CoffeeFiend

Could be a lot of things still. A lot of such old boards (from the AGP era) are known to have bad caps. Could be a bad/weak PSU (quite likely, especially in such old boxes). I've never, ever seen a BIOS chip go bad like that on its own (neither in another "non-PC" device). The odds of you having 3 bad boards, with 3 faulty BIOS chips is less than one in a million. Unless you happen to know they've been flashed by some mentally challenged person, who felt like unplugging the power half-way through the process. If I had to bet, I'd pick the PSUs.

I got 2 daughters about the same age. Same here and that works out great. They've asked to have one moved to their room, and the answer's always been NO (a lot of parents need to learn saying that word sometimes). A PC in their room is just asking for trouble, and then I'd feel like they have something to hide anyways, and I'd probably end up "spying" on them all the time too. Most of their browsing is either sites with flash games, wikipedia, and youtube. I might try Vista's parental controls soon. But if you want to see where they've been, there's always very simple things you can do first, like checking the web browser history.

It's not all bad I was mostly suggesting a Core 2 Duo (over a phenom anyways). A fast quad core helps for encoding, but that's about it. Mind you I do a lot of encoding and don't even have one myself. Which is pretty much what I've been saying from the start Yes, it's quad core, but it sucks. It's not exactly fast, just inexpensive, and even then... Actually, there are some real world tests / benches of it now, and it performs quite well. I just saw some real prices a couple days ago too, and it's not that bad even. The basic i7 920 is like $300, which isn't all that bad considering it beats a $500+ Q9650. Motherboard with X58 chipset? MSI has an OK board (X58/ICH10R, 6 DDR3 slots, 2 PCI-e 2.0 x16, etc) for $220, which isn't too bad either, considering the "good" LGA775 boards cost around $150 to begin with ($70 extra isn't bad at all for something so cutting edge). DDR3 costs a bit more, but it's come down in price a lot too. Give it a few months, and it'll soon become very affordable. I'm already looking forward to buying one. Depends who you ask I guess. It's by far the most important thing for encoding, but like I said before, it's only going to be a small part of what he does with his box (and even when it comes to encoding, the phenom still sucks). Antec 300? Exactly what I said. PSU? Would be in Zxian's recommendations too (mind you, I'd rather go for something else personally). Just saying', not everybody was saying completely incorrect stuff all along. Anyways. There's a few quality PSUs out there. Asus and Gigabyte make great boards (and P45-based boards are a good buy for sure). CPU wise, I would probably spend the extra $30 (like puntoMX said) for the E5200, but again, both are good options (the E7200 isn't too shabby either). RAID would sure help. Hard disks are the slowest thing in a computer, by FAR. A pair of decently fast disks (e.g. the 640GB WD640AAKS) in RAID0 helps a great deal. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING you can buy EVER will be future proof. There will always be something better/faster/newer around the corner. But anyways. A machine with specs similar to what you mentioned should be usable for a few years regardless.

No complaints there whatsoever. It's a matter of preferences I guess. It has a nvidia chipset on it, so I [personally] definitely wouldn't buy it at any price (I like stability). It's not exactly the most recent chipset either (it's a couple years old). Nothing really amazing... Definitely not. No Active PFC, not 80+, not modular, no OTP, etc. It's built by acbel polytech (meh). The label doesn't show combined power ratings (they'd rather you not know likely), and if it's like the other "eXtreme Power" models, even using those combined ratings, their power is easily overstated by 100W and the ripple level is unimpressive. Not really a amazing set of connectors, and again if it's like their other models, the wires' gauge is barely adequate (if that)... Or if it's anything like acbel's similar-ish "iPower 660" model, then it's even worse (it barely manages to supply 350W at a real-life operating temperature). There's FAR better out there for the money. Look for Zxian's posts in the hardware section for some suggestions.

Which motherboard would entirely depend on your CPU choice, and specific features you might need or not (SLI/crossfire, firewire, spdif outs, etc) Case is very much a question of personal preferences and budget. Cheap and decent, you could go for something like an Antec 300 (like $50, good airflow and all). There's nicer cases out there, if you want to spend more (mind you, more than half the cases costing more still suck hard). It comes down to how much space you need (like drive bays, or space for bigger coolers), airflow (a LARGE amount of cases completely SUCK at this, and it's quite important) amd noise (120mm fans are quieter and move more air than 80mm ones), how it looks (a LOT of people value looks over function -- like those annoying door things in front of cases), features it might have (e.g. front audio/USB/eSATA ports), how well built it is, is it tool-less, how stuff is mounted inside (orientation of drive bays, PSU at the top or bottom, etc) and some more factors. It's almost like buying a car...

Just a quick point: the mem usage column in task manager isn't actually what you'd think it is. Everything is named in weird misleading ways. What you want is actually called private bytes, and under XP's task manager, it's labelled as "VM Size" (not there by default). And you can't calculate this easy, due to shared pages, address ranges used by hardware (and also things like onboard video that may use a fair bit), limits of the x86 architecture and what not. We could discuss this for a hundred posts easily. If you want to look at how much memory (virtual, physical, etc) as well as other resources some apps take, use Process Explorer, not the crappy and very misleading task manager.

I try to keep it neat, but put a few workstations, a set of 5.1 speakers (a few fiber optic & coax cables), a 4 port KVM switch, a printer, scanner, cradles for various devices, keyboard/mouse/trackball/intuos, chargers, monitor, power to everything, LAN wiring, ATA (for VOIP), some more coax for capturing A/V stuff, a few network devices (routers, switches, etc)... Add to that home theater stuff, phones, gaming consoles and such nearby... It quickly turns into something that looks like spaghetti no matter how hard I try.

There's still some alright basic KVMs for cheap indeed. I had pretty good luck with ATEN myself (4 port, USB, probably $20 extra). However, I'd just about kill for my dream KVM: 4 port, two dual-link DVI (must support two LCDs @ 2560x1600 for future-proofing), USB and spdif for audio. I wouldn't care if it costs $1000. It's easy to find the non-dual head no spdif kind though (seen them around $200). Oh well.

I had no issues for over a week, and somehow it just started happening again... Oh well. Edit: the cookies are being set properly. The expiry date on the member id and password hash is set to the time I logged in + 1 year. Looks like it's a problem with IPB.

Wow, another old POS. Anyways, here. Not that it really fixes much.

Ah, that key. It's registered by wmpshell.dll (another reason not to use that WMP POS) Reg tweak to get rid of it: Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\Directory.Audio\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\WMPShopMusic]

It was probably me indeed. And yes, it does work great. The two main differences between workstation and server (for most practical purposes): -workstation has a snapshot manager (which can be useful for testing some stuff) which server lacks -server is also meant to start VMs without you having to login on your PC (not that anything forces you to make use of the feature) So unless snapshots are worth $189 to you, then sure, VMWare Server works fine for testing.

Depends what you're looking for (internal/external, what card formats is has to support. I just bought one of those card readers last week actually (don't need the ugly 3 1/2 -> 5 1/4 faceplate). But then again, there are plenty of others, who might have other stuff on them like eSATA (which sometimes don't actually work at all like on some ngear models) and USB (which I already have 6 of in front of my case) or even firewire. Hub wise, no idea. It's been a lot of years since I bought one. Computers have so many USB ports these days... Between the motherboard ports, ports at the front of my case, and the extra 2 on a bracket, I have 12 USB ports available already, and most of the time I'm only using a couple. And plenty of other devices also have some built-in (e.g. my monitor and an old spare keyboard I got laying around).

The player is meant for using existing VMWare Images, not creating them.

If it's just a file server, then why not just leave it headless? Just remote in every once in a while using remote desktop, vnc, or whatever you like (tons of options here). Looks mean nothing (if anything, it looks like a cheap toy to me). And I seriously wonder how much use most people would make out of a remote. Just how often you'd be switching to the file server in the first place? And why even take your hands off the keyboard then, to reach the remote (desktop clutter IMO), when every KVM has hotkeys? (usually, you double tap some key like scroll lock or such, then type a number for the port, then enter -- which keys exactly depend on the switch itself). You need to look into it more. It's not just a matter of "will it work with my current keyboard/mouse?". What if you get a new keyboard next week or month? Would it be PS/2 or USB? What if it's wireless? Some of those wireless "combos" use only 1 "receiver" for both devices, and some KVMs don't like that. Some KVMs don't work too good with Logitech devices either (like an old 4 port PS/2 Belkin KVM I gave away, the scroll wheel wouldn't ever work, and it would go crazy every once in a while). Then again, that KVM only has one VGA port (not DVI), so it's not exactly what I'd call modern or future proof. Cheap KVMs often have nasty ghosting problems at high video resolutions & high refresh rates too (it's analog...) No audio either, but then again I find analog audio useless (no spdif on any of them unfortunately).

VMWare Workstation is better IMO. It has more advanced features, but then again you might not need those at all, and VMWare Workstation is $189 (vs free for VPC).

A truly great set of switched video inputs (4 HDMI 1.3a, 3 Component, 6 S-Video, 6 Composite) with upscaling & Faroudja, 8 digital sound inputs (counting the HDMI ports too), 7.1, 192/24, every AC3/DTS codec you could ask for pretty much (including everything HD formats like Blu-Ray might use), plenty of power, great specs overall... It's not perfect, but for the price (especially when on special), it's pretty darn hard to beat. Sure, it's no match for a Denon AVP-A1HDCI, but it ain't 8G's either. As for specials, wait around boxing day. That's where they put the old 605 on special for like $300 IIRC (clearing out old stock at year end seemingly). And again, the problem might be something else than heat, or in part a heat-related issue... For all I know, it could even be an issue with their design (I've seen my fair share of such cases).

Most of the time you get what you pay for unfortunately. My Yahama receiver was more expensive than that, and although it actually works with 2 spdif sources (coax & optical), it still has a LOT of shortcomings... Missing adjustments, very few digital inputs, few video inputs, no video upscaling, no DCDi or anything similar, etc. Hence why I'll be getting an Onkyo TX-SR606. I've seen them on special before, near half price (so not much more than you paid). Definitely. Electronics don't like heat/need proper ventilation/airflow. Try uncovering it, see what happens then.

That has nothing to do with your PC. The receiver should be able to handle any 2 streams, whatever might send them, without doing this kind of stuff. If it's under warranty I'd contact Yamaha to RMA it. Chances are the SPDIF decoder chip (or DSP or whatever it's inside of) overheats or such when you try to make it decode/process 2 streams. If it's not under warranty and that you're handy with electronics, you could open it and check the temps on the chips (see if something could use a heat sink). Could be plenty of other things, but that's one of the most plausible causes. I'll be replacing my Yahama receiver with an Onkyo sometime soon

Very much so. If you have 2 CPU intensive apps running, change the priorities, you'll see a big change in the CPU usage of both instantly.

Looks like a problem with your hard disk. Could be the disk itself, the cable/connection or a number of other issues (bad drivers, etc). It would be a good idea to look at the SMART status, and perhaps running scandisk. Lots of possibilities, and it's hard for us to just guess.

[edit] post before mine just got deleted, please delete this one too...

Completely true, for now. That's what I was afraid of. Their upcoming CPUs are only going to basically match or very slightly overperform existing Core 2 Quads And by the time all that good stuff is out, then i7 already won't be looking quite as overpriced anymore...

Price? Depends. It'x cheaper than i7 for sure (then again, what isn't?) Otherwise, all other chips are cheaper pretty much. Performance? i7 wins here hands down. Then the fancier Intel quad cores, then phenom's and/or fast C2Ds depending on the task at hand... Stability? All CPUs should be a total non-issue. Stability will mainly be affected by the drivers, hence by the chipset used by the board (and also your vid card, etc) as well as overall hardware quality (e.g. a $20 no-name PSU doesn't make for a very stable box). CPU isn't the big issue here. Agreed. QX is just expensive. Although I'm very much surprised by your post! No comments on my *completely* off-topic USB -> multi serial crazy design? What kind of EE are you? Are you avoiding such talk not to sound like a geek? (too late, we already know!) I'm shocked!

yes. Why is that? There's totally free & legit software that's FAR better for the job... And tons of commercial options too. IE is the worst browser, and it truly sucks at FTP (rather unsurprisingly: it's a web browser, not a ftp client). Plus, it likely won't work for a lot of people, depending on their config options (things like PASV mode), and they tend to misbehave (open more connections than necessary, not close them, etc). It's pretty ghetto. Also, security wise, FTP is never the best choice, as credentials are sent unencrypted and such. And if you have it on port 21 and such, you'll likely have script kiddies trying to hack it (I'd keep a good eye on the logs all the time! trying dictionary attacks on it, trying every known exploit code against it, trying to tag it, trying ftp bounce attacks, etc) Lots of other little things (like having to open a port range in your firewall for it to work "fully") No version of Windows comes with a "real" FTP server. It does however come with a web/app server (IIS), which can be "shoehorned" into a FTP server. IIS truly rocks as a web (ASP.Net apps) & app server (server middleware), but when it comes to FTP, it's possibly the worst server I've ever seen (it's great except for FTP). But like jaclaz said, you need to make yourself familiar with the basic concepts of networking, TCP/IP, FTP and such to do such things.