CoffeeFiend

Free, along with a $1000+ OS. It's not like you can just have Hyper-V on any old box for free... That's like saying gas is free, because your new car comes with a full tank pretty much. Anyways. That trend isn't anything new. Xen has always been free. So has KVM. VMware GSX server has been free for a few years, and now ESXi is too. And that's not counting other solutions like Bochs, QEMU, VirtualBox, VPC, Virtual Server, etc. All of those were already free. VMs & hypervisor solutions have long been becoming a commodity. Same for VMware. There's several different APIs you can use even, and even addons for PowerShell and what not. And there plenty of free "addons" & utils for it too. There's entire blogs dedicated to it, lots of code out there, and even several books written about it. I still prefer VMware myself, in part because I don't have to buy Win 2008 to have it (also because I have lots of pre-written scripts & some utils for it). And it still has the edge when it comes to certain things.

No. You don't want the hands of any average consumer near 240 volt mains! And any basic screw-up on their part (a single wire wrong) and they can fry their PC or worse (death is very much a possibility here, and you could easily be sued over it). And there are regulations and laws to respect when it comes to selling such items. It would have to be something safe, with proper protection/isolation/grounding/etc. There's plenty more reasons. Say, if you ever want to turn off/shut down your computer. This would automatically restart it. Then all kinds of issues possible in case of power bumps, brownouts and what not. Well, making a truly good product wouldn't quite be that easy for most people. Instead of just relays, some might be tempted to go with logic gates, timers and what not, but in the end, the best way to do it is using a microcontroller which would monitor the power and act accordingly. But still... Think protection against transients, isolation (and safety in general), perhaps monitoring when the user presses the power button to shut the PC down (and even then -- what about when you go start > shutdown? it couldn't know for sure; you'd likely have to just assume, seeing the PC turned itself off, without losing mains power). And then *good* code for the power monitoring during various events which most people couldn't easily simulate themselves... And you have to keep in mind not all countries use 240 volt power either (e.g. all of north america). There's a LOT of things that comes in play here. (I work with embedded systems for a living) That's a pretty good idea, but it could be even simpler. If you have a WRT54GL, I'd hunt down a MIPS version of the "wol" binary (or compile one yourself). Then I'd schedule (cron job) a shell script that would ping the box say, every 5 minutes, and if it's not responsive, send a "magic packet" to it using the said wol binary (of course WOL must be enabled in your BIOS). Nothing to build/modify/hack/connect or anything. Only takes a couple minutes to setup, and it's real easy to test (once you get the wol command line right, try a simple script, then setup the cron job, turn PC off, and see if it kicks in/works).

Just when I thought nvidia drivers couldn't get any worse... Looks like they're causing RDP problems, and I've experienced the "an error is preventing this slide show from playing" bug since a nvidia driver update. It just keeps getting better everyday! I think I'm gonna order a new Radeon real soon. Probably a 4650, or perhaps a passively cooled 3450..

The monitor makes a huge difference for sure. Those who do graphics professionally tend to chose their monitors carefully. That 30" Dell Ultrasharp has a IPS panel, which has great colors, from any viewing angle. Most monitors with TN panels (including most 24" models, samsung included) can be problematic, as the colors tend to "shift" when you view it not dead-on (brightness/contrast is also an issue -- just see the bottom pics on this page to see). Obviously there's the gamut and all that too.

When it comes to the "ultimate" box, one could still suggest very different things (e.g. dual xeon workstation). I still wouldn't suggest things like DDR3 and a monitor that flips... But we have to stay within a reasonable price obviously (8GB of DDR3 isn't exactly cheap, and won't give a 1% speed boost). And like I said before, chances are that with some minor tweaks, and perhaps upgrading a couple things (not a new box altogether), he could get very good performance, without breaking the bank. BS. jcarle explained it all nicely (twice no less). However, if there's so much of that "evidence", you should have no problems finding some for us (explaining why/how it's better, from a credible source) -- and that doesn't mean a 5 year old "review" that talks about VGA output of heavily processed video (using things like "digital vibrance") the /3GB switch changes the 2GB/2GB split for system and user-mode virtual address space, to a 1GB/3GB split. It does exactly what I was thinking. PAE is for accessing over 4GB, and doesn't work on most systems (in part due to drivers). Sounds like you're the one who should go read up... No. Large companies are typically quite slow at upgrading. Lots of big companies just upgraded to XP a couple years ago.

Everyone has their opinion when it comes to this, so here's mine. My personal suggestion would be C#. It's easy enough to learn, it has a familiar C-ish syntax, and the .NET framework provides you with "features" to do just about anything you'd want. The IDE is nice, and the debugging tools are great. There's good documentation (MSDN), active newsgroups & forums, tons of related blogs, lots of commercial books written about it (should you want to buy or borrow one), lots of training material & samples & videos & guides and such things, very nice community sites like codeproject, etc. There's even some fun places with "hobbyist" projects that will probably interest you, like coding4fun. And if you want to learn on a budget, then how's free? You can download Visual C# Express from MS themselves for free, legit and everything. If you look at that link, there's even links to a "Introduction to Visual C# 2008 video", and a link to the "Beginner Developer Learning Center".

While I don't have a box with > 4GB yet either (nor run the x64 version of Vista), he's assuming he's using Vista x64, which is kind of unlikely. Photoshop on a x86 OS is still limited to the 2GB of private address space (assuming he isn't using the /3GB switch...) If you want to go the x64 way (on a new box), then CS4 which should be out in like 4 days now, will be able to make use of *all* your RAM, and even of your GPU. That will definitely fly. But like I said before, most of the time, there's no need for anything this drastic. Reduce the number of zoom levels cached, don't work at a ridiculously high DPI for nothing (e.g. you don't need 300dpi if you're going to do screen printing/halftoning on that large sign), don't go overboard with a super complex design, etc. I have yet to see a box being taken down to its knees by photoshop so far -- most of the time, it's the RIP that does.

jcarle: exactly. 8GB of RAM is useless, unless you're going to use CS4, on a x64 OS. DDR3 costs a LOT, yet yields no significant speed boost. Overclocking a quad core won't make much change either, it's not quite that CPU demanding... RAID & fast disks works fine (a fast scratch disk like I said before). As for ATI cards having better colours, I haven't really seen any evidence of that. Monitor wise, nothing against samsung in particular, but the choice is weird for sure. Typically, we've always been lacking horizontal space on our moniors for photoshop (due to palettes), and widescreen (16:10) monitors finally fix this. I see no point in suggesting a monitor that "flips" for this. Mine does too, but I'd NEVER do that in photoshop! You'd have a very tall and narrow monitors, and half of that would be wasted by palettes, making your monitor one REALLY narrow & very tall column, which isn't suited to most work (especially when most images tend to be wide, not tall)

I dunno why I'd waste my time over that. Win9x is very dead. Its market share is around half of 1% (0.54% as of Sept 2008), and still dropping real fast. Combined Win9x market share is going to be down to like 0.01% within a year. Why would you waste precious time trying to somehow convince the handful of hardcore fans left, who seem to think MS DOS somehow is the apogee of OS design, and that nowdays' OS'es should be run great on a 286, etc -- that there's better out there than their junk OS? Trying to convince die-hard fanboys is a waste of time (it's like trying to convert the pope into Richard Dawkins, GW Bush into Albert Einstein, or Bill Gates into Richard Stallman -- or vice versa), and trying to force them to another completely different platform is going to be twice as hard. I'm quite not sure why you bother. If they want to live in the past and keep using CP/M, and think it's the best OS ever too (no matter how delusional it is), it's fine by me.

Ah, yes, uptimes! One of the most pointless things to argue over these days They seem to mostly serve as some kind of e-p3n1s size contest of sorts. First, you're comparing the uptimes of an OS mostly used as a web server, to a very outdated desktop OS (both of which being radically different), so it's very much an apples to oranges comparison (and a pointless one IMO -- things like what can the box do/not do, which apps it can or can't run, which hardware is supported or not is a LOT more relevant really). If you want to look at record uptimes, Ubuntu isn't listed anywhere. The Sun box mentioned in that thread was most likely using Solaris (which is a lot more robust IMO). The current "world records" are held by VMS boxes. And if you look at the current netcraft uptime records, only 1 out of 50 boxes runs Linux! BSD holds the top spot, followed immediately by Windows (which still is there twice as often as Linux -- both times above it too), then a bunch more BSD boxes. Most of that list is either BSD or Irix. Just saying, it's not exactly "amazing" (none of these are running Ubuntu either). Plus, the whole concept of uptime is kind of pointless on a desktop box. Yes, Win9x-era uptimes sucked (like your PC crashing every other day), but these days are long over. ANY modern OS has plenty good uptimes for a desktop -- does it actually matter if you have to reboot once a month after patch tuesday or whatever? Nobody needs like five 9's of uptime on a box used primarily for surfing the web and gaming. Even for servers, I always found the concept to be a bit silly. If you actually NEED such uptimes (like a company losing countless thousands of dollars a minute when their system goes down, or things that just can't go down much like 911 service), then the uptime of a single server is still irrelevant: you're NOT going to just use one box. You're going to use multiple boxes with failover/load balancing or such (so you DON'T actually go down, for sure). And in a LOT of cases, high uptimes are a *bad* thing! It just means the servers haven't been updated, or haven't been rebooted post-update when necessary (i.e. kernel updates) and could often be easily "pwned" (a disaster waiting to happen).

Some points: "really large" doesn't really mean anything, so it's hard to say just what kind of needs you have as things are printed physically larger, the DPI at which you print also greatly reduces since nobody looks at a 10ft large sign from 12" away, so image size doesn't go up all that much image complexity (how many layers, etc) will also make a great deal of change on what kind of needs you have you fail to mention what kind of specs your current computer has (so we have an idea of what's inadequate for your needs, as a way to judge the workload, and suggest better) a faster CPU always helps to crunch the numbers faster, but a great deal of the bottleneck is memory (which is backed by a scratch disk -- i.e. a hard drive, which is relatively speaking extremely slow) more memory would work great for very big images, but unfortunately there is no x64 version of photoshop, so it can't really use large amounts of it... if you can't work fast enough within the limits imposed by the x86 arch (i.e. 2GB limit) & photoshop's scratch disk, your best bet is to look at how you can reduce resource usage, using the same old photoshop tweaks as ever (e.g. reducing the number of zoom levels cached, having a fast disk for its scratch disk, etc), and seeing if you can't make the image simpler (considering lowering DPI, layers, etc -- as possible) There's just no hardware that will make photoshop fly on just any large project. For all we know, you could be using an old P3 that doesn't cut it at all, a memory starved P4, or a high end workstation (overkill) but with a ridiculously large image... We have no way to guess, nor make any real suggestions. CS4 (will be out in 4 days!) will be x64, so if you upgrade to that (and a x64 OS obviously), then a new PC with loads of memory would help a lot. New photoshop, new OS, and new computer means a lot of $$$ though. However, it would mean a big boost in performance (access to lots more physical memory so less waiting for the slow scratch disk, the extra CPU registers help a bit -- about 10%, and it even has GPU acceleration using a suitable video card)

LilQi: agreed. Welcome to the forum BTW. There's basically no speed difference on today's hardware, and Vista SP1 is more reliable. Either ways: -this doesn't belong in the vLite section -there's loads of such topics already, some exactly like this one, and others having been around for 5 years. No point for yet another one.

That's a lot of old hard drives (80/80/200). Assuming they each use 10W, and cheap power @ ~10 cents/KWh and average taxes, they cost you about $30 of power per year (not counting possible extra air conditioning during summer). I've seen 500GB drives for $50 a few times before, so the new drive would: -give you 140GB extra space -pay for itself in little over a year in power savings alone (so over 2 years, you'd have 140GB extra for less than $0) -- quicker if power costs more there -make your PC produce less heat, thus making it run cooler, which will also make it quieter as fans don't need to be spinning as fast -- and also due to less drives spinning (and new HDs tend to be quieter too) -less stress on your PSU due to disk spin up (count ~2A per drive) -you'd free up some SATA ports on your motherboard, as well as drive bays (more room for expansion, no need to buy extra controllers, etc) Old hard drives aren't worth using (except perhaps in USB enclosures, for backups and what not). And that's without considering they're mechanical devices so they wear out (older drives are more at risk of failure). New hard drives practically pay for themselves...

At least, the placebo doesn't make you sick then again, pretty much everything is... Norton was OK, back in the DOS era.

If you only have 512MB, your best two options are: -buying more RAM (you can get 4GB of fast DDR2 for like $50) -not running the latest OS on less RAM than I'd use for XP (i.e. downgrading) But since you said in another post it's an old 1.8GHz sempron, I'd go for option #2 here.

That's just personal preferences seemingly. I've had nothing but troubles with nvidia cards myself (I'm using one right now, and it's the last one I ever buy). I completely agree with Zxian's and puntoMX's points

Same here. Anything less than a dual core with 2GB of RAM, and I'd stick to XP.

Did you try booting in safe mode?

You might have somewhat more control when you write something at a much lower level indeed. But most of the time, the functionality in the higher level languages is just fine (and most things can be extended, adapted, modified and what not to suit particular needs). Personally, for most desktop or web apps I'd rather use a high-ish level language and good set of libs, and concentrate on the problem to solve (how to solve it better), and have time to think about things like a good design/architecture (which greatly affect maintainability, readability, stability, and even speed more than any language choice will), instead of pointlessly spending my available time on low-level stuff, like writing tons of Win32 API calls, allocating memory (and chasing bugs where it's accessed after it's free'd, memory leaks, etc), fixing buffer overflows and all that endless "fun" stuff. For places where C# doesn't cut it, be it for resource usage or speed, e.g. microcontrollers, I normally use plain old C or quite often assembly (you can only fit so much code in a few KBs of memory, ISR's need to be very fast, etc). Database wise, there's a lot of nice stuff. ADO.NET is nice. SqlClient is great. And there's LINQ indeed, and several ORM's if you're interested e.g. NHibernate, as well as code generation tools & templates (to automatically write a data access layer for your database). And things like the enterprise lib. There's loads of resources out there. And the language itself (C#) is great for that purpose too (tons of useful things, like nullable types). And if you plan on having a web client for it too (not just a desktop app), then you can reuse a lot of your code for that too (everything but the presentation layer pretty much), and tons of "web stuff" is already done for you e.g. you want an authentication system? ASP.NET has a good authentication system built right in! (with users, groups, admin pages, pre-made components, page security, etc). You can build a solid, stable, reliable and app that performs great in no time at all.

They say it runs fine on Vista, and they even say "XP or Vista" in their requirements, so it's not a Vista issue. Try looking at the install log file to see what goes wrong.

Well, if he wanted to keep using pascal, the common choice would still be Delphi. But most people have moved away from that years ago now. Well, it's a nice, clean, simple yet powerful language with a familiar C-ish syntax. And you have access to a great base class library that covers almost every need you can think of (encryption, database access, networking, web services, etc -- you name it!). It's very quick to develop good quality stable apps. winforms is a joy to use (compared to MFC and the like). It lets you focus on solving the problem at hand, instead of working on the nitty gritty low-level implementation of every little thing. There's great development tools, a great documentation, very active newsgroups, tons of books, tons of other resources (samples, quickstarts, starter kits, etc), tons community sites like codeproject, tons of great 3rd party tools (e.g. anything by jetbrains), tons of ready-to-use code (e.g. enterprise lib), tons of training material, tons of great blogs, etc. And it keeps improving at a phenomenal pace (new language features like lambda expressions, cutting edge stuff like WPF and LINQ, new frameworks like the new-ish ASP.NET AJAX or MVC framework, etc). And of course, the language is usable for developing anything from windows apps (and somewhat on other platforms using mono), to server middleware, to web apps (ASP.NET). It's not perfect or anything (nor the only language worth using or anything like that), but it sure has a lot going for it.

That's the main reason most people buy a router for -- sharing the same IP (not having to pay for more). It's perfectly normal. If you're on a very slow connection (the very cheap "entry" plans), then yes. Otherwise it shouldn't affect your speeds much. Except when you're both on the same site, as the web servers usually limit the max number of connections per IP (and you're both making a lot of requests to the same server).

It's a solid language for sure. Many other languages have similarities with it. But if it's *the* way for you to go? No one can answer that for you. Personally, I'd say it's a good language to learn, but like they say, when a hammer is your only tool, everything starts to look like a thumb No. Apps written with VC++, using MFC and all that won't run on Macs. First, you need to use a widget set that's cross platform (e.g. Qt, wxWidgets, GTK+), but some are ugly as hell, some are expensive (unless you want to open source all your apps), etc. Then you also need to write C++ in a portable way (using GCC instead of VC++ perhaps), and deal with a lot of fundamental differences in various platforms like threading (i.e. posix treads vs windows threads). It seems to me like an awful lot of work for a handful of users on different platforms. Besides, user needs on various platforms tend to be different, I mainly write apps to solve windows specific problems, so being cross-platform is not an issue for me. I like C# a lot myself, but again, why not learn both? Use whatever language best solves the problem at hand. The langage itself can be cross-platform/is portable indeed. Faster? Unless you're doing something special (like writing 3D video games, or scientific number crunching, or writing codecs), almost any language is fast enough. No need for runtimes? VC++ apps need the VC++ redist too, and often plenty of other libs.

No, and not really. For more infos about this stuff, I'd highly recommend watching the sysinternals video library DVDs (don't recall which one precisely was talking about memory, sorry). Yes, I know it's $399

I hadn't looked there. But it's VERY expensive for that case. I paid about that much for one about a year ago, including the two extra 4-in-3 drive bays, taxes, and shipping too. It's $140 at newegg. I can't say I'm a big fan of TigerDirect either. NCIX has plenty of great cases within $280 too. The fans on it are very quiet actually. I can't hear them at all. Big 120mm fans don't need to spin like crazy to have good airflow, so they're usually pretty quiet.