Retaining

What interface, AGP or PCI-Express? Assuming AGP, here is a good place to start. However, do you have a particular reason for wantig 256 MB? It does limit your choices somewhat in that price range.

I'll try it and Google the next time I need to do research and see which gives better results. It would be interesting if the idea really worked like they said it does.

If nothing else, just open an explorer window (in Windows, of course) and just type in the url (make sure you prefix it with ftp://) and you have a basic graphical FTP client right there. It's not the best, but if you just want to cut-and-paste 1 or 2 files it's quick and easy.

Just a side note, the maximum safe temperature for your processor is 70 degrees C, according to http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. You might still want to look for a better cooler, but you're not in danger of frying your CPU as you type or anything right now. I just used the stock AMD cooler with some Arctic Silver and my CPU has never gone above 60 degrees, even when running processor-intensive applications for hours on end. However, I do have several extra case fans arranged so air comes in the front and top and goes out the back of the case, which makes a big difference in overall temperature for both the CPU and the motherboard (don't want to kill your chipset either!). If you decide not to get a cooler, try adding some case fans and improving ventilation in your case, it might help.

Asus A7N8X-Deluxe MoboAthlon XP 2500+ (Barton) @ 3200+512 MB OCZ Gold Series PC3200 DDR RAMWestern Digital Raptor 10K RPM SATA HDDMSI Radeon 9800 Pro (O/C'd a little)Some TV tuner card and an old IDE HDDI built it myself a few years back and have slowly been upgrading. I'm getting a second Raptor soon to RAID together and I want to get another stick of RAM sometime soon.

I beat the Crimson Room, and tried the sequel (Viridian?), but for some reason it was bugged and I couldn't beat it. After looking for an hour for the last item, I looked at a strategy guide and the item was not where the guide showed it. Fun games, though.

I spend a good amount of my free time on the computer, some of it gaming, some working, and some just browsing. I only spend maybe an hour a day on it during the school week (so little time!), but I usually am on about 6-8 hours on the weekends. I could live without my computer, but it would be pretty boring!

Those are good suggestions. Some other things I've noticed on pages that are really annoying include sites where the style of the pages/navigation menus changes a lot from page to page and where people overuse animated GIFs/Flash/blinking text/Javascript/etc. Just because it's cool and you can use it doesn't necessarily mean you should use it.

Wow! That is creativity at it's best right there. My only question is how much do the lobsters cost to restock the machine? I will start looking for those around here, I can imagine seeing them in arcades...

Are these any of the same people that send the online pharmacy spam? I really can't see a lot of those sites being legal, I'm glad Overture isn't supporting them anymore.

1) Homemade2) WinXP/SuSE Linux3) Mozilla Firefox4) Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail)5) Winamp6) OpenOffice7) Avast8) AdAware/Spybot S&DHope it's useful!

About backing up - is there another computer you could drop your HD in just to copy the important stuff off (i.e., boot off of the other OS)? That way, you could at least save some of your stuff. (If all you have is Win98 or something early, there is a utility that allows older OSes to copy files off NTFS drives.)

I really like Google because of the massive amount of content it searches (like PDFs and text files in addition to normal web pages,) and also because of the options for making your search very precise (limiting it to one site, a particular language, etc.)

A worse story I heard (it was in the news, but I don't have the link) is where a couple pretty much let their children starve while they played a game for some insane amount of time. I think they're being charged with negligence or something (they deserve it.) Talk about irresponsible...

I use Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, the combo works pretty well. I almost never get spyware anymore (not using IE helps a ton too!). I also use ZoneAlarm for firewall (in addition to the hardware firewall), so even if my comp got infected, it wouldn't be able to connect to the internet (without permission.)

I said phone, cds, france, dance, and hair. That was a really clever game, I love those kinds of things. I wish I could do Flash stuff...

Very, very nice job! I'm going to start using these as my desktop wallpapers, they look awesome. I want a copy of Photoshop, but it's a little out of my price range (<$20 )...

I think you have too many drives when you can't remember where you put stuff... I have 2 hard drives right now: a 36 GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000 RPM Serial ATA (soon to be 2 in RAID 0), and an old 40 GB ATA drive that I use for backups and Linux. The Raptor gets excellent performance, and I like to put all my music on the old HDD so I'm not putting overhead on the drive I run my programs off of.

Norton is quite a resource hog, to the point where it will almost crash older computers. How much RAM and what kind of processor do you have? If you have less than 512 MB of RAM, you might really get slowed down by NAV. Also, there are more effective programs out there, I've used Pc-Cillin and been happy, right now I'm using Avast, which is nice and has the added bonus of being free.

Yeah, Counterstrike is fun, but I can only play it for so long until I get tired of it. My clanmates and I play it every once in a while, we'll all go flood some server, much to the amusement of the people already in there. What exactly is a CPL config?

I use HTMLKit for most of my web design because of it's expandibility (start using a different language? grab another plugin that does what you want) and time-saving features. It has some nice stuff besides coloring your code and line numbers, for example if you type in <a if will fill in <a href="" alt=""></a>, which makes coding a lot of tags much easier than just typing them out by hand, without adding stuff in like some other editors (like Frontpage). It also has stuff like batch search and replace, which is good if you find yourself needing to change the same thing over lots of pages, and an integrated XHTML validator.

I think the time the guy tried to sell his (or was it someone elses?) kidney on Ebay was about the weirdest thing I have heard of on the internet. Of course, all the other things people have sold are pretty far out too, like pieces of toast burnt to look like someone, an aircraft carrier, etc. Makes me wonder what random stuff I could sell, hmmm...

How well do they work for gaming, specifically first person shooters? I can see the benefits of having one, but I just don't want to spend the money if it isn't worth it. Right now I just have an old Logitech optical that still works great, had it for about 4 years now.

Right now, I would get a laptop because I have a nice desktop machine and really could use something portable, even if it's not too fast or nice. Anything that could run some word-processing software so I could do my work even when I'm not at home would be nice. However, as a general rule, you do get a lot more for your money in a desktop.

Halo 2 is a good game, I had a lot of fun beating it on a friend's XBox, and going to LAN parties and such, but I really enjoy most PC games a whole lot more. Halo just seems kind of boring and less teamwork oriented than a lot of other games, plus I just like playing with 30-60 people on one server. It's still definitely one of the best console games out there, though.