Zxian

The actual STOP code would help a lot. To prevent the system from automatically restarting, you can change that setting by right-clicking My Computer, select Properties->Advanced->Startup and Recovery Settings->Uncheck Automatically restart. Once you've done that, if you tell us the error code you get, we'll be able to help out a lot more. What's the rest of your hardware? Motherboard, CPU, RAM, other hard drives? Are you using any SATA PCI cards? There's no reason why a SATA hard drive would prevent you from installing SP2. Pretty much every new system out there has SATA and SP2, so you should be able to as well. Why don't we get to the bottom of this?

What is the STOP code that you get when the computer blue screens? There can be many many many reasons why the computer is doing this, although it is strange that it happens in VPC as well as your system. What about the same CD (made using the same steps), but without slipstreamed drivers? Any luck there?

Sure... they work, but they might also prevent certain applications from saving settings on close. When all your programs are trying to save their settings to disk, 1 second might not be enough time for them all to exit. At what point in time is the waiting? Is it still at the desktop or later on during shutdown?

The 550W that your PSU can provide is more than what you need, yes. A 380W PSU would be perfect for your system, since it would put the system in the maximum efficiency range for most PSUs. I'm not saying that you should buy a new PSU just for that, but if you were to build a new system...

Unless you've got dual CPUs and dual video cards in your system, chances are you're never going to overload the PSU. I've seen some pretty insanely high end systems run just peachy off a 300W or 350W PSU. As for disabling devices - you're better off just removing them altogether from the system if you're never going to use them.

From experience or from what you've been able to see? As to your original question, I'm still not quite sure what you're talking about. When does this dialogue come up?

Either your settings aren't being saved on exit, or something is changing them on shutdown/startup. I take it you've run malware scans?

Running a defragger will help your boot times. Diskeeper 2007 is a good choice. Slow boot times might also be the effect of a lack of drivers. Make sure that you've installed the latest drivers for all your hardware, even if it's recognized with the default drivers that come with Windows.

Or... to make it an image that links to a website: [url=http://www.thewebsite.com][img=http://www.thewebsite.com/theimage.jpg][/url] That's pretty much what I've got in my sig. Any BBCode that you see on the forums can be used in signatures.

There is already another thread that was started just a couple of days ago! The only option that it doesn't have is Qemu, but we can add that if you'd like. Please search for similar topics before starting a new thread. Topic Closed

Toner refills for the model we have are still $45 or so. I haven't been able to find a seller of the kits so I can do it myself, but that's the price of a refilled cartridge. Still more expensive than not letting it happen in the first place.

But DVD-Rs only last a few years. The risk of the data layer undergoing chemical change, or peeling... no thanks.

How will having 3 gigs slow anything down? Here's what you do: You've got 2x512MB and 2x1GB. You just need to make sure that one of each is in the same colored slot. 512MB sticks go in blue slots, and 1GB sticks go in black slots (or other way around). You're done!. You've now got 3GB in dual channel. I just noticed something in that picture that's worrying me. The tab at the top of the left stick seems to be pushed down a bit. Make sure that the RAM stick is firmly pushed into the slot. The tabs should click into the notches on the sticks.

Or... you can just replace the dead drive in your RAID1 array and tell the system to rebuild... probably takes about the same time (if not less - no compression to deal with) as restoring an image. RAID is the only thing I trust with my files. I've got my 5 years of university on my RAID1 array at home, and on my remote webhosting. The only thing that could knock out my data now is an EMP to hit the entire west coast of North America. Edit - And all of what jcarle said...

This one might take a bit of explaining. My student society has a printer available for students to use, and we supply the toner. It's great for the students, if they've forgotten to print out an assignment, or an article, or something like that. The only problem is that we've also got labs where we take images that are mostly black with a few white dots. We've asked students to not print these out here, but they do anyways, and a $70 toner cartridge lasts all of a month. So what I'm looking for is some type of "intermediate printer" that the document gets sent to. This virtual printer would then check the black levels of the entire document, and if they are too high, the print is cancelled. If they're below some limit, then the print is continued to the real printer. I've already checked the "Toner Save mode" on the printer, but it doesn't really help when the whole page is black with a couple of white dots. The system that the printer is connected to can be running Windows XP or Linux of some form. Any leads, any at all would be much appreciated.

Anything sub-65 shouldn't be any worry for a P4. As for hard drives, sub 50 should be good enough. The lower the better, but drives are rated up to a maximum of 55-60C.

What? No you would not want just RAID0 for a server. RAID 10 maybe (mirroring+striping) if you're worried about performance, but you never want to run a server without redundancy. Doing so is just asking for trouble... RAID5 is fine if you don't worry about the time taken to rebuild the array if a drive dies. If you've got a RAID card with a dedicated XOR processor, then it's not too bad, but otherwise, it can take hours to rebuild the array. RAID1 or RAID10 are much faster to rebuild, and hence, you'll have much less downtime.

Please post in the correct forums next time. Access has nothing to do with Windows Screenshots...

Do not plug in your wireless card into the miniPCI slot after the computer has been started. You will cause damage to the system. A PCMCIA card can be safely inserted and removed from the system, but this is not the same as a miniPCI. I had this problem with my old Compaq laptop. Strangely enough, going to a previous version of the BIOS removed the problem. You might want to try any BIOS version you can find. If one works for you, and doesn't cause any system problems, then keep it.

Please keep all discussion in English. Not everyone here speaks Czech.

I've read a lot of what people have said here, and there's a lot of it. Therefore, I'm gonna keep this short. I use Diskeeper 2007. I have also tried PerfectDisk8. In my experience, both helped system performance compared to no fragmentation (obviously). Do I know 100% that one product does a better job in terms of system performance? No. Do I know that one product does a better job of keeping frag levels in check without my intervention? Yes. Diskeeper does this. PerfectDisk requires me to set up a schedule. DK sets auto-defrag on all drives right from the get-go. Have I seen any downside of not using PerfectDisk? Not really... When considering which <insert_thing_here> is "better", you've gotta look at the big picture. Sure, if you wanted do, you could compile everything to assembly, and then try to optimize the assembly structure of your program to every little nitpicky bit, or, you can use a higher level language like .NET, Delphi, Java, etc etc etc. Just like here, you could try to argue about every little thing when it comes to defragmenters, but in the end, which is easier to use? In my opinion, Diskeeper has become truly set-it-and-forget-it (the option is on by default in the installer). Install, and never worry about it ever again. Another thing to point out - time is money. To me, the time I save not having to worry about defragging my hard drive, or settings up a schedule, or whatever makes up for whatever price difference might come up between PD and DK.

The one of the best resources for troubleshooting tools is Ultimate Boot CD. That being said, check your memory with Memtest86+. You can be pretty confident that if no errors show up within 5 minutes or so, your RAM is probably ok. If you still suspect problems, let it run for a few hours.

Pong would be crazy fast!!!

Gross.... The video cards must make a fair bit of noise....

Servers should always be running with either a system backup, or even better, RAID1 or higher. If your system goes down because of the drive, then you want to get it up and running ASAP.