CoffeeFiend

Yet, you have no problem with charging him a lot of money too, and letting him keep all that old "junk" then. If it works fine, he can keep it, I don't see the issue. And if doesn't, then he's gonna have to buy a new one in both cases. You don't have a point, you just want to make new systems or hardware upgrades overpriced to justify overcharging people. And like I said like 16 times already, I didn't say that (work on your reading comprehension skills, will ya?). I was talking about overcharging people for "tweaks" vs a hardware upgrade. Nothing more. I wouldn't work (nor want to) in shop where techs grossly overcharge customers for minor tweaks, when for the same price you can give them a REAL speed boost, have happy customers which will return for more business. Yet again, I was saying he can upgrade the P3 hardware for a lot less than $450 and get 100x more of a speed boost than any of your tweaks will do, but you keep bringing nonsense into this (like printers, monitors, and now OS upgrades too). A hardware upgrade (new CPU, more RAM) will give them a HUGE speed boost -- a LOT more for their money. They can keep their OS if it does what they need. Again, you're the one pushing for those items to justify you overcharging people. Obviously you're the one that's lost here, totally unable to justify charging $450 for what can be 99% automated and done in 2 clicks. Now you're just resorting to personal insults and calling people stupid when you fail to come up with reasons to do so (as there are none). Nice of you! What was that rule 7b about again? Someone hasn't heard of slipstreaming, unattended installs, WSUS (or running updates locally), silent installers, scripts, or any of that stuff obviously. The electrician does a house call (drives both ways), requires actual knowledge/certifications (as in, having gone to college, and knowing the electrical code and all that), etc. Whereas, a very simple .cmd file can apply all your reg tweaks, run uninstallers/installers/patches and all that, in one double click -- no work at all, hardly any knowledge required. You're paying for the mechanics' time (a lot of hard labor). And they need a lot of specialized & very expensive stuff (garage, with lift, tons of tools including many specialized), and they tend to be far more trained than your average A+ guy doing house calls too. Now include parts and all, and it quickly gets expensive. More nonsense, heh.

I've posted some screenshots of my file copy speeds before. They're no worse than XP's (some stuff is actually much faster). Out of memory bug? Never had that problem. Sounds like early RTM problems. I never experienced that Such as? I don't even know what you're talking about here. 3D performance being lower was due to bad drivers mainly, and that's been fixed. There aren't that many serious bugs, the only annoying one I can really think of, is the explorer status bar. The same functionality is already there. Go to Control Panel > Programs and Features > "Turn Windows features on or off".

Possible use? Well, same as entering the IP in the other format... It's just an alternate way to represent an IP. It's not frequently used by most people though, as it's easier to remember IPs ranges for various networks with separated bytes (e.g. a /24 starting at 192.168.1.0 instead of starting at 3232235776...) You now also have IPv6 equivalent addresses too, assuming your network supports it (very few ISPs support that right now, most people resort to using tunnels for this) As for disabling it, there is no way that I know of (just like you can't disable the notation with 4 bytes and dots).

It only shows how little you know about encoding. I can encode XviD At full D1, with great settings, doing Lanczos4Resize, deinterlacing and all @ 150fps+ average (with spikes over 200fps) I can also encode a few dozen mpeg audio or AC3 streams in mp3 in real-time. It totally spanks a friends' Athlon64 X2 6400+ in actual encoding speeds, and it also benches about the same as a core 2 duo 6850 (both cost like $300 back when I got this CPU for 1/4 of that price) But now decode & frameserve high bitrate 1080i, deinterlace it in a non-ghetto way, Spline36Resize it down to 720p, do fancy (slow) sharpening stuff, color space conversion, etc. You'll see even a $1000 Xeon chip slow down to a crawl. A Q6600 would get around 6fps with this particular source, avisynth script, and particular build of the x264 codec, and a $350 Q9550 about 8fps. The first x264 pass is always pretty quick, but the second, ouch. I regularly see people with Athlon64 3800+ and such getting around 1fps, heh. You don't actually seem to know much about fast CPUs... or at least what they're capable of when it comes to encoding high def material in high quality H.264. BTW, that is the latest version of SpeedFan -- v4.35, and the core temps were fixed in 4.34 Yes, it actually does run that cold, even at full load, overclocked, on a stock HSF. Edit: here's the screenshot you asked for: Yep, they report even LOWER temps! 40C and 42C.

Well, that's the "new names" some people use to differentiate. But seriously, go in a computer shop, and ask them for a 500 gibibyte hard drive, or talk with a co-worker about kibibytes, and you're gonna get some weird looks. Similarly, some hardware sold goes by powers of 2 too like RAM (when you get 2GB of RAM, it's 2048MB, not 2000MB). In practice, nobody actually uses those fancy terms, even though we're really misusing SI prefixes... I just tried to explain it the easy way, without involving weird words You're still completely right

43C and 45C, after over 9 1/2h of encoding a HD movie in x264 (pretty slow using these settings w/ deinterlacing, fancy avisynth script and all -- yes, I do need a quad core). And that's @ 3.4GHz (it's a E2160 though, not a E2180). See the pic. Zxian's temps aren't much higher on passive cooling. While it probably sucks for gamers who want the latest vid cards and such for cheap, for basic business systems it's just fine. We got a pretty good support contract for free out of it too (not outsourced in India either), with 1 business day service (you call, next day someone shows up with spare parts), and pretty good prices. It runs Windows, Office and everything else just fine. They're silent enough and all that. No stability problems or anything so far. We don't have to return bad hard drives either (we just fax them a copy of the label) due to the sensitive data that might be on it. No real complaints about them here (not that I'd buy one for my specific needs). I think Zxian pretty much said it as it is (he makes a habit of it too). My $70 E2160 that's getting close to a year old gets 5.7 I'd say that's pretty good too.

Yep, I said inner when I should've said outer. Sue me PEBCAK. Mine never gets this hot even though it's overclocked 85% and using the cheap stock cooler, even when at full load for several hours. And zero crashes so far. Didn't see any such reports by anyone else so far either, and they sell a LOT, so if they sucked this badly, we'd be seeing a LOT of such reports and everybody would say they suck, yet, you're the first I see that claims this. I don't make $ overcharging people for this indeed, I'd sooner make money building them a box. Besides, I don't do that kind of thing for a living (not my job), so of course I ain't making money out of it. Again, I never said they should move to Vista (much the inverse), and most printers work fine with it anyways, including my ancient HP LJ4+

It was an answer to your numerous "they don't get a flat screen" or "they don't get a printer" points. They don't get a free flat screen nor printer, no matter if they pay someone $450 for 5 minutes of work, or if they buy computer parts, or a $5000 pre-built tower. They aren't free, so no one gives them out (if you do seemingly get one for free "as a bonus", it's just included in the inflated price). They don't get what they don't buy (just like they don't get a new car, new couch, nor a new dishwasher out of it), so your point was totally irrelevant. If their printer and monitor are working fine with their P3 (it's just the computer that's too slow), I see no real reason to change them. And if they're not good enough, then in all 3 cases you're going to have to pay to buy those regardless. Yet, you only added the cost of those items to the situation where someone buys or builds a new PC (as if you needed it then, but otherwise wouldn't), somehow making it much more expensive -- just like your "does it run Vista well?" point, which also seems to serve you as a purpose to make the hardware upgrade seem a lot more expensive. It's not like their P3 can run it at any speed, and a simple hardware upgrade of the P3 would have given their existing OS a GREAT speed boost regardless (a LOT more than any tweaks ever would) That's all I was saying.

Hard drives have been sold like this for a very long time. They sell their hard drives as 1 gigabyte = 1000000000 bytes, whereas you were expecting 1073741824 bytes in a GB. So your hard drive is 500 * (1000000000/1073741824) GB, or roughly 465GB. Here's a quick list of "advertized" drive capacities, versus "real" GBs (no decimals): 20 GB: 18 GB 40 GB: 37 GB 80 GB: 74 GB 160 GB: 149 GB 200 GB: 186 GB 250 GB: 232 GB 320 GB: 298 GB 500 GB: 465 GB 640 GB: 596 GB 750 GB: 698 GB 1000 GB: 931 GB

It's a perfectly fine IP address. IPv4 addresses are a 32 bit number, it just happens you're used to the "easier to read" way of displaying it, split in 4 bytes with dots between them, but that's just a representation of it. You can convert it back easily: If you take the offending IP: 65.98.92.48 (most significant byte at the left to least significant byte to the right) 65 * 2^24 + 98 * 2^16 + 92 * 2^8 + 48 = 1096965168 Or if you find that easier: take 65 * 256, we got 16640; add 98 multiply by 256 again, we got 4284928; add 92, multiply by 256 again, we got 1096965120; add 48, and we have 1096965168 again. A lot of programs accept IPs entered in both forms. For example, http://1089055075/ will bring you straight to Google (everybody has that number memorized, right?)

Cool new util, I've always been a big fan of everything sysinternals. While it's certainly nicer than virtuawin, it has its share of issues and shortcomings when I alt-tab on a new desktop, the cursor vanishes (not only hidden, it's missing altogether, like, it won't make the auto-hidden taskbar show no matter how much you go down) it opens up the language bar at the top of my screen for some strange reason (i got that thing closed) heap exhaustion problems on some boxes seemingly no way to transfer apps between desktops as they're not virtual (it creates a new "real" desktop + instance of explorer.exe to go along with each desktop) -- many apps don't want to be open twice, and you can't exactly open a new Firefox window and drag it there either (forcing you to have all your browser windows on the same desktop) desktops can't be closed/destroyed, and as a consequence of that, you can't really close the app itself (otherwise the desktops just stay open with no way to use them, forcing you to reboot to "fix" it) http://www.codeplex.com/vdm *might* be better. I'll try that one too. I'll have to wait to try it though (don't wanna load it at the same time as sysinternal's, so I have to reboot, and I can't reboot for a while as I'm encoding a hig def movie in x264)

[*]Give it time, I'm guessing this will happen. Although keeping them updated as Russinovich updates them might be a problem, it is still a good goal. I'd still be VERY happy with that. Even if it's not installed by default (perhaps make it an optional component, added in "programs and features"), and they could deliver updated builds via Windows Update for those who have it installed. [*]*cough*antitrust*cough*. Microsoft has to be VERY careful what they do, and do not, include. If they step on ANY public vendor products (like Roxio, Nero, et al) they tread on very thin ice. Yes, you're totally right on this one! It's amazing no one's sued them for including notepad or calc.exe yet... I hope I'm not giving anyone ideas here! [*]Indeed, although killing FTP over SFTP/SCP would be great... For sure, but unfortunately not all servers support it. The way I see it, FTP is kind of a lowest common denominator (kind of like FAT32), which everything can use (web browsers, any ftp client, CLI tools, download managers, etc) [*]Win7 currently has a much nicer RSS app, so you might get your wish here. Good news! I'm looking forward to that. [*]I think this falls under the Expression products umbrella, so doubt it makes it into the OS anytime soon. I was thinking the closest product would have been the digital imaging suite, but it wouldn't have to be anything fancy like that even. Anything more than paint would be nice... [*]One man's garbage is another man's just fine app, so to speak (actually, MCE - but it runs on top of WMP, so...). I think we've been there already: DRM in recordings, support for the broadcast flag (broadcasters get to chose if they allow you to record something), no support for CableCARD if you build your own MCE box -- nevermind CableCARD is only used in a small fraction of 1 country, which is no help for most people, and besides it tends not to work so great as I've read in some places. And CableCARD is being replaced by SDV in a lot of those places too (seemingly most CableCo's are moving to that) for which MCE has no support, MCE has no support for DVB-* devices (much less for CI modules and such for them), no client/server model (forget about having your noisy multi-terabyte server with all the capture cards away, and a quiet front end in several places), very poor menu design/layout, very bad support for x264-in-mkv files (i.e. all of my HD stuff, I encode in that very popular & good format), the resource usage isn't exactly low, etc. But sure, some people might like it anyways. Some people even like WinME & IE, and that's saying a LOT... [*]I find the Vista defrag just fine for the majority of users, including myself. It's improved a lot for sure, I just meant that as in, there's still place for improvement, if they add a few more features, no one would want/need to buy a separate defragmenter anymore (but then again, antitrust issues perhaps) [*]Gotta wait for powershell to become more mature, I'm expecting these to come as powershell gets older. And it's certainly getting there quick. One can write/install cmdlets to do most tasks like this, but it would just be nice to have them built-in. But yep, Rome wasn't built in a day. I guess powershell has other things to take care of first (like releasing v2 final, fixing their ngen problems, etc) [*]With the amount of languages supported, this is currently not financially or code-wise feasible. Well, even if you'd only support it in your "traditional" 6 or so languages, it would be a start. Code-wise? Looking at projects like aspell, I don't really see why. Financially? I'm sure MS can afford buying a few basic word dictionaries from companies specialized in this (or reuse those from MS Office, even if only using a subset of them?) Oh well. [*]Live Mesh, it's coming. It's a live product, but it (shock) actually *works*. That seemed to be more along the lines of sync'ing your desktop with your phone and mp3 player and such. At least that's what I remember about checking it out a while ago. But if it's more than that, sure [*]This might happen in time, but not soon. All kinds of legal issues. Understandable. I guess Linux has it easy when it comes to that. They're only distributing updates of open source stuff, so no legal problems there. [*]Again, one man's trash... IE8 B2 is fantastic, at least as good as FF3 (personally I find it better, but I'm slightly biased - however, being a web dev, it really is at least as good as FF3). I haven't tried B2, but B1 is a GREAT deal behind FF3 in every aspect IMO. In this particular case, I think it's bias indeed. Especially if you're doing web dev -- there's nothing for IE quite like Firebug, the web developer toolbar and all that (no, Fiddler and such aren't equivalents). If there's one group for which FF truly shines above other browsers, it's web devs. [*]Hard to say if this will happen, but probably not. Adobe's got this locked up, and it'll be hard to compete and not see the inside of a courtroom. Adobe discontinued ATM a while back. The only real option I see nowadays is extensis suitcase, at $100. It would still be nice to have something basic in Windows itself, I've only been waiting for that since 3.1 was out But I still totally understand your point.

That's what it really comes down to. Yes, everything could be hand-optimized asm. But the development costs would spike incredibly. Nowadays, all developers are dead-set against premature optimization (profile, then optimize the parts that actually need it). The second version is also a lot more complex than not only the first, but MUCH more than the C or C++ version. You'd need to hire a LOT of asm gurus to optimize everything like that too, and that doesn't come for free (like cluberti said). Plus, higher LoC count usually means more bugs, hence higher maintenance costs and all that. And there is far more to it than just that! You'd have your i386-hand optimized version, then your other code paths for different processor capabilities (e.g. your SSE2 version of that) plus processor feature detection and such all over the place, so now you're maintaining like 6 different code paths, which are each 50x longer than the original (so like 300x more code), which took a LOT longer to write, likely contains more bugs, and takes more time to maintain, etc. The project very quickly becomes a even bigger monster, which makes it that much more difficult to manage. Mind you, I'm all for optimizing stuff that actually needs it/benefits from it, up to a reasonable point (things like video codecs, and those already are). Optimization is always a trade off. The more you do, the more your product will cost (and people REALLY don't want that), and the less you do, the more hardware it'll require (users don' really want that either). It's a matter of hitting the sweet spot. If it runs on commodity hardware, then there's little point in spending millions of $ to optimize it further, but if it requires VERY expensive computers to run, then nobody would buy it, so then they spend the $ there... And while optimization is nice, most people wouldn't upgrade if it wasn't for the new features and eye candy. "Now with 5% faster DLLs!" won't sell a new $200 OS. They got a LOT of shortcomings to address (I think I made a pretty good list there) -- some points being WAY overdue, and personally I'd like to see them work on that first, as long as it keeps running on commodity hardware.

Which again was just a random example, which totally seems to go over your head. Yes, you can only have the low-end as in a super old P3, or a box over $1000, nothing in between will do! And yet again, you fail to explain why it's "junk". Junk? Are you out of your mind? It's a great CPU. I'm actually using a E2160 myself (OC'es quite nice, dirt cheap). What's junk about it? It's a big seller, lots of performance for not a lot of $. It's more than sufficient for 99% of daily tasks. I can run plenty of VMs at once, use photoshop, visual studio 2008, CAD apps, firefox, play & encode high 1080p video (in x264) and everything else I can think of. It's not junk by any stretch of the imagination. And you're sorely mistaken here. That reminds me of that $3000 P133 I bought in '95, yes, it was a monster for the time, but only a couple years after, a P2 that only cost half the price TOTALLY slaughtered it. Expecting a computer to last 10 years minimum is crazy talk -- that would mean still using that P1 in 2005 and beyond (whereas it already sucked hard 3 years later). That sub-$500 box will last you a good 5 years, at which point you can spend another $500 that will last just as long, without being stuck with a 10 year old computer (and without sinking thousands in it up front). Right, so explain why my $3000 P1 (was certainly top end for the time) ran Win98 like crap? Or Why I also needed to upgrade my other "top end" computer to run XP, or that a really top-end computer to run XP from XP's era (2001 -- top of the line being a P4 2GHz back then) doesn't run Vista worth crap and so on? Yep. Because it's just NOT the case. Yes, it will. They've even said Win v7 will run on the same specs as Vista. Windows 8 isn't even being planned right now, no idea of release dates or anything. But I'd bet good money that even a $5000 system you'd build today will suck HARD by then (just as much as the E2180 will). At some point, hardware 10% faster is like double the price or more, and it surely won't last much longer. Buying top-end usually doesn't pay, at all. And does it run Vista SP1 well? YES So instead of buying $500 worth of parts, you make them waste $1000+ on a similar pre-built box. Assembling it? It only takes a few minutes, and most shops do it for only a few dollars, besides, where's the problem with you charging them say, $50 to assemble it to save them $500? Shipping? Pre-built also charge shipping, or it's included in their (articially inflated) price -- nothing saved there either. Setting up the system? That should be 5 minutes of work for any competent tech (unattended install). Security and maintenance programs? Those can be unattended too, and pre-builts don't normally come with any, and the odd times it does, it's usually garbage (like norton sh*t) -- no advantage there yet again. "tweaking the security, internet connection, cleaning out the registry, disabling unnecessary services, slimming it down a bit" -- yes, because that's any different when you buy a system pre-assembled from Dell? More nonsense yet again. Delivery? You're going to have to deliver both... Setup/installation? Same thing yet again, the Dell doesn't come with a tech in the box to do it for them. Still no difference. State and local taxes? Both pre-built systems and parts have taxes. Yet again no difference. Training? Ditto. All you demonstrated so far, is that you're willing to make people spend hundreds of $$$ more on a pre-built so you don't have to spend 15 minutes to do it yourself. Same thing as I said in my last 3 posts or such: neither the parts, nor the pre-built comes with one (unless they artificially inflate the price of the pre-built even further and "give" you one). TANSTAAFL. That some people are lazy, yes. That's 100% irrelevant (as usual). We were talking about doing 5 minutes of work on a P3 for $450 VS getting a $450 upgrade. You're the one that's talking about OS'es here. You'd be surprised... There's a LOT of young geeks on here. Ah, more trolling and no insight -- as usual! You should copyright that, you're certainly pioneering that field -- you finally found something you're genuinely good at for a change!

Hmmm, no. No defragmenter I've used in a lot of years is that horribly bad. It'll place it somewhere decent. Companies who write defragmenters just might know a bit about file placement, they only make a living out of it Some, but definitely nowhere near as much as having it on another partition. The inner part is somewhat faster, but when you increase the amount of seek drastically for every sector you need, you're not gaining anything, much the inverse. Except, it is. Unless you use the worst defragmenter I've ever heard of. I don't have any speed issues with Vista x86 myself, it's just as fast as XP on my box. As for not seeing all your RAM as you hit 4GB or more, sure, that's an issue. And the fix to that is x64, but yes, the transition isn't always smooth because of various issues (notice I'm not running x64 yet?) However, the x64 transition not being as smooth as you like doesn't make Vista itself "incompatible" (you'd have the same kind of issues with the 64 bit versions of Win XP or 2003) It's not really that funny, nor surprising. Eventually they phase out some old things, and stop supporting them. In this case, a codec seemingly. With x64, they also stopped supporting other stuff, like the Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 ODBC provider, or providing components like ntvdm.

It's defragged alright, but it still increases head travel by a lot beteen any files and the pagefile, also slowing things down a lot. It can be on your usual partition with your OS, and not be scattered all over the place (defrag works nice). As for your handful of app compatibility problems, I'm not so quick at blaming Vista. Like I said before, VirtualDub & VirtualDubMod work perfectly here. AviPreview is working fine too. And from OllyDbg's home page: Emphasis mine. And you're using a 64 bit OS, and blaming the OS for compatibility problems? (especially for something like a debugger) I don't use it often personally, but I had no issues on Vista x86. Looks like most of your problems are related to the transition to x64 (you also mentioned your older games worked fine on Vista x86), and not Vista itself.

Like some people said before, DDR3 doesn't start to give any performance advantages before you reach pretty high speeds due to the higher latency. At 1333 it's probably a tie vs 800MHz DDR2 (depending on the actual latencies of both), but then again they also make faster DDR2. Not only DDR3 is a LOT more expensive, but boards that use DDR3 are also pricier. The high-end DDR3 certainly has an edge over DDR2, but it comes at a price. And that slight gain in memory bandwidth doesn't translate in a much faster computer (there's loads of other bottlenecks left). Most people don't want to pay like $500 extra to have a ~1% speed gain because they use DDR3, especially when that same $500 could go a long ways to make everything faster (faster CPU, more/faster DDR2, faster HDs, RAID0, faster vid card for gamers, etc). And yes, RAM amount is a LOT more important. Not enough RAM, and your system will have to page memory to disk, and that's SLOW (HDs are like 1000x slower than RAM). And having loads of RAM helps for certain other things, like pre-loading (caching) files in RAM in Vista's case (SuperFetch).

Well, we're talking about nvidia drivers here They certainly don't need that to crash, and it's not just video drivers either. Most of the drivers they write seem to have issues (e.g. nvappfilter.dll -- even Mark Russinovich covered that one). This is why I don't buy boards with their chipsets (I've been burned by several -- VIA KT133 was the worst, but they gave up on making chipsets). Also, I remember seeing very similar statistics straight from MS themselves and surely 87% of BSODs don't happen because of OC'ing. Ah, I don't think I've used anything OpenGL-based in lot of years, so I can't say. Anyways. AMD's solutions are much nicer than Intel's here. The Intel chipsets with onboard video (e.g. G45) don't seem to make it to many boards (mostly cheap mATX), and AMD's is nicer in several ways (e.g. often has 1GB of sideport memory) and actually makes its way on some nice boards. Oh well.

I see you enjoy talking to yourself! Like I said, that was just an example. There's plenty of decent PCs from pretty much any company out there for dirt cheap. And you can build yourself one for cheap too, like jcarle said. No it's not (nevermind you don't say how). It's certainly a million times better than those poor P3's you tweak. And if one looks for deals like most OEMs and stores have year-round, or buy parts taking advantage of weekly specials, it can be even cheaper. There's tons of sub-$500 PCs that will run Vista just fine -- including jcarle's example. No need to spend crazy amounts like you like to pretend. Besides, who said it had to run Vista in the first place? More nonsense (we're getting used to that by now). You charge them $450 for 5 minutes of work, to make their P3 perhaps 5% faster. Whereas if they spend that same $450 on hardware, they'd have like a 1000% boost in speed. In either case, you're not getting a monitor (again, unless you give those for free?). :lol: We got us a comedian! You're only proving one thing here (also by constantly using "Micro$oft" like most 15 year olds), as jcarle already stated before. Talking to yourself again eh? If I could, I'd give you the "most wrong ever" award. I've NEVER seen someone spout so much nonsense on this forum before in any thread... I very much doubt you work with computers, even at the A+ level (especially when your story doesn't even sound plausible, charging $450 for 5 minutes of "tweaks" that every 15 year old knows, especially when you look at the average IT wages these days)

Oh boy, I had missed that post... Wow. You almost sound like you even believe what you're saying! Amazing. One quick example: $324 will get you: a Dell Vostro 200, with a e2180 processor and 2GB of RAM. 16x DVD writer, a 80GB SATA drive and everything else. Everyday's normal price, no rebates or anything like that. Substandard, under-powered processor? The E2180 would be a huge upgrade here. Very minimum amount of RAM? There's 2GB standard (4x what he's got). No HD? It has a modern SATA HD. No DVD burner? It has a perfectly good DVD writer. Yep, you're wrong on *all* counts, and on a box that's 3/4 of the price you'd charge. That box will run Vista just fine too, and it's not an eMachines (and it even includes Vista). It's vastly better in every aspect than his current box. Yet, you'd charge $450 to tweak that P3 instead? Either some customers are absolute morons (don't mind paying WAY too much for "tweaks" that take 5 minutes to apply), or you just like ripping them off big time. There's no way you need to spend "$950 to $1250" for a box that can run Vista well (and certainly not in the USA), unless the case has to be made of solid gold or something. Also, you say they wouldn't get a monitor, speakers, keyboard and such out of it, but do you include those for free when you "tweak" one of those ghetto old P3's? Right, I didn't think so either. Yeah, others should feel silly Again, we have another person posting who cannot take 5 minutes and understand the point had nothing to do with the first post, but just charging people a LOT for doing them a disservice.

I hope you understand that it has nothing to do with Vista and is strictly due to the way those applications are written.Actually, I'm a very big user of VirtualDubMod myself (I've used it a few hundreds times on this box), and so far I had 0 crashes. None with avipreview either. I didn't see anyone else mention those apps crashing on Vista before either. Sounds like he has codec problems or something along those lines. Some people are VERY quick at blaming Vista for their hardware vendor's buggy drivers or for every little app glitch they've seen...

I can only agree with Zxian and jcarle here, on all points. Most of those tweaks do very little in terms of performance, and quite often people get problems from them later on -- just like we see everyday in the *lite sections (I've removed X, now how to add it back? what to keep so app xyz works? etc). Large hosts file can be a problem (and kind of suck, even for ad blocking), it's misusing it at best. Anyone who actually charges customers large sums of money for doing such things to their PCs are only doing them a disservice. For $450 you'd get quite an upgrade (or an entire new computer even). Any competent tech or shop would sell them an upgrade kit for half that, which would actually give them a real performance boost, instead of charging a LOT of money for almost no difference and potentially breaking things/creating their customers more trouble.

That's what I was saying in the other thread too. They're rock stable. Never one crash, EVER. I wish I could say that about nvidia. And no 50MB downloads full of "extras" (like "helper services" and such things). There's nothing I need that it won't do. H.264 decoding acceleration would be nice but it's just that, and nowaday's CPUs have no problem decoding that anyway, and getting it to work with some video cards is nigh impossible (this geforce 8600 POS I have advertized the feature, but it never actually worked).

If you looks at specs, they're very similar indeed. Creative cards have EAX (for gamers), but that's about it. I find onboard codecs like Realtek's are far nicer and FAR more stable (Creative has a LONG history of driver issues). Modern onboard audio also tends to do a lot more little things too, like support for the codecs used by Blu-Ray discs, have 7.1+2 audio, have advanced features like DTS Connect no found even on Creative's most overpriced card, etc. Also, Creative cards tend to be braindead when it comes to interconnects (from proprietary plugs, to sharing the same jack for spdif and mic input and things like that). No need to waste $100 on a card either, and no filling PCI/PCI-e slots for basic functionality. Not so. When you have a good speaker system (not one of those $100 5.1 setups), listen to high quality audio (preferably lossless), and also have a high-end card (not just any sound card -- LOTS of them are MUCH worse than most onboard audio), like perhaps a good M-Audio card, then sure there's some difference. On both my setups, my onboard audio beats my old $200 sound card hands down, that card is soon going to be donated. The REAL place where people NEED sound cards (non-onboard) is mainly musicians, who need their fancy multitrack low-latency ASIO and such (and rich audiophiles, and gamers who can't live without EAX)

How exactly? And don't say 3D performance as that's 100% irrelevant. I don't see anything wrong with it at all. In short: what makes the $40 card better at things like paying your bills and such. I very much doubt it, any proofs of that? Which are also found on a lot of recent onboard video cards I think video is gonna go much like the rest of hardware in the long run (onboard), and AMD is paving the way.