Grafitti

You CAN get cards for capture that plug into the PC card slot on the laptop, but I would recommend the USB option, as the card versions are extremely bulky, and don't quite fit on the thing. Like sticking a cam intake on a VW bug. It just doesn't look right. Get a card or USB that can capture at least MPEG-2. that's regular DVD quality. and if you're looking at high-end editing, not that you should be, because a laptop isn't built for that, but if you are then get one that can do DV capture. ... maybe I'm wrong and all cards do DV< but can the USB sustain the data transfer rate? Anyways, for DV capturing you'll need roughly a gigabyte per minute of video recorded, and for MPEG-2, you should manage at least 20 minutes per gigabyte.

I don't remember what brand it was. i think it was LaCie or some other uncommon brand. 120 GB though is never enough for me, i have 3 SATA disks, with a total of 700 GB, and it's nowhere near enough.

Or how about buying a second hand PCI video card with say 8 megs of memory? it should only cost you 5$ or $10 max, and you can happily use your antiquated set. Why bother though? a nine year veteran should be in a museum.

I don't think GIMP quite compares to photoshop. Photoshop is simply an incredibly complex and powerful program, and you notice it when you have to pay for it. i think it's overpriced, at least for home use they should knock a good 400 or 500 off the price, that would make it a more viable option, and if they want to go on charging companies and design studios 800 or 1000 or more, well then that would be reasonable. though if you CAN afford it, i would recommend it. Here's another idea: keep using the trial version, and just go through the registry every month and change the date so that it thinks you're only on the first day of your trial. I don't think THAT is illegal, is it? Maybe a gray area, but not banned.

That's old hat. My brother showed it to me months ago. Some group flooded the google bots with tracers to that page, and exploited google's page ranking system. nicely done, though.

I've got a beta version of Office 12. So what I've experienced is not the final product, at least i hope not. Overall, I'd give this beta a 7/10 score. The good points I've experienced are: Word is totally redesigned, with everything right there at your fingertips. Never had any problems with it, though it takes a little getting used to at first because it's all repositioned as compared to every previous version of Office. but once you get the hang of it, you wonder how you ever subsisted with the old one. Excel and Access come with new features as well, and i've enjoyed using them, though I'm not qualified to judge details as I only use them for basic tasks. So what I liked the most is the new templates and color scheme formatting Now the downside: Outlook is impossible to use. It crashes as soon as I try to send or receive, import anything, etc. Powerpoint, on the other hand, has some good and some bad qualities. It's great as far as advanced features, new layouts, effects, etc. But if you try to save the file in regular version format, it doesn't go very smoothly. a 30 or 40 slide presentation will take like 10 minutes while it goes through the thing and decides what to render as bitmap because earlier versions can't handle it. So if you haven't lost patience by then, you save the file and what was once a slim 5 MB file is now a whopping 200 MB. So: it's great if everyone else is using the same version as you, but if not, tough luck. Overall I don't know how much i can judge the unacceptable parts of Office, considering that it IS a beta. I'll definitely spring for the full version once it's released.One more thing: Built - in PDF creation, and XML format as well, make this an EXTREME improvement over Office 2003.

Google most of the time. it's simply the easiest. But i use dogpile sometimes too, when i want to look for something that doesn't come up in my google searches. there are a few other sites that specialize in certain areas, and you can find what you're looking for easier.

I don't see how someone is going to be that much of an idiot that they'll travel with a case or two full of stuff. Like HELLO!!! Anyone with a grain of intelligence would either copy it onto a dvd with a fake or misleading label, or have it on their laptop. what about on an external hard disk, or nowadays, a flash disk? Label the dvd "family holiday footage" and see how easily you can get by. I'd really like to see those sniffer dogs catch something. Hell, I'd even volunteer to be the test subject.

those half terabytes have been around for a while. around January i was looking on pricewatch and there were companies already offering it, with external raid arrays of 1 or 1 and a half TB. Still, the longer they've been around the better they get, and the more they drop in price. I'll be looking to get one in 6 months or so.

Stupid U.S. trying to extradite him. I say give him a free ticket to Sweden or Finland, whichever it is that has legalized hacking, if they're going to make him leave the country. I hope the UK has the balls to refuse the extradition request. Definitely he runs a 100% of no fair trial in the states.

For special codecs, windows media player sucks. for visualizations and skins, winamp easily has more available. Even my friends who prefer to keep WMP agree that the visualizations and skins in winamp are FAR superior. I like the smaller footprint of winamp. Audio options are much better too. The 5.xx versions of winamp sometimes crash. Now that the final version is out it's a good idea to upgrade. The only thing i don't like about winamp, in which WMP is better, is general video viewing. it should stick to being an audio player. that is its strong point.

I think the reason you were getting bad server errors before is because of the huge flood of brazilian soccer fans who were signing up for it. Orkut is alright, it's sort of a competitor to Myspace.com and possibly Hi5,Though the polarization is quite strong and i don't see it becoming the number 1 anytime soon. Basically, the states and western europe use Myspace, and Orkut is generally favored by those in Brazil, India, and Pakistan. I read an interesting article about Orkut in the IT magazine "Spider". It said that if there hadn't been this huge rush by brazilians when it was launched, it could have captured the US market. but because the servers were overloaded, people who logged on kept getting these bad server errors, and just gave up on it. I have an Orkut account but quite frankly i never use it. i have email, chatting, and SMS, and that's all i need. If you can keep it in its proper place it might be alright, but i live with someone for whom addicted is a mild term. first thing in the morning, every 5 minutes, and last thing at night. Sad thing is the only ones this person gets scraps from are people you spend half the day talking to on the phone anyways, so it turns out to be a big waste of time.

Here in Pakistan, i have a 128k "broadband" connection which i pay $25 per month, and for $35 i can get 256k. Only problem is, my actual connection speed is generally between 2k and 20k, maybe maybe on a very good day i'll hit 50k. And that's only when it's working. I'd estimate internet uptime at around 40%.Can it get much worse than that?

I had to repair the windows installation on a computer, due to constant power cuts for several days, once it started up and said "NTRDL is missing" etc. so i looked on all the tech sites for ideas on how to fix it, and tried them all. none of them worked. i couldn't fix the boot.ini or winnt files, because they weren't messed up, simply not there. so i tried to copy them again off the windows cd, but after telling me the file was successfully copied, i would look in the c drive and it wasn't there. Next i tried a repair install, but it wouldn't give me that option. What i don't understand is, why will windows, on installation, detect an already installed copy on the hard disk, but not give me an option to repair it? i tried several times, and finally after using the recovery console to fix the MBR, the boot, and then finally rebuilding the boot file, it then gave me the option of repairing rather than doing a full install. I'm not quite sure what it was that did the trick. But i would like to know because it happens frequently. What is a simple, generally tried and proven way to get the repair option to come up if it refuses to?

How about PGP? There's a free version, and it's as good as they come. Forget about recovering your passsword though, if you forget it, that's the end. The new free versions encrypt single files, but if you go for the older i think version 6, you get PGPdisk for free as well. basically it's a file that you create to whatever size you like, say 2 GB, and then when you put you password in it mounts the file as a drive on your computer, and you can have all your personal files in that one folder.

The cable is relatively expensive, if you're going for the good stuff. Those prices are way out of range, but still you can expect to pay 2 or 3 times as much for a good one as for the bargain one. Different companies have different quality standards, and cheap cable doesn't always transmit as well as high-end. There's a lot more shielding against interference in the better cables, and while it may not make much of a difference for the smaller end-user, it can be annoying. Case in point: we have cable here, but there's no competition to speak of. So with a relative monopoly, the cable company is free to use the cheapest cable, with the result that every electronics device like cell phones, microwaves, etc in our house and the neighbors houses all interfere with the signal, it gets choked and clogs the modem, and i end up restarting the modem, resetting the MAC iD at least once or twice a day. To top it off, my actual BROADBAND speed is around 15 k on a GOOD day! I do better on dial-up.

Well I've never heard yet of a free copy of windows. As we all know windows users tend to be those who don't know much about computers. Of course there are those who do, but if you look at it on the large scale, probably only 1 out of ten really know what they're doing. So until a linux version can come out with a GUI desktop that is AS EASY TO USE AS THE WINDOWS ONE, with the same amount of built-in driver support, tools, and at the same time looks and works like windows, it's just too much to ask of a lot of people. And while the big-names may cry bloody murder about people pirating their stuff and all the cash they're losing, the fact of the matter is that they have not lost ground, and actually have gained in sales. This was brought up during the Grokster case. It's fine that we don't condone piracy at Xisto, but at the same time it IS something that has merit in its own way. Figure if Microsoft charged half their cost for windows, I'm sure they would sell a whole lot more legal copies. Or if you could lease it. You buy your windows copy, and it simply devaluates in price as the years go by. But if a year later you decide you don't want it anymore, you get back 70% of its value. It's not like you've worn out the license. It definitely is upsetting, even for me, when i bought my laptop i wanted to use Linux. So i ordered my laptop online, but how many stores will ship you a laptop without windows pre-loaded and automatically charged to your account? Now it's getting better, and there's a variety of linux-based notebooks around, but to basically force someone to buy windows, I think that's just as much piracy as someone making an illegal copy of it.

I got a pretty decent HP keyboard for $10. nothing like wireless, but full multimedia capability. I lost my earlier one through constant use. What's worse than spilling it on your regular keyboard is spilling it on your laptop keyboard. I know someone who did that once, a small amount of coffee left in the cup, and sure enough she spilled it. A strange grinding noise happened next, and then then computer shut down, all in about 5 or 6 seconds. so there wasn't any way to react to it. Took it to lots of tech places, even back to the manufacturer. Everyone said the motherboard, keyboard, hard drive had to be replaced. She didn't have the cash for that, so she just stuck it in a cupboard. Pulled it out a few months later "just in case", and believe it or not, it started up fine and hasn't had any problems since. Maybe that's a freak of technology, but goes to show that there's still the off chance of the "back from the dead" scenario. Although I have heard that in electronics, spilling coffee, tea, juice or soft drinks is much worse than just plain water because of the sugar present in the other stuff. Is this a myth, or is there some truth to it?

I never took a full typing course. So I can't technically touch type. I memorized the positions of all the keys though so i can look at the screen without having to check for a key except once in a great while. But forget keeping my fingers properly positioned on the keyboard. i just position my wrists on the edge of the keyboard in relation to the keys and then my fingers hover above everything. For me it makes a difference when i'm typing from a page or from my head. from a page, i would say @50. and from my head, 75 or 80. Then again, I never have time to go chatting, so it's not such a handicap. But yeah, I agree, it's just practice and you start remembering where the keys are and before you know it, you're typing away at speeds far faster than before. it's just practice and repetition.

Ok. that was simple. I never got what the difference was. But here's the thing: if I'm running a 128MB PCI-e graphics card, and a 3.0Ghz processor, with a gig of ram, is there going to be any realistic improvment if i upgrade. of course i know my pieces aren't the latest on the market, but would the big cost in buying the latest pieces be justified in rendering capability?

I've tried all versions of premiere, now i have version 2.0 and it's a great improvement over the 1.5, but still i don't seem to be able to get real-time previewing in the little window. sometimes it works, especially when i use DV files and a minimum of transititons and effects, but otherwise it uses freeze-frame technology, or so it seems. only way around it is for me to render the full thing, but i'd like to know what the difference is between linear video editing and non-linear editing, and whether that has anything to do with my problem. or from someone who's tried premiere, is there a comparable program that WILL do real-time?I just want to be able to compile the layers of footage, throw in the transitions and a few special effects, and be able to instantly preview what i've created. as it is, i have to sit there after i do a 5 minute clip and wait for another 5 or 10 minutes before it's all rendered. then that works for as long as i leave it alone, but if i then want to change something - say i put the contrast down another notch or two, voila! I've got to render the thing from scratch. it's highly unproductive, to say the least.

a 230W power supply only meets the bare minimum for a computer today, and is only workable if you don't use any greedy apps, or open alot of windows. With a PCI-e card, 3 hard drives, 3.0Ghz processor, and 2 extra fans in my case i've found that even a 450W is simply "enough", and that a 500-550W supply does a better job of making sure everything runs stable, even with lots of apps open. that could also be because the city electric supply fluctuates all the time, even through the stabilizer, and the more powerful power supply simply has that extra oomph to kick through the bad spots.

It would be much more cost-effective in the long run for you to split your dual layer dvds onto 2 single layers, as a 4.7 gb blank goes for $0.50 or less depending on where you live. Here i get 3 for a dollar and i think that's expensive compared to where i was before. a dual blank still costs around $8. at that point you're better off waiting a year for blu-ray or HD, whichever way you're planning to swing. but dvd shrink does a pretty good job of compressing. you just stick in the dual-layer dvd and it'll make you a 4.7 copy. how nice. also better than dvdXcopy, another "could-be-good" program, but that surprises you by making a faulty copy if your dvd happens to be copy-protected. thing is you don't know until you watch the copy, because the program tells you it was successful. shrink, on the other hand, gives you the option to make a 1-1 copy, or you can choose which regions to make it playable for, whether you want to keep the CSS and other protection, etc. i don't know if that borders on illegality, but if it's only for your personal backups, it's nice. also justifying changing regions is if your dvd player can't be hacked, and you have a dvd from a different region.

If you have your disk set up as a dynamic drive instead of a basic one, if you stick it in a different computer windows XP will not automatically show it as a listed drive in explorer. again, you have to go to diskmgmt.msc and activate the disk. If it still won't show up due to an actual bad hard disk, once you've exhausted the safer methods posted by Trance & The Captain, you can try hard disk regenerator. As long as you can see the hard disk in the bios setup, hard disk regenerator goes through the disk and attempts to actually recover the bad sectors. they don't advise you use it on a hd full of data, but if you've got no other choice, and there's only a small bad patch on the drive, then it will only overwrite those portions, which probably would have been lost anyways. i tried it on an 80Gb drive that someone dropped, it could be read in the bios and in diskmgmt but i couldn't format it. with this HHD regenerator i got back about 60Gb space, but it took about a week to fix every bad sector (disk had 100% bad sectors). it's worth a shot.And while i'm on this topic, can someone explain to me what the actual practical difference is between basic and dynamic?

I've had that problem -- if u want to call it a problem - for a month or more. it says i have unlimited bandwidth, nad unlimited disk space. maybe it's not an issue for someone who doesn't have much stuff on there anyways, but for those who are close to their limit, it does make a difference whether you see the proper amount of free space or not. it would be nice to have it fixed once and for all sometime soon, and while the mods are at it, how about increasing the package to 200MB