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cyprod

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Everything posted by cyprod

  1. When push comes to shove and I can't figure out how to add reg info, I turn to an autoit script.
  2. well, my DVD burner is 18x, though keep in mind that DVDs are thicker and heavier than CDs are, so I wouldn't be suprised if they couldn't be spun as fast. But I also know that DVDs, like CDs, use constant angular velocity at max speed reads so the data rate increases as I get farther out on the disc. I typically see around 5x at the beginning and the outer portions I get more near 12-13x. Of course I haven't rigerously tested this, but this seems typcial for me. And also, I wouldn't consider 8x the standard, most everything supports 16x to my knowlege. And if I remember correctly, they could spin discs faster safely, but the LED is the limiting point from keeping them going any faster.
  3. If by Disk Management then you mean Device Manager, then yes.... its there, windows shows me the serial code and everything. I just can't access it. Do I have to put one as slave and one as master? Or is it something else, windows sees that its there. Also, it tells me that one is at ATA 0 (current one running) Primary Channel. The other is at ATA 1, Primary Channel. I can even do a speed test from the nForce2 IDE controller through Device Manager. Yes, you cannot have two masters on one IDE channel. That's probably why you can't access it. Honestly, it's impressive your computer even boots if they're both set to master. But what you said, it sounds like they're on different IDE channels. But then if this new hard drive is on and IDE channel with a CD-ROM, that could be your problem as well. But anyway, no matter what, you can only have one master per IDE channel. The other MUST be a slave. And at puntoMX, if he indeed does have two masters on one channel, it very much is a hardware problem.
  4. I used to have an ATI all in wonder card and will agree, the software that came with it was terrible. The only one I found that I really liked was WinDVR, it was an older version, but in my opinion, it was near perfection. All it did was watch tv and record it, worked flawlessly. Unfortunetly, since it's an older version, I don't know if you could still get it.
  5. Please don't flame if I'm incorrect on this as I haven't read the entire thread, but it seems you peeps are under the impression Windows 2000 supports multi-core CPUs. This is a falicy. Windows 2000 supports multi CPU systems, not multi core system. Proof of this is that I'm currently on my work laptop which has an intel core 2 duo T7200 processor in it and we're forced to use windows 2000, and though the device manager shows it as a multi cpu system, the task manager only shows one CPU workload. Further proof of this is the HP support people we get (we get better support than most as we're an R&D center and get HP R&D tech support) who are always laughing that we've got $3000 laptops with windows 2000 on them which is unable to utilize both cores. And yet more proof is, bog down one process, easy for me to do as I'm a software developer(lets not talk details here, lets just say I meant to make an idle thread and accidentally made it time critical), and watch how the whole system comes to a crawl, when doing the same thing on my home pc doesn't effect system responsiveness. Windows XP is the first windows with multi-core support.
  6. sorry, forgot about that portion, 32bit vs 64bit basically how much RAM you can have. 32bit processors are limited to 32bit operating systems which top out at 4 gigs of RAM, though I've never seen anybody on a 32 bit OS have more than 3.5 gigs of uesable RAM. 64 bit processors have a theoretical max RAM of I think 16384 petabytes of RAM (17179869184 gigs of RAM) though in practical senses, my current system has 4 gigs, expandable up to 8 gigs (limited by the mother board) and I can actually use that entire amount. I don't know of any consumer motherboards that address more than 8 gigs of RAM, so that will probably be your limit. Now in terms of performance, RAM actually has more to do with speed of your system than the processor since if you don't have enough RAM, your system will always have to swap with your hard drive and to put things into perspective with memory access, pulling from a register takes one clock cycle. Pulling from L1 cache is 2 or 3, L2 cache is around 10 clock cycles. Pulling from RAM is around 100 clock cycles. Pulling from the hard drive takes an average of 6 ms. Now, a 1.6GHz chip has 1.6 billion clock cycles per second, devide by 1000, you get 1.6 million clock cycles per ms, needless to say, you don't want to swap from the hard drive, so having enough RAM is EXTREMELY important to your system performance. So if you have a lot of memory intensive apps (which VMs are included in) you want lots of RAM, and 64 bit becomes attractive. But remember that to use 8 gigs of RAM requires 2 gig DIMMS, and those are kind of pricy. Lastly, since you did mention VMs, VMs benifit GREATLY from multiple cores as those can be set to run on one core while your host OS runs on the other, so from that stand point, dual core would be benificial.
  7. Frequency of a processor is only one factor to consider in the speed a processor. To answer your question about can you just multiply processor speed by 2 because of two cores, no, you can't. Each core is an independant processing unit and can only move data through it at it's given frequency. If a program is written correctly so it can break itself in to two threads which can execute simultaniously, then you do get an increase in speed with multiple cores. But you mentioned games specifically, and very few of these are multi-threaded in a sense which would greatly benifity from multi-processing. That being said, does the 3GHz chip make sense to use....maybe. The 3GHz chip no doubt has a faster clock, but it's also built on the netburst architecture. The netburst architecture uses a very deep pipeline (execution of each instruction is broken up into many steps) which means each step through the pipeline takes less time, so you can run the clock speed faster. This is fine and dandy, until you run into pipeline stalls. If an instruction relys on a previous instruction, no new instructions can execute until the one waiting gets it's needed result. In a very deep pipeline, this can mean upto 20+ clock cycles are wasted just waiting for a result and program execution isn't progressing during this time. If this happens often enough, it can effectively cut your effective frequency by a factor of 10. Now a factor of 10 would be extreme, but you get the point. (Folks, please don't point out out of order execution, I'm trying to keep this simple) Core architecture uses a more shallow pipeline, each step in the pipeline takes longer to execute, which means you can't run the clock speed as fast, but the stalls don't stop the processor for as long. Also throw in improved memory IO and such, and stalls don't happen as often. So with that, the short answer to is the 3Ghz chip faster than the 1.6GHz chip, it depends. I'd tend to go for the 1.6GHz core 2 just cuz it's newer, uses less power, is more easily upgraded, yodda yodda yodda.
  8. Hi, create a file, OEMLOGO.bmp. Put the picture in \Windows\system32. Have the picture be whatever you want to be displayed there. I'm not sure if it's size matters, but for reference, mine is 180x114 pixels with an 8 bit color depth. Also, again, I'm not sure if it's required, but you might need an OEMINFO.ini file with it, also in system32.
  9. It's hard to say actually. If it truely needs the full 3.36 amps, then no, the 12 volts at 4 amps will not work. Max power required is 53.76 watts and max power supplied is 48 watts. Now if it can live on less power and the power electronics inside the laptop are up to scratch, it might be able to live with 12 volts, especially as most computer electronics require less than 12 volts anyway so it'll be using a buck circuit of some kind no matter what. The problem I see is just not being able to pull the power required out of the power supply and burning the powersupply out, which could cause a short of some kind and fry your laptop, or, the power electronics inside the laptop suck and it truely does need 16 volts. Probably best not to risk it in any case.
  10. I'm not going to recommend a language but I am going to say this. First, Windows in natoriously difficult to program on, get a Linux box. Second, I'd recommend not starting off with a language that requires includes to do anything. Third, to those who recommend C#, need I remind you that it's Microsofts version of Java, it's slow and memory hungry, and as such, nobody uses it for anything serious, but then again, maybe I just work in telecom and view it simply as not an option. Fourth, look at scripting languages to start, that's what I learned in. Something like BASIC, shell scripting, one of the big Ps (perl, python, PHP), tcl, something like that. After that I'd recommend learning C, though C is extremely powerful, it's very simple if you don't want to do anything complicated. After that I'd learn C++ and by that point you've learned all programming styles and learning anything else is trivial. Well, except for Assembly, but you'll never use that. Might be good to learn for historical perspective, but you won't use it.
  11. Yeah, pretty much all media content (music and video) is pre-compressed as uncompressed cd quality audio takes up ~10 megs a minute and video can easily break several hundred megs per minute.
  12. I just think the files you're trying to compress are already compressed. Here's an incomplete list of file extentions that typically won't compress well. zip, rar, ace, tgz, cab, mpg, jpg, avi, ogm, ogg, acc, certain exe (sfx archives mostly), many, many, many more. If you want to see if it's compressing properly, grab a word document without any pictures in it, .doc, not the new office 2007 format as that one has compression built into it last time I checked, and try to compress it. That should give you a fairly good compression rate.
  13. Okay, so I have an odd problem. I've got a pre-configured vmware image of windows 2003 enterprise. The image was made in sweden, and uses swedish keyboard layouts. Once logged in, it was easy enough to change the keyboard back to a US layout, but for some unknown reason to me, the login keyboard format is still swedish. This image only has one account defined for it, administrator, and I can't figure out where one would go to change the keyboard format used for logging in. There's a little icon on the login box which looks somewhat like the language bar, but when I click it, it doesn't give me a menu to change the input language like the language bar does. Any help would be much appreciated.
  14. that's impressive that the fact that AMD has problems with XP drivers would affect a sound card. Fact is, AMD driver support and sound card driver support have very little, if anything, to do with each other. Proof: I have soundmax HD audio on my asus INTEL based board. My experience with soundmax is, their included bundled applications are terrible and god awful. Their drivers have never given me any problems though. If you can, only install the driver and skip any extra software that they ship with it and attempt to only install the driver. And also, saying AMD has issues with drivers on XP is complete FUD. I'm running 3 boxes built on AMD platforms, all of which are running XP and I've never so much as had to think about platform drivers for the processor or the chipset. Now chipset drivers for my latest core 2 laptop on XP is a different story...
  15. we run into ftp problems at work all the time when we run through our "NAT" for lack of a better term. The main cause is because ftp doesn't operate on one port. Though file transfers are done on one defined port, not everything is. We personally are limited to being able to change directories and send and get files. If we try to do things such as list the contents of the directory, those messages can never get through. Moral of the story, don't port foward ftp. Edit: Random though, should probably mention this is the case when we use any CLI based ftp programs, either Solaris, Linux based or the Windows ftp CLI program. The GUI based ones tend not to give us any problems.
  16. seems to me that it might be very likely that if his computer doesn't have the ability to boot from a CD, then it probably doesn't support 64 bit extensions anyway.
  17. no offense, but have you ever heard of this thing called google?
  18. Glad somebody caught that, I noticed it right before I hit submit but couldn't be bothered to fix it. Though to continue the cycle of hell, mb would be milibits, not megabits. and I don't think anything could function on a .512 bits
  19. Sorry, but I just can't help myself, .34375 doesn't round to .343... Sorry, I had a long day at work full of much test plan reviewing. Pointing out stuff like that is how we make it bearable.
  20. @ringfinger, your math doesn't add up, 352/1024=.34375 GB. And @HeartofGold, the more likely reason you're only showing up as 960Mb of RAM is because of your video card. Most, if not all, integrated graphics cards use system memory for their own use. When the video card reserves that memory, it's no longer available for use and will not register as part of your system memory.
  21. it's impossible to put high quality images into your boot screen. It's been a while since I've edited my boot screens, but I believe the best that can be done is a 640x480 image at 16 colors, though you can create a custom palette to make it look a little better. You could probably search the forums hear and find the directions for making the changes.
  22. well, some programs override the audio control and resets it to whatever it's setting was. One notable example would be windvr. So maybe check and make sure none of your programs you're using are changing it.
  23. umm...pretty much any part of any program except for the winforms GUI can be multithreaded. and if you develop a custom GUI (like what a game might use) then it too can be multithreaded. You should look up the difference between parallel computing and multi-threaded computing, they aren't the same. Multi-threaded is having seprate threads doing seprate tasks in a single program, though it is possible to have parallel computing in a multi-threaded environment, multi-threading does not gurentee parallel computing is being done. Parallel computing is having multiple processors working together to solve a single task. For example, game engines are very linear by nature. Though they can be enhanced by throwing physics off to other processors, the actual progress through the game engine itself does not expand well into the parallel computing world. My personal opinion is on a desktop, once you get beyond 16 cores, all avenues of parallel processing within that single system for most standard desktop applications will be exhausted and any addition cores will make next to no improvments in performance.
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