CoffeeFiend

I hate to break it to you, but it's not the case at all. Their stats have always sucked. Just look at the stats from any other such company and you'll see. One prime example of that: hitslink (they have more than 4x the hits and much large number of sites tracked too i.e. far larger sample size, so statistically more accurate/more representative of the overall install base) Their numbers never seem to match any of their competitors (be it hitslink/net applications, statcounter which is even bigger, xiti, onestat, etc). A pretty pic of the overall trend for the last year and a bit here. Nobody else seems to have noticed a similar "trend" (myself included -- we typically have 0 hits/month from Win9x boxes on our site). When your "increase" shows up on the more reputable counters (and I don't mean as a unexplained statistic fluctuation for a single month but rather as some kind of "ongoing" trend), then you can call it an increase. Right now, it's anything but that. And that pretty much makes my point. Every other site out there has been seeing record increases in Vista and Mac OS's market shares for many months straight, and decreases with Win9x (even a decrease in Linux this month according to some). And yet again, their numbers are the inverse as everybody else's... The biggest runners up all of a sudden losing ground to the one that's actually been losing the most for a long time? Ya, sure... Oh yeah, and when MS started hyping up Vista, it certainly meant they had given up trying to repair WinXP's image and only wants to leave it behind as soon as practical! Companies trying to hype up their latest/greatest to promote sales in order to make $ for their shareholders? Tell me it ain't so! Vista rocks! Flame on...

Unfortunately, there is no "complete" comparison of the main popular ones. A grid with basic features only says so much. Some work with more networks than others, others might be lacking specific features which may be important (or not all all) for you e.g. webcam. Or have advanced features which you might require (or not care for) too, like encryption plugins. Then again, those grids say nothing about the interface, the stability, or various issues with any of them. Trillian wise, last time I've seen someone use it (on IRC) was a while ago, but it was pretty annoying. The screen colors chosen by the user were "hardcoded" as the colors sent (i.e. they chose black text, then it sends text with a black color code -- nobody with a black background sees any of it, same for white, etc). Every client has its issues I guess. I'm happy with Pidgin myself. Not that I use it often...

XP can also run the Windows Performance Tools Kit (sucessor to Bootvis). At least the capturing tool... More infos here.

Personally, I found that 99% of renamers suck (the ones I tried at least). So instead I use a dumb vbscript that fills an array with the names of all the files, then loops thru it renaming all files. There's a "blank" spot in that loop, where you can type the code to manipulate the file names yourself (actually, there's pre-written ones commented out -- for the lazy). It's trivial to write, and it works great if you can handle a very simple scripting language. Replacing underscores with spaces would be as simple as: s = Replace(s, "_", " ") (you wouldn't even have to write that, just un-comment a line and put the underscore/space in there -- google for vbscript string replace or if you need explanations) Sure, it's not the most user-friendly "app", but I have yet to find an app that's half as powerful (again, assuming you can write a simple script), doesn't have confusing options and things you have to lookup (e.g. use %D for date and then use these complex parameters for formatting it a certain way), etc. You could even use regular expressions if you wanted to (more complicated though). Not for everyone I guess, but it's still the best thing I've "found" by far...

I thought about that one too. But the number of netbooks out there is likely quite low when you look at the big picture i.e. the millions of existing desktops & laptops (so low that I have yet to see one). I doubt it could really affect numbers that much. I dunno. It'll be interesting to see if the number bounces back up next month or continues to drop.

Updated graph! Linux took a BIG nosedive (a lot of people must be giving up on it, I can see why ). It's still 40% higher than Win9x's though (not that 40% more than a very small number means much). We'll see if it goes back up next month. Win9x market share is exactly at 1/2% and people are still abandoning that sinking ship real fast. The iPhone now has a bigger market share than Win98 or ME or 95. Another couple months like that and it'll tie with Win9x combined. Vista going to hit 20% next month, XP slowly getting closer to 65%. Also, Firefox market share is still on the rise (hit 20% twice in October), Chrome's market share finally settled at 0.7% or so just like Opera (IE8 beta is already close to beating them -- says a lot!)

Pidgin works fine.

Honestly I wonder why you waste time over such old junk. This is more than 10 years old, and was a cheap Pentium 1 clone that sucked even back then.

It's an older board: -Socket 478, not 775 -- it's been a LOT of years since I've seen a socket 478 CPU in any store, so you'd need to find one second hand. Supports P4's with a 800 MHz FSB up to 3.4 GHz. -it takes old DDR which costs more than DDR2 -old AGP 8x slot (no PCI-E) for they don't really make new vid cards for anymore (again, 2nd hand might be your best bet) ... Anyways. It's a fairly typical older P4 board. I wouldn't spend a dime on something that old personally. Especially when a LOT of motherboards from that era are known to have bad caps.

It's much like your old PCI video cards (cheapo SE version of a cheapo MX card -- very low end even for years ago, and a 486-era Trident card). Neither is actually good. Two outdated codecs (the ALS4000 is at least 10 years old, the other one very similar). A very crappy 5$ no-name sound card is better. $20 motherboards (yuck) on clearance have better audio onboard too. In fact, I was thinking a few months ago about listing my old SB Live 5.1 Platinum (worlds better than this) on ebay with no reserve, but even at $0.99 they get *zero* bids. Tells you how much your cards are worth.

Good joke! A pre-AGP board (paired with an old very, very low end budget PCI vid card and an ancient ancient budget celeron Socket 370 CPU no less) better than a modern P35-based board (and an overclocked Core 2 Duo). Right! Your PC would have stood a chance in such a "mine is bigger than yours" contest 10 years ago. In fact, a 1999 P3 chip (once OC'ed, on a good board, with fast RAM & disk, and with its 4x bigger L2 cache than yours) would most lilely beat it on a lot of benches...

Not at all! The heaviest thing this card will ever run is Aero Glass pretty much. Well, eventually I might upgrade to photoshop CS4 which is supposed to be able to use GPUs to speedup things (not sure how much effect it'll make). The only real features I'm looking for are: not nvidia garbage does H.264 decoding in hardware if possible i.e. Avivo/UVD (nvidia's system just ain't working at all, using any driver/decoder combo I've ever tried -- it was false advertising IMO) low power/quiet Looks like you can easily get a dual-DVI 3650 for $75 (everyday's price). It's PCI-E 2.0 and everything else. I guess it's as good as it gets, so I'll order one.

There's a 3 of them below $120 (all 3 having dual DVI too), so I may get one of those instead. There's also a 9800GT OC+ on sale for like $110, but I wouldn't want of it even at $10.

There's still like a dozen posts from 2004 or before being bumped up everyday (even some from 2002 today). Can't we just lock everything from before, say, 2005? I don't think anything that hasn't had a single answer in 3+ years is really of much interest anymore...

For the love of god, please stop bumping 50 topics from 2002 to 2004 everyday...

Yay! I was greeted with this nice window this morning when I was going to check the weather forecast: To keep with Sysdll's analogy, I'd say nvidia looks like crashesalotchrome to me (alright, that's not film... I miss shooting Velvia/Provia/Sensia though). I really got to order an ATI card sometime soon... Before I take the sledgehammer to this one at least. The new Radeon 4830 cards seem to be around $175 (a little too much for a complete non-gamer, and also considering the 4850 is only $15 more on special) unfortunately, and the only one in stock (Sapphire) at ncix is not dual DVI either (and the $15 extra 4850 is...)

I had a pretty good look at TeraCopy myself (the paid version) and its copy operations using 30MB chunks and all (time spent in process monitor, benchmarking, etc). I didn't really notice any improvement in performance overall. It only seemed to introduce a strange explorer GUI glitch (caused by its shell extension -- gone when it was removed). YMMV.

I'm not wrong. And yes, I'm well aware those hackintoshs. It's not legal though. OS X is sold exclusively to be run on Mac hardware, has fairly extreme DRM (a TPM module -- above and beyond what I've ever seen any other platform/software use for copy protection). You also have to pick hardware that's supported by it (it won't run on just any PC). Plus, you have no support then. As for MCE, I have absolutely no hope of it not sucking for once. Hell, it even seems to be getting worse with time. With the TV Pack 2008, you can't get ATSC tuners to work anywhere outside the USA (like in Canada). We've had ATSC feeds for quite a while, and we had to resort to workarounds to even enable the feature, and now they went out of their way to "fix" that too... It's even more useless than before, and I'd call that quite an accomplishment! Anyways. Windows 7 is looking like a decent successor to Vista. Some stuff if obviously improved a lot. Big enhancements to the taskbar: no large task buttons (already! I might not need 2 rows anymore) and taskbar shuffle-like abilities (just like I was wishing for) built-in. The system tray is improved too. Calc and paint are a LOT nicer (another thing I was wishing for). Very nice additions to networking, like HomeGroup. Lots of nice little things overall -- just like Vista has lots of of nice little things over XP. There's some more nice features, which actually seem to be good ideas overall, but I'm just not sure if they'll end up getting used much. Things like Device Stage -- which might be nice, but the XML needs to be signed by MS, so 100% useless for my existing Rockbox-running mp3 player and other devices. Same for multitouch displays. I had a peek, and it seems like a 24" touchscreen monitor is like $1000 extra (ouch). I don't see anyone running out replacing their already expensive monitors for even more expensive monitors just for that anytime soon, not with that price premium anyways.

We've been there several times before too... Short answer? Tapes? Sure, if you don't mind a $5000 tape library along with tons of tapes that cost as much per MB than hard drives pretty much, and backups far slower, using specialized software... CDs? Sure, if you don't mind burning the 17000 discs it takes, and then renting a warehouse to store them all! Restoring data from them would be fun too I'm sure... DVDs? Sure, if you don't mind burning the 2500 discs it takes (much better! only 50 full spindles per backup!) Blu-Ray writer? Sure, if you don't mind the $250 writer and the blanks that cost more than hard drives per MB (and that almost nobody can read yet). That leaves you with even more hard drives, yep! Edit: found my old answer to a similar question here (longer post, same idea)

That's what it comes down to. People often install junk and act carelessly, thinking they'll reinstall in 6 months anyways. I've seen many hundreds of those too (especially in office buildings). Working just as good as on the first day. Same goes for Win2k... Having to reinstall is a myth -- you only got to if you're doing something wrong. Hmm, no. Bits don't rot, they don't need to be "refreshed". It should be the same binaries regardless... Recopying the same DLL over shouldn't make things any faster. PCs get slower after people install 9823423 garbage shareware POS'es, heavy fragmentation, 7239213 more fonts installed (those hurt performance quite a bit, most people don't realize -- and the said garbage shareware POS'es tend to install many), dozens of unnecessary services for every little thing (bonjour garbage, itunes garbage, sun java updater, etc), a million systray icons (one for your vid card, one for the mouse, one for the wifi card, one for this, one for that...), malware in some cases, etc. If you try to be more careful and not just install every app you've ever heard of, and try to limit the amount of things running in the background (unnecessary services, processes, tray icons, etc) and such, then you'll see no reason to reinstall.

So now we do know for sure you're having DNS problems, and that your hosts file is good. Personally at this point I'd try resetting the TCP/IP stack. It shouldn't screw up anything. Just go start > run, and paste this in the box: netsh int ip reset c:\resetlog.txt A lot of malware likes to install itself into the TCP/IP stack (and prevent things like updating your box, so can't get rid of it), and this would put things back to their default settings. You could also post a hijackthis log, and we'll have a look. There's just no reason for just that one site not to resolve, I just can't see it being anything else than malware at this point (it's not like your ISP's DNS servers wouldn't resolve MS update...)

I was exactly there last year. How about DVI + VGA + HDMI + Component + S-video + composite? And 24"? Check, check, check, check, check, ... It does all that. How about super-crisp, 1920x1200 res, excellent viewing angles (only very expensive S-IPS panels are better -- this one's a P-MVA by AU Optronics), and it does have 3 USB ports (2 on left, 1 on top for webcam). $400 is "around" that I guess. The answer: a BenQ FP241W. I would have went for a 24" Dell Ultrasharp with a S-IPS panel instead, but it was like $300 more... This is the next best thing I found after doing a LOT of searching back then.

Expensive RAID cards can be bad for this. If the card dies, you *need* another similar card (often the EXACT same card, with the same firmware version and all) to be able to get your data back So you're essentially stuck re-buying an older card if it fails like 3 years down the line.

Norton not finding anything hardly means anything... In fact, I'd rather have viruses on my box than that. Anyways. If you can't resolve your DNS problems (try nslookup download.microsoft.com in a cmd shell), then you're never gonna get updates. Also, I'd have a peek at the hosts file still. You could also try resetting your tcp/ip stack as described here.

Sounds like DNS problems. Could be your ISP's DNS servers going insane (you could try opendns). Or it could be your DNS settings. Or malware that's causing problems (perhaps adding it to the hosts file).