Zxian

Welcome to MSFN!!!

If all you're worried about are drive letters, then the only thing you need to do during setup is have ONLY the system drive plugged in. Once Windows is installed, connect the second drive, and then use Disk Management to re-arrange the drive letters to your desire. With the 4GB of RAM, I would recommend you use Vista x64.

Interesting... It sounds like HP has already worked their way into the realm of molecular-based nano-tech. It'll be interesting to see how this stuff turns out.

Happy Birthday... if a bit late!

One miconception about mini-ITX systems is that they're always smaller than microATX setups, but it all comes down to the additional hardware and the case you put it all in. Depending on whether it fits, I'd rather go for a slim, wide case than a narrow, taller case. It usually looks better as part of a home theatre setup.

BluRay decoding requires either a powerful CPU or a powerful dedicated GPU. I can tell you from experience, the D201GLY2 does not have enough power to decode high-def material, nor does it have a PCIe slot for a dedicated graphics card. The processor on the D201GLY2 is far more powerful than anything VIA has to offer, so those boards are simply out of the question. There are quite a few people interested in mini-ITX systems over a SilentPCReview.com. From what I've read, Intel is due to release a set of new mini-ITX boards that support most of their Core2Duo lineup. See here. Is there any reason why the HTPC has to be mini-ITX? If you were to go with a mATX setup, you'd save quite a bit of money, and the system would be much easier to cool (in other words - it can be quieter). There are some nice pre-built HTPC barebones systems that can be bought for very reasonable prices. Something like the Hiper Media Center PC HMC-2K53A-A3 might be up your alley. I've played with the setup at SPCR's lab and I have to say - it's very slick. I wouldn't recommend going diskless. Buy yourself a notebook hard drive for the system drive, and then use a mapped network drive for your actual storage medium. I've got a setup similar to that in my XBMC and I couldnt be happier.

Nice setup Nitroshift! Just one question... what on earth do you use 8GB of RAM for...?

The only other way I could think of is to use JS to read the CSS file, and insert it into the webcode. This would of course change it from an external style sheet to an internal one (you'd lose any CSS hierarchy you might want), but it would probably still do the trick.

In Yoda-speak, it means "I want".

The maximum speed of Gigabit networks is approximately 120MB/s. I'm guessing that your network connection is not the limiting factor here, but rather the rest of your system (hard drives possibly?) The computer that's being written to needs to be able to write the data to disk at the same speed that it's coming in.

Two words... "I" & "want" Stupid... not having... money....

My home network setup: Motorola Surfboard Cable Modem - 5Mbps Cable Internet WRT54GL v1.1 w/ Tomato 1.18 firmware Dell Inspiron 6000 - wireless (mine) Seanix... something - wireless (girlfriend's) Desktop system (Athlon 1GHz, 256MB SDRAM) - wireless D-Link DGS-1005D - wired Desktop (see here) - wired File Server (see here) - wired XBMC - wired Samsung ML-2851ND Nothing too crazy, but it's what I need and it works.

I'm not surprised that the kit lens suffers from that kind of aberration. It is after all, just a kit lens. Once I save up a bit of money, I'll be getting something a lot better. I had picked up one of those Panasonic DMC-FZ50 cameras back in the fall (it was on sale for $125 off) and played with it for a weekend. I'm not entirely sure why, but the images I took with it didn't turn out that well. I have a bit of a feeling that it was the image stabilization, but in either case, there was pretty bad pixelation in a lot of the pictures. (See here) I have a feeling that the image stabilization is at fault, since it was on by default.

Happy Birthday!!!

CORSAIR XMS2 2x1GB DDR2 800 - $25 after MIR Honestly, I don't think you'll get much better than that. I've got two of those kits in this workstation here, and they do the job just fine.

I was bored, so I figured I'd test this again...

That's what comes with a 10MP CMOS sensor and a good quality JPEG compressor. The RAW files that the camera spits out are about 15MB each IIRC. Daffodils... dandelions... they're all just flowers to me. My girlfriend is the one who likes them. When it comes time to buy her flowers though, that's when the names really matter. Did you mean just on the very edge of the petals? I see it as well, but I'd think that the color is fairly accurate. It could just be the shadowing of the sunlight on the "back" of the petals. The sun was off to the right and slightly behind me, so it's possible that I caught some of the shadowed side of the flowers.

Thanks for the birthday wishes everyone! For those interested, dinner was very good. Steak, spanakopita, and a variant of black forest cake for dessert. The other dessert... that's none of your business. B) I'll admit... I bought my own b-day present for myself a little early, but only because it was on sale. I got a Canon Rebel XTi kit for $700 CAD. I only have the 18-55 kit lens, but the image quality is still miles ahead point-and-shoot cameras. For a quick preview of some of the pictures taken so far, have a look through my gallery. (The dandelion picture is my favorite )

Sorry, but no. This method only enables write caching on the disk, which requires you to use the "Safely Remove Hardware" option when you want to remove the drive. Otherwise, you risk data corruption when you disconnect the drive from your system.

Do you have the Rev A or the Rev B Ninja? I'm actually quite disappointed with the two Ninja's that I've got here. I've got a 1200RPM Scythe SlipStream fan on this E2160 system, and my load temps still hit 55C (undervolted to 1.22V, overclocked to 2.4GHz). For the most part, my temps aren't much better than what I got with the stock cooler.

And whatever the system that's running the code can support. I've written code in a few languages (C/C++, C#, PHP, Java, Perl, Python, Matlab, etc), but at times, I've needed to move from one to the other because of the system that we're running on. Writing cross-platform code takes longer, and sometimes just isn't worth the effort.

The total bandwidth of the PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s, so you're likely going to run into limitations simply by having the RAID controller and gigabit network card on the same PCI bus. RAID operations shouldn't require too much CPU power, but if the gigabit card doesn't have TOE capabilities, I can see your CPU limitation being a problem. Here's a quick test for you. Grab iperf and dump it in the system32 folder on two machines (one of which is the file server). Set up another computer to run an iperf daemon with a 1MB TCP window. Run iperf on the file server to connect to the daemon (also with 1MB TCP window) and set it to run for 30 seconds. Watch your CPU usage in task manager. I can tell you that even on my Q6600 based system, I see the CPU usage go up a fair bit when transferring large amounts of data over the onboard gigabit card.

Personally, I'm a bit partial to OCZ, Corsair, and Kingston. I've got 4 sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066 here - 2 of which are dead after only 3 months of use. I'm currently waiting until I have the time to sit on hold to get an RMA number from Crucial. All my computers at home use OCZ Platinum, my computer at work uses Corsair XMS2, and Kingston has always been a simple, cheap "fall back" option for troubleshooting.

Haha... whoops. 1GB wouldn't last me very long today. The WD GP drives have been very good so far. They provide decent performance while staying whisper quiet. Just a word of warning - if your case resonates due to hard drive vibration, don't mix the WD GP drives with 7200RPM drives in the same system. If you listen VERY carefully to my system, you can make out a 30Hz beat frequency (7200RPM = 120Hz, 5400RPM = 90Hz) caused by the frequency mismatch of the two drives. Then again, I've done all that I can to minimize the noise of my computers. If your fans are louder than your hard drives, I doubt that you'd notice this effect at all.

Time for me to add that last vote for 3ware. I've got 8 drives connected to my 9650SE-8LPML in two arrays - 2x1GB in RAID1 and 6x500GB in RAID5. Plenty of space, and I couldn't ask for a more reliable setup. My only gripe so far has been regarding email notification, but I just need to setup a proper SMTP server to handle that.