Zxian

41% Just barely a healthy life as per these people... They should ask a question about games (online/comp vs real-life) that would be pretty heavily weighted...

Just another suggestion... don't use Windows Media Player to rip your music. CDex is a much better ripping programs and will allow you to rip in just about every media format out there. Cheers!

Hey there... are you using the explorer shell? It doesn't look like any style that I've seen before.

I think that the problem with these computers is the pure lack of space in the case. My Dimension 4500S has the same problem... only physical space for 1 HD. I simply use an external drive to store all my data.

Just a note about FireFox... it's not perfect. It is a really good way of preventing most spyware from getting onto your system, but there are still some holes in it. SpywareBlaster is still useful in this department as it helps close these. Compatibility with certain sites can be a pain to get working as well... I will agree that using a non-IE (not necessarily non-IE-based) browser will defiantely help. Possibilities are: -Firefox -Opera -Maxthon Cheers!

I don't think that you've understood where I came from with this... I have slipstreamed SP2 onto my RTM install disc and installed (after formatting). I still had problems with speed and certain programs. Not all computers are alike, especially laptops... they're really fussy when it comes to drivers.

If the case doesn't have any bays for the hard drive, then your outta luck. An option would be to buy an external USB 2.0 enclosure and run the extra drive that way. You can probably find an enclosure for $50. Another option (if you want to fight with the system) is to try to clone the Dell partition that lies at the very start of your current drive onto your new one. Unless this small partition (24MB or so) is there, you won't be able to boot from that drive.

Hi There, I'm not all too sure about the connection to your router, but you could always give it a try, and if it doesn't work, then just return it. As for software, I'd have to say that Acronis products have always worked well for me. Acronis True Image is a really good "ghost" product, i.e. it will backup your entire drive so that if anything screws up, you simply revert back to an image. I don't know if it works with network drives though. Hope this helps.

Some people don't want to slipstream SP2 yet because of possible hardware conflicts. My computer runs considerably slower wtih SP2 installed, while it just screams along with SP1.

I don't know if you can slipstream all the updates (or if you'd want to spend the time doing it), but you can setup an unattended install of the updates. All the updates that you have to download are available for separate download (i.e. an exe file instead of having to go through WU). You can set these up to be applied automatically during your install so that you have less to do when you're done. Have a look in the Unattended Windows section of the forums for more information. Hope this helps!

Just a note to mods... There are quite a few links there that link to what I believe would classify as inappropriate content (i.e. www.desktopgirl.com) Just trying to keep things clean.

The cable connection that I have is rated for 10Mbps, but in actual through put I probably only get 2-4 (since cable is shared). The fasted downloads that I've ever recorded is 800kb/s (that's kilobytes/s). Can't complain too much.

I think that it's a fairly well made site. Most of the things you need you can find through the search function, and they've got a lot of documentation for their products there. Overall: 9/10

Muaha!!! I think I've found the best buy in town (Vancouver, Canada). There's a store called Atic Computers here in Vancouver which is known to be the best place to get stuff for really good prices. Anyways, they've got a Hitachi 80GB 5400 RPM 2.5" 8MB Cache Hard drive (link) for $178 CAD ($144 USD). Even better price than I had found before! The only Hitachi drives that match the given specs are the 5K80 and 5K100 models, both of which will do me just fine. (It'd be really nice if it was the 5K100... but I doubt that... probably more pricey) Compared to my current hard drive (the 80GN 40GB 4200RPM 2MB Cache), I think that I'll have a pretty big improvement. Spare parts are also nice to have as well... (my old HD as backup). Thanks for all the input!

Hi LiquidSage, Thanks for the input. I was guessing that the extra power usage isn't that big of a deal. I looked at the 7K60 model that you have, but I'd like to have an 80GB drive. I don't know if there are 80GB 7200RPM hotebook hard drives available... maybe I'm chasing a wild goose here...

Hmm... further investigation has propted me to consider the Hitachi 5K100 series drives... I definately like the 5400RPM speed combined with the 2.0W read/write power useage. I'll just have to see how much it'll cost for that... If the price is too high then I'll probably look into a 4200RPM drive that draws the same power as mine does now. Just as a side bar... do you think that an extra 0.5W makes a difference? I mean... how much is that compared to the power used by the CPU, RAM, wifi card, screen, mobo, etc etc etc? Not to mention I've got an ATI Radeon 9200 Mobility in my laptop... probably also draws more than 0.5W. My gut feeling is that it's not all that much difference.

I'm trying to stay away from the 7200RPM drives since they draw more power than 4200/5400RPM. I bought my Centrino Laptop for a reason... Thanks for the input though!

Hey everyone, I dropped into the local computer store (at least the one with decent employees) and I asked about a new hard drive for my laptop. I'd like to go from 40GB 4200RPM to 80GB 5400RPM Cache I'm not too worried about since my current hard drive is only a 2MB cache, and pretty much anything out there will have more. The guy in the store said that he could order a Toshiba drive (5400RPM) for $210 CAD (that's about $170 USD or 90 British Pounds). Is this a good deal? I didn't get the chance to ask him about warranty, but I'm guessing I'd get the standard manufacturer's warranty. Good deal? Bad deal?

If you connect the routers as I said, any computer that is connected to either router will run as a DHCP client. Essentially all you're doing with the second router at this point is turning it into a hub of some sorts. All that the second router is doing is transferring data to the first router which does all the talking with the outside world.

@MCT: Mmm.... Adrianna... so pretty... My desktop hasn't changed at all... I just love the Cyrix theme for WB...

Yeah, the uplink port method will work as wellif you have that option, but I've seen more problems with using that as opposed to the method I described (which is called "daisy-chaining"). As long as you only have one router set to act as a DHCP server, you should be fine.

First off... don't cross post. Secondly... Ignore most of what mattofak said... anything above 60C is sketchy... (I think that mattofak was working in farenheit, not celsius). At 100C, even water cooling won't do you very well since you'd end up boiling the water (if the plastic around your CPU hadn't melted yet) Read my reply in the general discussion section of the forum. @MODS: Please move any relevant threads and/or delete duplicates

I haven't done much OC'ing myself, but I can soundly say that you should definately 1) Add more cooling OR 2) Slow that puppy down OR (even better) 3) BOTH (a CPU that's running at <35 C will never* fry) 65 C is way above what a processor should run at. You didn't mention if this was at idle or at full load, but if it's at idle, then you could run into a lot of problems really quickly... IMO, overclocking is only really worth it when you have the cooling equipment that allows you to do it without running any risks to your hardware. Is it really worth it to bust $100-500 on a fried CPU for one second quicker loading of programs? or shaving off 10 minutes on a render that would take about 2 hours anyways? *never = 99.99999999% EDIT: The first thing that I would do to get you better performance out of your computer would be to throw in at least another 256MB of RAM. If you want truly seemless performance in games or when you have 10 programs running at the same time, get 1 GB of total RAM. The first thing that you should consider when going for more speed is where the bottleneck is. With the setup that you have, your lack of RAM is what's keeping you back, not your CPU speed. I'd bet you that my P4 1.8GHz with 1GB of RAM will out-do your system (even OC'ed) with most applications, especially when you've got several programs running.

Absolutely! I'm guessing that you want to use both to connect computers together and to the internet. To do this, connect the DI-704's WAN port to your internet source. Then connect port 1 on the 704 to the WAN port on the 604. Then connect various computers to each router. Now... the important bit. Setup the 704 to be a DHCP server and disable the DHCP server function in the 604. You must do this to get things to work! After that you should be good to go! Hope that helps.

I think the problem that he has is that he already has CWS on his computer and is trying to get rid of it. Simply installing Firefox won't get rid of CWS on his system since it's just a browser and not a cleaner. Once he's cleaned the computer he might go over to Firefox. I agree that Maxthon with SpywareBlaster and Spybot S&D's Immunize is good enough to block almost all spyware and is completely compatible with all websites right out of the box, no hassle to get working properly.