver 17A max. That's pretty weak, and the 3.3/5v rails are pretty high, which points to an older ATX 1.3 design to begin with -- and most likely it has group regulation too, so the extra load on the 12v rail isn't too good to have (affects the other voltages). By comparison, my inexpensive, entry level, but also good quality 350W PSU can deliver 324 out of 350W on its 12v rails (27A -- nearly 50% more). And that's assuming they didn't overstate anything on the label, which is actually extremely common in low-end units (not only 350W isn't super high, but it was pretty weak for a 350W unit, now think it's even worse -- loads of under-spec'ed parts I bet). And that the tests used are somewhat bogus i.e. tested at unrealistically low temps, whereas in real world usage, with normal temps, it would be rated lower than that by as much as 100W! (likely about 250 watts when you consider everything). If your case has poor airflow/high temps, or ambient temp is kind of hot during summer, then subtract some more. And since it seems like an older design and is inside what seems like an older machine (only had 512MB of RAM), bad caps is a possibility. These old units usually have so-so regulation and ripple, almost none of the optional protections, missing EMI filters, no Active PFC (of course), cheap and not so quiet fans, tiny heat sinks, small gauge wiring with no sleeving and so on. A decent PSU isn't that expensive. I'd be replacing this one for sure. If you get a 80plus model (like the one I picked) it'll essentially pay for itself anyways. Chances are the old has a pretty poor set of connectors anyways (it might not even have SATA power connectors). But if I was planning on gaming, I'd get a little more than 350W for sure, as the next card you pick might need it.

Not really. IE doesn't add startup process and such junk (unless you were referring to spyware). But then again, everything Apple makes does (and unwanted services too -- that junk even embeds itself in your TCP/IP stack) i.e. quicktime/itunes/safari, Java runtime does, chrome does, many adobe apps do (acrobat startup acelerator, adobe drive, version cue...) most printer drivers/sound drivers/video drivers do, many portable devices do (watching when the device is docked), tons of apps for "office" usage to (office accelerator, groove and so on -- not just MS' own), many apps add services (like disk defragmenters). Tons of other apps install annoying tray icons as well, plus a lot of shell extensions, the odd service and what not, a toolbar now and then (often optional), often without much of a reason to do so. That junk actually makes a huge difference. I eradicate most of it using autoruns.

One could help you with routing tables (it's really not that hard, providing you know the basics of TCP/IP -- just long, tedious and rather dry), but using two XP SP2 boxes as a routers... Ouch! You could accomplish the same using a single computer with 3 NICs, even using free options like m0n0wall or pfsense (anything using pf or iptables and such really). On the Windows side, there are some powerful options, but they're not necessarily cheap e.g. ISA server (now Forefront Threat Management Gateway) onto a Windows server. But if you really insist, using custom routing tables on each box, it is possible. It would likely work using a single box with 3 NICs too. Never tried that one though. Either ways, I don't see why you'd setup your network like this. I'd much rather have PLCs (and the HMI touch screen) on their own network, all by themselves, tightly firewalled from everything else (I remember when PLCs had battery backed SRAM packs... and now they got ethernet!)

So it wasn't your onboard realtek audio to blame after all. That was rather strange too. Anyways. The interference is coming from somewhere else, but it's hard to say for sure. So many possibilities... Could be basically any component in your PC, could be a power problem (e.g. ground loop, sometimes it's the PSU to blame), could be bad filtering, could be your card's line out wires running along another signal picking up interference (e.g. the mouse's), poor shielding throughout, could be so much stuff. And chances are, there's more than one factor involved. That's part of why I use speaker sets with a spdif or toslink connection (far less messy wiring too). No such problems, and the DACs are removed from that noisy environment too. Guaranteed clean sound.

The network capture shows a lot of clients trying to connect to you (doesn't matter if your torrent app is running or not, the box still has to process those packets and reply to them). Try disabling the port forward in the router, most likely the problem will go away.

LOL. That's nothing at all! I have barebones VMs with ZERO apps installed and they have 3x that many DLLs, totalling over 1GB. Makes me wonder if you're actually doing anything with your PC (there's obviously next to nothing on it). Here's end the output from dir *.dll /s on this box (not a VM): Yes, that's over 30000 of them, and a hair under 22GB (Windows + Program Files + Program Files (x86) a hair over 60GB). Although it's a few GBs less, as some of the assemblies in winsxs and the like are actually hard links instead. And I don't even have half my tools installed. Not worried about it at all either.

Starting apps won't change anything. Except, that's not how DLLs work at all... Anyhow. Your call.

It's not like having a handful of unused DLLs makes any difference. It just occupies a few sector of disk space, it really makes no difference, besides having 1MB extra on your hard drive to store something else (and if that's an issue, you're way overdue for a new drive). That kind of like sweeping one square inch (or less) of your floor on one level of your house. Except, it couldn't possibly know about them all for sure. You'd have to start every single app to know what DLLs are loaded dynamically (and those that might be loaded by those and so on).

That only provides longer battery life during brownouts (and again, not every APC model is a standby unit). And in case of brownouts, you're most likely going to shut down anyways. The few brownouts I've seen (past the odd 1 second or so that might happen when someone starts a large compressor nearby or something similar) might last a half hour or so. Personally, I wouldn't spend too much on this, if not just based on how uncommon they are in general. Based on that load, a small 500VA UPS would last nearly 10 minutes (plenty to shut down, even if the batteries aren't 100% and that you're running more than 3 VMs). It should be able to cope with the startup and it's inexpensive. As for the start current, yeah. BLDC motor start current is always pretty high (84W extra, that's like an extra 7A right there). But at 264W, you're reading past the worst part of the peak already, where it plateaus for about a couple seconds. If you wanted to see the nastier part, you'd have to look at it with an oscilloscope through a 0.1Ω shunt on the 12v rail or such. It's just too quick to measure otherwise. There are ways to decrease it (e.g. using PWM, ramping up the percentage at startup over a few ms), but that would mean a slower drive and no one wants that (yes, I work with motors a fair bit) P.S. I keep forgetting about looking for that HDMI cable to test 780G @ 1920x1200... And every time I look for it, I never manage to find it although it can't be too hard to find (was on a shelf somewhere, had to empty that place to change the water heater). I'll have a look tomorrow.

There's no universal settings that one can give you. Ideal settings will vary depending on the particular motherboard used, chipset on the said board, revision of the BIOS on the said motherboard, which CPU (and particular revision of it) used, which heat sink (never seen or head of yours) and how it's installed, which particular RAM and so on. There's just WAY too many factors. You have to know what you're doing, and try things gradually. You'll actually have to read up. Some people manage to OC it around 4GHz (it's 3GHz stock), that would make it as fast as a Core i7 920.

153 files to remove? That's like a whole whole megabyte of space! That's worth almost one tenth of a penny these days. I don't see why you'd waste a single second of your life over this, especially when there's potential to break several apps and even Windows itself (more time wasted reinstalling/fixing stuff)

Sounds like more bad drivers from Creative (that's half the reason I don't buy anything from them anymore).

Adobe makes some of the absolute very best apps out there, for content creation (Photoshop, Bridge, ACR, Lightroom and so on). I mean, amazing, top-notch apps, but when it comes to security... They still have some work to do.

Depends on the card. My Radeon 4670 under Vista x64 has a similar score for both, but my Radeon 3200's (780G chipset) under Win 7 has scores quite similar to yours (2.x and 5.x iirc -- the lowest being business, not gaming). My older card had similar ratings under Vista. It looks perfectly normal to me. Edit: updated the drivers on the Win7 box (Radeon HD 3200) with ATI's latest and refreshed the score: Graphics: 3.6 Gaming Graphics: 5.0 1080p H.264 decode works perfectly good too, and same for GPU-accelerated apps (like Photoshop CS4). Not too shabby for onboard video on a $90 motherboard (even has DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort!)

Of course you don't need to overclock it. Most people who overclock do it for cost savings (like my old $75 CPU which OC'ed faster than CPUs that were $300+ at the time). Since you bought a $320 CPU, it doesn't sound like you're exactly strapped for cash. But if your Q9650 is too slow for whatever you're doing, then you can look into overclocking. Overclocking done right (not running at crazy high voltages or temps) doesn't. Either ways, it'll be obsolete long before it fails, regardless of what you do.

APC also has models with that feature. Good power supplies can handle brownouts, minor fluctuations and the like pretty well already. That would notify all your Hyper-V clients (assuming you install it in all your OS'es of course), but it's a bit extreme for a simple home server, and not cheap indeed. I would try a typical shutdown sequence, including stopping your usual number of VMs running. It might only take 3 or 4 minutes. Depending on power draw, you might be able to go for a lesser capacity model too (1250VA would likely do just fine), saving a few bucks. And that is your biggest issue by far. Picking a plain old UPS is very simple. But here it depends on what will happen when your Win 2008 box gets the shutdown command (does it shutdown or "pause" VMs first?) or do they just stop? Or would the APC soft let you run a command instead? (haven't used it in quite a while, too lazy to look) Anyways. Don't forget you'll also have to buy new batteries every 3 years or so (give or take a little, depending on brand, usage and so on), which sometimes cost almost as much as the UPS does. I remember a few years ago, where it was cheaper for us to buy replacement APC UPS'es than to order replacement batteries from them... That's the main reason why I don't use UPS'es anymore. There's lots of people who seemingly wouldn't run anything without a UPS, but I hate having to replace a large battery like every 6 months...

Yes, it can run any 64 bit OS just fine. That makes absolutely no difference. Your computer while sitting idle is at temperatures far higher than any of my boxes ever have reached (in some cases, with 100% CPU load for several days straight!) That's not normal, and no OS can be blamed for that, nor drivers or anything like it. Time to get a RMA #.

Driver version for it would be useful too. Although from the strange DNS address (you didn't say which), it could be malware too (embedded in the network stack as a winsock provider or the like). A hijack this log would be great to have. Honestly, I have yet to see this particular kind of issue on any version of Windows, including Vista. Anyways. There's nothing we can say without having more details at this point.

Hotter without power saving features (ACPI)? Sure. That's normal. But not to the point where it would shut down. Perhaps the Vista OEM image loaded on your laptop is loaded with crapware (something a lot of OEMs love to do -- norton garbage and what not; they usually get paid for it), so that would make it run hotter, malware might be an issue too, but it shouldn't make it so hot that it would shut down by itself. I can have my boxes peaked at 100% CPU usage for several days straight and it still won't do that...