zonda

Going way back, Counter-strike 1.6 (built on GoldSRC, a heavily modded quake engine) also was benifited by this. I can't speak for movement speed, but the high FPS did indeed effect your recoil in this game, which was substantial. A higher FPS meant your crosshairs "reset" more quickly and thus gave you the ability to shoot more quickly / accurately... even if only by a few MS, in a game like that it made all the difference. And as for the refreshrate being capped at 60 or 85 on your monitor, the point is moot, because when your monitor DOES refresh, it is getting the most 'recent' data from your GPU. Even if its not processing half the frames being spit out, when it does, it's give you the freshest version if that makes sense. On fast paced games, that can also make a quite a difference if your in the competitive section of gaming.

I ran BF2 on a 5700 (an AGP card like yours) with 512 MB of RAM and it stuttered quite a bit. After running it on the same card with 4 gigs of RAM I had no troubles... I obviously couldn't play on the highest settings but not only did my FPS greatly improve, so did my lat. in multiplayer games. The easiest and cheapest way to upgrade pretty much any PC is generally tossing in a stick or two of RAM.

Refresh my memory... isn't there a .txt file in the windows or sys32 folder in which you can specify a "list" of IP's and domain names to refuse connections to? Heres my reasoning - I'm setting up a computer for a friend of mine and he has two younger children and he is worried about them getting into sites they shouldn't be on. I know there are various other ways to do this, but I don't want to use any program that is going to filter out sites, I would rather block particular sites from being accesable. Also, while we are on the topic, is there any kind of internet "black list" that is going to contain the most common pornographic sites and whatnot to be blocked so I don't have to manually put them in and such? Also keep in mind I already stated I don't want to install additional software or edit any existing settings. Lastly, will doing this effect just the IE browser, or all connections in general (including ping commands for example) Thanks

Not true, but okay... If your going to say something, at least provide actual information to back up your statements - or at least make it sound like you know what your talking about if nothing else.

This threads almost two years old...

No, you used an exclaimation point rather than a question mark.

As far as printers go... I pretty much sell printers all day, which gets kind of sickening but I can tell you that no one can really match HP's price and quality. If your looking specifically for photoprints look into getting Canon, however if you want something that can print good photos and won't waste of ton of ink, get HP... Any of their models with the individual ink catridges (SP?) would be your best bet. While the printer itself will cost more, it will be must more in effecitient and economical. Long story short, you save alot of ink. Tricolor catridges contain cyan magenta and yellow in 1 cartridge... yellow gets used the most to create the other colors, leaving you with plenty of cyan and magenta and very little yellow... in other words, you have to waste 50% of your ink and get a new catridge. The new catridges not only conserve alot more ink, but they also have the light cyan and the light magenta, meaning the ammount of yellow being used is decreased. As far as features go... things like the slots for your SD and XD cards are standard nowadays, so don't let someone go telling you that its a fancy deal, thats like a cupholder in a car. The MAIN difference you will see that effect price is: If it has copy/scan/fax ability If it is pre-networked / wireless Ink efficientcy The last one I mentioned is the biggest difference - In fact there are a few printers where I work that look identical accept one has a larger LCD screen and is $50 more so people just assume that your paying for a 2cm larger screen... not true at all. The cartridge for the more expesive one costs $2 more... but in the long run you get about 200 more prints from it. My biggest suggestion is DO NOT go with a brother printer - the printers are cheap but it wastes a crapload of ink and ink is very expensive. And as for price... with the newer HP printers you can print photo's for 22 to 24 cents per page. At walmart or walgreens they can print them for 18 or 19 cents per page so yes, they are cheaper... mainly you are just paying for convenience. Hope I helped.

Which is why people use lists of proxies obtained either via sites (which usually offer free ones that are extremely slow or overused) or scanning for them using programs called proxy hunters... basically they scan whatever range you want and will ping for different proxies on a specified port. Then it will record if it times out or if it responds, how long it took. When I was younger I'll admit I did my fair share of "iffy" stuff. And there are plenty of hackers who would beable to "hack" an account... but those hackers generally have better things to do with their time. Some interesting reads with plenty of links to read along the way if your looking to kill some time. (the first two being the most relevant) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEF_CON http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow This goes to show not all hackers are "bad" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacktivism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hat_hacker Interesting stuff, gets into the origin of hacking - phone phreaking and whatnot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_o ... er_history

While I agree we do get some repetativly questions or easilly answered questions this IS the tech and computer board in which he had some questions about tech and computers. To the OP though, a better way to ask would have been "are there any sites you recommend for downloading videos - the ones I googled have alot of popups" and "what program do you suggest using to convery video formats? all the ones I found on google are 30 day trials or cost a fortune"

I prefere winamp still for just about anything, but thats not the point. I think he means videos he was once able to play he no longer can - the only thing he has changed is his videocard driver (which shouldnt effect anything) If it were the codec, usually it would first try to download the codec from microsoft and if said codec was unavaliable (like divx) it would give him an error message, not simple continue to play the sound but not the video. I've had this same issue once before, and that was after downloading a video via torrent (if you must know, it was legal; Michael Moore released "Sicko" on the internet a few days before it hit theaters for free) In that case however the file itself was corrupt and went into the recycle bin, what a waste of bandwidth

I misread what he wrote.

Whenever I see the word "random" and "restarts" the first thing that comes to my mind is overheating. It could be very possible that the malware he had is not related to the computer restarting... actually, very possible considering he got rid of whatever it was - if he already ran a virus scanner and adware / spybot then telling him to do so again isn't going to help. This has been happening for 8 months, I doubt it would be any malware on the computer. First thing I would do is - next time your computer shuts down, go into your BIOS and go down to the PC Health Status - check what temperature your CPU and system are at. There are also some nice programs that do this for you (pc wizard I think has a feature that monitors CPU temperature, as does motherboard monitor) If it seems hot, take off the side case and put a fan near your computer. IF it stops restarting, you know that its a simple overheatting issue and that youll just have to toss in an extra case fan for $10. Or it could be as simple as clearing out all the dust inside your case / moving around a few IDE cables and some wireing. If it continues to restart chances are it is some conflicting drivers - I know that my mouse drivers (razer copperhead) will cause my computer to crash "randomly" if certain scenarios are presented... but first things first, check your CPU's temp, its just a process of elimination.

Depends on what firewire you have - some are faster than USB (which is why some external hard drives can be hooked up via firewire rather than USB)

Your probably looking at different models - theres a "Dell Inspiron" but about 30 different combinations you can get of it...

Make sure your "wave" and "sw synth" are turned on. I beleive wave controls the loading sounds in RS and sw synth will control the actual ingame sounds... or vice versa. Other than that - if your saying other sounds work, you've tried other clients, and your in game sound is turned up I wouldn't have any idea.

There use to be several hosting "search" sites - where you could fill out a form (I.E. How much space do you need? 200mb+, 500mb+, 1gig; banners: y/n) and then it would return some hosts that meet your criteria. Can't remember either names off the top of my head, there were two I use to use when I was younger and used free hosts... but I can't recall; it was something simple like hostsearch.com or in that ball park. Anywho, I am just using webspace that came bundled with something else I bought atm, quite cheap actually.

Dell has always made it very difficult to upgrade your computer (aside from RAM) unless you specifically upgrade it through them. My sister had a dell and my grandmother had a dell. One of the cases I opened was essentially booby trapped - I couldn't swap in a new video card, I couldnt take out the hard drive (had a wierd IDE cable that couldn't be removed) and I couldn't add another hard drive or CD/DVD drives. The other case wasn't a whole lot different. Dell even keeps a monopoly on their ink... dell printer? You HAVE to order your dell ink thru dell on their website.

err, my MSI board can do it, and it is not only a bit older, but one of their cheaper models. And no, there are no jumpers for the SATA drives, you just set which one is master and which one(s) is/are slave(s) using the boot sequence order in BIOS.

I havn't had time to post, been working alot. Anyway, just to update you guys - The hard drive was making the revving noise simply because of how it was sitting in the case. I didn't bother / forgot to screw it in completely. I only put one screw in to hold it in temporarily while I was still working out all the kinks. Turns out I didn't put the other 3 in, which resulted in the hard drive sitting in there at a slant, somewhat sideways. For anyone who has taken a HDD out while it was on, you'll know that those suckers spin quite fast, and that they actually have like their own wierd form of enertia or gravity or something. Anyway, it's fine now... and if you have no clue what I'm talking about, take your hard drive out while its spinning and hold it in your hand, and then rotate it vertically and horizontally, it feels wierd =) and no, it wont explode if you do so.

Ya, that must be what its for because it is a 3gb/s SATA drive. Anyway, the problem was completely random. I opened my case again the other morning and took the jumpers out of my IDE's which didn't help at all. I disconnected everything aside from the SATA - again this time it recognized it... I put the jumpers back into the IDE's and then rehooked them up. This time when I booted up it recognized the drive right away; I just had to go into BIOS and change the boot order. Er... I don't think thats correct. I have a cable that is split to allow 2 SATA connections on 1 SATA port and just from browsing on newegg I know some motherboards support up to 8 HDD's with 4 ports. Anyway... now that the drives working theres one thing I've noticed. It continually spins (like its seeking) and then slows down again. Kind of like a car reving up and then letting back off the gas over and over. I think it is actually doing this because it has to compensate for the slower IDE drives - I assumed it would just spin slower but I guess thats not the case. All well, as long as it's not causing any problems and its not bad for the drive I'm happy.

I wouldn't buy it for that price. I also don't care much for Acer. If there are two computer brands to stray from it would be acer and dell. The RAM would be sufficient since I assume it comes with vista, you will want at the very least 1 gig of RAM, but that would be the bare minimum. More will make programs load faster and work more effeciently as well as be nice for having multiple programs opened at once; doing some multitasking. The hard drive is nice, but that doesn't compensate for the slow processor. Look at it this way, a 1 gigabyte SD card for your camera can store between 400 and 800 pictures (depending on how many megapixles your camera is) so lets say about 600 pictures per 1 gig. That hard drive is 320 gigs. ALL computers are going to come with onboard sound and video, so you really don't have to worry about that - for the most part they are all the same. Not spectacular but more than enough for the average user. Same goes for a DVD-RW, thats pretty much standard now. If your looking for a laptop I would go with an HP - they have nice 15.4 inch screens that will save your battery life, come with DVDRW and wireless cards as well as integrated web cams, microphones, and vista as well as decent video cards for minor gamers - they also include a nice remote control that allows you to sit back and watch a movie, TV (if you get a tv tuner card), or listen to music much like the remote of a television. They have addiquatly sized hard drives and the like - the reason I reccomend HP over dell is simply because I have heard from many of my customers that dell has horrible service when it comes to getting help or troubleshooting of any sort. I personally don't like dell because they control their market - if you ever want to upgrade your dell computer you HAVE to do it through dell unless its something simple like RAM. Same goes with their ink... if you wanna buy dell ink, you HAVE to order it from them online... basically this allows them to charge whatever they like for it. You don't have to take my advice on getting an HP, thats fine with me, but I really do not think this desktop is worth what they are asking

Mmmk... well then how would I go about finding out which slot to put the jumper in for slave? All HDD's are different, and as I said before this one came with no label. Tomorrow when I have more time I am going to try and remove the jumpers from the IDE HDD's like I said and see if that works... time will tell.

There is no jumper on the SATA drive - all SATA drives are "master" - the only way to differentiate between them is via the boot sequence. You can have one set to master and still have it acting as a slave so long as it boots second (or this is what I have been told and have read from various websites) Another thing I've read is to take the jumpers out of the IDE drives completely and then set the IDE drives to boot before the SATA one. I'll try moving the SATA cable on my MSI mobo and see if that helps. Right now, though, I'm not as concerned about making it slave as I am making it show up when I have the other hard drives plugged in. I will try taking out the jumpers from the IDE drives and then see if the computer at least recognizes it Basically what I am saying is I can't change the boot sequence if the computer says the drive is nonexistant - gotta fix one problem at a time.

Hows it going guys, it's been a while. Anyways, I'm having a few troubles with several hard drives, so grab a glass of milk and some cookies because your going to be sitting here a while. Okay. So to start the story, I was using three seperate hard drives as follows: IDE 0 - 40 Gig - Master IDE 0 - 80 Gig - Slave ------------------------- IDE 1 - 15 Gig - Slave IDE 1 - (CD-RW Drive) Not only is it a hassle to juggle files between multiple hard drives, but the 127 gigabytes or so of space was not nearly sufficient enough for me. In fact I am using an old laptop and an old dell to store other files of mine that wouldn't fit on these drives. So the solution was obviously to buy a new hard drive and this is what I did. I bought a 500 gig hard drive from western digital, and it being newer it is SATA. My MSI motherboard has 2 SATA slots, so I hooked it up, but at first it was not being recognized. So - I took all the IDE hard drives out, and put the SATA in by itself. Still no luck. I then went into BIOS and after some trial and error managed to get it to recognize the SATA hard drive. I then put the 80 gig IDE hard drive in and the 40 gig IDE hard drive in, the computer booted up fine, but this time the SATA hard drive is no longer recognized. I know it has power, I can feel and hear it spinning... so basically why is it no longer being recognized? Does it have something to do with the jumper slot for master/slave??? I know that by default SATA is suppose to be master over any IDE drives (right?) but I want the 40 gig IDE to stay master since that has my copy of WinXP on it. So I want it to look like this: IDE 0 - 40gig Master IDE 0 - 80gig Slave --------------------- IDE 1 - CD-RW Drive (Master) IDE 1 - CD-R Drive (Slave) [i already have this set up and working] --------------------- IDE 2 - 500gig Slave IDE 3 - nothing So does anyone have any idea why when the 40&80 drives are hooked up, it shows nothing hooked up in IDE 2, but when I take the 40&80 drives out it shows up fine? Again the only thing I can think of is the jumper slots... and like I said, I know SATA usually takes master over IDE... but there is a pin slot thing on the back of the HDD, however it's OEM and I don't know where to put the pin to set it as another slave (if that is indeed the problem) I will edit this in about 5 minutes with what I changed in BIOS. Ok - In BIOS under "peripheral devices" I think is was... well... I changed this: OnChip SATA - Enabled SATA Mode - it was RAID... I changed it to IDE. When set to RAID it was never recognized. When set to IDE it will be recognized when alone, but will show up as "none" when the two other drives are inserted... which is why I am lead to beleive again it has to do with the slave/master jumper slots. There are a few other settings like Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, Secondary Slave and theses are for "PIO" and "UDMA" which I'm not sure what those are. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks

oi that works, thanks. Thats all for now I guess.