nmX.Memnoch

You said this is the 2nd drive that's gone out. Is this the "same" drive? By that, I mean is the 2nd failed drive the replacement for the 1st failed drive? If so, check your power connections to see if it's on a different power cable than the other drives (i.e. are the other drives all connected to the same cable, but this one is on a seperate one?). If so, you could have a bad power cable coming from the PSU, or a bad rail (which would've been causing other problems as well).

The only way you're going to get official support for the 1600MHz FSB is either with an Intel X48 or NVIDIA 790i based motherboard. One word of caution. Be careful if you get an X48 motherboard that uses DDR2. I'm not sure if they fixed the "problem" in the X48, but I have an X38 motherboard that uses DDR2 (Asus P5E) and memory support seems to be a bit quirky. As an example, Crucial recently decertified their Ballistix Tracers on X38 DDR2 motherboards. My P5E is stable as all get out, but it took a bit of tweaking to get it there. Just keep in mind that the X38/X48 chipsets don't officially support DDR2. However, DDR3 prices are high enough that putting up with some minor headaches was well worth it to me.

Actually... DX 10.1 is going back to the way they used to do things (e.g. DX 8 -> DX 8.1)...and is proper for software IMO. At least the major version is still 10 and they didn't go straight to DX 11. What NVIDIA did was went from "8" to "9" on the same core. Did they add some features? Sure, but they aren't major features or enhancements, they're additions to the existing product. If you equate that to software, it would be from 8.0 to 8.1 (or, as I stated before, this would be 8.2 since they've already released "8.1" (65nm 8800's)).

I think this is going to be a much smaller issue that you think. Even Microsoft says that there isn't that much in the ".1" update.

The 9800GX2 is dual PCB. AnandTech.com has a review. After reading the review, it looks like the better option is to save a couple hundred bucks and purchase a pair of 9600GT's to run in SLI (provided you don't have an Intel chipset based system other than Skulltrail). BTW, dual GPUs on a card is still no reason to go to a new naming convention. They didn't do it with the GeForce 7 series. I don't even think Hybrid SLI is a reason...especially since they have been talking about it since the early GF 8 days. But that's just my opinion.

And enough RAM to support the guest OSes. For the OSes you mentioned, 2-3GB should be plenty (512MB-1GB for the XP VM, 512MB-1GB for the Linux VM and 64-128MB for the Win9x VM).

Nothing but that's not what you stated in the original post.

Learned something today . That still doesn't change the fact that I don't think they should be 9800's. In fact, I think the original die shrink to 65nm should've been called 8900's (i.e. instead of reusing the 8800 GT moniker, we would've had 8900 GT's) and these new ones (the 9800's) should be 8950's.

Yes, I've read. I'm not going to quote it as fact because until the press release comes directly from NVIDIA and we have reviews on actual released hardware it's not fact. I disagree. It's the same architecture with a few tweaks. They should've done exactly what they did with the GF4's (from 4600 -> 4800), the GF FX's (from 5800 -> 5900) and the GF 7's (from 7800 -> 7900). What I'm saying is that these should've been called 8900's, not 9800's. See comments above. There are at least a couple of reasons they're going with the 9x00 name(s): 1. They could only come up with so many suffixes before it starts to get rediculous. I'm sure they sat around and the conversation went something like: "We could call them 8800 GTX Ultra Max In Your Face AMD/ATI" "No, No, remember 'KISS'? Let's just waste a whole generation of names and call these the GeForce 9 series...and forget that we could've used 8900 GS, 8900 GT, 8900 GTX, 8900 Ultra". "YEAH, I like that! Let's roll with it..." And there you have your "Marketing 101" lesson for the day. 2. The 8x00 line has been on the market for over a year and I'm sure they're worried about public perception. The "true" enthusiast knows what's going on...but the "wannabe" or "n00b" (for lack of better terms) enthusiast goes "yeah, time to upgrade!". And believe me, the "wannabe/n00b" enthusiasts outnumber us... KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid

We've been through this before in other threads... The .DEFAULT key contains the settings for the logon screen. Any changes you make within that only affect the system when it's sitting at the "Press Ctrl + Alt + Del to Logon" screen (or the Welcome Screen if you use that). It does not contain the settings for the Default User profile. In order to change the settings of the Default User profile you must load the NTUSER.DAT profile located at %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Documents and Settings\Default User\. Make your changes and then unload the profile.

I should clarify that as well. You can only have one drive attached to a virtual SCSI controller that's setup in shared bus mode for clustering. You can attach multiple drives to a single virtual SCSI controller if it's not setup for clustering.

I've read that the 9800GTX is nothing more than a re-release of the 65nm G92 core with more stream processors enabled and a speed bump. I don't know why they gave it a 9x00 name either, other than they're running out of how many times they can re-release the chips as 8x00 versions. I don't know that it's so much a mistake as they used to do it all the time in the early days, but I do think calling it a "next generation" part is a mistake. I've also read rumor that ATI's RV770 will have 800 SPs. Although that's an extremely high number I don't think it's going to give them that much of a performance gap over NVIDIA's GT200 as it might seem. Their SP count is much higher than NVIDIA's now (more than double) and it hasn't given them any real edge in performance.

I have only tried it with Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The downside to VS2005 is that you can only attach one drive to a virtual SCSI controller, and you can only have a max of four virtual SCSI controllers. So to maximize you put your OS drives for each node on an IDE bus and then create four virtual shared-bus SCSI controllers for each node. One of those will be your Quorum and one will be MSDTC. Oh...and your shared disks must be fixed size. You can't use dynamic VHDs. You can, however, use differencing disks to setup the nodes. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...oy/cvs2005.mspx

This is completely WRONG. The key only has to match whether or not the media is OEM, Retail or Volume (sometimes called "Corporate"). The service pack level of the media does not matter. If it did what would be the point of having the option to slipstream the service pack into the source?

Unless of course they came with XP Home and he's now trying to setup a domain. Which would require XP Professional since XP Home can't be joined to a domain. I'm not sure that you're going to find anywhere that sells Office 2000 other than someone selling it on eBay. There have been three releases of Office since 2000. I'm not even sure you'd find anywhere selling Office XP.

It depends on the application. Registry keys may not be the only thing you have to deal with. A lot of times there are DLL/OCX files that are also registered and required for the application to properly function. 99 times out of 100 it'll be more trouble than it's worth instead of just doing a second install of the applications. It's only drive space and drives are cheap now days.

This actually depends on how much RAM is on the video card. If it's 256MB the system will show ~3.75GB, 512MB it'll show ~3.5GB and with a 768MB card it'll show ~3.25GB. The attached screenshot is from my work system, which has a 768MB Quadro FX 4600.

Give this a shot. http://www.smartertools.com/Products/Smart...l/Features.aspx I have not used it personally, but it has been mentioned to me on more than one occassion. The only reason I haven't tried it yet is that I haven't had the need to. The feature list is pretty extensive though. The free version only allows one domain but that's all most people need.

Who assured you of this? I guess "technically" speaking it is if you reboot one node at a time since the failover will pickup the services. There may be a slight interruption in service while the services are being moved to the other node, but it certainly isn't that much of an inconvenience. As it turns out, you may be able to add the physical disk without a reboot using the cluster.exe command-line utility. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555312

Stupid question but did you reboot all cluster nodes after you configured the drives in Disk Management of the first node? They won't show up as available resources in Cluster Manager until you do.

I've never downloaded a .IMG from Microsoft. They're always .ISO's. I've had both a TechNet Plus and MSDN subscription for years...always ISO's. Even their monthly security update images are ISO's.

Dell's newer UltraSharp's have some pretty nice hardware scaling. My 2407WFP scales various resolutions pretty nicely...or I can set it to not scale at all. By that, I mean that I can set it to stay at the native 1920x1200 all the time regardless of the requested resolution. If, for instance, a game was set to 1280x1024 the monitor will display that resolution within the 1920x1200 (there will be black borders around the display). It's a nice feature to have if you game and the game doesn't support wide-screen resolutions. You can set the game to 1600x1200 and it won't be stretched.

Another thing to remember is that some installers actually check to see if the user is a local admin or not. InnoSetup, for one, allows the install creator to specify that the installer should check local admin group membership. I've used this in several application installers and install wrappers that I've created for work.

Also don't forget the AIK.

jcarle is 100% correct. If the CPU ID could be changed THAT easily then there would be a HUGE market for remarked/fake CPUs (i.e. Semprons changed to Athlons for the price markup). I'm not saying there isn't a market for remarked/fake CPUs, but it's not as easy to running a utility to change the CPU ID within the CPU.