Camarade_Tux

rulesPlayer looks nice. But I'm wondering how old it is. Is it more than 2 months old ?

Of course, forgot. Gonna edit my post.

I use : MPC + ffdshow, Plays everything, light, and only plays medias. It can also record if you need. MPC (official builds) : http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/ MPC (nightly) : http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/Media%20Player%20Classic/ Also, MPlayer+MPUI (NB: gMPlayer for windows is official now) MPUI is a frontend for MPlayer which is a command-line player, the best frontend imho. MPlayer is able to dump stream, audio, video or both. It plays even more than vlc. It decodes and seek sooo fast, the only choice if you need a previewer for a P2P client. Last it's really light. Oh, and forgot : decoding quality is excellent. MPlayer (official, mainly standalone but you may need so files from the official package) : http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html download : http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html CVS builds (platform optimized) : http://ffdshow.faireal.net/mirror/mplayer/ MPUI : http://mpui.sourceforge.net/ (to be put in the same folder as mplayer.exe)

The WD doesn't seem that good. I wen to WD website and on this page in "Reviews and Awards" they link to some tests. Among them, techreport.com (conclusion says it's rather average) and TH. Not that good in fact. :/ Your first link is for a 320GB model (only one to have NCQ). And it's simply too big. No use for so much capactity (I need 2GB for my system partition, it's not Vista x64 20GB yet ) And last, for the other Seagate model, I think it was also reviewed by TH and Hitachi's model was a bit more performant I think. So Hitachi. B) Btw, if I'd bought the HD last week, I'd taken a Maxtor.

I'll postpone the HD buy to tomorrow. I couldn't find any benchmark comparing Hitachi's T7K500/T7K250 and your models. But for the MOBO, I think I'll get the Gigabyte. PS: 3 minutes before I leave (cybercafé).

Nice to hear. Btw, the GPU I decided to take is the one there : http://www.rue-montgallet.com/prix/75012/a...-Pipe-II-256Mo/ Going to buy some more components in one hour (mobo, gpu ?, HD, RAM, card reader).

A Nec 35xx or 45xx. I'll check this evening, ATM I'm not at home.

Looks fine here now. But not the same computer. And this makes me think I should get my webpage too.

I have a *box to connect to the internet and it only supports g. I don't know if many countries have *boxes : they are 3-way modems (TV, telephony and Internet), and so called because they are LiveBox, 9Box, AOLBox... Also, I think I'll go for a 3500+ in fact, it's only 3 or 4€ more extensive because the price for the 3000+ was not the correct one. A friend of mine told me ASUS GPU had an annoying software thing : they need a software that is buggy in order to work correctly. It's a Gigabyte, fanless, I'll post details this evening. This friend also told me NEC burners were better. And he burns a looooot. So I'll trust him (did not see NECs because they only have BULK burners available)

There's a french company, which is at CAC40 and they own a big, big, big shop called "Surcouf" (they claim to be the biggest in the world, 3 levels, hundreds of meters long...). The thing is hundreds of people decided to establish there. Mainly Asians. So in Paris, you have a place with fast only computer shops. If you're lost you can find your way just by paying attention to the density of shops and where people with big bags go. They're really not expensive and have new hardware pretty quickly. Of course some shops are not really reliable so you have to pay attention. Nearly all of them are listed and ranked on http://www.rue-montgallet.com (named after the street where there is nothing else) I checked Asus's A8N5X. It has no Firewire but looks better for overclocking and silence (able to control CPU and case fan speed, but the case has a reobus and GA-K8NF-9 can change CPU fan speed with SpeedFan, see) :? For the WiFi, I choosed one with a movable antenna, hope signal will be better.

It looks like a pack with only themes. Or am I missing something ? (I can't install on this computer and have no virtual machine available) If you want to slipstream an icon pack, you have to extract this pack, understand how it works (they all use ResHacker but with different techniques : replace all resources vs. change some icons), recompress your files. But a regular theme file can also change some icons. I'll have to get a VM to answer you. :/

Of course, I did not realized it could be an annoyance (was thinking at something else ) AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1800 Mhz - s939) 0.09µ, core Venice Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (mobo) PQI PC3200 1024 Mo DDR * 2 -> 2GB Hitachi 250Go 7200 RPM S-ATA II T7K500 Asus Extreme N7600GT/2DHT 256Mo BenQ T705 (17", nice contrast and luminosity, answer : 13ms, 1280x1024@75Hz, will try to check inside the shop) MSI PC54G2 PCI Adapter (WiFi adapter, not sure but i can't find any good one) Powercolor CPCR-102 8 en 1 (card reader, 8 in 1) Enermax CS-5168ABFS-W (case, bought today) LiteOn SHM-165P6S BOX (DVD burner, scored really well on TH's benchmarks with DVD+Rs and I learned they make Sony's burners in fact ) Logitech Deluxe (simple and efficient keyboard, PS/2, bought today)

Can't wait. But I can already annoy you : there seems to be a problem in IE at the top of the page.

Thanks. I'll try asap. But I find this strange : windows uses both hives and "regsvr32 shell32.dll" to decide which tweaks should be enabled ? I don't really understand how it manages. :?

Bought case+alim and keyboard : PS/2 one without stupid keys. For the screen, since it is not bought from a website, I'll try to check if it looks good. Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9. Attached a .doc file with selected hardware, prices and shops. I only wonder if the WiFi adapter is OK. composants.7z

See my sig. And attach your lastsession.ini, who knows ?

I went on WU and it's not possible. However, I think I know why. I was too fast: THIS is the reason I won't install WGA. Microsoft is a liar! Quick translation : In order to use latest WU version, you need to upgrade some of its components. New version includes followings improvements: -fast and presonnalized install -smarter downloads -smaller downloads -only newer version -cleared display (means you can hide what you don't want, I don't call this 'clearer' personnaly) -Update infos : a new section Finished, clear answer : it's my fault, WU wants this update and I can't get around that, I won't get access to more options until this is installed. So from now onwards, it will be HFNetChk + Tomcat76's update list. WU disabled! ^_^ PS: I can get around that in fact. The difficulty is maybe WU would check if WGA is present in memory. But I think I would be banned, wouldn't I ? (I'd test my method if this computer was not a *work* computer for my father.) PS2: AutoUpdates in XP need the AutoUpdate service to be started to find updates. WU wants this service to be set on "Automatic" start.

Just a thing for the time needed to install XP : how big is your \i386\SVCPACK folder ? As for the partitions : I enjoy having a 4GB one with system and apps; games and documents go on another one (I keep my desktop clean and never put anything in My Documents). It's handy when you reinstall windows plus it defragments in 10 minutes. Used space is generally between 2GB and 2.5GB. About [Remove Box] and [Keep Box] : you may find that you need one single file that is part of a much bigger component you'd like to remove; tick this component with the needed file in Keep Box. It's for compatibility purposes. Now I use Remove Box to get rid of 3 of the 4 oembios.* files (one is critical). They are needed to activate windows but I just reinstall too often. Last I don't think one component will speed up XP (except the biggest ones : >10MB). I'd say it's the whole. However, removing drivers will speed up the "new peripheral wizard" a lot since windows won't go through thousands of drivers but only a few. You have to realize that windows loads quite a lot of small things upon start; lots of small things. This needs a lot of read operations and makes your PC starts slower. Moreover, when you have less files in your windows dir, using the search is simply much faster. Last, an nlitened PC won't store things that are unuseful to you in its cache memory. Also, when my PC is slow on a specific operation, I try to find the reason and once I've found it, I can decide if it is worth keeping the component. I don't like Windows Media Player : really too slow, entries in all contextual menus which makes the right-click unresponsive, makes browsing among media files slower... Find what annoys you, check if you need one of its functionnality, check if one of your program needs it, decide whether you remove it or not; don't try to get somebody's else configuration it is usually not a good idea.

It seems to be working though. I'll use a VM, do that, install .Net framework, some MS updates and VMWare tools for drivers. I'll see if it bugs.

I already use this one; imagine you're working and windows starts installing an update, then you go away and when you come back your computer has rebooted! But updates are installed from times to times and my father does not always really care. He doesn't want this either but I think he might click and install, or somebody else may do it. Also, I'm thinking that with XP Home it may not be possible to prevent the installation. Could anyone tell me if there is something that could make WUA think this one is already installed ? And this reminds me a sort of hack to prevent such installs : dummy files and NTFS rights. This is a possibility but it may be a bit harsh.

Really too complex. Doable but complex. Not worth. And also, it depends of the pack. Which one is it ?

Hi everybody, Right now I'm using a computer at my dad's office and I see that some updates are being automatically downloaded, blablabla. But we're not the second tuesday of this month at all so I'm wondering what is this update. I click and : WGA! Not a question of legal or not but I want the update corresponding to this KB to be forbidden. There's maybe something in gpedit.msc but it's XP Home here and group policy editor is not available. My question remains still : how to prevent an hotfix from being installed without SUS. And it may also well be with any other hotfix which may cause an instability in a specific environnement. NB: if this was not a legit copy of XP, it wouldn't be XP Home.

@Petr, good news. Do you know if makecab is now threaded ? It would be really pleasant.

I know I'm not as pro as TH's guys and did not intend to OC it to 4GHz. Thanks for your comment. Btw, I wouldn't overclock any system in Paris, definitely too hot here ATM (35°C). I'll wait until mid-September and then, OCCT. I thought LiteOn was not that good but was not sure. Now, I think LiteOn SHM-165P6S should be OK.

Meant Venice, sorry. And it's the same price, exactly the same. Also, I heard AsRock was doing good cards too. Your opinion ?