CoffeeFiend

Yet another vote for gmail. Ditto. Can't say the same about other services unfortunately.

Nah. It's just that some topics take a bit of time to answer thoroughly, and sometimes we all get lazy That can also be an issue. I totally understand it might all seem a bit complicated for some (basically everybody in computing eventually hit their level where it just becomes too complicated -- some just reach that point faster). But it's also hard for us to judge between those that need the help, and those just too lazy to do their own "homework". Start with the simple things. Forget about the domain for now, you can work that part out later once your FTP works. Basic steps: Install some FTP server app (there's dozens of those, use whatever you like best/suits your needs) Setup some basic account you can use to connect with (test it locally to make sure it works before bothering with the following steps) Open the necessary ports in your router and/or firewall (all depends on your network config, what port(s) you setup the FTP server to use, etc) Also note some ISPs actually block port 21/80 and such (and lots of script kiddies scan those common service ports specifically, and then try to hack into them...) This should make it work from the outside Setup PASV mode and such things (so it works when you're both being NAT and all that), you might a dyndns entry for that, and to open a port range for it Setup the other stuff e.g. user accounts/permissions and all that stuff Ideally, you'd need someone to help you test it (see if it works remotely/ports are open). Anyways. Myself I don't open ports for that kind of stuff, if I want something, I just VPN in.

Well, that's a bit of both really. MySQL might have limited full text search abilities, but if we let everyone search for 2 or 3 letter words (which would often be included in 3/4 of the posts), you can already imagine the results I'm sure. Even big search engines like Google disregard "common" words. There's just no practical way to search for such things. Results are pretty good in most cases. I can count the number of times I couldn't find the post I was looking for (in over 4 years) on one hand...

Like for any search engine, it's a matter of using the right keywords. If the results aren't what you're expecting, then try different ones... Also, google search works well if you know how to use it. Then again, those who do can already find what they're looking for using plain old google (e.g. by adding bits like site:msfn.org to your query). If Google ain't good enough for the job, I dunno what people can expect us to come up with for a simple forum. If we were that good at that kind of stuff, we'd be starting our own search engine likely. In any case, it's no worse than for any other forum I've seen (or newsgroups, or ...)

Of course (or I could get a truckload of USB->RS232 adapters), but that means one less slots for RAID/SATA/NIC/Video/DVB/ATSC/whatever else cards (or even things like eSATA or USB2 ports on brackets)... And since most motherboards still have it, I won't settle for one without it -- especially at that price. I've considered building a device with a couple USB hub chips + several FT232R chips though (or the FT4232HL even; throw in a couple voltage regs like the LM2594 too)... It could have a few banks of 4 outputs with either DB9 outs/RJ45 outs/TTL-level outs on pin headers, etc. It would come in handy a LOT (just no time to route the board & all that). Perhaps I should get a cheap 6 port card built around a MCS9845CV chip meanwhile. Oh well. LOTS of things I won't make a list, it would be just too long.

You're not kidding! It's like $250 at ncix (and still no serial ports...) I've seen LGA775 boards just as nice (unless you actually care for 4x PCI-e x16) under $100

Very strange. I've only ever seen that problem on XP, and it was due to some program interfering (close it, and it worked fine).

Intel already has some 6 core CPUs (Dunnington), but I'm not too worried about that yet. There's still a lot of stuff that can only make use of a single core... 2 cores is a LOT nicer than one, 4 better than 2, but at some point... That's the real issue I guess. What I want, is a board without that... With OSes like Vista & Win 7 making use of the GPU, as well as new apps making use of it (e.g. Adobe CS4 suite & flash player), it's getting more important. 128MB isn't enough even for non-gamers, and I don't want it to use my system memory for that. I'm going to use a ATI card regardless. After a lot of searching, I finally found one half decent AM2+ board: the Gigabyte GA-MA790X-DS4 (same price as a very nice P45 board pretty much), which still isn't exactly what I'd call perfect (only 4 SATA, no eSATA, only 6 USB, no parallel... and seemingly the mosfets tend to overheat too)

Hopefully so! I'll have a peek when we get more details. However, what's the odds of Deneb CPUs performing well (and being well priced) and also new motherboards being nice too (not wasting space for crappy onboard video with only 128MB)? I'm not getting my hopes up just yet. Firewire isn't that good for external drives, mainly because most computers don't have the port (making it mostly useless) and also because eSATA is MUCH nicer. As for pro AV equipment, Inever had any (at home at least), don't plan on ever buying any either (like most people). I've actually used firewire ports a few times (debug sessions, ibot webcam, networking pre-Gbit ethernet, etc), but I just don't have a need for it (less than ever), and don't foresee ever needing one again. USB3 should make it even more pointless (soon-ish). Even Apple is getting rid of it. In fact, I got like 4 PCI Firewire cards to get rid of...

Exactly. I wouldn't run it on anything less than 2GB myself. I'm sure it works on less, but if you want decent performance with some apps open and all... Yeah. You can get 2x2GB of fast DDR2 for like $50 these days. I had more RAM than that in my PC like 8 years ago. I somehow doubt that box has a fast CPU either. It's probably barely enough to run XP (unless you like waiting a lot).

First, find out what's causing the problem -- the router or the NIC/computer. Does your computer have an IP then? Does it say the cable is disconnected? Does the NIC appear "normally" in device manager? Does the router reboot? Does rebooting the router solve the problem? What activity lights do you have on the NIC and router? Have you tried an spare NIC? Can any other computers connect to the web when this one can't? Have you tried a different patch cable? ...

Unfortunately that's true I'm at the point where I'll delay building those 2 boxes a couple months if I have to, in order for i7 to be cheaper, or to see if the latest AMD stuff is worth it (AM3 boards mainly)... AM2 stuff doesn't perform good enough IMO, Socket 775 is dead, and i7 is too bloody expensive right now. All we got is 3 bad options (teh suck/dead/bloody expensive) Well, I looked a fair bit. Based on previous experience, I'll avoid anything using nvidia stuff at all costs (video or chipset, be it on a AMD or Intel board), so that already rules out a large amount of them. And then again, AMD boards all seem to sacrifice the nicer ports on the back panel (almost never serial/parallel, few USB, not always spdif/toslink, often no eSATA nor PS/2...) just to include onboard video which typically only has 128MB (already not enough memory, and no dual DVI) that I'm not going to use anyways, and sometimes a firewire port for which I never had a use. I just haven't seen a single AM2+ board I like, at any price point Now if there was something much like a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4P, but with a AM3 socket, I'd buy one (assuming their next CPUs are also decent).

The title may suggest so, but if you look at his description, it's more like a general purpose PC that will also do some editing: "This PC will mainly be used for internet, word, music, movies, DVD burning, Macromedia Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and of course gaming." And the vast majority of these tasks will run better on a dual core, than a quad core with slow cores (anything but encoding, and even then not with all apps & codecs). The phenom is just a poor choice for most tasks overall. It's not even for sale in most stores yet, so of course it's expensive now. Give it a year or so and it'll come down in price a LOT as it becomes mainstream. It slaughters all other quads at winrar, xvid & divx encoding (likely x264 too), Mainconcept encoder, Premiere, Cinema 4D (pretty much anything video editing/encoding related seemingly) and most other CPU intensive stuff (just about everything I looked at). Sounds good to me. Yeah, it has a slight lead in some hand-picked benches. Too bad that for each gaming benchmark where it wins by a slight margin, there's a few dozen others that show it losing. If anything, that makes Lost Planet an exception... Anyways. Its his choice. I sure ain't buying a phenom anytime soon (unless they drop the price by half or something, but even then the performance is still unimpressive). If AMD wants to sell me a CPU (I'm building 2 new boxes right after xmas), Deneb better bring real performance boosts and be well priced too. And even then, I wonder what AM3 boards will be like (I just don't care for most AM2+ boards out there).

Much like everything else these days (including xvid like you mentioned). That's precisely what I'm saying. You can get decent performance now, for cheap. Yes, spend more money later, to hopefully will even match the old Q6600's performance... I'd sooner go with a Q6600 now (which despite of being so old, still beats the absolute fastest phenom available...) First, you take for granted it'll actually work, whereas the recent past tends to show otherwise (no, you need a AM2+ socket for that phenom, won't work in that old AM2 board! -- and nevermind the TDP issues and other stuff). Plus, motherboard makers have a strong incentive NOT to (as in, selling you a new board to make more profit). Same thing about their performance to have "much improved". They claimed the exact same for the Phenoms, and they've been quite deceiving overall, forcing them to do price cut after price cut to try to sell any... And by the time his CPU is too outdated and that he's looking for an upgrade, chances are we'll pretty much all have moved to DDR3 and such anyways, and a whole bunch of new stuff as usual. There will likely be plenty of reasons to get a new board regardless, and "future proofing" your computer usually doesn't work all that great. So your rationale is buy something that sucks now/gets beaten by a cheap dual core CPU on 99% of tasks, with hopes it can be upgraded to something decent in a few years by spending some more again. Personally I'll just buy a new Nehalem CPU + new kick a** mobo (X58/ICH10R, 6 DDR3 slots, loads of PCi-e lanes, etc) + fast DDR3 ram then -- probably for not much more either (and it'll likely still beat AMD's offerings' performance by a large margin still).

And then again, it's not an isolated benchmark result e.g. it's also faster for winrar and such. Single threaded perf on the Phenoms is pretty bad. It's cheap for a reason, and even at that price (reduced many times) it ain't selling too well... If the performance was actually good, they could charge more, heh. DivX? It probably ties, or it must be REAL close (the dual core E8200 still beats that phenom). Totally un-impressive for a quad core that's 50% more expensive and more power hungry. Again, it all comes down to: do you want to pay 50% more for a CPU with poor single threaded perf that will suck at everything but the one or two tasks that'll make use of all 4 cores (where it's still not that impressive, doubly so considering it gets pwned even by a much older Q6600). He also mentioned he wanted to play some games, and the cheaper E7200 slaughters the phenom for that unsurprisingly.

Moot point. He's not OCing. How does that make it moot? Overclocking or not, 4 slow cores (with pretty bad single threaded perf) isn't really better than 2 fast cores. Again, the E7200 at ~$140 beats a ~$200 phenom X4 on many benches. No overclocking involved anywhere. The phenom will be slower at most tasks. Except the handful that can actually make use of all 4 cores, in which case it's still quite unimpressive. Like I said, the E7200 is 25% faster than that slow Phenom at XviD encoding, and that's without overclocking or anything (if you OC that E7200, it'll leave the phenom in the dust on 99% of tasks).

Why even use an external exe for something so simple, instead of the Terminate method of the Win32_Process class? (fully documented on MSDN and all, just google it). Unless that doesn't work in a HTA (can't say I bothered trying).

You might not find it annoying, but that doesn't mean others don't. Pointlessly reviving old threads for no reason is quite annoying to many.

Not so. XP Home was meant for home users but not XP Pro. XP was just as much a replacement/improvement over their existing win2k. Most businesses are running XP these days too. It's not like they only want a subset of their user base to upgrade. But hey, we can keep doing this for a good while: Oh yeah, and when MS started hyping up Win2k, it certainly meant they had given up trying to repair NT4's image and only wants to leave it behind as soon as practical! ... Oh yeah, and when MS started hyping up DOS 3.3, it certainly meant they had given up trying to repair DOS 3.2's image and only wants to leave it behind as soon as practical! ... This is nothing new. All companies do this. It's exactly the same as if he had said Sony is hyping up the PS3 because they gave up on trying to make the PS2 not look like the worst failure ever, or BMW is hyping up this year's model of their flagship car because the old one sucked too darn bad. Whereas, it's just business as usual.

You don't need asm for that. Direct access is possible in most languages (as long as the underlying OS lets you do it). You can also write ISR's in several languages (e.g. C and C++ -- you could even do it in turbo pascal back in the DOS days). It's nice having "lightweight" ISRs though. I guess I won't be of any help with Delphi, I quit using Borland stuff in the Win95 days (over 10 years ago) and haven't looked back. Anyways. Have fun

Most people seem to have missed a critical part of the first post: Unless you're on a static IP (most ISPs charge extra for that), then using a plain old domain name will mean downtime every time your IP changes (for you to realize it stopped working, then updating it, and changes to propagate). For those type of scenarios, there's really only 1 solution: DynDNS's custom DNS service (perhaps others have a similar service, I never actually looked). Your DynDNS client app will make it update the IP "instantly" (just like for any usual DynDNS entry), with no downtime. I never personally bothered, as my up speed sucks way too bad for any practical "server" use (0.9mbit). And to VPN in and such, a plain old DynDNS entry works just as well (no harder to remember than whatever long domain name you can come up with these days -- pretty much anything you can think of is already taken).

Not much people write asm by hand these days. There's 2 main fields where you still see it: -places where stuff has to be really optimized (like video codecs) -- and even then, normally it's just minimal parts that get "optimized" (profile it, see what could benefit most from it first) -embedded systems (and even then, C is pretty mainstream there these days, and C++ is slowly being adopted -- especially on "bigger" MCUs) I still know my x86 asm quite well, but it's been a long time since I've bothered to write any (haven't had to in many years). Most of what I write for desktops (or servers for that matter) is C#. However, I've written a fair bit of motorola-ish asm for embedded platforms. Writing software in asm requires a LOT of time and it takes a lot of lines of code. So it's very slow to develop and costs a LOT of money.

It wasn't an analogy (no cars involved anywhere either!). It was sarcasm. Attempt #2: Oh yeah, and when MS started hyping up XP, it certainly meant they had given up trying to repair Win2k's image and only wants to leave it behind as soon as practical! rolleyes.gif See? It never was the case. They've always been doing that, just like any business. Nah. They're doing exactly what they've always been doing about every version of their OS ever, or much like 99%+ of corporations are doing with their products. Business as usual. It's no different. Looking into my crystal ball, I can already see them hyping up Win 8 once Win 7 has been out for a few months! (what an amazing prophecy! I must have psychic powers of some sort ) That must be because Win 7 will suck too? And then what about when it happens with Win 9? Right. Business as usual: companies trying to sell their products. Nothing to see here, move along.

When it comes to encoding, a fast quad core is great to have for sure (4 slow cores isn't always much better than 2 fast ones though), especially if you plan on encoding high-def content in H.264... It's been years since I've done analog capture (eww), but most people recommend Hauppauge cards for this. Better solutions cost more (and would blow away your budget real fast). Then forget about i7! A fast i7 CPU by itself could easily cost $800 when it'll be out (cutting edge stuff is very expensive. And forget about the faster quad cores (i.e. not the "low-end" phenoms) pretty much... It's hard to get a cutting edge/high performance box on a budget unfortunately. You can get a quality box of average performance out of that budget, and that's pretty much it (especially if you also want to do things like gaming i.e. have to devote a sizable part of that budget towards a fast vid card). Even the "old" Q6600 beats the Phenom X4 9550 hands down in premiere benches (~25% faster). The Phenom is cheap for a reason... That CPU scores no faster than some mid-range dual cores on many benches e.g. winzip -- a cheap E7200 is 35% faster. It's also 25% faster than that Phenom at XviD encoding. Not bad considering it's cheaper, less power hungry, and manages to perform a lot better on half the cores...

Anyone tried the VS 2010 CTP? PDC 2008 showcased some really exciting & great features, but it's a 7GB download (VHD file split in 11 RAR's), and I'm not too sure how long the trial works (when it expires). Also, I got that feeling it might run better on a x64 box with loads of RAM (so you can give it more), and reinstalling from scratch just for that is a little bit extreme... I'm all ears