wutske

That's possible yes. I don't know visiontek realy well, I've never owned one or know someone who has one (maybe if I think realy hard I'll remember ). And what you say is correct. nVidia creates and sells their GPU's to other companies. These companies can either follow the reference design (the standard board that nVidia designed) and use the default chips (like voltage regulators, caps, memory) or they can design a complete new board (=expensive) or use faster memory than normaly or put another cooler on it or ... or all of the previous at once. I'll give you an example. This is the reference radeon 9600 PRO board: https://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/sapphire/9on%209600%20PRO Now, this is the sapphire Radeon 9600PRO Ultimate: http://www.sharkyforums.com/ And here are 3 9600 PRO: http://www.tt-hardware.com/img/vga02/rad9600_03.jpg Left: Sapphire Middle: Hercules Right: Reference

If you want a live cd to try, I would check out this site: http://livecdlist.com/ Slax is a real good live cd, it's based on slackware and using slaxcreator you can even add programs, it's simple. It should give you some idea about how slackware will work. Ubuntu getting more popular, so you could check that one out too. Other one's to look for: Suse Live-Eval -> Suse Linux Kubuntu -> Ubuntu with KDE (instead of GNOME) MandrakeMove -> Mandrake Linux I've tested quite some distro's (ok, compared to what is available I only check a tiny bit ) and for beginners I would suggest using Suse Linux or Mandrake (ow, it's Mandriva now). If you want a workstation, only to work on, I'd suggest RedHat or Fedora, but overhere it's the same as xboxrulz, they run rather slow. If you're more advanced (or realy want to learn it and you have lots of time), then Slackware should do .

It's quite simple. There are several chip makers, but the 2 biggest are ATI and nVidia. What they do is just creating the GPU (like, for example, the NV350 wich is an ATI Radeon9600PRO).Now, they sell those chips to different companies who put those chips on a PCB, together with memory and all other stuff needed to have a videocard and then they sell it.Now, ATI also sells it's own cards, but those are the most 'stock' cards available from ATI. nVidia does not sell cards and let other companies do this.Why they do that? More companies that sell cards means more diversity (memory configuration, cooling, ...) and better concurrency (and broken cards go to the companies and not directly to ATI & nVidia, wich also saves a lot of time and money)

Not shure if this might help. Right-click on the taskbar and untick the 'lock taskbar' option.Than try fiddling around a bit with the sliders that have appeared, maybe that might make the appear.

wow, never had that problem before, it always gave me a recovery option if windows was installed.I would suggest you to get at least a BartPE cd so you can easily recover and repair files on your hdd if windows refuses to boot, it has been useful before to me.I think the reason why the cd did not give a repair option was because it simply did not find a windows installation (because the NTLDR was corrupted).

Well, Volari card aren't exactly the beste cards available If I remember correctly, the latest version of DX is indeed DX9.0c Maybe reinstalling DX might help, you never know I've googled for the 2nd errorcode, maybe this might be usefull: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (can't read, takes too much time to load since I'm on smallband )

pfff, this is pure overkill. Who needs that power to play games ??? Even SLI on it's own is overkill, one single 7900 card with a DC64 is more that enough to play games at high resolution with AA and AF ... And of course, it's cheaper, not only to buy, but also to feed it.But, if one day he want's to give it away, I'll be waiting for it

And what about AZERTY ???My guess is that azerty was made so because it would be more easy to write in some languages. Anyway, I have no problem writing english/dutch/french using azerty

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display0202071454.html Source: http://www.techradar.com/

That's kinda a complex hdd organization Overhere it's a bit more simple 1) D:\ (1,91Gb) -> swap file and temp folders ; reason: first partition and fastest sectors on the disk, no fragmentation of the swap file or other files (temp folders)2) C:\ (78Gb) -> Windows/Program Files/Documents/... All-in-one; no limits on space or losing space (that's why I prefer to have 1 partition for linux and 1 partition for linux swap)3) E:\ (31Gb) -> uhm, leftovers from other installations . Need to clear it so I can install linux on it.

Same thing overhere, I'm sticking with WindowsXP for as longs as possible, and for many reasons.1) Windows is getting simple, M$ wants every user to understand windows, this results in annoying messages explaining and asking for lots of things (look at SP2 and you'll know what I mean)2) performance, yeah, no explanation I think (not to forget limited OpenGL performance! )3) Limitations like DRM etc ...4) Securtity: new target = less viruses/spyware/... for XP ?5) price ...And actualy, I'm pretty happy with XP.

This probably won't pose any problems. I think this trick only applies to Internet Explorer, because Opera has such a setting built-in (Tools>Prefs>Network). 3. Absolutely right. Those programs change settings like ttl etc, but changing such settings can even result in worse performance caused by lost packages (yes, they can get lost). And lost packages means, re-request of the package and all the other protocols. The best way to improve internet speed is to get a faster connection (and Opera or FF)

You can also try to do it manually: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

When will you people ever learn, never eat or drink near your computer .Anyway, good luck with the keybord, I hope lemonade is better than keyboard cleaner (once used very much of this stuf to clean a keyboard, it never worked again ).

You can try to recover the files using Handy Recovery 1.0 (freeware) (http://www.handyrecovery.com/handyrecovery-fw.exe).Altough chances are rather small that you'll be able to recover the data, because when it's overwritten by other data, it's lost (except if you want to pay a few $100).

You could also try the free vmplayer (http://www.vmware.com/products/workstation.html) and download a linux OS (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). Works great, maybe a little bit on the slow site, but it works

This one can: http://www.nullriver.com/products/winmd5sum

Most distributions and version are available at ftp.belnet.be . Slackware versions are here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ I've used slackware for a while on my computer next to windows, but I still used windows more than linux (because my data was there on an NTFS partition, I couldn't find programs that I want and linux is a slow booter ). Now I removed it because I had to reinstall windows and I needed an empty partition for my data (+ the partitioning would change so I couldn't use the boot.bin anymore to start linux via the windows boot manager). I think I just need some time to realy get used to linux. I'm not realy a slow learner, more a fast forgetting type , so that doesn't make it more easy . But, if I finish this schoolyear succesfully, I have 3 months or so to learn it

Few year ago, I would have totaly agreed with you, but today tings are more difficult. Intel used to be faster when it came to video-encoding and memory-intensive tasks, but today there are more apps in wich it's faster, especialy when you consider price/performance. Especialy Intel's mobile products (put in a desktop) are realy good and it seems like they are even getting better. In terms of heat output I would say that AMD still is the winner. But to keep it short and simple, AMD has lost (already a while ago) it's huge advantage in price/performance (I'm thinking about the time when we would still be buying AMD AthlonXP's and P4 Northwoods).

msconfig allows you to enable or disable program to start-up or not. I can also do the same for services, but I would suggest to use the system-management tools instead.

I have actualy no idea of how fast I can type. In fact I'm now timing how fast I can type, but I don't thing it's going to be that good, because atm I'm making a lot of mistakes and I don't know what to type, so forgive me if I don't say anything interesting at all :lol:So, I tiped this at about 73 words per minute. Considering the fact that I normaly don't make that much mistakes (and because I didn't knew what to type )and that I'm not typing on the keyboard that I'm used to, I'll probably do something like 90 wpm .

just one thing I'd like to share, most programs that promise you to make your computer faster just don't do.An good example is freeRAM XP Pro, what it actually does is clearing the RAM so that other applications have more 'fast' memory to work with. Unfortunately, when the program clears the RAM, it forces other thing the where there to be stored in the 'slow' memory, the swap file.Now what happens when a program need that bit of information ? Yes, it has to load it from the swap file wich is sloooooooow. Even worse is that these programs slow down the computer when they are clearing the ram (if they do that automaticly it can be very annoying).There are only a few tweaks that realy can boost the performance of a computer, like having lots of RAM and having no swap file, or prevent the usage of the ram. For vid-card there are numerous of setting wich can increase or decrease performance or image quality. CPU wise there are no real tweaks, except maybe setting the correct L2 cache. HDD wise there are no tweaks, but there are 2-3 tweaks for speeding up an NTFS formated partition.The performance gain of these software tweaks is marginaly small (except image quality setting for games).The only effective way of 'boosting' performance is through the BIOS (tighter timings of the memory, overclocking, etc...) and by installing the best drivers for your hardware (same here, graphic drivers are most effective for boosting performance).

It's a way of changing the default folder where windows searches for the wallpapers (normaly c:\windows). But, if you store all your wallpaper in my documents/walllpapers, you normaly have to navigate to select a new wallpaper. Changing the key into my documtens/wallpapers resolves this 'annoyance', because you now see al your my documents/wallpapers wallpapers in the display manager.

okay, this program is just cheating. The only thing it does is making a game skipping frame. It's even this worst that I only got 34 3D03Marks !And downloading onle went worse with this app.

Well that sounds like *BLEEP* to me. Download Files x2 Faster <->impossible, your ISP limits the speed you can download at and I don't know any drive that is not capable of writing data at 1MB/s, so there is absolutely nothing to speed up.Speed Animations\Applications x2 <-> again, impossible. You are limited by the power of the hardware, no app can boost speed in such order, it can only give a 5% gain.I'll test it w/ some benchmarks and post the results later.