Zxian

@jondercik - Why do you say Alienware? Their systems sit at a very premium price. For example: Dell Latitude D510 - $1,357 USD + tax Sentia™ m3400 - $1,595.00 USD + tax Granted it's widescreen, but $240 more? And that's not even when you go high-end.

This is not Microsoft's official forum. You should visit Microsoft's website to make requests for software. Topic Closed

Out of the options, I'd say Dell. Another big contender is Lenovo. They still use the same parts that IBM used when they still dealt with the consumer lineup. Both companies have good quality control and generally satisfactory products. I'm definately heppy with mine, and I know lots of other people who have theirs working just fine. Toshiba - I've heard of one model where the metal casing wasn't properly sheilded from the internals. When you rested your wrists on the laptop and typed, the bio-electricity in your body would cause the computer to hard reboot. Sony - decent laptops, but far overpriced. Apple - Same as Sony, but even more so. (It's all about marketing for Apple) MDG - I dunno... they seem kinda sketchy. I've just never had a good feeling about them. Acer - Most of the people I know who have Acer laptops are generally satisfied with them. My friend just got a new one with the Intel Core Duo and it's pretty slick. In the end, it's actually all about the little things. With my laptop, it's a bit thicker than other laptops, but there are standoffs that keep the lit away from the keyboard. This means that you won't get the tell-tale keyboard scratches on the LCD. Also, the power cord for my Dell allows for the cord to be wrapped around the power adaptor, meaning that it's a nice compact thing that you throw into your bag. If you want a really good resource for reviews and other users opinions, http://www.notebookforums.com/ is a good place to look. They've got pretty much all the info you could ever want. Hope this helps!

Fatality - mmm.... legs.

Business would probably do it for me. I don't game that much, so the tweaker wouldn't do me any good, and the podcast creator... well, there's other stuff that can do that for you. If Vista Business is the extension on XP Pro, then I'll be very happy with it.

No worries.

Members are members. They do not have any control when it comes to moderating or administering the forums. There are several ways that users can notify the moderating team if anything comes up. The 20 or so of us live around the world, so chances are that you'll find one of us online at least once an hour. Caveat hacks and optimized code also makes maintaining and updating the forums a pain in the butt.

Media Library. Plain and simple. Also, with 5.2, Winamp now has native support for several portable media players (Creative, iPod, etc). These are things that don't come "out of the box" with many other players. Also, Winamp in itself isn't all that bad. When you've got a decent system, why do you worry about 10MB of RAM? Do you keep your media player open when you play games or do other really really heavy stuff?

I've actually been using WS_FTP 2006 recently. It's nice for me since I need to use SCP connections, as well as FTP. I've just found it to be a bit nicer, and I get it free from my university...

Nicholas Karl Johan Geraedts - aka Zxian.

The advanced performance options on disk drives often refers to disk caching. This means that files that you have recently accessed may be stored in the cache instead of directly being written to the disk. If you've got a decent power grid where you live, or you've got a UPS backup, then go for it. The risk otherwise is, as the description says, that you might loose some data if the power suddenly goes out since the files may not yet have been written to the disk.

Check to see if any odd items are in your startup list. You can do this in many ways, such as the VBS script that gunsmokingman created, Mike Lin's Startup Control Panel (link), or AutoRuns (google for a link). If you're not sure what an entry is, Google it. You'll be able to see what items are starting up. If there's anything that you don't want to startup, simply uncheck it in the Startup Control Panel or AutoRuns.

Good work gunsmokingman. This makes it nice and simple to check what programs are run at startup, and where the possible problem might lie.

Title edited and topics merged. Do not make duplicate topics. It makes it harder for other users to reply to your question/problem. As for your problem, what cluberti said...

Did you recently unregister any .dll files? I think the one in question would be mydocs.dll.

What are the specs of the system that you have? Have you checked that you have the latest video drivers? Standby and Hibernation both require proper video drivers to be installed in order for them to function. Also, check in your BIOS to see if there is any Standby level setting. I think that for most computers, if there is an option, the choices are S1 and S3 (don't quote me on that). If you have the option, try changing the standby level and see if there is any difference. Also, in future, it's better if you press and hold the power button for 4-5 seconds instead of pulling the power cord out. Doing so powers off the computer internally, instead of suddenly removing the power from everything altogether.

There's no way for you to copy an installation from one system to the other without violating your XP (or whatever Windows you use) licence. You could make a UA CD, but you'd still run into the troubles of licencing when it comes to the software that you use (unless you only install freeware - which would be fine).

Filezilla should be able to do that for you. http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

Certain things such as...what exactly? From my expereience, XP can run for days on end... Yes, in Windows 98 there were simply problems with memory management, but on the other hand XP can run for ages. I use my laptop throughout the day and I only put it into hibernation. The last time that I actually booted Windows was when I installed the Catalyst 6.1 drivers (i.e. mid last week). Ever since then, it's been just peachy. Fans are actually designed to be run all the time - especially computer fans. They're designed to run and run and run to make sure that your CPU doesn't overheat. It would be somewhat nearsighted for the engineer who designs the fans to only consider cases where the computer will be off. Likewise with hard drives. From what I've read, most hard drives are rated for at least 20,000 hours of operation, if not more (I read up on this when I bought my old laptop hard drive). Proper cooling will help increase the life of your hard drive. A drive that runs at 45C 70% of the time will probably fail before a similar drive that runs at 30C all the time.

http://www.nero.com/nero6/enu/nero-up.php 6.6.1.4 actually...

Great stuff wolf74481. A couple of quick suggestions though. 1) Put Microsoft Update first on the list. For the most part, if you've got that up to date, you're better off than not doing so and using an up-to-date anti-virus. There are security vulnerabilities that an AV program may not pick up. 2) Replace AVG with Avast in the list of free anti-virus programs. From what I've told my friends (and personal preference), Avast is easier to use, and also has a better track record than AVG. 3)For firewalls, I would recommend Kerio over ZA. I've found that ZA has quite a few false positives and it's fairly heavy on system resources. 4)Where's the recommendation to defrag the hard drive? Even the built in Windows Defragger will help over nothing at all. This is an absolute must if you want to keep your system running decently fast. In general, if you want a good list of the latest freeware, www.filehippo.com is a good place to look. Again, great work.

Overall - Kingston - Relatively cheap and **** good reliablility. I haven't done all that much overclocking, but I've never had Kingston RAM fail me. *touch wood*

@Jeremy - There's an updated version of Nero 6. I think it's 6.6.0.19, but don't quote me on that.

Nero 7 works well for me. I'm not sure what other people say about it being big and bloated, but just install the components that you want and it's fine. I haven't had any failed burns yet, and the program layout is fairly intuitive.

Moved to Unattended forum.