atomizer

Fredledingue=clueless

like i said, dissable norton -- if it's even possible

i may be wrong, but i'll guess that one of the primary underlying reasons for IE7 is to compete with google and dissable google related stuff (current or future). the latter may or my not happen right of way, but see if some "security patch" down the road doesn't do it. poor lil billy is mad at google and i'm lovin it!

^ THAT is FUNNY ! ^

try dissabling norton. that app, IMO, IS a virus. also, after a new boot, see what's running in task manager. look for anything strange.

what hardware do you have? i have a piece of junk HP Pav at work and i hate it. i think it's a 2.4 mHz with RAM that i added (1G now i think) and it boots slower than my highly tweaked P3 box did that i built long ago. now, on to another theory... i built a new box a few months ago. i usually configure BIOS to set up the hardware via the "is OS plug and play aware = NO" option. the other day i had occasion to get into BIOS and i changed that setting to "YES". wow! after log-on the OS (XP Pro) took forever to finish loading and CPU usage was, and remained (even after loading) pegged at 100%. i haven't bothered to troubleshoot that yet, i just changed BIOS again, but maybe this is your problem as well???

welcome! you'll find quite a few knowledgeable folks milling around this joint. and then there's peeps like me who know just enough to become a danger

many burner apps have a built-in "burn a bootable ISO" option.

yeah, there are several firmware and other hacks that can be applied to "cheaper" creative cards to give them the functionality of more expensive cards. it's not long ago that i started playing around with firmware and i'm learning that many hardware products can be forced to use different firmware. often the hardware is identical, it's just that the vendor decides to help profits, or spit out a "new" product to compete with the competition. i'm all for the vendor turning a profit, unless i have a reason to dislike their products, ethics, etc., in which case, in my book, all is fair. creative is one of those vendors. people have been complaining about their drivers forever. these type of "hacks" work with quite a few video cards and who knows what else. linksys is another canidate for hacked firmware. so are cell phones.

try howard forums. you'll learn all you need... and more.

i'm a fan of CCleaner, but it is not the most thorough utility by far and fails to root out much of what other utilities do (and i've used many over the years). just a day or 2 ago i did a clean-up with CC, then right after that i ran registry mechanic (which i've never used before). RM found something like 70-80+ additional "errors", of which 50% or more were very benign things like MRU's, but it did find a lot of errors that CC passed up and that i confirmed were indeed invalid entries. thing about RM is that i can't stand its "hello noob! let's completely automate the process and remove all the hard-core options" goofy UI. many commercial programs seem to be that way. one thing that i've noticed about all the utilities i've tried is that NONE of them ever find the same errors and all of them miss errors that others catch. actually, i think the best reg cleaner is Linux -- no stupid bloated, error riddled, gibberish packing registry at all. it stores its settings where they belong -- with the program groups.

none of the above. build your own.

hmmm... interesting. one of my favored windows annoyances (all flavors of windows that i know of) is the storing and well hidden IE history files, though it goes deeper than that. i was told by a fella that works as a tech guy in a computer store on the side and works for the military as his primary job, fixing windows bugs/holes, that XP corp does not store and hide this info. reason? according to him, the government is funny about having that sort of stuff stored on their HD's. i don't know if emails are stored in a hidden database on corp, but IE history certainly is (proof here).) more info about the topic here

first off, IMHO, creative's drivers are crap! then their idea of having to hang on to the original install CD (because of some 1/2 baked hacking prevention scheme to take one installer and modify it to get more functionality out of a cheaper card) is another joke. anyway, if you're reasonably tech savvy and don't mind some tinkering, these drivers will provide a huge improvement and much more functionality over the creative stuff: kxProject

dunno where you're getting that impression. firefox (v1.06) is a 1.45 MB installer. by itself, FF is pretty stripped down. YOU add what YOU want with plugins, extensions, etc.

while you guys are on the topic of a corporate license, other than MS crappy activation scheme, what other differences are there between a VL and a regular license? is it true that the OS (data on the disk), corp verses non-corp, are identical? so the only diff is the license key?

i may not understand what you're trying to do completely, nor do i know what "WSUS" is, but i'm thinking you may be able to just download all the updates you want and then deploy via a CD/DVD etc??? too bad it's not XP > RyanVM

unless you are SURE it's XP which, by default, it shouldn't be, you may want to check and be certain that your MB supports the type of RAM you installed in the configuration you installed it (what size sticks in what slots - how many sides - etc.). you can also run a very thorough test using a utility like memtest+.

to elaborate on why it's more efficient to have the same size drives in a RAID 0 array (you already know why having the same type/speed is important), i can add that in this type of array, each file, program, whatever, is sort of divided in half. one half gets written to one drive and the other half to the second drive, so if one drive is larger than the other, then that extra space is simply wasted and, to my knowledge, there is no way to partition and use it because the OS (any OS) sees both drives as ONE drive. my only advice would be to not store important data across a RAID 0 array because, as has been mentioned, if one drive bombs, the other 50% of the data is 100% useless.

how many beeps? if it's just one, than it may be perfectly normal. one beep means, if i'm correct, that BIOS did it's thing OK and now the system has been turned over to the OS. if it's more than one, then it's a troubleshooting code whose meaning may be in your MB manual, or the vendor website. to those who mention "grinding" hard drives, if the drive is reading/writing properly (no data loss) and checks out OK with a disk checking utility (chkdsk), then all is probably OK. it's very normal to hear a sort of muffled grinding noise from a drive as it reads/writes data. some drives are much louder than others.

for me, i've found a combination of products that seem very successful for blocking spyware/malicious scripts/etc.. that combo is firefox, with some key extensions, and thunderbird. i use nLite to remove a lot of garbage from windows but, at this point, i'm still keeping the IE core files. since i keep that, i also find it necessary to configure IE security settings to a point where they are very restrictive.

multiplayer well, often you have to connect through a server, but it doesn't have to be a 3rd party server. many multiplayer games allow you to run your own server which is often rather transparent to you. sometimes this means starting a LAN (local area network) server. so 1 box runs the server and the other then connects to it (this is often very simple). depending on your fancy, there are many! try a search for "multiplayer games".

i'm sure you're right. mainly i want to install frequently used programs though and get any advise i can from others who may be doing this.

you're obviously on a tight budget (or so i gather since your brother is chipping in). take a look at some alternative components though and see if you can't do better for roughly the same amount of money... AMD processor -- good stuff at a good price (take it from a former Pentium freak). definitely dump the celron! MOBO: look at MSI (miocrostar international) -- some very good boards at really good prices. if you're going to skimp on anything, don't let it be the MB! that's your building block for your whole rig and i guarantee you'll have problems or a slow system if you buy a cheap board. get the best you can afford. period. if you can't quite afford a good board and processor, skimp on the RAM for now and at least get a good board. you can always add more later. just get 1, 512 MB stick (more than enough to run XP, especially if you nLite it ) another area to not skimp is the HD -- get a good one. 40G's is fine if you don't plan on storing a lot of stuff (MP3's, movies, etc.) and even if you do, you can always add drives later. if you can, get one of the small WD Raptor SATA 10,000 RPM drives and a MB with a SCSI controller, then, later, you can add an identical 2nd drive and create a RAID 0 array -- you'll be groovin!

the hitboxes in HL and HL2 (and all mods) have been a joke since day 1. to my knowledge this is due to the way that VALVE decided to implement them; rather than a pixel perfect hitbox based on the player model, as in the Unreal engine, the HL boxes are more like a totally separate model that, as you can see, doesn't always jive with the player model. there has been endless complaining, statistics, papers, surveys, etc., on the hitbox subject and it really disappointed me when VALVE chose to use the same dumb-@$$ method of employing the hitboxes in HL2. the HL2 MP game is, IMO, is a really poor concept of what everything a MP game should be (lacks speed, too many weapons, poor choice of weapons, missing TAU, etc., etc.), therefore i can't imagine it ever being suited to any serious competitions. CS however is a different animal that *requires* very accurate aiming and it is used heavily in professional competitions. it seems rather strange that gaming organizations would even consider CS for a competitive game when the hitboxes are as screwed up as they are. then there's STEAM -- VALVE's wonderful idea of bypassing the middleman to deliver content directly to you, the end user. in practice, STEAM is a great idea. in reality, STEAM is a *STEAMing* pile of manure and is the biggest reason i dumped HL. when i shell out big bucks for a top-rated game, the last thing i want to see is 3rd party advertising! much less not being able to play off-line when the STEAM servers are down... which is too often. still, i will say this; if you haven't played CS or HL2 SP (single player), you may want to check it out. the HL2 SP episode with its fantastic graphics and physics far exceed the quality of any other game out there, including Unreal. that's a pretty big statement considering that VALVE had their source code ripped-off and delayed the release of HL2 for a LONG time. what is lacking is the "tweakability" of the Unreal engine which far surpasses that of any HL (Quake) or even the brand-spanking-new Source engine.