CoffeeFiend

Not fair! Linux is already enough of a punishment And today's bug: Yep, eth0 doesn't exist (yet, it's there, it has valid settings and it even half works!)

Weird problem. We bought a pair of Win 2008 Standard keys (legit and all) mainly for usage under vmware, and the install disc won't even take them! All it says is "Windows installation has encountered an error and needs to be restarted". No other details of any kind. How useless. "Something didn't work, must reboot!". That's got to be one of the most useless error messages I've *ever* encountered. Yet, we can install without a serial, then change the key and activate online no problem! There are no problems with the disc itself, and it's not "the wrong key" either... Looks like it's not just me either. Plenty of such reports on the web. MS needs to get its act together on this one seemingly.

That's what I'm doing too. Albeit the lazy way, using swfobject

VERY good points indeed. There's lots of ways to replace static images with flash (if it's detected) and text with images and all that, in case the browser doesn't support "fancy" things. I test with a fair amount of browsers just like you, inside VMs as well, but not quite as extensively: I've never seen a single hit on our web sites using Opera, and it's been years since we've seen IE 5.5 or less. Netscape? Years without a single hit too. No hit that I remember of from a Linux box either. Our visitors use mostly IE6 & 7, Firefox, and then there's the odd hit from Safari.

That's a bit extreme. Worst case scenario I'll serve browser-specific CSS to older IE's but that's about it, not 2 different sets of pages. With a bit of work, one can usually get IE 6 and 7 to display pages acceptably too. It's a bit of a pain though. Can't wait for IE pre-v8 to be extinct already... (it's also part of what I do for a living, ASP.NET FTW!)

To some extent. I make sure everything validates when I make an app or site, but it's not like I lose sleep over an image that's missing an alt attribute either. When developing, yes. Not just on the markup either. It's developed using Firefox (Gecko), then I test against the current-ish versions of IE (6 and up -- Trident), as well as other major engine (KHTML & WebKit). There's just no excuse these days for the people that only test using IE (2 votes like that, heh). Thankfully the grossly incompetent (those who are only testing against IE) are quickly finding themselves out of a job these days.

That, and the built-in cmd line utils, and the usual (e.g. autoruns to disable startup junk) There's nothing on this list worth using/voting for, so I picked the last option.

Nope, same slow 3500-ish MB/sec speed... I've seen people get over 8000 in those benches with DDR2 800MHz @ CL5 (just installed the everest trial, getting ~7000) Edit: that's not a exactly a Q6600 BTW. And then again, it's a slow-ish old nvidia chipset. And perhaps the FSB is limiting you a bit too...

My old E2160 gets 5.9 with DDR2 800MHz, even if I leave it at CL5 (@1.8v) I get over 6000MB/sec. 3500-ish is a very bad score for that kind of machine, I'd have a look at it, something must be wrong. In AMD's case indeed HT helps a bit, but QuickPath "solves" that with i7 Either ways, there's no reason why your box shouldn't get 5.9.

It was pretty common with the older onboard audio chips. It's been years since I've seen that though. Perhaps you got an old board with an older Realtek codec? I'm lovin' my ALC889A. Better than a Audigy 2.

Onboard Realtek is quite nice actually. 7.1 + 2 channel, 192KHz/24 bit, spdif and toslink outs. Better connections than a X-Fi, and better drivers too. Supports all the codecs you could ask for. The nicer ones even support features like Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect. The only other things fancy cards do is: somewhat better analog outs if you still use those (even then, depends on the card -- all my speakers have spdif and/or toslink inputs) EAX (only matters if you're a PC gamer -- not my case) advanced stuff like low latency multitrack ASIO and such (I'm no musician either) I'll take onboard Realtek over anything Creative-made anytime.

I'm going to reinstall Vista (x64 instead of x86, just upgraded to 8GB) very soon, maybe even tonite. I'd give SP2 a try, but since it's a beta and all, I don't want to have to remove the beta SP2 later on to install the "final" one Too much trouble for nothing. So much stuff to reinstall

That's hardly what I'd call a review... It mostly judges them on points like ease of use and such things, and a mostly pointless checklist with "works on OS xyz" or "certified by whatever company". Not actually checking how many viruses it gets, and how many false positives it gets and all that. NOD32 ends up being 4th indeed, not because it detects less or has more false positives or uses more resources (it's clearly the winner when you combine all 3), but because it lost points on "Ease of use" LOL. What a useless page... Precisely.

I've never actually seen it rated at the top. But every AV needs 3 main things: Good detection rates Low false positives Low enough resource usage (RAM usage, CPU cycles, low added latency, ...) #1 is very easy to get if you disregard #2 (or you can aim for a low #2, and manage that, at the expense of #1). And it's hard to get 1 and 2 right without compromising on 3 (see Kaspersky...) Most have one big flaw. Be it bad detection rates making it useless, or too high false positives (half your apps are viruses all of a sudden), or it makes your PC crawl -- sometimes all 3 (*cough*Norton*cough*). NOD32 has a pretty good detection rate (right behind Kaspersky), very low false positives (better than Kaspersky), and is very lightweight (far better than Kaspersky -- at least v2.7, haven't tried v3). NOD32 is definitely top notch. It's the only AV that managed to score "advanced+" in last month's av-comparative's tests. Of course there's a lot more to it, like not introducing bugs, how the interface is, how often the definition are updated, extra features, pricing, etc... But even just considering those 3 basic things, most already fail. Either ways, I don't use one.

Must be something with your drivers or config... My 1 year old E2160 (even with 2GB) plays H.264 (unrestricted profile) @ 1080p @ any bitrate, with 5.1 sound and all no problems. No choppyness or anything ever, and that's with all the decoding done in software (no fancy vid card with AVIVO or anything like that -- a crappy low end GeForce POS). There's just no reason for your box not to handle DVD quality stuff, when lots of people got that working on P3's, and the problem isn't Vista by itself.

Why get updates from elsewhere? And why install the old crappy RTM (pre-SP1) too? Slipstream SP3 in your old disc and install using that. WU should have the subsequent updates. Vista works fine too (assuming you have a "modern" box).

I disagree. It doesn't actually do either thing he's asking for, and I'd say it's quite a waste of $99...

Applying common sense? What's this world coming down to? I must have woken up in a parallel universe this morning 300x200 is a truly great resolution to show your desktop, just see mine (Vista, taskbar on auto-hide, sidebar hidden, black background): * Besides, I don't see why anyone would expect large images in a thread related to screenshots. (My sarcasm meter is reading off the scale, it must be broken or something!) * Fine print: not an actual screenshot

One word: OpenDNS. I'll let you block individual sites if you want (LAN-wide), but even better, just pick whatever categories of sites you don't want users to visit at work (pr0n sites, gambling sites, warez, etc) and just put a checkmark next to those categories, done! 99.9% of end users wouldn't know how to change their DNS settings by hand regardless. And it only takes like 5 minutes to setup.

Everything *YOU* need from it, isn't the same as it doing EVERYTHING the other does! That's EXACTLY what I meant by "catching up with Nero 4" i.e. just got the basic burning stuff now (that's been in nero for like forever), and none of the other stuff (no matter if you actually want it or not). Sorry, but it still is. Mind you, I don't use any of those features myself either, but I know a lot of people who do. Personally, I'm happy with ImgBurn for most things (InfraRecorder probably does less, and at best, does nothing extra I actually care for)

LOL! As if there's even a chance of that happening. Do you expect them to allow ad blockers too? Keeping your life's history on a gigantic cluster and serving ads is what they do. I don't expect them to change their ways anytime soon. The whole point of Chrome was to try to replace browsers that more or less all have ad blockers these days (like Firefox with adblock plus, opera's built-in one, or even IE8's new privacy mode thing). It's understandable an advertising company is trying to prevent the death of their business model (I'd call that grasping at straws), and to stop even financing tools that work against them (like funding Firefox development, when most users end up installing ABP).

It seems like a couple things combined: The server's TCP window seems to behave somewhat normally. Perhaps it should scale down quicker (overloaded server perhaps), as the ACKs very quickly start to lag behind the packets being sent. That would likely prevent it from running into 0-sized window (as in, it can't process any more data right now), but it should still work despite of that, as you've noticed using the other box. Its size is probably kept to 0 that longer in the first capture because of all the network problems i.e. dupe ACKs (over 150!) and retransmits (tons of them too) -- those are definitely NOT normal. In the 2nd capture, there are exactly 0 dupe ACKs and no fast retransmits (that's what you expect to see normally, not 10%+ of "bad" packets like in the first capture) If anything, I'd blame the connection going to the box that runs IE7. Try swapping around both boxes, and then try again. The box with IE7 just might now work, and the IE6 box fail. Might be your network card, might be the wiring/patch cable, might be the switch port, ... Something's dropping packets somewhere, and a lot of them. Even the very first packet being sent (#8 in the capture), gets ACK'ed 3 times (packets #11, 14 and 16) -- the server probably "thinking" your box didn't receive them, as it didn't get the following packets, and then your box proceeds to retransmit the next 3 packets. And then it fails to ACK like 8 packets altogether (likely didn't receive them).... And the list goes on and on, until it ultimately fails. You can already tell this transfer is NEVER going to work. It's perfectly normal that your browser eventually gives up trying after all this. So check your network. It's not the web browser at fault here. And it's most likely not the server either, seeing how it works alright with the other box (not scaling down the TCP window size as quickly as I'd like it to still isn't a big problem). Poking around the registry won't fix this either. Edit: that barely looked like english, hopefully it's understandable now...

Not quite! Those 2 only seem to concentrate on data disc burning (which is admittedly the main part of what I do), and for this imgburn works even better IMO. imgburn has a couple shortcomings (e.g. no blu-ray support & no lightscribe). Also, some options are a bit "out of the way" so most people don't find them (like in the "Build" mode, "Advanced" tab, there's a "Bootable Disc" sub-tab nicely hidden quite deep; or how you have to create a cue sheet first to burn an audio cd -- not intuitive for most!) Nero will do all this and WAY more... From authoring DVD stuff, reencoding videos, reencoding audio, CDs and DVDs of all kinds (bootable, mixed, audio, etc), has a movie player, will encode (and do basic editing of) videos in H.264, burns to Blu-Ray discs, does lightscribe, has a sound editor, a cover editor, and all kinds of other stuff. Others are still mostly playing catch-up with say, Nero 4 in terms of features (burns basic data discs and little more). imgburn handles 95% of my burning needs these days (and at 8MB, it's a LOT smaller than any recent version of Nero, stripped or not). It'll probably get Blu-Ray support soon too.

You could capture the network traffic (during an upload) using Wireshark, then we can hopefully see what goes wrong & makes it fail. We got nothing to work from here, so all we can do is guess.

Yeah, I figured as much. Our profit margins are also a lot higher (and our stuff isn't made in China/Korea or such). Anyways. DOA happens regardless. Packaging problems, all chips have failure rates, soldering problems, problems with the assembly, ... And then again, I'd say ~3/4 of our returns are perfectly working products (user error mainly), and about 3/4 of the rest is due to something the user did (managed to plug it backwards, dropped it, etc). There won't ever be a mass-produced product that won't get returns.