CoffeeFiend

Definitely not an OS issue. An OS itself doesn't make a computer overheat. Changing OS to anything else won't fix that either. Besides, the hardware should be able to withstand 100% CPU usage (and the heat associated with it) for a few hours. If it doesn't, then it's cooling (design) is inadequate. You just can't build a computer, expecting someone won't actually make use of it. That being said, dust build up, blocked vents (depending on how you hold it) and such could be an issue too. Laptops do normally get kind of warm after a while, they have special coolers for them, but it shouldn't ever get to the point where it actually shuts down because of heat. Sounds like the guy who was "helping" you had no clue.

Which no one could ever even notice (5% difference in benchmarks -- nothing I'd upgrade for!) Which is pointless. EM64T was slapped onto the old 32 bit [crappy] Netburst design as a quick catch-up measure to AMD64 back then (not a new core completely redesigned for 64 bit, no 64 bit data bus or anything like that either). And as such, it performs pretty poorly (basically negating the speed gain you'd expect from the extra registers). So the only reason one could think of which would motivate someone to run a x64 OS at that point is being able to use more than 4GB of RAM, which the 915G chipset in your GX280 can't do anyways. An improvement, that yields no performance improvement, yeah. Honestly, I don't see how the 5% performance gain over a a fairly dated netburst CPU was worth it. Especially when there are FAR better dual core CPUs with modern designs that are cheaper than that, yet that are nearly 3x faster than your new CPU. Yes, you'd need to buy a new basic motherboard to use that, but you'd get a LOT out of it too. $58 -> 5% speed increase, same old basic 915G based board that's well known to have bad caps (bad enough that they have a out of warranty support program because of it!) Roughly $12 for each 1% of speed gained (more when the board finally dies) *or* $50 on a Athlon64 X2 5200+ and another $75 for an amazing motherboard (e.g. GA-MA78GM-US2H) -> 250% performance increase, dual core, good at running x64 OS'es, supports >4GB of faster RAM, more SATA ports, 7.1 channel HD audio with digital outs, great onboard video that can decode 1080p H.264 in hardware (~1% CPU usage) with DVI and HDMI outputs, eSATA, Firefire, upgradable later to a fancy quad core and so on. And the board won't be plagued with bad caps. $0.50 for each 1% of speed gained (arguably 24x "cheaper"), plus tons of extras, room for upgrade, and reliability. At some point, it's just not worth it spending any money on an old rig.

Haven't tried to OC my Athlon X2 rigs, but on the Intel side (well haven't tried with i7 yet), it's super simple and you can get some amazing results... My old, low-end, discontinued Intel E2160 that was only like $75 back then? Stock clock is 1.8GHz. I raised the FSB from 200 to 375 (not in one shot obviously) and set the RAM divider so it runs at 900MHz or so and I was done. It's been running at 3.4GHz for a couple years (85% overclock). It's still a hair quicker than a E7400 that's like $120 today. It was quicker at the time than CPUs that costed $300 or more (E6300, Athlon64 X2 6400+...) That being said, not all chips OC as easily (depends on several factors) and not all chipsets and motherboards are alike either.

Yes he is. Read his post again: If the extraction stops as the extracted size hits 4GB with a "disk full" error or such, you know the file is obviously bigger (else it wouldn't have given an error but just stopped there). Anyways. Next time you run into a problem like that, try Process Monitor. You could find the problem a lot quicker than it takes to post here about it, nevermind waiting for an actual decent answer. (hint: optionally filter for the winrar process, then look for access denied near the end -- should take under 30 secs to do!)

Yep. That'll do it. Edit: Looks like Ponch hit "submit" a whole second before me...

Use process explorer instead of the task manager. You'll see what's causing this.

I was talking more about say, XviD to DVD. But either ways, encoding on a P3 is painfully slow. And most software suites to do that (often bundled with cameras, or those sold in stores like photoshop elements) will run like crap on a P3, at best. I've seen a lot of people running XP on P3's (stripped down as much as possible), and I wouldn't exactly call it fast... Running modern apps on top of that? Only if you're very patient. It's not so much the OS support. A nice library in iTunes can get pretty heavy, even on a modern CPU. No, I meant like Gamin or TomTom software. But even Google maps is quite sluggish on a P3. Barely adequate, and only for the most basic tasks, yeah. But yes, I agree that not everyone is a hardcore gamer or Blu-Ray watching addict. Saying a P3 is "good enough" is very much the extreme opposite though (mainly used by those who basically don't do anything with their PCs). Even the P4 (a chip released back in 2000 -- 9 years ago) is also on is way to irrelevancy now (power hungry, not exactly fast by today's standards, not dual core, not a 64 bit design, most have no instruction sets or features past SSE2, old FSB design every manufacturer abandoned, netburst junk, old boards with bad caps everywhere and often little in terms of modern features, uses old AGP cards, etc -- far, FAR behind even a low end $50 Athlon64 X2)

That would have been accurate several years ago IMO (XP's era). However, I see loads of people even in their 50's and 60's who do much more than that with their computers. Like converting videos to DVDs, editing photos (who doesn't have a digital camera yet?), using GPS tools, sync'ing their iPods and so on. Also, half the tasks you mentioned are only somewhat doable on a P3 if you're willing to use software several versions out of date which most people don't really want to do.

Hmm, no. Just look at the techs that are likely going to become mainstream soon e.g. multi touch, amazing hand writing recognition, stream processing, 1080p H.264 playback including Blu-Ray, devices "talking" to each others and streaming multimedia content (i.e. DLNA) and so much more... We're barely getting started. According to who? Everything is going up in speed quite a bit, be it CPUs, RAM, GPUs, buses and so on. Yeah, because having more than one core is the only improvement, right? Just like a 8086 is every bit as fast as a Pentium D, I'm sure. Passmark scores: Average Pentium 3 (800MHz): 125 P4 3GHz: 480 Core 2 Duo E6300: 1100 Core 2 Quad Q6600: 2892 Core i7 975: 7113 Yeah, looks like CPU progress has stopped altogether! </sarcasm> Except, that's not what he said at all, and anyone thinking that would only point their ignorance towards the fundamentals of computer hardware. Hard drives have access times a million times slower than RAM (one is in nanoseconds, the other is in miliseconds). And the best way to make a computer crawl, is to decrease the RAM until it starts having to page to disk a lot (funny how using storage a million times slower makes your PC crawl). Great way to make your CPU wait! He talked about SSDs also (those aren't really hard disk drives -- no platters or anything), but even there, we're nowhere near RAM speeds. And it's not exactly mature tech either (many are having big performance issues). I don't see NAND based flash (or based on anything else for that matter) ever catching up with DRAM in terms of speed. Your definition of basic stuff and someone else's obviously differs quite a bit... All this says is that you don't do much with your PC, don't care about things taking a while, and don't mind doing it with software several versions out of date. Honestly, it just sounds like you're stuck in another decade, and are somehow trying to convince yourself that barely anything's changed since then.

1GB of RAM is a waste, especially on lower end cards (the limit isn't the storage for better textures, it's the GPU itself). Also, the 9400 is MUCH slower than what he already picked. The 9400 (16 stream processors, lol) loses to older cards like the 4550 & 8600GT... It's a very low end card, definitely not one I'd buy even for light gaming. That 4650 is significantly faster than the 9500 even (as much as 50% faster on some benches). I'd say the 9400 is about 1/3 as fast as the 4650 (and only like $10 cheaper). It's only like twice as fast as his existing and grossly underpowered card, whereas the 4650 is like almost 10x faster. As for faster cards (e.g. the 9600 you were mentioning which can suck up ~100W by itself and is barely faster than the 4650 anyways), they'll just use too much power, requiring a beefier PSU which he won't find in the TFX form factor, hence also require a new PSU *and* a new case, along with his new card. We're not in the $50 price range anymore... That 4650 was a great pick.

That's not even impressive, not even a deal, that's everyday prices I got a passively cooled 4670 for like $5 more (not a low profile card though -- no use for one). For $90 USD ($100 CAD at today's rate) here you could get a 4850 or a 9800GT. Just sayin' ... Anyhow. That 4650 is a decent choice for sure. Great for playing HD stuff too.

1. Hard to tell just by pin count alone. Most likely for fans though. 2. You don't. The faceplate snaps in the case, it's not attached to the rails at all. 3. Those have long been useless. Last time I remember using one is circa 1995 (Win95 era, using the built-in CD player). We've been reading CDs digitally instead for decade or so. You could hold on to them for a while longer, and then sell to a museum perhaps 4. Only if you're still using floppies a lot I guess. I haven't had a floppy drive since 2001 personally (kept a LS-120 in storage just in case ever since, and haven't taken it out even once) 5. Unless they're great fans (most 80mm fans suck, especially older ones) and plan on buying a case that'll use them somehow (most of those suck hard). Might come in handy, but I don't keep any personally... 6. Some motherboards have a little piezo for this now.

and also Exchange, SQL Server and so on.

Thanks for the heads up! Very handy tool. Looks like they fixed some bugs in zenmap too.

Yes. See this.

This e7 article (Win7 blog) says 94% of users seem to prefer cleartype (good read too). Anyhow. I like it, text looks great. I'm assuming you already went through the cleartype tuner and all that.

No better than starting a plain old Google search (from their normal sites) with "site:msfn.org" either (w/o the quotes of course).

Sorry for the hijacking... RAID isn't really useful to 99% of home users either, typically those same people you're talking about. It's far more than that. 10W is closer to the average use of a drive already spinning. And it's not so much about watts, as much as how many amps. Each drive spinning (ignoring the initial short peak) uses about 2A from your 12v rail. A dozen drives means around 25A over your normal PC consumption (with an initial peak that's MUCH higher). It's a fairly significant peak. I don't see any reason to do so. Unless you want to do RAID 5 or 6, as it sucks a fair amount of CPU power. Some people just have a lot of data e.g. a couple drives for their "movie server" use (fills up REALLY quickly with HD movies), a drive for digital photos (large RAW files and even larger PSDs), a drive for VMWare images (or Hyper-V or whatever you use) and ISO images you use a lot, a drive for PVR'ed TV shows -- for MCE or the like, your music collection (lossless takes a fair amount of space), etc. RAID5 or 6 wouldn't really do anything for me. In case of a drive failure, it would mean a quicker restore, and that's about it. It's no replacement for backups or anything. I'm way more likely to lose data to filesystem corruption or a virus or such than drive failure in the first place, and RAID doesn't help one bit for that. There's absolutely nothing that justifies a $800+ RAID card. Those are failover replacements. If my PSU ever dies, I can definitely afford the 30 min downtime to replace it... Also, this requires expensive redundant PSUs (server class hardware), a case meant for it and so on ($$$) Which mostly complicates things, requires several machines to be left powered on and all that stuff. Besides, DFS needs Win Server (expensive licenses) and a full blown AD setup, and is mainly for load balancing & high availability. However, libraries are a nice feature of Win7, which I'll use to scale beyond 12 drives soon. That, and most likely port multipliers (on eSATA ports -- been thinking about infiniband too) One can get 10TB of space for like $800 these days (10x 1TB Hitachi drives) along with a decent case and PSU for like $1000 total (buy the case, then a new drive each month -- not that bad). However, something like you describe (Win server, with redundant PSUs and fancy PERC) could easily cost 10x that... I may as well look into SANs at that price! Just too bad I don't have the price of a small car to spend on this. In fact, I'd be buying this case for my upcoming build, but w/o staggered spin up that's an extra 40A load or so on the 12V rail... Not just any PSU will cope with that kind of abuse. Anyways. I haven't had to rebuild an array (at home) ever, be it on a Promise card, onboard Intel matrix or whatever else. Edit: more infos here

Anything will do for that basically (including those awful LCDs made from 6 bit TN panels) Well, if you're happy about it there, you know better than I do (I think I may have played Chess Titans once or twice last month, and that's about the only gaming I've done). Most people who do casual photo/gfx work are reasonably happy with a LCD made from a decent TN panel (lots of them are happy with really crappy LCDs too, and don't notice they're using 6 bit TN panels because of the dithering). One just doesn't need much of a LCD to crop a picture and other simple things. Anways. It uses a plain old TN panel (8 bit, not the uber-cheap 6 bit kind). The resolution and size is good enough for most people (although bigger LCDs are dropping in price very quickly -- my usual place had a 23" LCD with nearly identical specs for $180 CAD last week). As for thew viewing angles thing, that's a big issue as far as I'm concerned (160 deg on yours -- not that those specs ever reflect reality), but the problem is amplified as the monitor size goes up... Still, if you move around, or have to be more than 1 person looking at it, it could be rather problematic. Then again, you say it's not an issue for you so no worries.

Very much depends on what you're going to do with it... Gaming (response time matters a lot to these folks seemingly), watch movies or do AV editing (then it becomes black levels, 1080p or better, etc), graphics work (resolution, size, gamut, accuracy, viewing angles, even backlight, ...) Different folks have different needs. Some people can't seemingly live with anything but the absolute lowest response times (which matters very, very little to me) and are perfectly happy with absolutely horrible viewing angles -- and the color shift and brightness changes that comes with it (that definitely wouldn't last an hour on my desk). Hmm, I'd have to call it a tie. Each one wins in different categories (LCD for brightness, CRT for viewing angles and no color shifts, etc), although which of those matter to you might be completely different than those that matter to me. Kind of hard to pronounce a clear winner for someone else's use.

That's a S-PVA panel, not a cheapo 6 bit TN panel, of course it looks good. They don't even compare. Nowadays, people want cheap, and as large as possible. That usually means using low-end panels, and severely over-driving them to make the specs look good. So older quality LCDs looking far better isn't surprising at all. I'm still primarily using my BenQ FP241W (P-MVA panel) which also works great (including pro photo/gfx work -- as in, part of what I do for a living). Was about $700 CAD when I bought it a couple years ago (including taxes, delivery with insurance, 0 dead pixel warranty and everything else)

Bah. LaCie is usually overpriced to begin with. And in this case, it's vastly overpriced, even for most graphics use... Some of the better TN panels are good enough for most graphics tasks, but MVA/PVA displays are nicer overall. And if you really have the buget, then get a S-IPS based LCD or such. This is better in several ways (besides being bigger), at 1/3 of the price. Personally, I'd even take this one over the LaCie (same size too), even if it only costs like 1/6 as much. In fact, even the 30" version is noticeably cheaper (a pair of those better 30" Ultrasharps wouldn't cost much more than a single 24" LaCie). So many ways to look at it... The price difference between the much cheaper 30" Ultrasharp and the lesser 24" LaCie would pay for a Cintiq 12WX tablet... Or an extra large Intuos4 (22" diagonal!) and several accessories with it. I'd question the sanity of anyone who'd take the lesser 24" over a great 30" LCD and a high-end tablet too! There's plenty of other ways to spend the extra money too (lots of coffee , computer upgrades, storage space, better office furniture, office supplies, advertising for your business, etc) Anyhow. One doesn't need a super-high end LCD for basic graphics work. It just has not to be a really low end POS. Much like the carpenter doesn't need a gold-plated DeWalt hammer encrusted with diamonds, it just has not to be made out of Jell-O. Or just like the local pizza delivery guy doesn't need a Ferrari, just a reliable car (i.e. good enough tools).

A lot of the 22" LCDs are low-end garbage. Like 6 bit per pixel with dithering. Those are a big step down even from a CRT... No amount of color calibration is ever going to fix this. If you're going to do graphics, you just can't use a bad monitor. That's just like a carpenter showing up at work with a hammer made out of jell-o. There's no avoiding having decent quality basic tools for the job. Also, a half-decent graphics card (no need for an expensive gamer's card) is a good investment. Not only newer OS'es make use of it (Aero Glass), but graphic apps as well e.g. Photoshop CS4. You can get something "good enough" for like $30 anyways.

Barely. It only needs trivial changes to the BIOS' code (using code that's been around forever, pretty much), which should also easily fit in the existing flash (only a few extra bytes), and then they could have the feature on every single board they make for good. The cost here is negligible (as in, less than a penny/motherboard likely). The only thing that's "expensive", would be a SATA power connector with pin 11 left floating or such. I don't see those being any more expensive than plain old SATA power cables either, and they could be optional too (or even mod your own). And that's where you're somewhat missing the point. I'm not actually using RAID with a lot of drives. Most of them are mounted somewhere in the filesystem (no drive letter or anything). But that's still a dozen drives spinning at once, RAID or not. Yes, there aren't too many consumers with 12 drives in RAID, but people with more than a pair of drives is a LOT more common than 1% for sure.

I've had both issues today as well. It probably has to do with setup'ing the new site front page (web server restarted perhaps?). Most likely it won't happen again. It's not like it's been happening for a whole week, and had to re-login a couple dozen times or anything. Edit: talked too fast. Had to re-login 4 times so far. Looks like the old problem's back.