CoffeeFiend

Wow. That's good to hear. I'll make sure I'm using the latest build then, and disable all other "strange" drivers that might be installed (SPTD perhaps? Some DRM-related driver? who knows). Very good news, thanks!

Perfectdisk is a great defragmenter (aguably the best), except for x64 systems seemingly. That's the only app I've encountered that didn't work as expected since I made the switch to x64 a couple weeks ago. The driver it installs is quite problematic (would often prevent the machine from booting normally, having to boot in safe mode to remove it so I can get back in Windows normally). Boot mode never worked either... Very deceiving. Diskeeper isn't quite as good IMO, and I don't particularly care for the company itself. It feels like you're paying for little more than the brand name (besides supporting scientology, that is) I'd be interested in other defragmenters that work fine on Vista x64 for sure (anything but Diskeeper, which ain't getting a penny from me, nor Perfectdisk which ain't quite working as expected). I might give the 'ol O&O a try again... It's been a lot of years since I even bothered.

Very true. There's no actual reason why a machine should get to that point in the first place. QFT. I can remove ~99% of malware within 10 minutes tops using safe mode and autoruns combined. Most of the time it doesn't take all that long. Reinstalling Windows and drivers might only take an hour-ish, but then reinstalling dozens of apps big, every little utility (like winrar, 7zip, unlocker, putty, taskbar shuffle, ccleaner, etc), and then the TON of settings & prefs (including things like the setting the symbols path & what not)... It actually takes me a few days of spare time to get around to reinstall & reconfigure everything just the way it was, and that's no even doing it from scratch (parts reimported from a user profile backup).

Seconded. I've been thinking about ordering that Xigmatek for a while now.

Filtering events in the event manager is quite nice for sure. Definitely beats scrolling for hours in log files (scattered all over the place) looking for something wrong. What a great idea! Surely, nothing bad could happen Priceless, really. Kinda reminds me how the MacBook Air was hacked in 2 minutes earlier this year. So much for a "non-Windows" machine that is so much more secure as some say -- or like how all iPhones seem to be jailbroke, so much for security! Safari hacked faster than IE, yeah, that screams security doesn't it? Meanwhile, Vista lasted until the last day (with more relaxed rules), where they had to use 2 exploits combined (none of it being in MS' apps including Windows): Java to bypass DEP and Flash as the "real" exploit (congrats to Adobe & Sun!) In fact, I don't think Macs are really great at anything. They've also totally lost the slight edge they might have had before when it comes to graphics. As of PS CS4, the Windows interface is noticeably nicer, like the separate menu bars on the mac, tabs not enabled by default, and tons of such things -- and not having a 64 bit version either! And since they both use the same generic Intel hardware, you can buy/build a significantly better/faster machine for the same price as the Mac. Its quicktime authoring edge has disappeared too, since pretty much everybody has moved on to flash video and the like these days. The Mac loses all-around here.

Nah. Not everyone on Windows uses IE. IE has a < 70% market share by this month's stats while Windows has like 90% of the market. People aren't forced to use the default apps shipping with the OS. At the fundamental level perhaps. But 1 app alone having a few somewhat equivalent apps on other platforms means nothing at all about anything. Easiest or preferred? Hmm, I'd go with the one that runs the software I want & need, and today that's Windows, by far. Also, I find it far better to fix Windows as well (like cluberti said). From the startup options (safe mode, last good known config, etc), various tools built-in (from regedit, to system restore, to command line utils), very handy options for when something breaks (e.g. the driver rollback), easy to use debugging tools (windbg and various tools), having WinPE and such discs available, top of the line tools like the Sysinternals suite, logging and tracing tools, etc...

On price alone maybe... But the choice of parts though :/ Shiny fast quad core, but real low on memory -- that'll way more than offset whatever speed gains the quad may bring, and DDR3 is expensive stuff too Slow HD (19ms seek times on a HDTune bench, making it dead last in the whole bench!) Cheap case... Cheap PSU too Single 12v rail with 30A total (a lower wattage Corsair gets a solid 10A more -- hell, my 350W Seasonics can do 90% of that, assuming the Ultra actually manages to live up to its label which is actually quite unlikely); not 80 plus (never actually hits 80%, more like 75%), looks like an old design (more amps on the 5v rail than the 12v one?), etc. Can't say I've been impressed much by previous Ultra PSU reviews (not in a good way anyhow) -- and that's one of their "fancy" modular ones... Just a quick excerpt from that review: I'll stop here.Within $50 you could get way better IMO, e.g. a plain old Q9600 or even a Duo, along with 4x2GB of fast DDR2, better motherboard, WD AAKS drive and quality parts overall (good PSU, case with good airflow).

You're SERIOUSLY mis-underestimating the average user. As soon as most people would use Linux, you'd have millions of users who would gladly do just that, or enter their admin pwd at any and every prompt. Nope. Windows has just the same. And with the current version, you're not running as admin by default, and even if you went and made yourself an admin, there's still UAC on top (unless you go disable that too). You can use both as a normal user just fine. Windows actually has the advantage here. Yeah, a not tageted OS at all with no market share, and without all the n00b users doing everything in the big book of "things not to do" everyday. Of course it can't be compared! Point #3 doesn't really mean anything when it comes to security. Not at all! First of all, it's not that big of a majority in the first place. Secondly, there is no user logged in on those boxes executing programs, so viruses wouldn't ever have a chance to run (same applies to a Windows box w/o ever a user logged on). And those DO get attacked and rooted routinely. In fact, insanely high numbers of them do get hacked just because of the software they run, just for example, the recent-ish phpbb exploits. There's just WAY too much garbage php "code" out there to even bother writing anything fancy to attack them. Just about any script kiddy with 5 minutes of time to waste can PWN a lot of websites with the first thing they read from "SQL injection 101"... Yeah, the sub-1% of geeks who run it now don't. But move half of the Windows users to Linux overnight, and you'd clearly see LOTS of that. What you're saying, is that the OS is too hard to use, so nobody else "normal" will use it -- that's not saying much in favor of the OS being secure (i.e. the users are merely more knowledgeable -- not that the OS is actually any better protected or secure!)

That's where you're completely wrong. It is primarily because of the way too low market share not to bother. Those OSes don't offer anything magic to protect against viruses. 99% of their "protection" is either: it doesn't run 99% of apps/executables out there (not compatible with Windows binaries) most people aren't logged in as root First is directly due to their low market share, and that can be "fixed" easily. As for #2, that's no advantage over Vista with UAC (main diff: one asks for a password, the other only needs a click) False. Viruses could infect anything too (every single binary on the box -- there's nothing special preventing that) given the proper permissions (no difference at all!) Nope. The viruses could be installed anywhere, just like on Windows. Removing a user won't fix everything magically. And with anything UNIX-y, you can still have rootkits and such (hiding any process/malware and such). It sounds like you don't understand how viruses fundamentally work. Linux/BSD/Macs main advantage is that they're not targeted yet. Cluberti/Zxian/Tarun are totally right. Besides, don't underestimate the amount of people who will gladly type in their password to install "shiny cursors 2009 pro" or whatever such garbage. There's enough of those people around to create HUGE a market for Linux/BSD anti-malware apps. Anyways. Malware aside (it's really not much of an issue these days), where people would go is really simple: they'll go where the software is. And people make software for the platform with the most users. There's more software for Windows because there's more users, and the users keep using Windows because that's where the software is. That's pretty much it in a nutshell (but there's a LOT more reasons why people will keep using it anyways, just too long to list 'em all)

Like x-Shadow-x said, any of them will do. However, they may decide to change the numbers later on (or add/remove some), although they just might be lazy and keep on using those too. Ideally, an app would search for the XML inside the installer, dump it, and use data from it to strip optional parts out... It's not really complicated, but it takes time to write an app that does that (along with a fancy GUI and everything else). I don't use Nero 9 personally as v8 still works fine for me (along with imgburn), so no plans to ever work on this. I might upgrade eventually.

You're only saving like $15 or so looking at that list. I'd sooner pick the exact motherboard and CPU I want instead. And it just might end up being cheaper (or cost a little more but be a lot better). You should be able to get a good P45-based motherboard, a Intel E5200 CPU, 4GB of quality fast DDR2 and a good PSU for under $300.

With a new CPU, just about any old vid card will do (yours will definitely work). PSU? You don't need anything near that. Even a 350W unit (of decent quality) would be plenty. But DON'T buy a generic/no-name PSU. You don't have to spend like $100 either (on some kind of fancy brand name and modular design and everything). I just bought a pair of Seasonic SS-350ET PSUs for very similar rigs actually, 350W, 80Plus (about 82% avg), Active PFC and all, plenty of power where it matters (324W for both 12V rails combined, etc), good set of cables, etc. For $30 each (edit: was on black friday; it's currently $50 at newegg though, but still... doesn't have to be expensive not to suck)

Don't worry, I have plenty more than one posts doing that too...

The e22xx also use core 2 duo cores (Allendale in this case). It's essentially one, just not marketed as such. Same thing for the E5200, it's a Core 2 Duo in all but its name. But no point in saving $10 by picking the E2220 over the E5200. The extra $10 brings you 0.1GHz extra (all of 100MHz -- not that it really makes any difference), but it has double the L2 cache. Lots of people love Asus boards but I'm more of a Gigabyte guy myself.

Nah, cruel would be letting you know my *discontinued* used-to-be-low-end last year CPU (wasn't even marketed as a Core 2 Duo...) and that was only $70 back then does too In fact, it's almost impossible to find a slower CPU in any computer shop than that P4 (besides the super low power Atom chips) Any Core 2 Duo will suffice. Even the dirt cheap E22xx series would (then again, the E5200 is only like $10 more).

You have to keep in mind that clock speed only means so much. Clock speed is a bit like RPM of an engine -- it hardly means anything by itself. The actual "speed" would be more like the product of the clock speed multiplied by the IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) -- for a simple CPU with only 1 core. And IPC can vary quite a bit from a CPU to another. The number of cores also affect things quite a bit. And then, there's all the other factors. Size and speed/latency of all caches (L1, 2 and sometimes 3), the type of BUS (FSB, HT, QPI) and its speed, the way RAM is accessed (via FSB or memory controller on-die, in the CPU), different SIMD instruction sets supported by CPUs (e.g. SSE4.1) and a whole bunch of other stuff. Anyways. Here's some simple numbers: Core 2 Duo E8400, clocked @ 3GHz, scores 2897 on passmark - cpu mark; P4 3GHz, clocked @ 3GHz, scores around 450 (like 6x slower, despite having the same clock speed) My old E2160 (which was a low-end chip last year, now discontinued) once OC'ed to similar speeds as the P4 it replaced, encodes video/compresses in RAR format and everything else (benchmarks included) about 3x faster. A XviD encode that would have taken 60 minutes to complete now only takes 20. Something that would have taken 15 minutes to RAR up would now only take 5. Clock speed alone doesn't mean a whole lot as you can see...

There's reasons. Transistors to switch analog video have been around for just about forever, the circuits are simple, and it's all mass produced so cheap. It's prone to ghosting, but it's not much of a problem to solve either. DVI uses signals with significantly higher frequencies, and dealing with radio frequencies is significantly trickier, and since the tech is newer, the parts haven't been around for basically forever and for the most part aren't quite produced in as big numbers yet... And to make things worse, switching DVI-I means a LOT more stuff going on than just VGA. DVI-I can still carry analog signals (DVI-A), as well as digital (DVI-D)... Plus, in some cases, there's quite a bit of data signals being used, like for dual link connectors. Basic DVI switches aren't too expensive though. The nicer ones (two DVIs, two dual-link DVIs, etc) are quite expensive -- especially if for more than just 2 computers, and in some cases don't even exist (just fine me a 4 port KVM with two dual link DVI's and USB for mouse/keyboard -- spdif would be nice too!). Oh well...

Nope. Doesn't affect things at all.

Like cluberti said, for those things, you really want a newer 3xxx or 4xxx radeon card. The old one won't really cut it unfortunately. A lot of those also suck unfortunately. Super slow startup times, old profiles (pre v2.0), no support for optional audio codecs, etc. Right now, there's only a handful of decent players out there: the PS3 (no thanks!), or a couple stand alone players (e.g. Sony BDP-S550 & Panasonic DMP-BD50), most which cost about twice as much as a PS3 (none being cheaper than the PS3 AFAIK). My front neighbour bought one a couple months ago, and it has it's fair share of issues. He tried to get it RMA'ed but was told to "just unplug it so it resets itself" when it does something strange. That sounds like quality, doesn't it? I love the 1080p, but Blu-Ray as a format generally sucks, and so do the players. They just "resecured" BD+ again too, yay for more DRM! It's like these people do everything in their power to make sure we don't want to buy their stuff... BTW, upgrading to a ~20% faster CPU wasn't worth it, unless the CPU was just about free. For ~$100 you can get a CPU that's like 3 to 4x faster than that once OC'ed.

Your problem is your CPU. Unless you upgrade your vid card to one that can do the decoding in hardware, and manage to find a set of drivers + codec where it actually works (unlike my geforce POS card), your CPU isn't good enough. A P4 3.4 isn't all that fast by today's standards, my old CPU that's a year old (E2160) that was like $70 at the time benches 3x faster than the old P4 3.06GHz it replaced. Some Blu-Ray titles manage to peak some core 2 duo's to 100% cpu usage (then again, it depends on the title, the player, codec used, vid card, etc). Of course DVDs play fine, a P3 can handle those... However there's a HUGE difference between crappy old mpeg2 (where the vid card does 95% of the job anyways) that's easy to decode and at low resolutions (~1/3 megapixel), and very high bitrate encrypted 1080p (6x more pixels) H.264 video (WAY more work to decode than mpeg2) with fancy audio and all like Blu-Ray uses. Edit: if that can give you a better sense of what kind of specs you need, WinDVD 9 calls for: bare minimum: Athlon64 X2 3800+ (that's a dual core chip), or similar-ish Core 2; recommended is an Athlon64 X2 4200+, or a Core 2 Duo E6400. PowerDVD lists lower specs, but you can get by on a slow CPU with a fancy vid card and everything else setup perfect... Not very realistic though. And even then, if it works at all, it's probably at the cost of turning off just about all video post-processing. They do state "Dual or quad core processors recommended" though.

It was MSDN media indeed. Good to know. Either ways it's installed and all now, but the installer's error message was completely unhelpful.

The only real difference is features you can or can't use. Home Premium has features like media center, movie maker, parental controls and that kind of home-ish stuff. Enterprise lacks those, but has different things instead, like being able to join domains, better management options (e.g. group policy), EFS, NAP, IIS and such things most people wouldn't use at home. The only thing some might really miss is being able to connect to their box using remote desktop (client works though, and there's always VNC & all that). Most people aren't able to buy this version anyways (myself included). Then again, Ultimate is probably just a few dollars more (which is what I chose personally).

Exact same thing here. But another thing that tends to slow systems down quite a bit over time and that always gets overlooked is the amount of fonts installed... But just the startup processes & useless tray icons + defragging (and removing malware if there's any) should already do wonders.

I installed Windows -- problem solved! I get tired of fighting with it to get basic hardware and functions working, that Just Works™ under Windows. There's hundreds of hits for that on Google so it's sort of well-known, there's also several bug reports already filled like here. Besides, Ubuntu's network manager has always been kind of ghetto (lots of people using wicd instead and such). I wish I could say I'm making this stuff up, and there's plenty more where that came from unfortunately. And BTW, I also point out Windows shortcomings too.

My best shot at this: Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Czech Danish Dutch -> nope! German English Spanish (Latin America) Spanish Finnish French Croatian Hungarian Italian Japanese Korean Dutch Norwegian Polish then your list is a bit messed up I think (an extra line somewhere), I think (not 100% sure) the next 2 are: Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese Russian Slovak perhaps? Slovak maybe? Swedish Thai Turkish