nmX.Memnoch

Those Dell printers had to have been at least overused for that model in some way. We've got several of them here (5300n, 5210n, 5310n, 5110cn) and haven't had a single problem with any of them. If they're only 1-2 years old they should still be under warranty (depending on the warranty you purchased with the printers. What do you consider "high capacity/volume"? The 5210n that we have is barely a year old and has had over 20,000 pages printed. Of course, the bulk of the printing in that office is done to a Xerox WorkCentre Pro 238...which has has over 125,000 prints/copies in it's two year life. I'd have to recommend staying away from HP as well...if for no other reason then their shoddy drivers (yeah, they used to be the best but times change). Try using the Universal Print Driver on a Terminal Server...

AutoPlay is probably disabled. Is the computer a member of a domain?

Mobile parts are always more expensive.

What's your point? Because I can afford to get both? No, I'm pretty sure by now you all know I'm a hardware junkie. I just got a brand new Dell PowerEdge 2950* at work today...and the very first thing I did? Disassembled it. *The new box is 2xQuad-Core Xeon X5355 2.66GHz, 8x1GB DDR2-667 FB-DIMMs, 8x73GB 15K RPM 2.5" SAS drives, redundant PSUs and integrated SAS RAID controller. All that in a 2U chassis.

Also keep in mind that the rated power draw is with the processor under FULL load (not just showing 100% in Task Manager, but all of the L2 cache being actively used at once). Generally speaking, the mobile version of a given CPU will usually use less power than it's desktop counterpart. Battery life is important in laptops. If power and cooling are important to you, then I would suggest focusing on laptop/mobile based parts. AOpen has a lineup of Socket M based motherboards that even use SO-DIMMs (laptop memory), but still have PCIe x16 slots on the motherboard so you can get decent graphics. http://usa.aopen.com/Products.aspx?id=52 You would just have to make sure that you get the Socket M variant of the mobile Core 2 because there are a few that are Socket P.

Windows 2000 doesn't have 48-bit LBA support during install unless you make some changes to the installation media. http://www.msfn.org/board/48_bit_LBA_Win2k_setup_t75713.html If I'm not mistaken, I don't think even Windows XP had 48-bit LBA support during install until SP2.

Remember I said I have some other systems that need to be upgraded? I roll my upgrades. My machine always has the newest/fastest parts and the other machines get my parts when I upgrade. I also said I "generally" skip a generation...but sometimes I don't.

I did some quick searching around Google and the motherboard should support 48-bit LBA with BIOS version 3.6 and higher. I don't know if you'll get Win98SE to install on it though. Windows 2000 won't even install on it without doing some manual work on the installation media.

http://www.widescreengamer.com/ http://www.widescreengamingforum.com/ http://www.widescreengaming.net/

* taken form the specs of the LG L204WS-SFRight... in contrast to what? That would be one of those dynamic contrast specifications I mentioned.

Naa, next chipset is neat, skip this one . There's always a "next" something. I generally skip a generation. My current motherboard is 965 based and my current video card is a 7900GT based card. It'll soon be time to ugprade both. Although, strictly speaking the P35 and X38 are technically the same generation, but my current motherboard is about a year old and I've got some other systems that need upgrading so one of them will get mine and I'll get a new X38 based motherboard.

Mmmmmmm....X38

ISOBuster should do exactly what you want. It's what I use to extract the boot image from Windows CDs for creating my Unattended disks.

Sharing IRQ 16 shouldn't be a problem...it's a virtual IRQ as well. The actual IRQs go from 0 through 15. Check your Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) settings in the BIOS. If that's all working correctly Windows XP will take over IRQ control once it starts. I would try reinstalling the chipset drivers (using the latest version). Here's a list of mine for comparison. Note that I have several devices sharing IRQ 16.

If the users will still be logging into a Windows 2000 Terminal Server, you do NOT have to purchase TSCALs. Your license server must run on a Domain Controller, which as you've said will be upgraded to Server 2003. All you need to do is activate the Terminal Server and it should automatically pickup the Windows 2000 Terminal Services CALs. However, if you also upgrade the Terminal Server to Server 2003, you will need to purchase TSCALs. I just went through the same thing on a side job. We left the Terminal Server running Windows 2000 until the TSCALs were purchased. Because of their purchase process it took a few months to get them ordered. There was no break in service. Once the TSCALs were purchased we reinstalled the Terminal Server with Server 2003, installed the TSCALs on the license server and everything continued as normal for the users.

Those are called desktop cases. You can get microATX desktop cases that use standard sized power supplies. Here's an example: http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=92480 What kind of hardware are you planning on putting in the system? You may not need more than a 380-400W PSU.

I'm not sure if there's a way to do that. There aren't any configuration options on the Cisco VPN virtual adapter that gets installed with the client. Question...are y'all using this to connect two sites together?

No, it doesn't. Asus removed the AHCI option three or four BIOS revisions back. Their stated reason for this is that ICH9 doesn't support AHCI. And according to the link I posted above, they're right. Since NCQ is a feature of AHCI, there is no NCQ support without AHCI support.

Well...unfortunately it took an outcry from the community to get something added on Intel's site. From what I've read (and I'll admit I have no first-hand knowledge or on-hands experience with it) many of the other tier-1 motherboard OEM's that have P35/ICH9 based motherboards (without RAID) have AHCI support in their BIOSes. I know that we have some Dell OptiPlex GX520 machines at work that have the AHCI option in the BIOS...and they don't have onboard RAID. To be honest I'm still not sure exactly what to believe, but it's right there in black and white on Intel's site...and it is their chipset after all.

Just curious...why do you want to use 32K clusters? I can see wanting to change the stripe size on the RAID array, but ideally you want to use the smaller cluster size to reduce wasted space on the volume. Look at it this way. A 1K file on a volume using 4K clusters will only take up 4K of space on the disk/array. But a 1K file on a volume using 32K clusters will take up a full 32K of space on the disk/array. So, supposing you had 100 1K files on your volume, compare the wasted space: 100 1K x 4K clusters = 400K 100 1K x 32K clusters = 3200K To put it simply, a single cluster cannot contain more than one file (one file can be more than one cluster though). So a 1K file would take 32K, a 2K file would take 32K space, a 48K file would take 64K space, etc, etc. Basically you're going to end up with a lot of dead space that you can't use. If you notice in Windows XP when you look at the properties of a directory to get the size, it gives you the actual size and the "Size on disk:". The "Size on disk:" is the amount of space it's actually using on the disk. The difference between the "Size:" and the "Size on disk:" is empty space that can't be used. The greater the cluster size, the greater the potential for empty space that can't be used.

In the Cisco VPN client right click on your connection entry and choose Modify. On the Tranport tab there is an option that says "Allow Local LAN Access". Check that and you should be good. This should allow you to get rid of the 2nd NIC as well.

Sadly, that isn't always the case. Look at the Pentium III vs. the Pentium 4. Clock for clock, the P3 was faster but due to the limitations in the design they hit a wall and couldn't get the thing any faster than 1.4GHz (and those were rare). I think we can consider that case a "lesson learned" on Intel's part though...I don't expect that to ever happen again.

Some of you have seen me mention Asus' lack of AHCI support on the P5K series of motherboards...specifically those that don't use the ICH9R southbridge. Well...Intel has finally put some information on their site as to why those boards don't have AHCI support. Moral of the story? If you want full AHCI support for your SATA devices on an Intel southbridge, get one that uses the RAID version of the southbridge even if you aren't going to use the RAID functions. If you're wondering what AHCI gives you...without it you won't have support for NCQ or Hot Plug features. There are other features, but those are the two most used features.

Here's what you need to know about widescreen LCD resolutions: 17" - 19" widescreen = 1440x900 resolution 20" - 22" widescreen = 1680x1050 resolution 24" - 27" widescreen = 1920x1200 resolution 30"+ widescreen = 2560x1600 resolution (exceptions are HDTV's being used as monitors, those are usually 1366x768) I find it odd that so many replies have been "wasted" discussing who's right or wrong about how much less area a widescreen vs. standard width monitor has, and not one single person has mentioned contrast ratio or response times. Let's get back to the discussion at hand... Ideally you want an LCD monitor that has a 1000:1 or higher contrast ratio. Be careful of some monitors though because they advertise a dynamic contrast ratio (Samsung is doing this with their latest LCD monitors). You want to look at the actual contrast ratio. Basically, the contrast ratio is the difference in brightness between the darkest dark and brightest white an LCD panel can produce. The higher the ratio, the closer to true black you'll get (assuming that the brightest white is true white to start with). I don't believe there's a single LCD monitor on the market right now that can produce a true black, but some are coming very close. As for response time, if you plan on doing any sort of gaming then you want the lowest response time you can afford. 5ms seems to be about the average, but you can find some as low as 2ms (again, I point to Samsung). Personally, I have the Dell UltraSharp 24" 2407WFP and couldn't be happier. If you look at Dell, do not look at anything other than their UltraSharp line. As for Viewsonic, I try to stay away from them. Their quality control has gone downhill in the last few years.

HE knows that what you mean, but the OP (and other people asking the questions) don't. I don't know what more I can do to make you understand that you can't just generalize the technical stuff and then expect the person who's asking the question to just understand the rest without explaining it fully. On to answering the question... Put simply...the Core 2 CPUs are a completely different architecture from the Pentium D's. The Pentium D CPUs are nothing more than two Pentium 4 cores slapped together in a single package. There were no other optimizations done to them at all. Intel took the best of the Pentium 4, Pentium III and the original Pentium M, added some more optimizations and power saving features and ended up with the Core 2's as a result. Since the Core 2 architecture is much more optimized, it is clock-for-clock faster than the Pentium D. A 3GHz Core 2 will run circles around a 3GHz Pentium D any day. For that matter, a 3GHz Core 2 will be faster than a 3.6GHz Pentium D. As for the 45nm die shrink (codename Penryn), it's scheduled to be released on or about 12 Nov of this year.