qwijibow

Today, the microsoft windows operating system is the only OS so suffer from disk fragmentation and need constant maintenance with a disk "defragmentor"their are 2 main reasons for this...1) The file system, NTFS is FAT32 are seriously out dated. reiserfs, Xfs and Jfs would be much better solutions, but unfortunatly, microsoft are planning on sticking with NTFS for longhorn.there is nothing we can do about this.2) The SWAP file !first a definition of the swap file (sometimes called virtual memory)All running programs need to be stored in RAM. to keep the RAM clean, and maximise the amount of programs you can have running, RAM which hasnt been accessed fro a while is removed from ram, and swapped onto the hard disk, when it is next needed, it swapped back in. basically, it allows you to use a much slower, but larger hard disk, asif it were RAM memory.now, the porblem.the swap file is a single file which can often grow upto a gigabyte in size. this file is constantly growing, shrinking, moving. which causes it, and all other files on your disk to become fragmented.the swap file is a NIGHMARE.the solution.Other OS's like Unix, BSD and Linux have a simple yet highly efficiant way to completely prevent this kind of fragmentation...they dont have a swap file, they have a swap partiton.unlike a file within the main file system, a partiton is a seperate area of the disk, completely unrelated to the main root filesystem.in the old days, a swap partiton was annoying because a partiton always takesa certain amount of space, it cannot grow or shrink like a file. so if you have a 1gig swap partiton, you will always have 1 gig missing from your disk, even if the swap is unused. however today, a singl;e gigabyte is nothing, hard drives are massive. the difference between a 40gig and80gig disk is £10.implementing the solutions...1)The easy solution would be to simply to turn the virtual memory / Swap Off in the memory management of the ocntrol panel, however unless you have alot or ram, you run the risk of crashing if your memory is dipleated.2) add a second hard disk, prefferable ona different IDE channel an use that as purely swap.3) the super fun cool hack way....re-partiton your windows disk, and add a swap partiton.to do this without having to format the disk you will need a liveCD called knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/)burn the cd iso to a cdrom and boot it.you need to do this because you cannot repartiton a mounted disk.in the main menu once you have booted the disk is a porgram called qt-parted.this is a graphical forontend to a free partiton tool called "parted"its very simple to use, shrink your windows partiton by the amount of swap you want to use... 1Gb should be more than enough unlesss you do some hard core multimedia editing.in the empty space at the end of your disk, add a new partiton and format is as "vfat" which is anouther name for "fat32" fat32 is flaster than NTFS, and because the partiton is only 1Gb in size, we dont needs NTFS's abilites to hold files greater than 4GB.re-boot windows, in the cotrol panel, set the swap files ocation to the newly grated partiton (probably labeled D:/)THEN boot knoppix again, and delete the old swap file from windows C:/ disk.THEN defragment your both partitons.you should now dotice then the main partiton needs defragmenting less often.

or get a local cacheing proxy, their are loads on sourceforge, and the portage tree.although unlesss you have a largeish network (more than a couple of computers) there is not much use.

Run Ut2004 with the "-nosound" parameter.this will show how much of a loss of performance the sound is causing...not even noticable, mabe a frame per second here and there.fior gameing performance, you need CPU and Graphics card power.turn off detailed textures in the graphics section, this doubled my frame rate, and you can only tell the difference when you stop, and face a wall at point blank range... not somthing you do much in 1st person shooters.

i would agree, DOS is probably the most stable MS OS.

however it is worth noting that USB sound or a metal em shiled around your sound card will not effect the quality of audio that your computer exports as a file... only what comes through your speakers.for me, the interfereance was completely in the cable to the speakers, not the sound card, however it could be a great home project shilding your sound card.look up Farraday Cage (and ive probably spelled that wrong)

why does everyone always say windows is cheap, when its clearly the most expensive desktop OS available.average windows machine... WindowsXP + MS Office + Nero. how much is that ???MacOSX is much cheaper..and BSD Solaris and Linux are Free and Open.Anways, securety and price aside.. its a matter of taste.im used to gentoo (possably the fastest OS available)so when im using windows, i just get angrey at how sluggish and slow to react it is.but i suppose if your used to it, it isnt a problem.to each his own

But thats shareware ($45).... Knoppix is free and open.

Processors are sold on their performance. ive never seen a ampage or average operating tempreture on a cpu advertisement. so it seems unlikely that the cpu is just as safe and stable overclocked. better fans can help with heat, but what about EMI ?

Yesterday an xploit was released that use IDN to spoof a linmk in your address bar. for example, you could be viewing some and your browser will show "YourBank.com" this exploit is meant to work on every Browser EXCEPT internet explorer because internet explorer doesnt support IDN (in other words, dumb luck) The exploit should even work with a secure SSL encryption. anyways.. here's the URL http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ if you get a web page saying meeow, your browser failed. I myself have tested this on Fireox and konqueror in GNU/Linux (gentoo dietribution) https://gentoo.org/ Firefox without SSL Passed Firefox with SSL Passed Konqueror without SSL Failed. Konqueror with SSL Passed (reports that the encrypytion certificate is invalid) they say that all browsers except IE fail this test.. mabe they were only talking about browsers on the MS windows operating system.. Anyways... What OS and browsers are you guys using, and how do they do ??? Pass or Fail.

Knoppix to the rescue !!!!!!!!!!!! get your self a knoppix cd image from http://www.knoppix.org/ and burn the iso to a cd. then boot this cd. in the main menu is aprogram called "qt-parted" its a partiton tool. shrink your current windows partiton to make space for new parttions. then, aswell as your windows partiton, you will need the following partitons... 1 boot partiton (10 - 20 megabytes) 1 swap partiton (linux uses a partiton as swap instead of a file, which severely reduces disk framgmentation) (i recomend 512megs to 1Gig) 1 partiton for every OS you want to install. lets say u want 3 OS's, windows, linux, and macOSX, you will need 5 partitons. next, download a Linux install CD, and boot that... i recomnd the following free newbie friendly distro's of linux http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (a distro based on redhat) https://www.suse.com/ (a distro by novel) http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (great distro, stable, and easy to use) none of those distro's are the fastest or most powerfull linux distro's but they are the easyest to use. for an easy to use NON free distro, use http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ find more at distrowatch.com when installing linux it asks if it should auto-partiton your dirve, slects NO, and manually partiton. make sure you select your 10meg partiton as the boot partion, and your 500 meg partiton as swap... then pick one of the free unused partitons as root. install as normal. tadaaaa.... you have a dual boot windows/linux system, and your windows partiton is still in working order, no need to tre-install. for more help, goto http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ to install MacOSX, you will need the emulator called PearPC (which runs ontiop of linux) but thats anouther tutorial.

you whole computer, or just firefox ???firefox shouldnt be able to hault your whole system, however it is possable firefox could trigger a bug in the underlying OS...unless you post some info about yuor ssytem its impossable to tell.anything in the system logs ???what OS ? windwows 2K, XP, Linux, Unix, solaris MacOSX....... ???run firefox from the command line....when it crashes, is there anything on the std error output ???

So why would Intel delibraly underclock a CPU sooo much if there is nothing wrong with it at full speed ? sounds like commercial suicide to me ???

MBR is the secortys of the disk which the bios run.you NEEED a boot loader on your MBR or the disk will not boot.you could configure LILO to boot windows without asking you what you want to boot...but you will need an OS with lilo installed to do this..OR you can use "fixmbr" on your windowsXP disk to do this for you.read about this before i tried linux, but never needed it, so ive not used it first hand.. but its preety simple.boot the XP disk and in rescue more, run fixmbr.not sure of any guides... try microsoft.com

Yeah.. fluxbox, blackbox, iceWM, XFCE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment.what can i say.... i like konqueror's level of integration, and i have a few xpu cycles to spare ;)some days i wake up and im lazy.. KDE, some times im a minimalist... iceWM, and oher times... i dunno, i just feel like Gnome.just annoys me when the ignorant say that linux is coppying windows because kde has a clock in the bottom right of the screen...Linux, and GNU are copyung UNIX (in terms of philosophy and standardisation)... and they are proud to do so.

The best time to switch between OS's is day1.the first time you sit at a computer, look at all the possabilites, pick which is best for you..unforunatly, by the time people even learn there is an altenative, they have become dependant on the pre-installed Windows.apart from som commercial games, linux will do everythings windows can do..but in some circumstances, like professional video editing, it means you have to re-learn how to use the applications.luckily i had only been using windows for about 2 yars when i discoverd linux.. ive now been a linux user for 3 years. i occasionally use windows, but only when m dads computer breaks down, and do run mantenance.... defrag, virus scan, registry cleaning. that sort of thing.

Jut like every other linux distro. Gentoo is currently on its 3rd stable AMD64 release... most other distro's are on their first. but like i said before, gentoo is not for the computer newbies.

fdisk works, but th interface is terrable !cfdisk is alot better, the command line uses a menu drived intercafe.for anything more complicated than creating / deleting partitons, you need parted, a great free toll to rezise partitons without destroying the data they contain. qtparted is a good graphical frontend to it, buy you need qt toolkit installed.

first thing... never re-install.i could have fixed theresolution problem easy, and whatever went wrong the first time will go wrong the second time (unless it was user error)on the same place you downloaded your cd-iso's there will be files named almost exactly the same but with a .md5 extension, these contains md5 checksum codes.do an md5checksum on your ISO cd's and make sure they match identically.Next....Yep.. did you use Grub or LILO as your boot loader ?the boot loader is installed to your hard disks MBR (master boot record)deleteing partitons will not get rid of it.windows has a program called "fixmbr" which will reset the disks MBR to its factory defaults.also... for quicker answers, have a look at linuxquestions.orgits a forum jam packed with linux guru's.sorry to hear your first experiance was not a good one.but you should expect to come across more porblems as time goes on,linux is trying to be a desktop OS, and its doing exptremely well, but it has strong roots as a server / developers OS.

Perform best... as always Gentoo. https://gentoo.org/ Gentoo performs best because its compiled from scratch on your machine. if you set compiler optimisations and USE flags correctly, its lightning fast. however it is the second hardest distro to install.

lol.... not off to a good start im sorry to hear.fisrt off, after downloading your disks did you run an MD5 check ???when downloading such huge files, its not uncommon for files to become corrupt.right.. how did you get into your graphical mode... is your computer set to automatically go into graphical by default, or did you have to type "startx" ?boot to graphical mode, and hit ctrl+alt+F1 and error messeges on that console ???(hit CTRL+ALT+F7 to get back to graphical mode)im guessing kwindows (the window manager crashed)hit ctrl+Esc (or load KDE-system gueart from the main menu <start menu>)look in the porcess table, is there a porcess called "kwin" running ? open a command line console and run "kwin"what does it say ?now try "kwin --replace"anything ?hopefully we will get an error message that will tell us how to fix it.

Pentiums FSB is twice as higher frequency as AMD.. however AMD's pipe is half the length... im no expert... but it seems to me that all that means is similar performance, but extra power consumtion and therefore heat for the pentium. in other words... Pentium is good for Big numbers... like 800mzh FSB but if meaningless numbers dont interest you, but performance does.. AMD

this is definatly interferance.... make sure the audio wire funning from the pc to the speakers goes nowhere neer the mouse wire, or monitor wire (or monitor), and possably network cable (however network cable interferance should be out of hearing range)The interfereance is only effecting yoyr speakers, so for exampkle burning an audiop cd, the sound will be perfect.if you cannot get enough distance between your audio wire, and sources of interfereance, look into using shielded wire (like coax). not sure f you can buy it, but if you own a soldering iron, its nothing complicated.

wow... this should definatly be the default setting, many spyware / adware / virii use the registry to auto start after a re-boot.

this was surgested here http://forums.xisto.com/topic/81583-topic/?findpost=1064286215 and as a result, we now have a windows, Linux and MacOSX subsection in Howto's and Tutorials->OS for the more technical stuff... i think that means this place is leaft for thje OS wars... or atleast less technical stuff.

If someone broke into my house... i would be more worried about my TV than by bios battery. im not going to even argue with you anymore, because its painfully obviouse your making it all up as you go along. do you really belive what you are saying ? i mean.. to blive that you must understand nothing about OS design ? you are either making this all up as you go along, or you are trying to start a flame war. i wonder, have you ever used UNIX ? ever studdied OS design either at university or seriously studied it out of curiocity ? could you write a bash script ?