Zxian

I understand your frustrations completely. There are so many times when the people "upstairs" can't make up their minds about how things should be done, and therefore we end up running around going back and forth.

As far as I know, no RAID controller will let you create a RAID1 array with more than two drives. RAID0 can have as many drives as your controller will support (there's no theoretical limit).

RAID10 is always built the same way - a large RAID0 array where each part is made up of RAID1 arrays. In your case, you'll just have 4 pairs of drives in RAID1, each of which becomes a member of the RAID0 array.

Maleko - I noticed that you've got a diNovo Mini there. Has it ever given you any significant headaches? I've got one as well, but it's gone back into the box (and probably back for RMA) since it's decided that it should continuously glitch out and "half-work" (touchpad would be responsive, but no buttons).

Please avoid posting full sized screenshots in this thread. Most image hosting sites have the ability to create thumbnails for the images and provide the BBCode for it as well.

It should. But again, update to the latest BIOS as soon as possible to eliminate any CPU incompatibility issues.

I'll add one more thing to cluberti's post. I've worked at several companies in the past few years, and almost all of them have paid for training with a particular piece of software. These training seminars were not always cheap ($2500 for a 3 day course for one of them), and I still got paid while I attended. The company had decided that my training was worth that, even for something as short as a 4 month internship. There are times when a company is willing to pay money in order to have increased future productivity. $400 per person (which is roughly the costs that you described above) is not that large of a sum of money for a company with 3000 workstations and, presumably, 3000 employees who use them.

That's definitely a possibility. The processors are fairly new, while the 965 chipset is a few years old. Unless you've updated to the latest BIOS, there's no way of telling. See if you can find an old E2100 series CPU and use that on each board to update the BIOS (there's a floppy tool available from Foxconn).

I don't see how making programs searchable by typing is a terrible thing. I'm currently on an XP machine (soon to be formatted to Vista) and I wish I had the built-in search that Vista provides. If you've ever used it for day-to-day work and finding documents, you'd know that it is faster, and lets users be more productive in the end. For most of my collegues and friends who have made the switch, it hasn't taken more than a couple of weeks in order to get the hang of how Vista is laid out. After the switch is made, they all say they like it more. And no, they're not in IT nor are they tech savvy. If employees are having a really hard time making the switch from XP to Vista, they're lacking experience/training in general computer usage, and that's no fault of Microsoft.

To be honest, I'd say, no that's not a very good deal. For $1100 CAD you can probably do much better. Motherboard - Gigabyte EP45-UD3R - $163.05 CPU - Intel Q6600 - $261.13 RAM - G.Skill DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 - $69.99 Hard drive - Western Digital WD3200AAKS - $62.83 Optical Drive - Samsung SH-S223F/BEBN - $32.99 Video Card - ASUS EAH3650 Silent Magic - $55.95 Case - Antec 300 - $80.31 PSU - Corsair VX450 - $82.57 Mouse and Keyboard - Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 Keyboard and Mouse Combo - $29.99 Monitor - BenQ G2200W 22IN LCD Monitor - $233.42 Total Price - $1069.23 This isn't even taking into account the various sales that happen on almost all of the above products. I've seen the video card sell for $40, the PSU for $70, and the case for $60 (just to name a few). If you want to go for a faster dual-core, the E8400 is about the same base price, but goes on sale more often. If you're going to run Vista on that system, you'll easily get 5.9's on just about everything, except for the video card which will probably net you about 5.4 for gaming.

For anyone interested, I picked up the nMedia keyboard and remote combo today and got around to formatting the media center with Vista today as well. I must say, I'm thoroughly impressed. It really is a simple plug and play solution (it even works in BIOS!). The only gripe I've got so far is that the trackball on the remote has a very different sensitivity than the one on the keyboard. You spend a lot of time rolling that one if you've got the keyboard trackball calibrated.

Umm.... no. Ever heard about ATI's Unified Video Decoders or nVidia's PureVideo? They decode your videos on the GPU - that's graphics processing unit. aka video card. If you're having troubles it's because you either don't know how to setup the software (which in many cases is as simple as installing it and using it) or you're running with some pretty terrible drivers. Vista doesn't trick you. Your lack of understanding and knowledge (and your un-willingness to learn or realize the facts) is what's the problem here.

Again, that's caused by the already prolonged life that XP enjoyed. Windows XP is the first time that any version of a major operating system has had 7 years on the shelves. The extensions of XP's support lifetime has been the result of Vista's delayed release into the market. Fallacious arguments? You mean that in order for me to get the same kind of lifetime, I have to dig though man pages and make sure I've got the proper kernel modules and packages installed? And then I need to go playing with config files manually? Whatever happened to simplicity? On my netbook, I've installed XP and it just works. My CPU drops down to 600MHz on its own, and speeds up to 1.6Ghz when needed. te integration of Windows Search into the rest of the operating system is Vista specific, and simply installing WDS onto an XP machine is no substitute. The search bar exists in the Start menu, Explorer, Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery... need I go on? As for network settings, I click on the network icon in the system tray, then on "Network and Sharing Center". Tada! I'm at the same place that I would be by right-clicking on the system tray icon in XP, and then selecting "Open Network Connections". I don't see how Vista's layout is any more "hidden" or difficult to figure out than the various options in XP. It's simply different, and IMO much better laid out. Try it yourself. Run some video encoding, Matlab simulations, and then a few simultaneous virtual machine installations. I've done this on a Fedora machine, Windows XP, and Windows Vista, and Vista is the only one that maintains system responsiveness while the resources are maxed out. I think I've had Vista's explorer crash on me once, and that was because of poor video codecs that were causing errors when Windows tried to render thumbnails of my videos. When did I say that application crashing had anything to do with multi-tasking? Why should I blame nVidia? Why should they be forced to make their drivers open source so that they can be recompiled everytime the kernel is updated? Do you expect that all software and hardware companies simply share their intellectual property (and drivers do fall into this category)? I certainly don't share the source code of the work I've done thus far without some sort of compensation. You're also suggesting that less than 1% of the total population out there is significant enough to force a major company like nVidia to open their driver source code.

Really? How come it's still gaining market share? Really? Roll the clock back 7 years to XP's release. How long did it take until people started liking it compared to the alternatives? How many hotfixes and patches were there in the first couple of years? How many major security vulnerabilities in the first two years? Like how? Media Center, Remote Desktop, Bitlocker - just to name the few features that I use regularly. Why does my laptop battery run out so quickly when I'm running Fedora or Ubuntu? Oh wait, they can't get power saving to work properly. Why are you constantly looking at your network connections? The only time I need to check mine is if/when something doesn't work (and that's very rarely for me). I like to use my computer (as opposed to tinkering with it), and Vista lets me do that much more easily than XP or Ubuntu. Windows Search and breadcrumb navigation are wonderful, and neither exists like it does on Vista. On every aspect? Vista handles multi-tasking far better than either XP or Linux (take any distro you choose). I can't count the number of times compiz has crashed on me, or how many times I've had to wait another week for nVidia graphics drivers to be updated alongside the newly released kernel.The most likely reason for your work laptop's poor performance is not because of Vista, but rather the other senseless crap that most OEM's ship with computers. I can build a fully Vista-capable system for roughly $500 CAD, and no, it won't be sluggish. I've got one system running Vista Home Premium x64 that's using an E2160, P5B Deluxe, GeForce 8600GT, and 2GB of RAM - all of which are parts that were released at roughly the same time as Vista. No performance complaints here.

This sounds like typical Vista bashing that's been going on since Vista's release. I haven't seen a single valid point here that's somehow new for Vista compared to other new operating systems. Didn't we need newer more powerful computers 7 years ago when XP was released? Weren't people saying that they'd stick with 2000 because they didn't need all that "fancy crap", and that it used less resources? Any computer purchased since Vista's release will run it just fine. You can get the parts for a fully Vista capable system today for under $500 (and that's not choosing poor quality components either). Since when was this a new concept?

Thanks geek. I can't seem to find that item for anything less than $120 CAD around here. I've been reading up on nMedia's solution - Link. Anyone had any experience with the unit?

Most likely yes.I'd disagree. I don't see the need to reformat XP or Vista just for the sake of them "slowing down". What is required, however, is proper and routine maintenance of each system. I doubt Win7 will be any different.

For what it's worth, off-site backups are the only way to know that your important data is backed up safely. RAID is not a backup solution, and should never be treated as such. My backup procedure has become as follows: Sync folders from workstation to RAID5 array in file server File server makes a nightly sync to an external 500GB drive of the important files (pictures, documents, music). External drive is purely for backup purposes Every two weeks, I make a copy of my files from the external onto a portable external drive that I then take to work and copy to my NAS. One copy, two copy, three copy. Yes, it costs a bit more in terms of hardware, but like crahak said, some data is priceless. I honestly couldn't imagine losing some of the pictures I've taken or the documents and work I've done in the past few years (the past year and a half of my thesis included!). The only way that I would lose more than two weeks worth of data is if an entire EMP were to hit Vancouver, or some other large scale natural disaster.

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I'm trying to find something to replace my Logitech diNovo Mini that I've got, which seems to have a few too many minor glitches to make it really functional for my media center. I've looked at the full diNovo set, but I'm worried that I'll just run into the same problems again later. Does anyone have suggestions for good all-in-one keyboards that can be used to control a full media center PC? I read about the Microsoft MCE keyboard, which seems good at first glance, but it appears that the mouse control isn't really a true "nub" like those found on business laptops, but rather just an 8-way cursor controller... other than that it would be perfect for my tastes.

That's really unfortunate. Dell's are definitely the way to go if you can afford them. I'm quite happy with my Samsung 2443BW's though (I have three of them now). Three year standard warranty, and I managed to get them on sale for $300 CAD each too.

To ring in the new year, here's a screenshot of my netbook. 1024x600 - 125KB

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