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.

That's very strange. The only time my mouse ever *jumps* is when my mouse rollers are dirty, or whatever you call them (yes, I still use a mouse with a ball, I cba to get a new optical mouse). I just take the ball out, clean the gunk off, put it back in and I'm good to go. I have to do it about once a week. I can't figure out what your problem could be. :x

Specs is short for specifications. (ie. Operating System, CPU, RAM, Video card, etc)

I was thinking your mouse was dirty, but then I read you got a new mouse... Are you using a mousepad? If not, it could be the surface you are using the mouse on.

well im using a modem. Okay, and you didn't answer my questions. :roll: I'm assuming it's wired. What are the specs on your computer?

What operating system are you running?

Either your ISP is having problems, or your computer cannot handle the broadband traffic maybe? Are you using wireless, and you're getting a poor signal? What are the specs on your computer, and are you using a wired or wireless internet?

Firefox is not totally immune, it's just at this point MORE immune than IE (a lot more for that matter). I doubt you got it from these forums, your virus scan might have been sifting through your temporary internet files when you were browsing the web and came across that. I'd run a full scan on your system if you haven't already. If you have one instance, it might have propegated at some point, so you'll want to fix or delete the other instances, so they can't do more harm.

Last time I checked it should auto-configure itself when you install Sun Java. Did you download the Sun JRE from their website and install it?

MOST game developers don't even write their code from scratch. They buy a 3rd party gaming engine that uses some scripting language and mod it to their tastes. But yeah, the gaming engine is USUALLY written in C/C++ (and maybe some of the low level stuff in assembly) There are Java gaming engines out there, but not very widely used. If a developer writes it from scratch, they might use Java or C++, depending on their tastes. C++ will run faster, but your code will only be able to run on one type of machine (ie only Windows machines, only Macs, only Linux, etc). Yeah, you can port it, but that depends on what C++ libraries you use from the start (and graphic engine, you can't port a game that uses DirectX to anything besides windows without rewriting the whole game, with OpenGL on the other hand, it should be fairly easy), and you'll end up having to change some code (it may be a lot, it may be a little). Java will run slower because the code is semi-interpreted from the "ByteCode". ByteCode the compiled Java code that is written at a low level language that's not native to any machine, but can be interpreted by the Java Virtual Machine fairly quickly, but not quite as fast as native written code. However, the bytecode can be used on any machine that has a Java Virtual Machine written for it (which is almost every OS at this point) and does not require a single line of code changed to use it on different type of machine. Virtual Basic isn't that widely used. It's just not as powerful of a language as C++. Why have hamburger when you can have steak? It all really depends on what you want to do, I guess. There really isn't ONE thing that's used, it's a combination of all of the above.

Try cutting down the resolution in counterstrike. Usually the monitors will allow a higher refresh rate at a lower resolution. (I would check the manual to confirm that). A lower resolution will also mean faster framerate. Find a balance that you like!