Zxian

@Dagonet' - Wow... I like it a lot! That wall is crazy!

Well... you said earlier that 512 is a minimum for XP... which isn't quite true... And 512MB will do most people just fine even if they do multi task. I ran 512MB for a year or so without any problems whatsoever. A gig is truly overkill for most people. If I didn't run VMWare on my laptop, I wouldn't have upgraded it to 1GB... Most of the time I'm not even using 250MB of RAM...

I'll let you know tonight...if it works, then it's one more piece of info as to what services do.

Ok... I'm sorry. I would NOT buy this laptop. There is no Pentium M with HyperThreading!!! They're selling you a load of crap with those laptop specs, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sold you a load of crap for a laptop. If you want to do gaming, I would recommend something like this. Laptops aren't cheap to begin with, and laptops that you can game with are even less cheap. And ripken204 - You can actually run XP with 256MB of RAM just fine. If you don't do anything intensive (i.e. surf, type, read), then 256MB will do you just fine. If you want to do anything more than that, then yes, 512MB is a minimum.

You want a reference manual to what each of the 200,000 something registry keys does? I'm not sure that you'll find such a book...

I'm pretty sure that the signal is just as weak directly below the router as it is above. Athough the general idea is correct. I ended up moving my router to the other end of the desk and just running slightly longer CAT5 cables to the computer in that room. I used to get Poor/Low/Average signal in my room (other side of the house), and by simply moving it, I now never see anything lower than Very Good. Also, keep the antennae away from any EM fields (speakers, CRT monitor, TV, any kind of electric motor, etc). They will interfere with your wireless signal, degrading your wireless capabilities.

Yeah... the guest account does suck. That's why I always disable it on my computers... it also helps to protect us security paranoid people from having "guests" on our computers...

Hehe... nice. Like I said, that's probably because the GUI is handled by the graphics card, so there's more CPu power for everything else. Can't stop progress.

Another useless fact - Margarine is the only food that flies will not eat.

Yup... computers do relatively very simple computations on the most part. Just think about the body's ability to balance while walking. That's something that took years of development. I read about this a while back. Still really interesting.

Are you having that problem even when you enable the service and restart? lol... it's like the networking plague... I'm sorry... But your connection will eventually revert back to connected after a couple of minutes, right? Mine will eventually kick back to the "Connected" state if you leave it alone.

Only if the phone is a 2.4GHz phone. There are some bands that may interfere with your wireless signal. If you find that you're getting disconnected when talking on the phone or a call comes in, try changing to a different channel in the wireless setup of the router.

Hehe... yup. It's the same argument that people gave when XP came out... and I've run XP on the bare minimum requirements without any problems whatsoever. Microsoft was giving the "recommended" specs if you wanted to have all the fancy GUIs and such...

BAH!!! Your friend knows nothing!!! Regardless of battery life, the Pentium-M processor (found in Centrino systems) is still the way to go. Laptops already have difficulties with cooling, and the low power usage of the Pentium-M processor makes it ideal for laptops.** The Turion is getting there, but still a ways off. It would be my second choice to Pentium-M (the 64-bit is a nice feature... but I'll wait until the Yonah core P-M comes out). The Spempron is horrible for laptops...trust me... my girlfriend has one... the fan comes on continuously. ** Just for comparisons sake... my laptop uses a 60W power adapter, and will keep up with my friend's P4-M 2.66GHz laptop that uses a 95W power adapter just fine. All that power that feeds into the laptop eventually ends up as heat (except for the light from the display), and we all know that heat+computers=bad.

Well... you've made a good choice in the router you bought. I've got the same one at home (different version number, but same model). As for your signal strength problem, it could simply be a problem with your layout. (You said the laptop is beneath... I'm guessing you meant above) The signal is usually the weakest directly above and below the antennae because of how they work (look into basic E&M if you're interested). If you can imagine a large invisible "donut" around your router (about 15m radius), where the donut would be is where you will find the best signal. It's a funny way of thinking about it, but it's how the signal is emmited from standard antennae. I'd suggest seeing if you can move the router to another location where you aren't directly above it. Hope this helps.

Daemon Tools for me. Simple, small, and does exactly what you need. I'll stick with Nero for burning.

That's strange... I've always done networking without the Guest account. Have you tried using a login of a user on the remote computer? For me, it's always remembered that setting (probably since there was a password involved).

Or to delete: ->right click "My computer" ->Disconnect Network Drive ->Follow instructions In future, you can find answers to questions like these by searching. Google - Mapped Drives XP Microsoft Technet - How to connect and disconnect a network drive in Windows XP (First link) If there's something that you can't find, feel free to post here.

Have you two gone through the stickies...? About this section

Well... here's a couple things you can check to help pinpoint your problem. - Check the voltage of your CMOS battery (a watch battery found on the motherboard). If you have access to a voltmeter, compare the reading to what the battery model should be (you can find the nominal voltage online with a bit of searching). - Download and run Knoppix. If you can run that for a while without the computer rebooting, then chances are you've got a Windows problem (either with the system or with drivers). Usually if it's a power supply problem, you won't get reboots, but you will get strange behaviour.... although anything could happen really...

Have fun with your new toy! Just a couple of tips (if you haven't owned a laptop before): Get a proper carrying bag - something that is specifically designed for the 15.4" laptops. If you can, bring your laptop to the store to test out the bags before you buy one. It should be snug, but you should never have to force your laptop in there. If it's too loose, that's bad as well. I'm not sure what's available in your area, but Targus makes good bags (my backpack ). Swiss army bags are good as well. If you do a lot of traveling, get a backpack - your body will thank you at the end of the day. Get a good LCD cleaner solution (i.e. don't be cheap). You get what you pay for in this department, and LCDs tend to collect more dust than CRTs since they're plastic. If you're going to be doing CPU intensive work, invest in a cooling solution. It doesn't have to be fancy or expensive, or even need fans. I've got the Targus Coolpad (I'm not even sure if that's available where you are), and as you can see, all it does is raise the laptop up to allow airflow underneath. With it, my laptop CPU fan rarely turns on, whereas without it, I'd hear the fan every 20 minutes or so. Actually... get something like it anyways...it's worth the money. Calibrate your battery once a month, no more, no less. Too often and you'll end up wearing out the battery prematurely, not enough and your battery life will drop over time. Those are the biggies... I'm sure that you'll take good care of it.

The problem is not at startup. ("...after my computer has been on for a while..." see above) When I startup my computer with the wireless card enabled, the first icon I see is a connected icon (no aquiring network address). The problem is if I have disconnected from the network and then try to reconnect (with any network adapter). @Wicket20519 - I'm at work now, so I can't check out my theory... but do you disable the NLA service (Network Location Awareness)? I'm wondering if some of my disabled services have anything to do with this, and the reason why it takes a bit longer is because the system is waiting for a reply from one of them. If someone could test this out for me (disable NLA, unplug, wait 10 seconds, plug in), I'd really appreciate it.

@boooggy - I don't think so... Microsoft hasn't signed any deals with hardware manufacturers so that they can all "grab our money". I've read about a guy who ran vista on a system with PIII 800MHz, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD, and a 16MB Geforce video card, and the system worked fine. Sure, the glass effect wasn't there, but that's eye candy. The big changes, like Martin Zugec pointed out, are under the hood. Even without the aero glass, offloading the GUI to the GPU will improve performance termendously over the current standard. And I already pointed out... the beta 1 was working fine on my laptop (1.5 years old). It will only get better from here.

Yes... you will end up with SP2 installed afterwards... but it's still installing it after having installed XP. By integrating SP2 into your CD, you'll save time during the install process and future testing. I would highly recommend looking into the links I provided or using nLite to integrate your SP2 and hotfixes. You'll end up saving time and space on your CD (meaning more room for other apps once you get into full UACDs... ). XP Gold + SP2 = 484MB + 266MB = 750MB (dunno how you get that on the CD in the first place) XP SP2 (integrated) = 582MB XP SP1 is even bigger than the gold version, and it will still end up being the same size in the end with SP2 integrated. It's definately the easiest way to do things in the long run.

@DigeratiPrime - Yup... much higher by default. On my laptop, it used ~300MB of RAM by default (XP with all drivers is ~250MB incl ATI drivers) and 38 processes! A full XP install has something like 20-ish by default. Although I will definatly say that the layout of the GUI is much better. You can disable the extra information bar at the bottom from showing up, but the fact that you can navigate to any subfolder (not just the parent of the current folder) is a big plus. It definately makes things a lot faster. The new start menu is also much better as well (no more pop-out menus for "All Programs"). Even with my laptop, I didn't notice any lag whatsoever when browsing through files (and generating thumbnails for pictures and videos). My guess is that the threads to take care of those extras run at a lower priority so as not to interfere with normal usage. It's a beta1 OS and I don't even have all the drivers installed properly (just the default drivers for video and audio) and the system still runs quite quickly. Startup is a bit slow, but no optimizations have been made as of yet in that department. Generally speaking, it's a nice improvement over XP. At the moment however, it seems to suffer from "identity crisis" (hehe, prathapml). There are some dialogs that say Vista, and some that say Longhorn.