wutske

Actualy, I do rule them out ... The cheapest Macbook pro comes at €2000. The normal Macbook has small, glossy screen and the graphics card is only an Intel GMA950, wich isn't made for a bit of gaming, yet, the cheapest model would still costs me €1120. Wich is too much for things I don't want. @Grafitti: To bad I live in Belgium, no $300 off here , but I know Dell usualy gives some €€€ off (currently €100 when ordering online , it's been like that for months). So, atm it's between the Inspirion 6400 & 9400. But I realy need to do some more investigation (exams, exams ). All I know is that Acer is no go because they all have glossy screens (same goes for the expensive Sony's).

that would be the best choice, CRT + Dual core. CRTs still guaranty that you'll get more image quality for your money, if you'd combine that with a good pc, you'd have everything you need to do basic to more advanced stuff.

Does anyone understand the Dell website . Their pricing sucks: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Inspirion 9400 (take the second model). from € 1.228 for € 1.037 , but when you do configure and order (configureer en bestel), the price suddenly changes into from 1.542,21 for €1.351,46 .... rip-off ... //edit: damnit, nevermind... or

@WeaponX: I'll take a look on the Dell site, but I guess the XPS series are bit too expensive for me (I'm just a casual gamer).I think I mean the anti-glare thingy , as long as I can't use the screen as a mirror (like the Sony Vaio laptops).I'll take a look around for customizing some laptops, but first finishing my exams .@Lewisthemusician: I've been looking into these macbooks, but the macbook (not pro) uses a small, über-reflecting lcd and comes with an onboard GMA950 and the Macbook pro is a bit too expensive (starting at €2000 ).@Grafitti: I've been looking into some laptop, but that's been a while ago (exams ), maybe next week I'll be looking for some laptops again :P//edit: any input on the inspirion 6400 ? Looks sweet

If you realy want them to be upgradeable in the future, I'd suggest to get the OEM Option 2. The refurbished computer won't allow you to upgrade to anything worth upgrading and option 1 uses AGP and while these cards aren't going to disappear completely from the market, there will only be a very small amount of them available in the future.I do agree with wath yuhuu says, but not with everything. First; he's not getting these computers for overclocking, second; intels aren't running much hotter these days, tirth; you stink if you burn an Intel, they have overheating protection since they made the first P4, fourth; intel motherboards are advanced too you know, last; a processor doesn't just reset itself ...Just check out some OEMs with an AMD CPU.About the CRT's, yes, they radiate, but it is so overhyped, it's not going to kill you, it's not going to make you sick. There are strick guidances for making CRTs, if a monitor radiates more than prescribed, it won't be released on the market.You can save a lot of money when you buy CRTs, but don't forget these things use a lot more power than LCD (in the long term, you might save some money on the electricity bill). But I certainly won't suggest you to buy new LCDs, especialy if you're on a budget.

I want to buy a laptop for school. So, what I need is a laptop that can run at least 2-3 hours, the more, the better. I realy do NOT want a relfective screen, these are so annoying and we have a lot of windows in our school.Other things I'd like:1Gb ram (at least)80Gb HDD(at least)a rather descent graphics card, because I'd like to do some gaming on the laptop too (some lessons are freaking boring ).Dual Core CPU (slow model is good enough)my budget is ~ €1200I've never had a laptop before (okay, I do have a DX4 laptop w/ 16Mb RAM , but that one doesn't count), so I'd like to have some input about brands, what are there positive and negative points ?Ow, before I forget, I also want to know how the sound quality is, it's not something that will be descisive, but I just like good speakers (especialyl their sub to medium range, because that seems to be the problem with most speakers).

probably some bad monitoring software. the min and max values are totaly messed up. Don't worry too much about it, it's just the software that doesn't understand the signals. And even when wrong, the current values are all within the limits (ATX specs give a +/-5% margin for voltages, 5V+5% = 5.25V, so don't worry too much).And if you do worry, grab a multimeter, these give the best results

Vista Premium will only cost $400 @ amazon and Pro will cost $300. Basicly, you'll get less instability for you money when you buy the pro version . And I think it's better to try out a Vista version that is not beta or RC before you decide whether it's instable. That's what RC's are for, they have everything the final version will have, but it still contains errors and bugs. But as you say, it's better to wait for SP1 (+ after a few months, most of the tweaks and hacks will be available so you can modify vista to your needs).

I'll try it out as soon as MU has some Belgian downloadslots available .Maybe you could add some screenshots to this post to give us an idea

i've found a very good link about some currently available web-os'es. The link seems to be down atm, but I'll probably get up as soon as possible (I hope ): http://ww1.franticindustries.com/

booting linux is completely independant from the OS, it all happens before any OS is loaded, so you'll be able to boot any bootable cd (if of course the BIOS can boot from the CD).First you'll probably have to resize the partition on HDD for linux, then boot some linux cd and install it. For booting, I suggest using Grub, it allows to (un)hide and remap disks and parititions automaticaly (you have to configure it to do that tough, but that's easy).

OPN is etched on the core or on the IHS. same info about AMD cores @ wiki: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Check out this website: http://www.ultimatehardware.net/166.htm and scroll down for the CPU-z screenshot. That's a 64bit CPU: look at the instructions list, at the end there's x86-64, that means it's a 64bit capable cpu.

Good article, but I miss the part about RAID. RAID is a nice thing, we all know that, but it can be a b**** too. Stripping hdds creates an incredible performance boost, almost 200%, but the change to get a disk failure is 200% (lets say, 1 disk out of 100 fails, the means 1% chance, if you have 2 of them, there's 2% chance it'll fail. If you have 100 disks, you'll be 100% certain one would fail).

The question in fact is probably something like, wich car drives best ?Everybody will answer something else (someone would say a ferrari while someone else would say a volvo).First, you can't answer the question (okay, I did ) if you haven't test every distribution for the same period and doing the exact same things with it during that period (wich I didn't ).First of all, stability depends on your system, I for example ran my computer overclocked for a long time while keeping the voltage low (for temperature/noise reasons). Explorer would crash from time to time because of the low voltage (I accepted the crashes, since nothing would be lost execpt a few seconds).Second, the hardware configuration is realy important for linux, because linux drivers suck, especialy for new or rare (or expensive) hardware. The best example is my computer, I hear people shouting it from the roof that Ubuntu is the best linux OS ever ... it just won't boot on my computer.Tirth, versions, updates and patches, newer isn't always better, bot older isn't either. Newer kernels support newer hardware, are safer but can still contain bugs.Last but not least, you are a factor too, if you go tampering with the kernel, you might do something that could make it less stable than it was supposed to be, installing software, changing that software etc. can all make your system less stable than you hoped for.

I'd like to run a live cd on a very old laptop, but it only has a backpack parallel port cd-rom of wich I can not boot. So my idea was to put the ISO file on the hdd and try to boot it using some software. So far, I've tried grub4dos ( http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/ ), which didn't work at all. I've tried ISOemu (wich I loaded using a modified version of Grub) ( http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?shoic=8955= ), it finds the partition, but fails when it has to find out wich type (it's fat32, converted from fat16) it it's, so that doesn't work either. I've also tried RedHat5.x boot floppy, they seem to have backpack driver, but that doesn't work either (+ I don't want to install linux, I want to boot it). Does anybody know how on earth I could boot an ISO file from a hdd ? Ps. the laptop is DX4 120Mhz , no cd, 2Gb hdd, floppy and Win98SE installed.

I prefer manual. All those fancy crap programs only screw up windows, they do things you don't want them to do and most of the tweaks they have don't offer a real performance boost.

Ubuntu is a linux distribution, it's great for people who don't know much about linux, because Ubuntu is very easy to use, they even name it "the linux for human beings". You might check it out at: https://www.ubuntu.com/ . If you download the ISO file and burn it, you can boot it directly from the cd, without installing it first (so you could try it out first).

Quite a coincidense, I had to do a small asignment on a less known OS, and I've chooses Slackware, because I've used it too for a while.It apeared that Slackware is the oldest available distro and that it wan't to be the most UNIX-like OS without all the fancy graphs, all for more stablility.I've uses Slackware for a long while, only crashing one time (it hung and only resetting could bring it back to life) it proved to be a good OS. But that doesn't make it a more stable OS than other distro's, I've used Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake, Slax, Knoppix, ... they all work very stable (except maybe Fedora C4, we use it at school and konqueror sometimes crashes, but that seems to happen in every distro I've used so far).But that vision might change if I switch completely from windows to linux, because so far, I haven't done anything heavy with linux).

Look for something like this:DVD Burner (~€35)HDD 160Gb (~€60)512Mb DDR2 (~€55)AMD Sempron64 3000+ AM2 (~€55)Any Low-budget VGA-card or even On board (€0 - €50)WinXP HomeThis should be available for below $400, it won't break any speed records, but it's enough for office stuff.

According to my dad, the bridgerectifier, I guess (bruggelijkrichter for thos who understand dutch), is broken. I hope I can get him to replace it this weekend so I can work at a descent resolution again, because that works a lot better when working for school.

I have problem with my monitor, a Sony E-220 17" CRT. It won't turn on anymore, it doesn't matter how many times I press the on and off button or connect/disconnect the power cable.This screen (a good one imho) has had some 'power' problems before. Sometimes it wouldn't wake up from sleep mode or it would get stuck somewhere in between sleep mode and on mode, turning it off and on again (cft. The IT Crew ) usualy solved this.3 days ago, the problem started, I had switched it of (using the power button) and a while later I wanted to turn it on, but it didn't do so, the LED remaind out and no demag-noise. I've turned it off and on a few time, pulled the power cord out and put it back in and after some more trying, it suddenly worked again after leaving it 10secs on.Yesterday, same story, except it didn't turned on . So far, my dad has check the fuse and the power switch (because the button is missing, I have to use a screw driver to switch it on and off )and probably some more things. My guess is that there's something wrong with the high voltage part, because windows still recognizes the monitor (when I set it up as a secondary monitor, windows detects it and is able to enable the second output, wich isn't possible if no monitor is connected).So, idea's ?P.s: no 'buy a new one' or 'buy a flatscreen', I just want it fixed.

I've given it a try ... changing colors didn't work ... ctrl-scrolllock-scrolllock didn't work either .First one has 2 possible reasons: lack of correct shutdown and reboot (only crashed it after changing it) it'll never work: as I already tought, applies to win3.x only Second one, different story: this DOES work, I've did it before, but the settings were altered by x-setup (if not mistaken) my keyboard might not send the ctrl-scrll-scrll correctly (it's a wireles logitech) the driver wich is responsible for this feature (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/244139) is replaced. //edit: reason why it didn't work: "The computer uses only a universal serial bus (USB) keyboard." Strange thing is, when I had colors set to brigt red/bright white ... crashing windows (by overclocking) didn't gave me a BSOD, but a monitor that ran out of range ...

I've used linux, but it became so hard to keep data synched between linux<->windows<->usb-stick<->folder at school ... so I dropped linux and the folder at school .But if I find time and possibility to use linux again, I'd probably get:1) Slackware (I prefer this because it isn't as 'easy' as some other linux distro's, I like the challenge ).2) Ubuntu (the opposite of 1), this is the 'easy' linux, I'd take it because it probably does everything windows does in an easy way ... except it won't boot here)3) dunno, probably something with KDEThing I won't get:1) Fedora/Red Hat; don't like the looks, feels bulky and doesn't 'feel' good.2) Suse; I must admit, Suse is a great linux distro, but it is sooooo bulky and heavy3) Any other gnome based distro; too ugly, xfce won't make a chance either, handy, but restricted in use.

The CMOS can be replaced, it sits in a socket, you'll only need a tool to get it out (don't try it with a screw driver, I've tested it on several (dead) hardware and you'll end op with a broken socket )

Things have changed abit lately. I'm still using the PC1 setup as it it, but I only have 1 monitor now (I've re-arranged my room, threw out the table for my stereo and my little desk and moved everything to my bigger desk, so I had to leave one screen, otherwise I wouldn't have room for studying). Ow yeah, my sound system is upgrade too . My stereo now replaces the front speakers of the Ozaki, I'm glad of it because these damned front speakers were picking up a lot of noise (some kind of fault in the amp I guess). It sounds even better, the stereo added more lower-midtones to the sound and it sounds even better now P2 and P3 are no more, by means that PC2 is stored somewhere and PC3 is disassembled and put in a box with my other old hardware.