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Do you mean booting from a ramdrive? This is what WinPE and others bootable CDs do... It's been done. Standard Microsoft RAMDRIVE.SYS and RAM-LOAD utility can boot a DOS v3.30 kernel from the ramdrive *after* the main hard drive has booted and loaded the driver, then copied the files to the ramdrive and then essentially boots from it without restarting the whole machine.

It's called a Beta for a reason... don't expect it to work perfectly! Try reinstalling it again and see if that helps.

Is it a logical drive or physical drive? If you just want to relocate the boot.ini and the rest of the bootfiles to a different partition on the boot drive, just set the other partition as active and place the bootfiles there. If it's a physical drive, change the BIOS settings to boot from it, and place the bootfiles there. Note that D will now be C and C will now be D (on some BIOSes; others leave the drive orders unchanged at the risk of incompatibilities with other OSs that don't like to boot from a drive other than the first - Windows XP not being one of them).

Remember that security is never perfect. It depends how far you want to go in applying these restrictions.

RAM drives work better as FAT16 since they're not going to be much bigger than 512Mb, and they don't need all the extra features of NTFS since they're transient.

It's broken. One of the sensors must've gone faulty and making the drive think there's always a disc in there.

Take the 250 unless you're sure that you need more than 250Gb of space.

How many discs have you tried?

Also related, clear out the dllcache and prefetch folders once in a while (once a month is sufficient, or maybe once a week on a heavily used system).

Google "PE file analyzer"... The required DLLs would be in the program file's Import Table.

This indicates that the CPU is idling (it's named "System Idle Process" for a reason...)

You may have bad RAM... according to Microsoft's article. It is also possible that some other system files are corrupted as well. Stop 8E is KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED and the exception is C0000005 which is Access Violation. Run MemTest86 on the system to see if the RAM is bad. Otherwise you may need to reinstall Windows.

Re-extract explorer.exe from your Windows CD, that should get rid of any virus residing within it.

Incorrect. It's not done in hardware, but rather it's "software assisted", meaning that the software has to be able to support dual-core. Windows Home will run on dual-core, it just won't be able to run processes on the secondary core. Pro can do that (and supports SMP as well). However, if the applications program can use both cores, it does not matter the OS.

This might be related: I have an older Celeron machine with an FX5200 (AGP) in it, and it also had the same conflicts with the memory ranges (also said it was used by "System Board Extension for ACPI BIOS"). I managed to get the card working correctly by booting into safemode, *removing* the "System Board Extension for ACPI BIOS" device from the devmgr, then booting normally. It redetects the SBEfACB, and everything else including the video card works fine; the only irregularity I get is that the SBEfAB shows up with the yellow icon and claims to not be working properly. All I see is that instead of the problem being with the video card and the system complaining that it's not working, it's moved to the SBEfAB and Windows doesn't complain when it starts up.

Backup your data now! Hard disk errors usually indicate a failure may be coming soon!

Accordingly that is the standard method of doing it... search around and see for yourself e.g. http://forum.ecoustics.com/bbs/messages/34579/138629.html

The P4 3.2GHz CPU can probably be overclocked to 3.7GHz. A 3.6 can likely manage 4.0, mine could do 4.17 with good cooling.

Be careful! Even image files can contain exploits that can download malware/software onto your machine (remember WMF exploit?) - for this reason I recommend reading e-mail in text only, and downloading/viewing attached images only if you are sure it is not malicious.

...copy and paste in MS-Paint?

Put the Win2k CD into the drive, reboot, and follow the instructions on the screen.

TurboTax is known for its intrusive copy-protection system that may corrupt parts of your hard drive... my advice is to avoid it completely. A full wipe and re-format may be required in order to rid the system of its remnants.

I agree. Better one fast core than two, unless you're running *very* CPU-intensive applications that *also* support more than one processor. Otherwise, most of the time the second core is just idling uselessly.

You may also want to lower the priority of its processes, using the Task Manager.

If I remember correctly, aren't DVD video files split into 2Gb pieces?