Zxian

Using my brother's Verizon FiOS connection in New Hampshire. Rated at 5Mbps down, 2Mbps up.

Best wishes to you and your father.

I've got the Antec 900 for my case at home. It's not quite as big inside as some other cases, but it's still plenty of space for all your hardware. The cooling system is also something that can't be beat. The G92 series cards are the new generation. One easy way of distinguishing them from the old cards is that the old cards come with 320/640MB of VRAM, while the new cards have 512MB/1GB.

I'm not really sure what to say about the reviews of the DVR-212D. I've bought three of them in the past few months, and jcarle's got four of them in his system (as you can see from his sig). jcarle rips/burns more DVDs in half a year than most people watch in their lives, and I've gone through my fair share of burning and ripping myself. The DVR-112D (IDE version) and DVR-212D are the only burners I've used that I haven't made a single coaster with. *touch wood* The extra cost of the Q6700 isn't worth the money. Even with the old B3 stepping, you'd easily be able to match the Q6700 speed by a very minor overclock (that your hardware would easily be able to handle). The difference between the B3 and G0 steppings isn't really that great, and unless you're trying to go for a world record overclock - won't matter.

CoreTemp is the only program that I've found will give the proper CPU temperatures "out-of-the-box". Make sure you get the latest beta version (0.95.4 I believe). If you check out what oscar3d has done over at SPCR, he's managed to get his temperatures down to rediculous levels by undervolting the CPU.

Just thought I'd give a bit of an update (and look for some feedback) on my work tonight. I was bored, and didn't want to go to sleep, so I updated the theme on my blog, and cleaned up some of the content. I know that things aren't quite right in IE7, but I'm working on it... (stupid IE CSS handling... ) The new-and-improved Zxian.org!!! I also moved my blog from DreamHost to HostingPlex (recommended by nmX.memnoch) - the difference is like night and day. It's cheaper too! Once I get Kwikpiks updated I'll be moving that over as well, and dumping Dreamhost for good. Let me know what you think! Any suggestions or comments are welcome! Edit - I just managed to fix the layout in IE, thanks in large part to jcarle's help.

I've heard of people breaking 4GHz with the QX9650 on air - check this out! He's even got things running relatively quietly, so his fans aren't running at full tilt. The TRUE is really an incredible heatsink (my Q6600@3.0GHz runs at 46C at full load).

If you want to see the most insane rig around here lately, check this out! Wanna give us the latest parts list? Also, regarding the Raptor drives, two of them in RAID0 will give you the best performance, but if you're worried about the extra price tag, two 320GB drives in RAID0 will give you almost the same performance for about half the price.

ACK!!! What are you saying? The first card you posted is the newer card, and will kick the pants off the second (the older).

There isn't any particular reason why an optical drive wouldn't work under RAID mode. I've got several systems on different chipsets all working under RAID mode with SATA optical drives. Also, RAID mode does enable ACHI as well on all Intel chipsets (see here). Intel actually recommends that you use RAID mode, even if you're not going to enable RAID on your systems. Here is a list of the Intel chipsets that support RAID and ACHI - Link I'd recommend trying another optical drive (if you can get your hands on one), and/or upgrading your motherboard BIOS and optical drive firmware.

The second test would likely be a better test of NCQ, since there are multiple requests going on during bootup.

I'll blame the people who say "linux just works" when as a matter of fact, they don't. I had an interesting system crash with the integrated graphics (G965 chipset) and an OpenGL based program. The whole system would just freeze, forcing me to hard reboot the system. As a second example - our Linux servers decided that they weren't going to implement the routing information given to them by DHCP. Two days later, after various troubleshooting, the problem fixed itself. The OpenOffice loading times are with the pre-loader. I wasn't aware of any MS Office preloader that was installed on my system... know where I might find it under AutoRuns? I'd like to disable it and compare. I wasn't just talking about memory management in terms of resources. Modern linux distros take longer to load, perform slower, and use more RAM - in general use more system resources than Windows XP.

The EeePC doesn't have a built in optical drive, so the only way of using a Live CD would be to load it onto the hard drive (which kinda defeats the purpose, doesn't it? ).

Those artificial benchmarks don't really give the whole story of performance. I don't think that the advantages of features like NCQ are properly represented in HD Tune. As memnoch pointed out earlier, I think that all you've succeeded in doing is loading the ACHI driver under XP, but not actually enabling the ACHI features.

For me, the best way of learning a new OS is not by using a bootable CD, but rather setting up a virtual machine in VirtualBox and install linux in there. That way, you get a chance to learn the "how-to" of installing device drivers, installing software (which can be a major PITA), and in general, using the real system. My recommendation for Linux systems would be FedoraCore (it's closely related to RedHat), while a good Unix-based OS is FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a great, lightweight server OS that gives you just what you need and not much more. The documentation is also top notch.

Just try using Linux with some newer hardware. AFAIK, nVidia drivers still don't properly support the old 8800GTS video cards, and definitely aren't up to spec with the new 8800GT/GTS cards. Other more obscure hardware might not even be recognized either. One more reason why Linux is starting to go downhill... lack of MP3 support. I understand that the devs want to keep everything "free", but at least build in MP3 support to keep up with the times! It's rediculous that I need to use the RealPlayer driver in order to listen to my music... I find OpenOffice slow... it takes a good 5-6 seconds to open the OO Document program on my Fedora Core system (E2160, 2GB DDR2-667), while my Server 2003 system at home (E2160, 4GB DDR2-800) takes only 2 seconds to load MS Word. Newer versions of Linux are no more resource friendly than XP. My FC8 system uses 400MB of RAM on bootup, comparable (if not more) to that of a base XP installation.

If you're worried about the battery life, get yourself the 9-cell battery. Mine's over a year old, and I still get a good 4 hours of use out of this system while surfing the web and listening to music.

By proper I meant something that hasn't been reverse engineered. Samba works quite well in most scenarios. I've had some cases where it fails horribly, or just isn't up to snuff with NFS or true windows-to-windows sharing.

There are plenty of options for this - Google Picasa lets you create a web gallery. Flickr is another popular solution. I've setup Kwikpiks.com for simple image sharing and allowing for hotlinking to forums and the like.

Erm... Kel must be smoking some really really good stuff there... @Idontwantspam - Don't listen to Kel. He's forgotten that you're dealing with a laptop. Personally, I'd always go with a dedicated card over integrated video solutions. The only question is - does the 8400M-GS use dedicated VRAM, or is it the "turbocache" version? The 8600M-GT is likely a purely dedicated solution, but sometimes the "mid-range" cards will be nVidia/ATI but still use shared video memory.

Slipstreaming is a pretty simple process. MSFN even has a guide on how to! Check it out! Vista has much better base driver support than XP does. You wouldn't have this problem using Vista.

ooOOoooo. Proper Samba implementation...

Yes, downloading any software that isn't otherwise available for download via Bit Torrent is illegal. For Microsoft products, the only way that you can legally get the disc is from a licensed retailer (your computer store) or from Microsoft themselves. I'm with ripken on this one. Slipstream SP2 into your XP CD and install from there. Not only will things work out a bit cleaner, but you'll also be able to use all that 300GB of space.

Free in terms of your bank account maybe, but not in terms of time. It would take me far more time than $100 worth of wages for me to get Xorg setup to that degree (and ease of use). I'm guessing that it's limited to 2d applications. It's mainly meant for use where multiple people need simple applications, such as a web kiosk or the like.

Happy Birthday Champ!