CoffeeFiend

I have that song looping!

I value system stability, that's all. Nothing nvidia at any price will make me sacrifice stability by using it, no matter how fast or shiny it is. Not until they learn to make decent drivers anyhow. You can try to say their drivers are stable all you want (ditto for that one odd guy who backs you up), but LOTS of us know otherwise. I will sooner seek other alternatives, even including onboard Intel video (which is about a trillion more times stable than anything has to offer IMO). BTW, most of the things on your list of "advantages" hardly are e.g. purevideo is a joke (it was half the reason I bought that nvidia card in the first place), and not the good kind! If anything, it very much belongs on the "cons" list (higher CPU usage than AVIVO and quality issues too, like improper handling of 1080i with 3:2 pulldown + very simple bob-deinterlace instead of the motion adaptative -- assuming you even manage to get purevideo to work!) As for the OP, I don't think he'll bother coming back, so we've all been wasting our time Edit: "EDIT: BTW purevideo ain't that bad: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html...W50aHVzaWFzdA== " Says a 3 year old article which doesn't reflect today's reality. Purevideo is worse than bad. Also, if you think nvidia drivers are stable, than clearly you've only used XP (not Vista, much less Vista x64 -- and I don't see their drivers getting any better with Win7 either). Dig around all you want to find the odd guy that supports your viewpoint (and more outdated articles), but tons of us know it's just NOT how things are. I'm quite frankly fed up to even discuss this, and I'm not going to bother anymore. nvidia makes decent hardware, but their drivers make it not worth the hassle. They're quite possibly the most troublesome of the bunch these days (much like everybody else around here knows). Feel free to claim they're actually usable (just like saying water isn't wet) all you want...

Of course you haven't, you're running XP. XP just BSODs instead, and it does that just fine with nvidia drivers. Steam user base isn't really reflective of the larger picture. Besides, most of these people likely bought whatever card had more frames per second per dollar more than anything. And I don't think it's relevant anyways, that's like saying "tell the millions of people at McDonalds that food elsewhere is better" (all the lemmings are doing it, must be good!) I don't think so. First, nvidia doesn't quite sell anywhere near 2/3 of the cards on the market, Intel is the biggest seller (also, not everyone's a gamer, and buys cards to play games). And I'd say a very large number of typical users have experienced their fair share of BSODs due to nvidia (mind you, they just tend to say "Windows sucks!" then). It's very well documented everywhere, even people like Mark Russinovich have devoted blog entries to crashes due to nvidia drivers. And I've seen nvidia driver updates break LOTS of things (like Vista's photo screensaver or remote desktop). And most of the more knowledgeable members on this forum all seem to admit to nvidia's poor driver quality (e.g. puntoMX, cluberti, jcarle, Zxian and so on). I don't really see anything backing you up anywhere (besides the one delusional guy who happens to have bought some vid cards before -- just like everybody else)

I wish. It's been acting up a lot, and not just that way.

QFT. I just got rid of a GeForce 8xxx series card, and it ALWAYS sucked HARD. No matter which drivers are used. Even onboard ATI 3200 (780G) is WORLDS better. With nvidia, expect this almost daily: And those every couple weeks: BTW, it also TOTALLY sucked for HD. Much higher CPU load than both ATI card types I got... Their claims of off-loading to the GPU are borderline fraudulent (IMO). Their video decoding assist's never actually worked, using any OS (XP x86, Vista x86, Vista x64 or Win7 x64)/any vers of drivers/any H.264 codec combination. Nevermind some video quality issues in PowerDVD (severe red blotching -- again, using any drivers, any video renderer, etc). Overall, it's been utter crap since day one. Quite possibly the worst video card I've ever had. I moved to a nice Radeon and all the problems are solved! I wish I had never even bothered. No more nvidia garbage ever again, unless they're the very last manufacturer left and I have no choice at all. nvidia is also very well known for very poor drivers for other devices. I wouldn't want of a GTX 295 even if it was free.

Ditto. Last time I bothered with that thing was in the Win98 era IIRC, about 10 years ago. Totally unnecessary these days. But I'm sure that the answer really helps those who were looking for it... 6 years ago. Since then, we've all moved to SPTI and other techs (SPTD, Patin-Couffin, ASAPI, etc). Bsides all burning programs come with whatever they need. Adaptec's ASPI layer v4.60 is 10 years old and was meant for Win95 and NT4. Adaptec's page even says: I wouldn't exactly advise people to install 10 year old crap that's both unnecessary and known to cause issues.

Not really. Offer & demand, economies of scale. There's no demand, nobody stocks it as it just sits on shelves, so everybody buys it in small quantities (so high prices) and so on. It actually makes perfect sense. DDR3 is significantly cheaper than PC133 over here (e.g. Corsair XMS3 TW3X4G1333C9DHX 4GB DDR3 2X2GB DDR3-1333 CL 9-9-9-24 Dual Kit is $75, which is still $10 less than the cheapest 512MB stick of PC133) I'm talking about local prices at reputable stores, pretty much anywhere in North America, and for decent quality stuff as much as possible. Not no-name, high density stuff that likely won't work or won't be completely seen, that still costs me half the price of the 4GB kit, needs me to register for paypal, wait a week+ for international delivery, customs clearance and all, assuming the seller can be trusted in the first place.

As always you're right! Not that a new box has to be expensive, it's pretty amazing what you can put together for $300-ish. Yes, it might be ~$250 more than you'd spend on the vid card alone, but you'd get a system with USB2/SATA/PCI-e, tons more RAM and likely a dual core CPU (and faster bus, more L2, etc) which could actually be upgraded later unlike socket 478, better audio/NIC and so on. A video card by itself won't make much of a change, unless you're just looking to play some older games that your onboard video doesn't handle very well. On a side note, I got a kit of Buffalo 2x2GB of DDR2 800MHz CL4 for $37 CAD last week ($30 USD), whereas the cheapest stick of 256MB of PC133 is $41, or $85/ea if you want 512MB'ers! Yes, more for a single 512MB stick of PC133 than 4x2GB of decent fast DDR2 (8GB total). Keeping old computers just costs way too much IMO.

For those "laptops with sensitive information" cases, we've been using EFS for ages (encrypting filesystem), but it seems like BitLocker is the new flavor. One warning: if you lose the decryption keys, kiss your data goodbye (EFS had recovery keys though)

It's not like that machine should have troubles running Vista... Besides, XP is a 8 year old OS that's very soon going to be 2 versions out of date. Time to move on.

I'm sorry, but I've never seen any actual evidence backing that up, ever (random uninformed folks saying so on various forums doesn't count). Besides the very extreme cases of defragmentation that is (if you go out of your way to make a batchfile that loops your defrag'er, sure... or doing it on SSDs). And yes, it's scheduled by default to run once a week:

Exactly. It proves nothing, and to the contrary, goes against your point (which is little more than circumstantial evidence, or plain bad luck). Your own link in your last post says it should increase life: "This should make it last longer". And it only makes sense when you think about it. I've never, ever seen a drive die prematurely from being defragged a lot, and I've been doing this for numerous years too.

To read from the registry, use the RegistryKey class, which is documented here on MSDN, along with sample how-to code. As for decoding DigitalProductId's, there's a large number of programs and scripts who already do this. Find one, understand what it does, and then recreate that. It's actually quite simple. Timers? There's like 3 different timers. You're likely using System.Windows.Forms.Timer, which is documented here, again with working code and all. A mod will likely move this to the programming section shortly (where it belongs).

[Citation needed] In fact, most studies say otherwise. A few minutes of higher usage doesn't really put any extra wear on it (it's made for it, they're not meant to sit idle 100% of the time), which will reduce seeking a lot afterwards (less work after). Companies even advertize this, e.g. diskeeper claims "extends hard drive life spans" (and they don't make profit from replacement drives either), and they're not alone saying this.

There are still a handful of low-end video cards available as PCI, but it wouldn't be much improvement over what you already have onboard (IMO). And they can be hard to find too. Nothing AGP or PCI-e will work. The best thing you can probably do, is look on the used market for an older card. It should be VERY cheap too, or upgrade your computer to something newer (not that expensive either) Kelsenellenelvian: newegg won't ship to Nepal, or anywhere outside the USA for that matter Plus, most of those you searched for are PCI-e, they have a category for those that contains 40 low-end cards, which is likely ~39 more than he'll be able to find in Nepal.

It doesn't have AGP nor PCI-Express, only 5 plain old PCI slots. Spec sheet located here. The chipset dates back from 2002, so it's way too old for PCI-e, and the AGP slot in the chipset is optional, and wasn't used on your board.

DAO is ancient crap (obsolete now -- doesn't even work on x64 platforms, from the Win 3.x days), and it's included with MDAC, so I'd suggest updating your MDAC, or to move to a dev environment that isn't over 10 years old. You can get MS VB Express 2008 SP1 for free, and lots more, over here.

Lots of people are abandoning XP these days, and there were very few XP MCE users in the first place, and as such this section has always been a littler quieter. Sometimes, searching is your best bet.

The ext4 developer (Ted Tso) says so himself

ext4? Great way to lose data

I haven't tried this particular card, but when it comes to analog capturing which card you pick makes a world of difference. Better white/black points, better color calibration, better sharpness and deinterlacing options, better comb filters, better ADC and so on. Also, it seems like this card doesn't do hardware mpeg2 encoding, so your CPU would have to handle that in software too, resulting in much higher CPU usage. Not totally sure if it works with MCE either. As for digital broadcasts, where things like white and black points don't matter (you're not doing analog capture), there are still things that matter, like which modulations are supported, and mainly the tuner sensitivity (varies from a card to another). A good antenna is a good investment too for ATSC feeds (you can build a good quality antenna yourself too, for cheap), assuming there are any feeds in your area (you're in the USA, so that's likely a yes) -- free high bitrate high def TV, gotta love that. The bundled software (and which software is compatible with it) also varies quite a bit. And like for any hardware, the drivers aren't always perfect (and sometimes 64 bit drivers aren't available at all) If you mean the RF lead coax, yes, you can. But do you want to? Probably not, as it offers the worst quality of all capturing methods (the upside is, you don't need a set top box, nor to setup an IR blaster to control it, nor to schedule the STB to change channels) As for archiving it to DVDs, I don't make any, so I'll let others chime in on the editing software (BTW, some editors can auto-cut ads) and authoring software. There's probably some all-in-one solutions for this these days though. As for VHS tapes, just connect the output to the input of your card, play the tape, and record at the same time. Very easy. The bad part is, the magnetic tape isn't perfect, and sometimes your VCR's output will be missing certain "clock" pulses (e.g. vsync) and you'll get dropped frames, which can mess up A/V sync and the like. Anyhow. I'd look for some good quality reviews before you buy one. Search/ask on avsforum or the like, and avoid being stuck with a card that sucks and cost 95% as much as a great card (can't say I'm exactly a fan of MSI personally). I almost bought this card a couple days ago, but I wanted to look for some reviews first (haven't had time), but it looks alright. There's better cards from Hauppauge, but for a lot more $$$ unfortunately.

...and also how fast is the app doing the defragging, and what settings (how thorough) one uses, how fragmented it is in the first place and and so on. Besides, over USB it'll take longer. Could be 5 minutes, could be 5 hours.

Remote desktop isn't intended for video, that just won't work. What he needs is some app that captures and streams the video (haven't used analog tuners in years, so no idea there -- support varies from a tuner to another too), and then something else to transcode it (VLC can, windows media server can too) to a bitrate his upstream speed can comfortably handle. Then he can connect to that through his firewall or router (open necessary port(s) first). There might also be "all in one" software for this these days, not that I looked (I'm more into multicasting MPEG2 transportstreams myself)

Well, yeah. I didn't need them either, but it's highly desirable for sure. Faster speeds overall (roughly 1/3 faster or so), less CPU usage (about half) due to less headers to process (only like 1/6 as many packets), etc. I think it's quickly becoming something close to a necessity for a lot of us with file servers and lots of large files (HD video, PVR'ed content, movie servers, VM disk image libs, ISOs, large archives, etc -- and possibly even thinking of things like a basic iSCSI SAN sooner or later). It's highly desirable for sure. I'll likely post back when I get around to test it.

If you ever get that 3com, please report back I just ordered a Netgear GS608 (dirt cheap, 8 ports for $50! Minus a $25 main in rebate afterwards!) that's supposed to support 9000 bytes. It has a small 128KB buffer though, but you can only expect so much outta $50 (their JGS524 has 2MB, but it's also 5x the price). It gets OK reviews on newegg. I was looking at a very nice HP managed switch before, but it wasn't exactly in the same price range. This one's so cheap I figured I'd just try it. If/when it dies, or if it sucks too bad, then I'll get something else. SMB2 + IPv6 + jumbo frames should work nice Hopefully one day we'll see jumbograms support and 10 GigE too.