CoffeeFiend

Same board I got. But no, it doesn't do the same: it doesn't have PCI-e 2.0. Not that you really need that yet... Similarly, your P35 was made using the 90nm process just like anyone else's, and doesn't offer the power savings (which are probably quite minimal, and mainly mean they get away with a smaller cooler on the chip -- costs savings for them). P45 also brings DDR3 support (which is still too expensive, isn't used on all boards yet, provides little performance gain so far), support for 1600 FSB (which AFAIK only the QX9770 and QX9776 use), and a little nicer ICH10[R] over the ICH9[R] (hardly any difference). I surely wouldn't spend $150+ to replace a perfectly good P35-based board.

Because my last 3 installs went XP -> Vista x86 -> Vista x64 (and the next one will likely be Win 7). Also, one may prefer reinstalling "clean" with the latest service pack slipstreamed in the install disc (vs reimage with an older install, then apply the new SP on top). If I was reinstalling often, I would be using acronis trueimage.

Some people prefer to resist change (and bi*ch about it) instead of embracing it. Nothing we can do I'm afraid. I never cared too much for XP's start menu (took too bloody long to get to any app you haven't used last), but Vista's and its search is a million times better than XP's and classic. You can start ~99% of your apps in 4-6 keystrokes, without ever touching the mouse.

Actually, Win95 times IIRC. And that's getting quite close to 15 years ago (and like 8 or so versions of Windows back) Besides, a very quick forum search for oeminfo.bmp returns 6 full pages of results (like 150 matches)

A little know how, the sysinternals suite, and the usual tricks (safe mode, etc). Haven't come across something I couldn't remove yet (and in mere minutes), but these days I do very, very little of this (friends' PCs, not even once a month). Then again, I never head of half the apps on that list...

No kidding. It's only a matter of time before he starts to evangelize the gimp (over photoshop no less), emacs and latex... Yes, great place to bash Windows, without requiring any actual facts, grounds, reasons or anything, and where you get modded up for "chair" and BSOD jokes year-round. The only interesting (and very, very funny) thing about that place is that they owe a very large of their revenue directly to Microsoft. Yes, open source's business model is so great it has to rely on ad money from closed source vendors to survive (bashing them meanwhile). That place is a luser circle jerk site and not much more... News? LOL, whatever. Yellow journalism at its best. Misleading/troll/controversial headlines and everything else they can get away with (and forget about fact checking altogether) to get more page views (more views = more advertising money). Even digg is better... Linux is so great that even those that don't want to use Windows still chose to buy $2000 Macs (with another closed source, non-free, commercial OS, with DRM and all) over Linux by a factor of like 100:1. When you can't even manage to give away your main product, and that 99% of people would rather (and do) pay a LOT for the alternative, you know it sucks very badly. Then again, some people seem to prefer not having to pay anything, over having quality software with a good interface and all (or software that just works, unlike Linux) and the very best offerings from commercial vendors. Then they try to convince themselves it's just as good or better... lol

Oh yea, someone likes it, he's a fanboy! Just as much as everyone who doesn't is just trolling (actually, some of them are... for sure, some even make a habit out of it, no need to point out names even) Couldn't care less, I ain't ever going back In fact, I'm rather looking forward to being completely XP-free, in a couple of months. Facts? LOL. I didn't see much of that in here (only noticed any in Zxian's posts), including your own posts. I don't particularly care why you don't like it either, nor which"facts" you hand-picked to support your biased views. Either ways, if you don't like it, you might as well go buy a Mac today... Edit2: yes, totally hand picked (and I'm using the term "fact" lightly here). And buy a Mac, because you won't most likely won't like Win 7, nor 8, nor 9, nor 10, etc. That, or you can go back to Win 3.11, which has no actual features (what you guys call bloat), which is basically the only thing some of you wouldn't complain about (but then again, some will still say "oh noes, it's from the evil, eviiiiil Micro$haft0rz and it's not open source!!1!one!!! And it costs more than nothing too") I don't really see why I'd have to come up with anything either. Besides, you're not interested in facts. When presented with some, you try to sidestep them, counter them with irrelevant/unrelated things and FUD, and nitpick overall (yeah, Linux power management *really* works, LOL)

That very well sums up the whole thread. Vista is great, best Windows ever, and hopefully Win 7 is very much like it

Writing a basic md5 or sha-1 hashing cmd line util only takes like 5 minutes anyways As long as the ISO is under 4GB, that is (it's like 12 years old, no surprises here).

They're completely different beasts. PE explorer is an expensive tool that lets you see (and fix if needed) the "special" hashing used by PE exe's. Hashtab (and md5sum and what not) all perform plain old standard file hashing (not the same thing at all).

To exe's without even having the program name even... (as in "here, just install this unknown stuff from a deep link!") I already found the ultimate IE killer 5 years ago (and no, that ain't seamonkey)

No, the client PC doesn't use the same source and destination port numbers when connecting to a service. Let's pretend you were connecting to a web server, using plain old HTTP, to request a web page, on port 80 as usual. It would go something like this: Your computer sends a SYN to destination port 80 of the server, but with a different source port (let's say 12345 -- it's as good as any other number really), and then you reuse those: the server sends it's SYN/ACK from port 80 to your port 12345, then your computer sends ACK (still src port 12345, dst 80). Now that the TCP handshake is done, your computer makes the HTTP GET or POST request itself (same ports yet again), and the answer from the web server (e.g. HTTP/1.0 200 OK) is just like its SYN/ACK packet (src 80, dst 12345). The client never actually receives data on port 80 at any point in the process. I hope that helps.

If you want cheap, have a soldering station and you understand electronics circuits, then you could use 2 transistors from your miscellaneous parts bin (or even reused parts from old electronics) and some common resistors and make a simple inverter. Even if you had to buy all the parts, you could build it for under $1 (and in about 5 minutes). That's assuming your serial port "understands" TTL levels, but pretty much all of them do these days.

Already have... Not that I know of. But I'm no expert in QBasic. Last time I came even near that thing is over 15 years ago. BTW, there are tons of simple training/get started/how-to's and such if you need them. All free of course.

QBasic is from MS DOS 5, circa 1991, or 18 years ago. That's from before Windows 3.1 even... Time to upgrade to something more modern perhaps... There's tons of free compilers. And if you're into the basic syntax, then there's the free Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition

Unfortunately, RAID works best with identical drives, and with 2 different drives (not identical size), some RAID cards will outright refuse to create an array (besides JBOD). And RAID 1 is still not a replacement for proper backups... Filesystem corruption or malware (although very uncommon) could easily destroy all the data on both drives. Just sayin' Also, if the [insert RAID controller name here] dies, you might have a hard time getting data off of your old array. Often, you need to have the exact same controller, with the very same firmware on it to get it bak (been there, done that, got the t-shirt too) That's the key. If you go with optical media, disc using metallic dye is the way to go (e.g. taiyo yuden). I find it's too much work to burn dozens of discs all the time, so I reuse older HDs as backups for the most important data (1 kept at home, 1 elsewhere). eSATA will make this even more practical in the future.

As far as anecdotal evidence goes, I've seen plenty of dead WDs (and not just in computers either). I stopped buying them in 2001 (for a few years anyhow), after having 4 of them (big & expensive ones) die on me within 2 weeks... I have some now, no problems with them yet. That's pretty much it. Quality goes up and down, different bugs appear, manufacturing problems, QA problems and what not. No manufacturer is perfect, and it's always a bit of a gamble.

Seriously, you're blowing this WAY out of proportion, just because of you and a handful of other guys with a defective drive from the seagate forums. I have a about a dozen 7200.11's, and they've all been working great, for quite a while. Millions of people are perfectly happy with them. It only seems to be certain models, using a specific firmware, and with a serial that starts by 9Q or such that are affected. I wouldn't trade mine in for similar sized WDs either. There were millions of people affected by bad Fujitsus, deathstars and what not. Specific batches/series [of any type of product] having issues is nothing new, and it generally speaking doesn't mean much about the overall quality of their products. Every company has a problematic product at some point. But yeah, not all of them are so good or committed towards fixing them... Anyways. They've been using perpendicular recording on other drives for a while, without any issues... Other companies are using it too.

Once again you have evaded trying to understand what others wrote. Try working on your reading comprehension skills instead of your trolling skills (which are also laughable) It only further shows your ignorance towards the technology. And no, it doesn't imply anything weird like you just said. Nobody talked about xp tool in here besides you, and no, there are no such things "known" either. Of course, like always, you have nothing to back this up. And as always, you'll expect to put the burden of proof onto others, when you can't backup any of your wildly inaccurate claims and other fabrications of your imagination (besides "but, but! one crazy guy on the web says so!", of course) You keep telling yourself that. You are a VERY funny man, I'll give you that. Very entertaining. The only fear I have here, is to die from laughter.

There is no way around that. Be prepared to lose anything that isn't backed up. It will happen some day. In fact, you could do more than 2 copies (I have 1 copy at home, and another "off-site"). But it's not like you have to backup *everything*. I couldn't care less if I lost my Windows install, VMs I can recreate in mere minutes, and stuff like that, due to a dead drive or whatever. As long as my *important* data is backed up (again, things like family photos -- your kids won't get younger again, no chances to re-take those pics, ever) It's just a very simple circuit that does level shifting on the serial port (to have "proper" rs232 voltages towards the PC, and TTL level signals towards the drive). It's really nothing special at all: it's a TTL level serial port, like found on almost all embedded controllers (the only "hard" part here, is knowing which pin is TXD/RXD, which is still quite easy). A plan old max232 chip or any equivalent will do, but then again, most serial ports these days will work at TTL levels just fine (still gotta invert it though -- a pair of plain old GP transistors works fine or even a ghetto old 74LS14 or 04, and also clamp the voltage not to fry the drive's controller). You could even make a USB version of it using a FTDI series chip (or any of the other common ones like cypress and others). Or then again, you can buy such pre-built devices from dozens of sites (they're actually very common devices). Exactly. The old drive can still be RMA'ed. And removing BSY alone will likely not bring it back to a "functional" state (i.e. in a state where you can recover your data). As the video Fuzzy_3D posted shows, there's quite a bit more to it. A minor screw-up in connections can easily fry the controller or worse (it's simple stuff, but some people shouldn't be near electronics...) And the whole thing still relies on you entering the right commands (which are poorly documented at best) and where any minor mistake may have unfortunate consequences... Either ways, good luck

Not to sound rude or anything... But a quick search shows that very, very old (most people figured it out around when XP came out, like 8 years ago) "tip" as being in about 200 different posts (8 whole pages worth, at 25 results/page). Not exactly news.

Windows already has that built-in: fsutil file createnew c:\path\to\whatever_file.ext 12345 where 12345 is the size of the file you want created, in bytes.

To be honest, I'm not exactly surprised. I've had similar-ish trouble with pretty much every HD company out there. From 6.x to 8.x GB Fujitsu's dying by the hundreds (big class action lawsuit over those), to DOA and died-within-a-week NEC drives where NEC never actually honored its warranty, to $1200 worth of western digitals dying on me in the summer of 2001, various drives of different companies dying on me in PVRs and such applicances, IBM "deathstars", etc... I currently have some WDs and Seagates (7200.11's indeed), all are working great so far. All companies have problematic series, problematic batches within a particular serie, problematic firmwares, etc. And you can't always count on them replacing your drives. And most of them have some really good products too. Just like when you buy a car, you can be stuck with a lemon, and it really sucks then (and understandably you can be angry about it). Moral of the story: you have to make sure all your data is backed up, and preferably twice, one copy being in a "off-site" location (in case of flood, fire, theft or what not). Especially data that can't ever be replaced, like family photos. Storage is dirt cheap, some data is priceless.

I'll be waiting a while longer too. Expensive CPU, expensive motherboards, expensive DDR3... I'd rather let others spend crazy $$$ to get all the issues worked out (like the DDR3 voltage issue which may kill the CPU). It would be nice if there was a price cut on existing quads though. The Q6600 is 2 years old, and the cheapest I've seen it is still $220 CAD Add taxes, shipping, and perhaps a decent cooler, and the extra 2 cores would cost me over $300.

That's good news, sort of. They're easy to fix for the most part, and the board should be fairly inexpensive to replace too (but then again, the replacement board may fail too -- replacement boards don't address quality issues unfortunately). Anyhow. Basic 24 inchers' prices are coming down a lot lately. I think I'll be getting a pair of them for the kids' boxes, it's only like $100 more than a smaller 22" that has a lower resolution. Totally worth it. Now if only WQXGA monitors would become more affordable The cheapest are still like $1000+