jcarle

It's been a hell of a long time, but I'm back... sort of. The links are updated and the files are available for download directly from my personal servers again. I'm overloaded with work in my personal life, but I've seen just how popular these few utilities have become, so I've updated the source and recompiled them with Visual Studio 2005. I'll be trying to update the programs, maybe re-write them... I'll be bringing into this mix a couple of my other utilities in the near future too.

@Andromeda43: I have a Pentium 630 (3.0GHz, 2MB cache, 800FSB). Mine doesn't get nearly more then a touch warm. And not to mention that here, in Canada, it cost me less then the AMD equivalent by a large margin. The debate is long and fruitless, it's been going on for nearly as long as the introduction of the Athlon XP as to which company has the better processors. No one will ever win. IMHO, there should never be a winner as this incourages both companies to up the standards on the quality, the speed and lower thermal output of both their products.

What in the world are you talking about? Thermodynamics? PLL? Do you sit there with a computer manual reading out the glossary? Nothing you sade made much sense at all. The case is obviously simply cramped, generating lots of heat and requiring so sort of extra cooling. And on top of that, you didn't even answer his question.

Umm. No.First off, memory is NOT manufactured at the same places. There are MANY memory manufacturing plants and companies. In fact, there's even one here in Sherbrooke, QC, Canada that makes high-end server memory. Samsung makes it's own memory and makes memory for other brands. GB Micro make memory and there are others as well. Generic memory is NOT performance memory. Generic memory is BUDGET memory that MAY work for a while. Comparing OCZ performance memory to Generic memory is RIDICULOUS! @others: My preferences are Kingston for stability and reliability. OCZ for performance.

Of course! Why didn't we think of that? Man! THAT's the solution! Let's all play outside in the snow with our computers so that the "ambient" temperature is lower! No overheating! PERFECT! Yea, because proper seating of the heatsink, proper application of thermal compound and a proper selection of an appropriate heatsink is NOT the solution. I forgot. You twit.

Now that's just an insane amount of redundancy!

You obviously haven't read what he posted. He doesn't want an Intel motherboard. And throwing a dual core processor on an Intel motherboard is in itself a waste. Intel boards, as stable as they are, are not performance motherboards. Also, the thermaltake heatsink he picked is a fine heatsink.@phillyman2004: You made some great choices, I'd go for it. Just make sure you check to be sure that the heatsink clears the capacitors on the motherboard.

DSL is very shoddy for that reason.

My personal favorite is RAID 6. When the single parity protection of RAID 5 isn't enough, go dual parity. Anyways, everything else seems to be going dual. Dual core, dual videocards, dual channel... why not throw dual parity into the mix.

Let's stop the propaganda! B)

You can in fact mismatch drives in a RAID array. However, in the cases of RAID 0 and RAID 1, the smallest drive within the array will be used as the baseline for the array size. RAID 0: Stripping [Total Capacity] = [smallest Drive Capacity] * [Number of Drives] RAID 1: Mirroring [Total Capacity] = [smallest Drive Capacity per Pair of Drives] Example: 80GB + 200GB in RAID 0 = 160GB 80GB + 200GB in RAID 1 = 80GB 200GB + 200GB in RAID 0 = 400GB 200GB + 200GB in RAID 1 = 200GB 40GB + 60GB + 80GB + 100GB in RAID 0 = 160GB (First two drives paired, then next two drives paired) 40GB + 60GB + 80GB + 100GB in RAID 1 = 120GB (First two drives paired, then next two drives paired)

This is what I found according to Microsoft directly: Source: https://members.microsoft.com/oemconnect/ch.../200209-10.mspx

I highly recommend the Promise SATA300 TX4 4-port SATA II PCI card. It does not support RAID, so it's much cheaper then it's RAID equivalent.

The primary factor in determining the effectiveness in the use of a thermal compound is it's thermal conductivity. The electrical resistivity of the combined elements used to create the compound determine it's suitability to be used as such. A pure silver compound first of all would be impossible to use since pure silver would make a solid metal and second of all, pure silver would not allow much if any electrical resistivity therefore creating electrical distortion within the processor's core. The particle density is completely irrelevant. The importance of the gap filling properties of the compound on a microscoping level are far outweighted by the the importance of the heat transference properties of the compound. Even if you could create a compound that filled every microscopic hole on each of the surfaces (which would be nearly impossible), the point would be null if the heat transference was low. It's much more effective to have a compound with extremely high thermal conductivity and high electrical resistivity then it is to have a compound that "fills all the gaps" and has none of the important properties.

DIRECTLY FROM THAT PAGE: Q. How does this licensing policy affect products such as Microsoft Windows XP Professional? A. Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows XP Home are not affected by this policy as they are licensed per installation and not per processor. Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Microsoft Windows XP Home supports one processor. Again. Windows XP Home does NOT support symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Windows XP Home WILL IGNORE anything other then the FIRST CORE of the FIRST PHYSICAL PROCESSOR. Again! Refer to above! Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows XP Home are not affected by this policy as they are licensed per installation and not per processor. Therefore, if the LICENSE permits an unlimited use of processors and cores, what stops Windows XP Home from running more then one core? The kernel. What stops Windows XP Professional from executing on more then 2 physical processors regardless of the number of cores? The kernel. So what stops XP from running 4 processors? Oh guess what? Not the licensing, THE SOFTWARE DOES. That's easy. Open up ANY multi-core/multi-processor based Windows XP Professional machine and explain to me why the second core is NEVER at 0% when system processors are above 0%?

What in the world are you talking about? Bandwidth saturation does NOT cause disconnections. And routing table misconfigurations would NOT cause disconnections either. Bandwidth saturation simply brings the network transfer and responsiveness to a crawl. And routing table misconfigurations would make it impossible to reach certain destinations, that's all! Disconnections like these are caused by one of two things... modem signal drop outs or firmware/hardware problem with the router. That's it, that's all.

Um... particle densities have NOTHING to do with it. The differences are with the efficiency of heat dissipation and conductivity between the different materials. Also, if you had PURE silver as your heatsink base, you'd most likely cause electical interference to whatever you wether trying to cool.

No... no... Recordable media is composed of special chemicals that are altered during the "burning" process while original disks such as from Microsoft are stamped with the data contained on them.

@teqguy: You have no idea what you're talking about. First off, Windows XP is licensed PER INSTALLATION not per processor. This applies to both the Home and the Professional editions. Second of all, Windows XP Home does NOT support multiple processors. Although Windows XP Home WILL run on a multiple-cored and/or multiple-processors system, only the PRIMARY CORE OF THE PRIMARY PROCESSOR will be used. Other processors and cores will be simply ignored. Third, Windows XP Professional supports up to a maximum of 2 physical processors with an unlimited number of cores. Additional processors will simply be ignored. Fourth, the limitiations for the number of processors supported are a SOFTWARE limitations within the operating system. They are NOT licensing limitations. And by the way, Windows XP Professional does indeed do load balancing across multiple cores. System processes are distributed across multiple cores only individual application threads are concentrated on the primary core, although an application can be manually assigned to run on an alternative core.

You know, there's nothing that frustrate me more then watching someone give improper advice to people. The unaccurate opinion of a single member can misguide hundreds of members in such a large forum as this one. It is not by talking with terminology that people are unfamiliar with that the opinion expressed contains correct information. teqguy, it is of my opinion that you are one of those people. There are many points that need to be clarified, that I will do one at a time. And I will attack all points discussed in this thread, and if I've missed any, then please point them out to me and I'll clarify them. So what affects a single drive's speed? There are a few factors to consider. The most obvious factor, and the one SCSI drives have long been reknown for is the revolution speed. Older drives spin at 5,400rpm while most current drives spin at 7,200rpm. Only the ever so famous Western Digital Raptor series turn at 10,000rpm in the desktop (non-SCSI) world. Of course, the faster the revolutions, the faster the overall drive response, transfer speeds and seek times. The amount of cache is also responsible in speeding up a hard drive when information is gathered repeatedly, such as the case in things like video games. The more cache, the better. Cheaper drives are only equiped with 2MB of cache, most drives today have 8MB of cache. More and more drives today are starting to come out with 16MB of cache. The interface plays little role in the speed of the drive. Most drives today cannot reach even the transfer limits of PATA technology. The advantage that can come through the interface is with SATA's ability to use Command Queuing (TCQ/NCQ). Command queuing on a desktop setup does not give advantage to speed, but instead hinders it because of the linearity of command issued on a single drive from a single user. The platter density has a direct affect on speed. Increasing the platter density has a two fold advantage. It reduces seek times because the head has less distance to travel to reach two given points and it increases through put because more data passes under the drive's head at the same revolutionary speed then a drive that has a lower drive density. The number of platters also has a direct affect on speed. Increasing the amount of platters creates the same speed gain as increasing the platter density. Data is spread throughout all platters and for each platter there is a matching set of drive read/write heads. It's much faster to read/write from multiple heads on multiple smaller platters then to read/write on a single head on a larger platter. This is why a 320GB 7,200RPM 8MB hard drive is FASTER then an 80GB 7,200RPM 8MB drive of the same make, model and type. Now what about RAID? First off, the differences in RAIDs. RAID 0 is done by stripping data across drives. This provides no data reduncy so if one drive fails, everything is lost. However, the advantage is purely for speed. RAID 0 is one of the simplest RAID logistics, therefore requiring very simple RAID controllers and/or requiring very little overhead on the system to run. Drive reading and writing is improved substancially due to the distributed nature of the reading/writing. The overall bandwidth of the array can be seen as a total of all drives together, minus some minor overhead for the RAID controller. The total capacity of the array is equal to the total combined capacity of all drives in the array. RAID 1 is done by mirroring the data from one drive to the other. This provides direct data reduncy so that if one drive is to fail, no data is lost. Mirroring is even simpler then stripping and creates a similar speed increase as RAID 0. The difference is that although the reading bandwidth is increases per total number of drives, writing is equal to the writing speed of a single drive, minus some minor overhead for the RAID controller. Also of significant importance is that the total capacity of the drives is equal to exactly half of the total combined capacity of all drives in the array. So why RAID 0? If you want read speed and write speeds to both increase and do not intend on storing valuable data on that RAID array. So why RAID 1? If you want to make sure you never lose your data from disk failure. With the size of today's data, it's not conceivable for people to make backups on remote servers. You simply cannot backup GIGS worth of personal data on a remote server. People nowadays have music collections, movie collections, personal videos, personal pictures, documents, large e-mail folders, programs they've collected, source code, photoshop source files, and the list is endless. You cannot just Ghost, backup onto CD/DVD or store on a remote server that sheer amount of data. It's senseless. The only sensible solution is to RAID current a couple of large drives together and keep all valuables there. Hard drive also have a hugely higher safeguard life (when from a reliable company such as Western Digital, Hitachi or Seagate) then optical media. Due to the chemical composition of optical media, optical media deteriorates within a matter of a few years. Optical media is also easy to damage with scratches, temperature changes and general simple abuse. Even the highest quality media will no resist the damage a child can do to it, and nor can it survive more then 5, 6 or even 7 years at the most. Hard drives, because of their metallic and magnetic nature, are much more reliable at keeping the data safe. Yes, it's true that a fire can destroy a fire, but a fire will also destroy the optical backups you may have in your house as well, remember that. There's a reason why in my personal machine I have two 10,000rpm hard drives that are functioning in RAID 0 and in RAID 1 mode. I keep my operating system on a RAID 0 array for speed and I keep my personal data on the RAID 1 array for safe keeping. If there was no speed advantage to the RAID 0, I would have stuck with a single drive, and if there was a more cost alternative method for data safeguarding, I would have taken it instead of a RAID 1 array. The cost incurred for building a RAID system on two 10,000rpm hard drive is a VERY costly choice. But that cost brings gain and all my experience is not wasted when I made that choice.

Unfortunately, warranties when it comes to LCD monitors are very severe and the "dead pixels warranty" is usually comprised of a required minimum number of dead pixels grouped together. Useless when you have a single dead pixel.

Right now I'm disecting the XML file that nuhi showed me. I've found a link to a more recent version of it that's still being maintained. If everything goes well, you'll be able to download updates all the way back to windows 98! Though I may simply code support only for Windows 2000/XP/2003.

They don't really make routers with gigabit switches for home use because it's kind of pointless. No internet connection for home use exceeds 10 megabit. What you could do is get yourself a single port router such as the Linksys BEFSR11 and plug it into a gigabit switch such as the Linksys EG005W. Whatever way you go about it, I HIGHLY recommend you go with Linksys products for home use and Cisco products it you're going commercial.

Call Electronic Arts Technical Support. You paid for it.

Uninstalling XPize does not restore the command prompt to it's original look.