PhrstBrn

I'm looking to buy a power supply for the server I am building. The case I bought came with a busted power supply (I tested it with a volt meter). The case and PSU was only $40, so it wasn't too expensive or high quality. I bought the case from newegg. From the reviews I heard it's a pretty crappy PSU, and the return shipping is most likely worth more than the power supply itself. :D What do I need to look at when choosing a PSU? I don't want to spend a lot of money, but I don't want to buy something that's junk.

I personally would get a smaller laptop if you plan on carrying it around (around 6 lbs). The Dell Inspiron 9xxx are just too big to lug around all the time. If you plan on leaving your laptop in the dorm most of the time, the bigger laptops might be the best way to go (if you don't want to bring your desktop). If you plan on bringing your laptop around campus, you're not going to want a large one, and the battery life is going to be a lot less than a smaller model. Of course, the smaller models lack a good video card for gaming. :roll: I would find a balance that suits you best. You might want to consider bringing your desktop with you to play games (and possibly upgrade it), and buy a cheap and light laptop to carry around and do your schoolwork.

Strange, I never heard of an ISP doing that. If that were true, you wouldn't be able to run any server type things, filesharing, hosting online games, etc. I would recheck that, I highly doubt they block all the ports.

ALL ports? Highly unlikely. If they closed all the ports, you wouldn't be able to browse the web. How did you manage to get to tip.it?!?!? :lol:

No, you can just set Apache to use a different port. It's in the httpd.conf file. Your URLs will just have a port number in them. No biggie.

Your ISP did that on purpose. They don't want you running a webserver from home. A lot of ISPs are doing that now. They also often block port 25 (SMTP) and a few other ports. They say for "security reasons". It's really for "We don't want you using up our bandwidth" reasons. (I will say leaving port 25 open is a security risk, but I won't get into that) The only thing you can do is use a different port :-\

The Thunderbirds (regular Athlon) ran hot, AMD has solved that issued in the past few years (Athlon XP and Athlon 64 run cooler)

Yeah, you can do that, but you'll have to reinstall all your programs again (even if they're on the other hard drive). You could also get an IDE or SATA card. They're about $20 (?) and can give you extra IDE/SATA ports, and you can just addon an extra drive. That will use up a PCI slot, so make sure you have one to spare.

If that was the case, everybody would be buying a Mac instead. Too much money and software is already invested in Windows. Recoding software costs money, and a lot of it. Business cannot afford to recode all their software because they don't want to use Windows anymore. This ends up trickling down to home users. Again, Microsoft knows this, and is just looking for ways to make money off their empire. Being "easy to use" is not the reason why people still use Windows. It's because too much money is in the Windows boat.

There is a small software company called Vista [vista.com] who is complaining about copyright of "Vista". Link to Story: Seattle Times Whether or not this will go anywhere, I don't know. On another note: Windows is known to make great secure and compatible software. IE7 should be more compatible with other standards (CSS/JavaScript) and be more secure, blocking more spyware then ever. Unfortunately, I don't believe Microsoft is going to dish out any money to improve IE when the can repackage what they have already and make more money. Microsoft isn't very innovative, and doesn't care too much about security in their products. The problem is, people are buying Windows (and in large numbers), so why should they care? Why spend extra money to make something better when you can just sit back and watch the cash flow in? I don't see Microsoft doing anything exciting in the near future. People will have to stop buying Windows before Microsoft does anything.

We have no clue what kind of computer he has, how much RAM, etc. He could be freezing up due to lack of RAM, small page file, etc, (unlikely, but you never know). And yes, post the HijackThis log (even if you already posted it on the dell forums, like you said).

http://www.imageshack.us

Have you ran a virus scan lately or checked for spyware? Give us a HijackThis log: http://www.merijn.org/files/hijackthis.zip [merijin.org] Also, do you have enough system resources? (press ctrl+alt+del to bring up the task manager, and give us a screen shot of the performance tab) There are so many different reasons why your system may freeze up, I hope we might be able to pinpoint it.

It should show up as weird characters. Last time that happened to me it was a bunch of question marks. :roll:

See if you can delete it from the command line. I've had that happen before, and that's how I got rid of it. Make a new .bat file on the desktop saying "command" (make a new textfile, write the word "command" in it, and save it with the .bat extention) Double click the batch file (.bat). You should get the command line on the desktop. Type "dir" to see all the files on the desktop. Delete the folder by typeing "del ". Say yes to all the prompts, and the folder should be gone.