CoffeeFiend

Lots of us saw that coming for sure, and not only in the EU. Could be, but regardless of that, Intel was most definitely deserving of it. Giving companies rebates based on NOT selling your competitors' products? That's not exactly "playing nice"...

Are you trying to plug different computers directly in your cable modem (without a router) by any chance? Because a lot of ISPs configure them to only give an IP address to only 1 computer (it remembers the MAC address). If so, you could try to "ipconfig /release" on the computer you're disconnecting before you connect the other. if that works, then a router is your fix.

That's a seriously BAD deal! I got a 2x2GB of DDR2 800 kit (Buffalo) for $37 CAD like 2 or 3 weeks ago (that's about ~$30 USD) at ncix. Newegg has many 4GB kits around $40. SATA is the future. And such an old drive probably not that fast either. Still, you should be able to reuse it (except for a couple boards with non-bootable jmicron controllers and the like). Video wise, for basic needs like that, some onboard video is just fine. Last couple boxes I built used a AMD 780G chipset, which has a Radeon 3200 onboard. Works great for anything non-gaming (1080p H.264 movies play fine, Aero runs fine and everything else).

Well, it sounds like it's a problem with the one site anyways. So it's likely a problem with that site (regardless of if it uses ASP.Net or not). Your best bet is to contact their webmaster in that case. https/ssl traffic is kind of a PITA to capture anyways.

There's nothing special about those sites (ie. back end tech used), it all works the same. And since you're having problems with more than 1 browser, seemingly the problems are elsewhere (firewall perhaps?). We got nothing to work from here, so we can only guess. Ideally, you'd provide us with a network capture or something (NOT with your real credentials of course)

Hibernate takes basically as long as plain old rebooting (without those storage driver problems which make it even slower), it's just that your stuff is already open. And S3 sleep means losing work when your battery runs out. Vista's sleep is FAR better. Resuming is instantaneous just like S3 sleep, and you never lose work just like hibernate (along with better scheduling and everything else). Same for Win7's.

That hardly matters. Clock speed by itself means nothing (even less so between server & destop lines of CPUs, from different eras, and from different manufacturers no less), and here 6000+ is a better number to go by (i.e. it'll slaughter any P4 3GHz in any bench but a i7 at 3GHz would also be a LOT faster -- clock speed only means so much). P4-era Xeons aren't that fast. The Athlon64 6000+ cores 1509 in passmark, and a 2.8GHz P4 (same class more or less) scores 400-ish. Not surprisingly, a dual Xeon 2.8 scores a lowly 840 (that's slower than any low-end dual core CPU sold today or even older stuff like the Athlon64 X2 3600+, Sempron Dual Core 2100, Pentium D 3.2, or a Intel E2140!) Hyperthreading is only a ugly hack around their netburst-era pipeline architectural mistake (nothing at all like being a dual core), and it actually slows down some workloads significantly. As for having 2 CPUs, those old CPUs are interconnected by a slow FSB bus (nothing like hypertransport or quickpath) which is also a LOT slower than the bus between both cores on the Athlon64 X2. Also, that slower bus also happens to be shared between CPUs and also going to the memory, thus creating another bottleneck on the already much slower interconnect, to much slower RAM as well. And we're disregarding things like OS/drivers/apps being SMP aware too... It also will cost more money to get another Xeon too (server processors tend to be expensive), and it will suck a lot more power too (about twice as much; translating in a higher power bill - more $ again). And most of the stuff on that board (like storage controllers and what not -- I believe this has an old ICH5R, we're up to ICH10R now) would also be older (often slower and/or more expensive) tech i.e. PATA or SCSI instead of SATA, as well as PCI-X slots instead of PCI-e ones, less USB and so on. The only advantage the dual Xeon has, is having 6 DIMM slots, but then again, that means fancy (more expensive) and slower 400MHz ECC RAM if you want 12GB (many inexpensive AM2+ boards support 16GB anyways, some even 32GB) -- and that's only useful if you need that much RAM in the first place (not that 32 bit XP will use it, and XP 64 bit isn't exactly great IMO -- not that I use XP anymore). If that 6000+ ain't fast enough, your best bet is to get a quad core. Many AM2+ boards will take Phenom II's. A $190 Phenom II X4 940 gets 3796 in passmark, that's 4.5x faster than that dual Xeon and much cheaper too -- and it's a real 64 bit CPU (not an old P4-era 32 bit CPU with EMT64 slapped on top of it). Or even a cheap $75 Phenom 8450 is like twice as fast, or a $90 Phenom 9600 that's about 3x faster. Same with Intel CPUs: a $70 E5200 is twice as fast, a $170 Q8200 is almost 4x faster. Personally, I'd be getting rid of such a Xeon box very quickly... It's slow, very power hungry, expensive and usually loud too (heat = fan noise), likely doesn't have so great power management and so on. If you want something any faster than your existing 6000+ in decent quality and preferably modern-ish server-class hardware, be prepared to pay for it! Just a basic dual socket board (like a tyan or supermicro) will run you $300 and over (more like $500 for something kick-a**), then add the expensive CPUs, the ECC RAM or FB-DIMMs, etc. Getting a decent desktop-class quad core CPU will give you a LOT more bang for your buck in any case. Also, you can find the whole server (1425) with dual 2.8's in it for less than $300 to begin with... I've seen dual 2.8 Xeon servers for as low as $150. A pair of socket 604 Xeon 2.8's goes for like under $30 on ebay, including shipping in the USA (e.g. see item # 320217706535). Everybody's trying to get rid of that old stuff, that's why it's so cheap. People don't want to fill precious rack space with old, slow, power hungry stuff as it just costs too much overall.

Simple: if you stream it at a lower bitrate than it is encoded at, then the filesize will be lower, so less bandwidth. It's all about the bitrate.

That card would fit, if it comes with the other bracket. Is it better than what you got? Yes, but is it worth upgrading to? Not really. I'm a total non-gamer, and I got rid of one... Sucked too much. edit: the pics show the other brackets.

The 9500 isn't much of a gamer's card. As for the 8600, forget about it... Just google for benchmarks and you'll see. You won't really find many half-height cards (newegg only has 7) Nevermind that any worthwhile card will require a new power supply.

No. That card won't physically fit. And first, you'd still need a new power supply (which again, you just might have to get a new case for). So, your shopping list: -new case so the card and PSU fit inside, like say, an Antec 300 (cheap and good), $55 or so -new decent power supply, to handle the demand, starting around $50 -new video card, to play new games at decent settings, perhaps a Radeon 4770 or 4830 at ~$100 Most of which you won't find at Dell's site. Or you can try to get a TFX PSU (good luck) that doesn't suck, and a half-height card that's good for gaming (ditto), for basically just as much (not that Dell will sell you either). You might as well buy yourself a 360, as it'll likely be cheaper (Dell also sells that).

Between 2 sets of $25 speakers, brand doesn't really matter that much (in fact, a "no name" might be better here instead of paying for the brand). You're only gonna get so much... The Logitech set has 7W RMS, but that's rated at 10% THD (something you wouldn't do as it would sound beyond awful -- you want more like 0.1%). At a decent THD, it's probably more like 5W or less. The Altec Lansing set says 15W, also rated at ridiculous 10% THD, and more deceptive stuff (says the response curve starts at 30Hz -- yeah, sure ) Then again, watts doesn't really mean nothing all by itself, without knowing the speakers' given SPL (sensitivity i.e. dB/W), and you're not provided with those infos here. Given the same SPL on both, then the one with more watts would be louder. But then again, it would not necessarily be the best sounding one either... Both have tiny 2.x" satellites and a wimpy 4" sub. A good portion of your money here goes on gimmicks like wired remotes, mp3 player stands and fancy looks instead of sounding good. Both are very basic speaker sets so don't expect too much.

It's a problem with resuming from sleep. Getting it to re-detect won't fix this. He needs other drivers, or perhaps unchecking "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" as a workaround. Bugs wise, there are some. The main one I encountered so far is video changing mode to 800x600 for no reason every few minutes for every user.

Ideally, we'd have a network trace to look at (i.e. wireshark capture), then we could tell what the problem is in the first place. I'll probably have a look tonight. Edit: I can't reproduce the problem after updating to IE8 (haven't changed any settings). It works fine. We got nothing to work from here, so there ain't much we can do. My best guess right now is what cluberti said: an addon causing problems.

It's only a RC, and drivers for it aren't perfect yet. Try updating (or downgrading, even) your drivers, see if that works. But that's the whole point of betas, to see if stuff works, and for companies to fix their stuff so it works with it. If you wan to avoid such things, the don't use beta software (I'm not using Win7 either, tried it, went back to Vista because of bugs)

Stats say there are about 1,463,632,361 users total. Aprils' expected, combined Win9x market share (report out in a couple days) should be around 0.28%. 0.28% of 1,463,632,361 is about 4 million (most of which are likely in 3rd world countries) Another way to put it, 4 million still use Win9x (all versions combined), whereas 1460 million don't. Also worth noting, Win9x market share is dropping by about 500000 users a month, using those numbers again (0.54% in Oct 08, 0.31% in Mar 09 so 0.23% less in 6 months, or 0.038333333... % less per month, times 1,463,632,361 users = 561059 less users/month average) At the current rate, within 6 months, it'll be under a million and under 0.1% I had missed that. And nope, it's been shrinking all along, for many years. If anything, it's shrinking slower than before i.e. between quarters 3 and 4 in 2006, Win9x went from 3.61% down to 2.87, losing 0.74% in 4 months, or 0.185%/month --about 5x faster than now. You're likely only noticing now, as there's barely anyone left still using it. Here's the curves (along with Win2k and Linux) for the last couple years. As you can see, Win2k is quickly getting there too (haven't seen a single win2k box in 3 or 4 years or so either -- I can't even remember how far back is the last time I've seen a Win9x box!)

Fans or not, the last similar Acer I've seen was packed so ridiculously tight, that there was virtually no airflow. You'd put ten fans on it, and air still wouldn't move around. The Antec 300 is cheap and good. The P18x series is a bit nicer indeed, but more expensive.

RAM, for sure. Otherwise, it depends what socket your CPU uses. If it's socket 775 (and assuming the chipset supports it), I'd look into a cheap dual core CPU (e.g. a E5200 at $70)

Linksys and others do just the same. And it's not just when it comes to networking. Hardware versions/revisions is something pretty much any company that makes hardware does. Could be DOA or anything. Hard to really blame the manufacturer so far. It happens. Much like calling tech support... pretty much anywhere these days. Which reminds me a lot of the DLink one I was trying the other day which also wouldn't work with SP3 (missing entry points in some DLLs and what not), and wasn't fixed months later on DLink's website. Or he various Linksys cards without any 64 bit or Vista drivers. I could go on about this for a long time. Most cards from every manufacturer suck, and their drivers are only worse. Often, problems with many adapters are "fixed" by using generic drivers (like RALink's). Which could be caused by pretty much anything. Low signal and interference (especially with a USB key thing like this!), software, etc. The card itself could suck though. Haven't used this particular model, so no idea. Then again, every company has some nice and some not-so-great stuff every once in a while (especially these days where a LOT of stuff is sub-contracted & manufactured in many different places when not simply rebranded). I've had a lot of NetGear network equipment over the years. Tons of NICs, a couple hubs, a couple routers (some were rebranded Zyxels which could be reflashed with Zyxel firmware -- they were great units), a few switches (some of which were very well built, all metal). As a matter of fact, I just bought another Netgear switch 2 weeks ago, and it's absolutely great! Gigabit with jumbo frames. No complaints whatsoever. Far better than a LOT of other networking stuff I've had my hands onto before. It'll take FAR more than one guy having problems with a couple cheapo USB sticks for me to stop buying stuff from a company. If everyone would stop buying something after one guy who had a bad experience, we'd have nothing left to buy anymore. BTW, I've seen several dead WRT54GS units, most often from the CPU overheating (cheaply built stuff these days -- too cheap to put a HSF on the chip nor a fan on the enclosure)... Nevermind all the cutting on the RAM & flash on these units, when they don't even make the antennas non-removable to save another half penny. The WRT54GL is the better unit (can run 3rd party firmware that's a LOT better too), but even those die.

Win98 has a 0.19% market share as of last month, and if the trend continues this month's report (which will be out in 5 days) should indicate around 0.17% (below 0.1% within a few months). See for yourself here. I haven't seen a single Win9x box in many years myself, even XP is quickly losing popularity.

You could add a small vbscript snippet (or a very simple C# or VB app) to your login script to do this. It could read it from a text file (located on a public directory somewhere on the network), or read from a database using ADO (make sure the account used only has the bare minimum permissions i.e. read only, and only on the necessary tables). It's pretty easy do to. You could even use a simple app with a web browser control to display a html page (so you can use fancier text, images and so on), in which case you could even use the web server to "rotate" the pages daily.

And having seen Acers before, it's probably even less. The last Acer I've seen had a PSU that said 300W (same was advertized on their website), but the fine print said "rated at 20C; 270W at 50C". And even for 270W, the 12v rail was quite weak (lower than some 250W PSUs). And yet, that one unit died with a much lower load than that (and took the motherboard along with itself!). It would be nice having a picture of the label. As for the Seasonic SS-350ET, I got two of them. They're great units. Working perfectly. They're very inexpensive if you get them on special too (they were $30 on black friday). Great company, great quality, 80plus, 27A combined on the 12v rails which is plenty for a lot of people, quiet 120mm fan, etc - overall an excellent unit (far better than some 650W units I've seen before...) There's no PCI-e power connectors though, so if whatever card you're looking at needs it (the 4830 does, didn't waste time looking at the other), then better look at something else. The new ncix specials should be on tomorrow nite, and with some luck they'll have some nice units going for cheap (maybe even a good deal on 4830's, who knows).

Telnet is very simple, and well documented i.e. RFC854 There's TONS of sample code out there doing exactly this as well a many complete apps that do just this, a search should turns up tons of results (tons more places to search e.g. sourceforge). People have been moving away from telnet in the past few years because of the inherent lack of security (login/password sent in plain text -- much like ftp). It still gets used as it's one of those "lowest common denominator" protocols (well supported on any platform)

Lots of such things leak memory like there's no tomorrow. I once forgot such a thing running in a browser overnight (the only tab open too), and it was using over 1GB all by itself.

You also have to keep in mind that WD makes drives specifically for RAID for a reason: they have TLER (they're like double the price though i.e. WD1002FBYS is $240 while the WD10EADS is $130 -- kind sad really, my new Samsung 0A38016 was only $90). It seems like you're doing RAID1 as the pic says "MIRROR 931.51GB". If a drive has a problem and enters a deep recovery cycle (which is what TLER prevents), then most RAID cards will drop it out of the array, hence the "degraded" warning on your array (and having to do a lengthy rebuild which might go wrong) Either ways, I'd keep a good eye on the SMART monitoring for a while AND ensure I have backups of anything you can't afford to lose.