Zxian

If the drive is in an external enclosure, set the jumper to Master. I've heard of enclosures not working properly unless this is so.

There's a bug with the link on the frontpage - sends you to wwwl.virtualbox.org.

Are you sure this doesn't happen with any other thumb drives? I know my OCZ Rally gets warm when it's plugged in, but it does this on all computers. It shouldn't be burning hot, but warm is fine.

And then the discs get scratched, or the chemicals in the discs deteriorate, or you've forgotten where you put something... Like crahak already said, indexing that many DVDs properly is a major pain in the rear. I won't trust anything of mine to anything but disk nowadays. Anything really important goes on my 80GB RAID1 as my backup, and everything else is just mirrored to somewhere else on my network. When I get a little more money (probalby after I graduate in April), I'm going to be buying myself a simple 4 or 6 port SATA RAID controller and tossing on several 500GB drives there in RAID5. I'm guessing that it'll cost me almost $1000 or so, but it'll give me a little more piece of mind when it comes to my data, and with 5 year warranties on Seagate drives (or enterprise level WD), that's $200 per year to make sure that 2TB of data (LOTS of space) is stored safely. Oh... and then there's the 200GB that I get from my webhosting... for $8/month...I spend way more than that on coffee - sometimes even in a day!

The codebox has the extra lines when I view it here in Opera 9.10. Click to see In IE7 however, the empty lines are indeed missing. I'm guessing that this is an IPB bug...

@SubCodec - Real System Power Requirements I'm not sure how the Opteron based system would stack up side by side with the P4 that SPCR uses, but as you can see there - they only manage to actually load the PSU to just over 200W. From what I can see, the SmartPower should have been able to handle that system without too much difficulty. I doubt that the Opteron system would draw 200W more than the P4... @LLXX - How is that system stressing a 300W PSU? 300W is a lot of power, and there's no way on this earth that a K6-2 system would stress that PSU.

My workstation - Lusankya. In all of it's PIII 700 glory... B)

That being said - you're fine. My basic system at home: PIII 700MHz 3x512MB PC133 40GB Seagate Barracuda 8x CD-RW 32MB GeforceII MX200 USB 2.0 PCI Card Some random PCI audio card Draws 63W out of the wall at full load. That means that the system draw is more like 45-50W. If you consider maybe 10W per drive, you'll still have plenty of power left to spare. People often overestimate the amount of power required for a system. My very first computer - a Dell Dimension 4600C - was a P4 1.8GHz, with one hard drive and one optical drive, and the whole thing ran off a 200W PSU. I miss that system... it was actually very nice...

Hehe - another Canuck! And what about this crazy weather, eh? Vancouver's got snow 3 times this year already!!! First dump of snow was at the end of November!!! Anyways - Welcome to MSFN!

Ack - get yourself a new PSU - quick! The 12V rail should never go below 11.5 (11.4 is the lower end of the ATX spec IIRC). Could this cause damage to your equipment? Yes! A faulty PSU can provide irregular power to the components, subjecting them to voltage spikes and drops. Electronic components like constant power. Antec and Seasonic are very good PSUs. If I had to choose today, I'd get myself the Seasonic S12-380. It's got enough juice to power just about any decent system out there, but has rock solid stability, and is very quiet.

This has been discussed so many times! Search Results For further reading...

Wow... very nice find. Thanks JoeMSFN.

Hehe... university network speeds rule... I think I've actually been able to get higher uploads than that before. I've uploaded files to external sites at 2.5MB/s... oh well - can't complain. Edit Hehe... just got a better speed. I'll try again tonight when there are fewer people on campus.

Well what you say has some merit, but then again, when it comes to Office Documents, I don't open any from whom I don't know the sender. It's just like opening random e-mail attachments. I've been running without an anti-virus for a while now, and before that, I hadn't got a virus in over 2 years. The one that I did almost get was one of those "oh crap" moments - i.e. my own stupidity. Also... isn't it funny that the "small & lite" apps that you mentioned are also generally held as some of the best (anti-virus wise) out there?

100% agree. But it was a flawed question to start with. Asking "what OS is better" is exactly like asking "what vehicle is better", or "what tool is better". Without a specific use in mind (best desktop OS, for general use, or gaming perhaps), the results won't be too relevant. And there will always be a fair amount of exceptions (someone using their desktop for something special) and extremists (especially the "everything new is bloated" folks) as well as those running on pretty old hardware which just can't run modern OS'es too well. And the thread is too old anyways. In over 1 1/2 years, lots has changed. New OSes, new service packs, driver availability for certain OSes has changed quite a bit, x64 hardware is more common, PCs are somewhat faster than they were, etc. And since then, I'm sure lots changed their minds (like ripken204 did), and can't change their votes either. I just don't see the usefulness of it at all. Yup. Topic Closed

Thank you for pulling out the real message here!!!! Anyways - that's true. As long as you use PageDefrag to defrag your pagefile (if necessary), you'll never have a reason to disable it.

No - that's not true. The physical RAM wouldn't be completly filled up. Windows always reserves free RAM for new applications. My mother's computer only has 256MB of RAM, and with XP, Avast, and Comodo installed, it's still got 100MB free. If I close the two bigger (in terms of RAM usage) startup items on my computer, I still don't get down to anywhere near 150MB used. Take a computer system with 256MB of RAM and install a basic installation of Windows. Look at the amount of free memory. Now upgrade to 512MB. Look at the free memory again. It will not have increased by 256MB.

The same can be said of this entire thread. The number that people give doesn't really mean anything without knowing how much RAM the system has to begin with. Obviously, my system that uses 300MB of RAM won't on one that only has 256MB to start with. Windows will properly distribute the memory allocation for those processes that require it the most.

Vibrations don't kill solid state drives...

My primary browser is Opera 9.10. Ever since Opera 8, I was hooked. Right now, I'm writing this from Firefox though, since I just installed Xubuntu on a spare system I've got here. Figured I'd make it 2 tux boxes that I've got.

@punto - Why do you say that quad cores will only have 2.5x the power of a single core? That doesn't make sense to me. Since we're actually able to make use of 100% of 4 cores when running stress test programs like Prime95 or Orthos, then it means that the CPU is still the bottleneck in terms of the computation pipeline - even with 4 cores. There are members of SETI@Home and similar programs who have had their work units double because of dual-core setups. I'd be interested to see someone here sacrifice a week or two on single and dual-core instances of SETI@Home to see how their average work changes.

Yay!!! It works with AveDesk running now!!! Very very slick. I'll probably end up using this as my primary media player from now on. w00t!!!

Just wondering what kinds of gallery setups people use for their pictures. Right now, I'm using Menalto Gallery, and CeleronDude's Gallery primarily, and I've been trying to write my own basic, basic PHP/MySQL gallery (none of this "add to cart" or crap like that). I know I've only got a handful of options up there, but if you come up with others, I'll add them to the list! Have a look at my gallery!

No need to apologize. I figure that a lot of people have misunderstood the importance of dual core systems. When it comes to cache separation, it depends on the CPU architecture. I can't tell you off the top of my head which does which, but there are various schemes for sharing the L2 and L3 caches between the two cores. I think that in the end, all this discussion is more or less moot point, since people (and systems) are leaning more and more towards multiprocessing. Single core systems are really a thing of the past now, and almost all apps that you run nowadays use multiple threads.