Grafitti

i say it's a laser head problem. i had the same thing before, and took it in, they said the head was out of whack. was cheaper to buy another instead. or first try setting it as the secondary IDE master, and see if it makes a difference

i got myself a lite-on 8x dvd rw for $40 and an external case for $20. not bad, and no coasters either. it's only USB 2.0 though, and if i had to buy one again, for the extra $5 i woulf get a firewire enclosure, as the limited usb data transfer rate only allows a maximum dvd burning speed of 5.5x.---fine for most uses, but now with dvds being a minimum of 8x you might as well take advantage of the extra speed. one thing to look for is an older non-DL writing model, as it'll be half the price, and you'll never use DL dvd writables anyways at the price they are now.

from what i hear the main difference between radeon and nvidia is that radeon has higher performance but mroe instability, while nvidia is stable but not as high performance. nowadays though every card that comes out is pretty much ok.

i'd take the radeon 9800 over the Nvidia 5200.but here the 5500 costs only @ $50, while the radeon 9800 is over $80.you can get a basic average quality 128MB radeon or nvidia card for $40 or so.

if you're really desperate, stick the hard disk in the freezer for a few hours, and then once it's frozen take it out, pop it in the computer adn try to boot before the hard disk warms up. if it does, then stick it back in the freezer right away. it sounds like a crazy idea, nad i wouldn't recommend it as a first-try option, but more as a last resort, as opposed to sending it to a lab to be repaired. it'll definitely be over $1,000..is the information worth that much?others i know, in desperate scenarios, aftre all other methods failed, have used techniques such as letting the hard drive fall a foot or so straight down onto a book or stack of paper. tapping it with a hammer. shaking it vigorously. et cetera. sometimes with success and sometimes not. basically what you want to do is dislodge the heads from their position, and try to get them past that. i've tried to revive dead hard drives through these methods, sometimes they kept crashing, but on the 50th time they would finally boot up long enough at least for me to get the most important data off, before they finally died forever.

far as i know, the TOS forbid you from hosting any Mp3 files on your site. there doesn't seem to be any ban on hosting wma. Though in several forums people have stated they're posting their own mp3s on thier sites, and they haven't gotten banned. i think basically what it is, is no copyrighted material allowed on your site. Get clearance from an admin or moderator, but i think it's legit.

as in all my other posts on the subject of virus scanning progs: NOD32.have tried many others and am stuck on this one.simply the best!

here are a few good ones:http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ course there's a multitude of other sites out there, but overall i would recommend pricewatch as the very best there is. you can search for ANY hardware you want, and it gives a list of stores anywhere that carry it and the lowest prices. i've found some really incredible deals on there. then both tigerdirect and refurbdepot are good choices for refurbished hardware. i bought a laptop from refurbdepot over a year ago, and while their customer service wasn't the greatest, i did get the merchandise as advertised. though a couple weeks late. tigerdirect is supposed to have better customer service, and they have great stuff. buy from an out-of-state dealer as then you don't get charged sales tax. i made that mistake and bought from refurbdepot in NY, and ended having to pay over $100 sales tax.

filezilla's great. i tried several others, but they didn't compare very well with it.

yeah i guess......... but it's all a matter of personal opinion. you'll find people dead set against norton (like me) and you'll find those who swear up and down that nothing can beat norton. While not necessarily the worst, they're definitely not the best either.

for me, the speed of serching for files doesn't balance out the loss in speed of having google desktop constantly running and indexing your files. i turned this feature off in Windows XP and noticed a marked improvement. and no, i'm not interested either in helping google archive everything i look at on the net.

really, anything is possible. even if the program wants to identify itself, there are ways to bypass it. But if u insist on using pirated software, the safest is not to update at all online. or use a program that monitor every single outbound request or information packet, and analyse the traffic. be creative!

what's your card specs? or perhaps you need to assign a new profile to your monitor.

for dvds i use windvd platinum6. i tried the version 7 but was disappointed with several "bugs" that at least on my computer made watching a movie unpleasant. the window would resize on startup to a strange angle, the sound had major echos when trying to boost volume, and occasionally would go off altogether, and only come back when i restarted the program. then one day it just decided to stop working completely. so i swtiched back to version 6. for my audio files i use winamp 5. the visualizations are great, the vast amount of plugins beats anything else, and the great skins available make it IMO the best there is.

use movie maker. what better program to use than microsoft for it's native format. you get lots of options as to what bitrate, end file size, encoding format to use.

yeah well I think NFS underground2 is great. i got it 6 months ago but resolved not to play it until i had finished #1, and i love part 2. the only thing i don't like is that there's no cops to escape from. that's a major part of the underground, and should have been added.

I learned by experimenting and failure. when i first got into it i learned a few commands and stuff, and i thought i knew alot. then someone asked me to do a website for them, and i found out how much i didn't know. Needless to say, after that disappointing experience i resolved to study other people's webpages and learn from that. but i never got around to that. i thought of studying a book, but i couldn't keep my mind on it long enough. so basically i just learned through trial and error, what worked and what didn't. it's not the best way definitely. now my knowledge of HTML is below what it should be, and i no longer have the time to study it, what with work and a family to take care of now. ...one of those lost opportunities.Since i have a problem especially with finding errors in code, i use dreamweaver with a split interface. things never were easier, though admittedly it makes you lazy.

what i do when i need stuff is look it up on dealtime, read expert's reviews and all, and then go to tigerdirect or refurbdepot, and order from their site. i've found D-link to work alright. not like i have that much experience in that area, but the price was definitely good. But looking for both router and card for $60 seems skimpy. You'd probably only find an 11 Mbps for that price.

I disagree with that. while GIMP may be the most powerful FREEWARE program, there's no way it compares on the same platform with Photoshop, especially CS2.

it'll be sort of pointless to back up the registry, if the computer is bloated and running slow. a clean install and reinstalling all programs would be much better. or another idea, if you're stuck on not reinstalling all the programs...admittedly headache, is to use a program like jvPowertools16 to clean your registry of all garbage. and then back it up.

Nah, i think more that the reason they keep it in Beta is so that memebers feel they belong to an "elite" club, and of course that'll make others who don't have it feel like they're missing out on something. when something is totally free it isn't valued as much. i think it's a smart idea on their side. even though every gmail account has their 50 invites to give away, and the mroe you give away, they just get replaced in your box, but still, it's a good idea. then the lack of graphical ads, the ability and ease of checking your mail through a pop3 client, the speed with which your pages load, the ever-increasing hard disk space, ability to use your gmail account as a hard drive, to run your website from your mail account, and much more. all this i think makes a pretty strong case for google as the No.1 in email providers.

just use Media Player 10. it's free and gives u the option to rip to mp3 files. that's the simplest. if you're not ripping off a cd,but just trying to convert, audioconvert is real good... huge selection of formats to convert from/to.

I like XP. it's the most user friendly. the one that the most games run on. the most programs. it's industry standard. It's got (more) than its share of problems, but still, i feel overall it's the best to use. I don't like the lack of GUI on Linux, and i don't like Macs in general----nothing performance related, just personal preference. one point i feel has merit, in the Windows vs. Mac battle, is that Mac hardware is expensive and hard to come by compared to PC components. available everywhere and anyone can fix it, if it needs to be replaced, for petty cash you've got a new piece.

I prefer MS Office as well, because of the standardization factor. give Open Office a few more years, and it'll probably be good enough to use well. but then again, by that time there will be a new Office suite out, with even better features. i think that the open source will always be a step behind.