Zxian

Yup... As for what manufacturer... Seagate. The 5 year warranty should be selling point alone, as well as their friendly and fairly responsive tech suport.

Score... someone else who actually understands what I mean when I say some of this stuff... I just finished reading Battle of Corrin (just came out in paperback - hard cover is too expensive).... so GOOD!!! I don't think anyone minds that at all... it's a good point of discussion as well. I will however refute it a little bit. We have already made computers that are able to compute far faster than all of us combined (Blue Gene anyone?), so wouldn't that be a bit "greater" than us? It may not have all of our other abilities (parallel thinking, reproduction, etc etc), but it is greater than us in one of them. it all depends on how you define "great". @DL - Think of instict as biological ROM...

Yes... you can do all this, but there is so much more to being smart. There's the concept of what is best... can you really trust a computer/machine to decide what is the "best" way to do things? Anyone who wants a really really really good read about all this stuff (computers being "smart", making decisions, etc) read the Dune saga by Frank Herbert as well as the prequels by his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. There are now 12 books in all, and the last three that were released (that are actually the beginning of the whole story) dive into this topic a lot. I'm working on the last one and I love every last bit of it. There's always the everlasting question of "what does it mean to be human?"

Umm... Slackware = Linux Linux = GPL GPL = free.... no? As far as I can tell, there's no problem with posting download links to free software. The price is for the CD shipment along with a reference book.

@bledd - He's looking for a program to burn an ISO... @computerMan - CDBurnerXP will also do that for you Home Page

I always just use a soft, clean cloth (even a clean t-shirt will do) and my breath to clean CDs. No need for any fancy chemicals or cleaners.Breathe on the CD a bit (so you get the condensation on there) and then gently wipe radially (i.e. from the center to the edge) making your way around. DO NOT WIPE IN A CIRCLE OR AROUND THE DISC!!! Keep that habit up and you will end up with a scratched disc that will be very difficult to repair. Although you should be handling your discs either at the center or the edge anyways... so cleaning shouldn't be necessary...

Some things to try... Disable the indexing service. Once you have done this, right click on each drive and select properties. Uncheck the box beside "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching". When was the last time you defragmented your drive?

Partitions. There are more advantages to it other than just support from the OS.

SP2 will include it. You should also check that your hardware can support it. Old hardware will usually be buggy with large drives (over the 127GB, not 137GB). You're probably better off getting multiple 120GB drives than a single 200 for example.

That's a good tip. I had heard of it before, but never tried it out. I would be wary of the following... If there is any way for water to get under the surface of the label, you can kiss that CD gone within about 2-3 months. The water will evaporate under the label (that also contains the data layer) and create a hole when it evapourates. This hole will then expand as you use the disc, taking the data layer with it.

But that's exactly what I'm saying... without software, computers don't do anything. It takes a human being to write the software that they run. When I refer to solving problems, I'm not talking about math problems... I'm talking about design and business problems. The kinds of problems that companies are actually willing to spend millions of dollars on a single person to figure out. That's something that IMO, we won't be seeing for a very very long time. Not to mention that if you couple the CPUs of 2060 with 4MB of RAM, they'll be able to do diddly squat. CPUs are just one part of computers...

That's what my parents have (Athlon 1GHz, but pretty much the same back then), and it does the job great. My dad even does some basic image editing on it.

To specify the order, right click on the tracks, and select Move Up or Move Down. I know it's not really ideal, but it works. As for playing the CD again, simply select Repeat from the Play menu. *shudders*... don't go there. Every time I've tried to do something DOS in XP, I end up more frusterated than I started. No clue man...

CPUs are not "smart" in any sense. They can calculate numbers faster than any human brain can, but they are in no way "smart". Smart is figuring out how to solve a problem. Smart is discovering something new.Without a person who writes a program, a CPU is just a very expensive piece of silicon. I hate poorly worded articles.

Simple step-by-step instructions 1) Copy the entire contents of your XP CD to a folder on your hard drive (lets call it C:\XPCD). 2) Open nLite. In the page that asks you for the location of the installation files, type in (or browse to) C:\XPCD. Click Next. 3) On this page, make sure that Integrate a Service Pack and Create a Bootable ISO are selected. Click next. *** 4) Click on Select and browse to the location of the SP2 network install that you used for the "hard way". Click on Next when the integrated install is completed. 5) Click on Make ISO and select a location to save the ISO of your new installation CD. 6) Exit fron nLite. 7) Open up your favorite burning program and burn the image you just made to a CD (you do not want a data CD here... look for "Burn Image") *** If you want to go one step further, select Unattended Setup from this list as well. In the page after integrating SP2, fill in all the necessary information under all the tabs (General 2/2 and Display aren't too important, the others need to be completly filled). This will save you from having to enter this information while XP is installing. That should sum it up. When you're done, you should have a bootable CD with Service Pack 2 slipstreamed (and maybe an Unattended setup as well).

If you think how compression works decompression shouldnt take anywhere near as long but after winrk finishes i'll test and also add more infomation for each prog. This is true to a degree... decompressing a plain jane ZIP file takes much less time than a 7-zip Ultra file. Normally I would completely agree but think of it more like this. 30Mb is the difference between using NERO or Windows built in cd burner. DreamweaverMX or Notepad how about Symantec Norton AV or the luck of the gods. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yup... and also when you do compress... hopefully you only do it once or twice and keep the file for future use.

Good!!! Someone who's not scared of getting their hands a little bit dirty!

lol... if I can trade for what she's gonna get (doubtful) it won't be...

It seems like your hardware should be able to handle the drive just fine. To slipstream... there's the hard way or the easy eay. You'll need the administrative install of SP2 in any case, which you can find here.

For most people though, the all-in-one solution is simple and generally does the job. Most people like just having the one-stop solution for everything... which is why we now have Starbucks in our grocery stores...

I'm just wondering about the last two compression programs... how are the decompression times? @purq99 - Yes, compression is important, but if the last two methods take a rediculous amount of time to decompress, then they are not viable solutions for compressing to fit on an install CD... who wants to wait 20-odd hours for installing your computer?

VMware... I don't really care about the audio in my virtual machine... not to mention the fact that VMWare gives far better speed than VPC. Linux support for VPC is pretty bad as well...

Yeah, I'd call Acer. I remember reading about a case where my model had problems from the touchpad not working due to heat from inside the laptop. I haven't had this problem yet (touch wood) but Compaq said that if the problem came up, simply return it for a repair. Your laptop should be well under warranty after only three months.

Well... have you tried slipstreaming SP2 onto your XP installation? It's not necessarily your hard drive that's buggered up. I got a 200GB drive a few months ago, and it caused me all sorts of problems with my old motherboard. I upgraded my motherboard to something a little more recent, and all was well. What are the specs on this computer? [offtopic] I've said this to some other people as well... complete sentences do wonders for our ability to understand what you're saying. Turns into.... A simple period and capital letter makes all the difference. [/offtopic]

I agree with everything that's been said before... no need to repeat. And.... I'll add as a future note of caution - get a good quality (i.e. no dollar store) surge protector or, even better, a UPS. The UPS will allow your computer to run for long enough to save any open files you have and properly shut down.