kam1405241509

I assume you removed the bluetooth adaptor completely, or that it fell off (ie it didn't break in two, leaving the USB plug still plugged into it). Does the motherboard come with any onboard diagnostics (modern ones from Abit & Asus etc come with a nice LED that reads out error codes, so you can then look those up in the manual). Usually the error codes aren't of much detail, but they at least tell you where in the boot process it gets to (I had some boot problems & thought it was the board (having just removed/reinstalled it to add some fans), but then looked at the board codes as they went through the sequence & it stopped at the RAM check ... it was incompatible RAM!). I'm guessing he means he doesn't see his HDD read/write LED turn on.

Hi Spartacus :-),I love Rome Total War too. Check out this roundup of cards (http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/print/2004-27gpu2.html). It's quite old (no 7xxx's etc) but I doubt you're after a high-end expensive card ... esp since these things double in power every 6-12 months ... it's probably best to upgrade later (unless you have a specific game/app that needs the 7xxx's power ... or you could upgrade to PCI-e & SLI etc .. but that's still quite an expensive route as well). Anyway, the review includes benches for a few strategy games (Rome) & some FPSs (Doom3, HL2, Far Cry). If you just want to play the Rome & DoomIII at min performances (low-res, low effects), then just get a 5700 which will give you approx 20-23fps in both, otherwise a 6800 would be twice that performance&cost in Rome, and nearly quadruple that in Doom3 (because it has the hardware to handle complex shaders/lighting, & the fill rate etc ... and hi-poly characters/animation)! At the highest end in Doom3 (1600x1200, FSAA/AF, etc), the 5700 only manages 5fps whilst the 6800 can reach almost 39-49fps (54-90fps in SLI mode)! The 6800s have upto 16 pixel pipelines (62xx was released with reduced functions to sell cheaply etc .. I think they had 12), 6 vertex units, Shader Model 3.0 ... upto 7200Mpixels/s fill rate (same for #texels per sec wrt 1 texture unit per pixel pipeline) ... and the memory bus reaches 35GB/s (128-256MB)! 5700's are 75USD, and 6800's (at newegg) are 150USD :-). So it all really depends on whether that extra 75USD is worth it for you if you play the most recent games with complex shaders etc. Finally, personally I prefer NV for their drivers (very good Linux, OGL & multimonitor functons ... see the above link plus this one http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/), but ATI has a strong following too due to their focus on efficiency & low-heat/noise etc rather than brute force.

The 64-bit Far Cry patch is the only damn good commercial homeuser demonstration of what can really be done given 64-bit processing & memory addressing. The draw-distance can increase (scene can be drawn out further into the distance), more objects can appear onscreen simultaneously, higher resolution textures (this makes a big difference & I think most games developers say they are going down this route soon .. ie in 2006). Wrt games/graphics I really like the look of HDR & some of the newer shader ideas, but that's going slightly off topic ;-).

I think the main problem with x64 is that many hardware makers haven't bothered to release 64-bit drivers at all, or at best the drivers are not very stable. I don't think the OS itself is to blame. Also I don't think MS takes it that seriously & knows full well that this problem is due to vendors' resources being focused on Vista instead which will have a longer lifespan (and therefore worth the effort/time/money spent on developing Vista specific 64-bit drivers instead). Again though I don't know anything for sure since I haven't seen the internals!

Vista brings with it a GPU accelerated GUI (basically since OSX had Aqua .. Linux is also getting equivalent setups but it'll probably be minimalistic/efficient :-)). Eventually it'll bring with it the SQL-server-lite-enabled WinFS ... not sure I'd want a database running 24/7 behind the scenes, unless it doesn't do much beyond updates & tree restructuring etc until it is needed to find something. Current realistic specs are bidirectionalPCIeX16/GPU/256MB, 2CPU(it's more threaded internally)/2GB, SATA/NCQ ... and of course an HDCP HD-LCD to view BRDs/HDTV/etc (legal) content! I agree, but it depends on the user. I don't want my OS doing much since for me it's just there to manage/run all my apps efficiently. For a laptop, especially, wrt one that's trying to save power, running a DB on a 2nd CPU is excessively wasteful! I too don't want my OS dictating what I can & cannot view/execute .. I will certainly not have my main PC running any protected content .. There are cracked hardware out already wrt HDCP to DVI, but the standard allows for the blocking of specific peripherals & they can change the encryption codes etc at any time. I'm sure that eventually there will be work arounds .. or people will just get all their content from non-legit sources online instead .. in the same way that many people avoid iTunes files simply because they do not want any restrictions, so they burn their CDs & compress to an open format! Overall I think there's very little benefit for far too much cost with Vista. I'd use OSX if I wanted something pretty & with a database (and secureness), or Linux if I'd want something efficient that just works & does the job (and can look very nice if setup well etc .. without being inefficient). And I still really like W2K more than XP because it works as well without any of the fluff! With HW virtualisation (esp in v2) there will be less/no reasons to run Windows as a main OS just so as to run a particular app(s) .. so then people will chose their main OS purely based on the features they need (or think they need). Finally, I think MS's logic is that they rarely produce a completely rearchitected OS (a lot of the stacks in Vista are completely rewritten or new), so they won't get a chance in the near future of taking advantage of all the new hardware changes that have/are taking place (multicore, 64-bit memory space, PCIe graphics, SATA-NCQ, etc), so they may as well focus this OS on the very latest or near-future (DDR3) hardware, and wait for the majority of users to catch up. Eventually all this will be common/cheap (even multicores on laptops now exists), and hopefully the continued focus on lowering power by intel (and also AMD to a lesser extent) may have some decent results soon :-). This is all conjecture/guesswork though until the final final build is released.

The original roadmap stated Vista would be released to RTM in June & public launch in Oct 2006 .. it was never H1 that was just the later betas/RCs (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). Vista betas are getting delayed & now an MS exec stated the final's been delayed too(http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/).They're going to release as both 32-bit and 64-bit .. it'd be pretty dumb to sideline the majority of users (even if their experience would be pretty lame without serious hardware!). Yes the IA64 is a serious number of changes, but it's basically dead thanks to much higher prices & much poorer IA32 performance! Intel's other 64-bit CPU architecture is (now*) an exact copy of of AMD64 .. because MS said they will not support two versions of x86-64 CPUs just because Intel didn't like the fact that they didn't invent it & because they wanted to cheat and use their dominance/power rather than compete fairly (AMD filed a recent lawsuit claiming unfair lack of competition from intel in the supply chain)! * Intel originally released an incomplete version of AMD64 (of course they called it an Intel acronym) ... Intel had less not more x86-64 intructions initially! Now, although x86-64 is a simpler change than IA64 (obviously .. as it's a bunch of extra instructions not a whole new ISA), it's not simply a matter of widening the eight GPRs etc (64-bit addresses to be able to address >4GB's without a broken Xeon memory bus extension). AMD doubled the eight GPRs & eight SIMD (SSE/2/3) registers, and the rest is const (eight x87 FPRs & the extra 120 hidden/internal registers for register renaming. Finally, AMD's K8 ISA isn't simply just 64-bit-ness. They also took the leap to HyperTransport CPU&PCIe interconnects ... and the integrated memory controller which helped scalability without losing/sharing performance .. these two only really come into their own at the high end though (2/4-way SLI, massive peripheral bandwidth etc for the former ... and SMP/ccNUMA for the latter).

It may be possible to free up some space in that small laptop (by removing extra internal CDD/HDDs/batts you don't need when it's off) ... then embed/hide some phone/GPS chips in it so you can track it like they do for stolen cars .. no biggie. If you want more details/howtos ask away.

I agree with Sarah81, WD SATA/PATA drives are very nice. They are the only 10k RPM SATA drives with 3-5year warranties on their top end drives, so they believe their drives are reliable otherwise they'd be losing money ;-). Ditto I'd agree that you need to get as much HDD space as possible if you're gonna store tons of videos on the HDDs. However if you are just aiming at max performance on a few AVs then SCSI would be best. Maybe even a combination of the two if you're loaded! I'll probably be selling a bunch of WD250GB SATA's on ebay soon, and I took a look at the average price a few weeks ago (to guage what price I should sell the at) and I think it was around 80GBP for new ones. IBM have some 400GB drives out, and several other manuf's will be doing likewise (right now just a bunch of stoopeed paper launches which are now stoopeedly common in this supposedly-fast-developing but-more-like-fast-lame-@r$-marketing industry :-((). Sorry for the rant, just remembered how long I've been waiting for larger drives promised nearly a year ago .. so dumb to wait for things that aren't out yet when they keep changing their deadlines all the time! With AV files, 16MB caches were popular on SCSI drives & are now common on high-end SATA/PATA ones ... not sure it'd be that big a deal when streaming a giant AV into RAM, but obviously no harm if it's the same price :-).

Hi qwijibow,there are many different speeds of IDE, SATA, SCSI ... pSCSI runs up to dual channel U320 (320MB/sec) and 640 is on the way soon along with serially-attached etc. SATA is currently at 150MB/sec and soon will be at 300MB/sec which is still slower than good old U320 SCSI! If money is not an issue, a SCSI RAID array is the way to go for NLE video editing apps, no doubt about it. However, SCSI drives and controllers are more expensive than their SATA/PATA counterparts, due to the extra complexity in the protocol (it's made for multiple devs accessing things simultaneously & is built with large queues & respective algorithms for this). The algorithms are not all aimed at server tasks, since AV is a popular use of SCSI drives, so some desktop alg's are also defined by the big disk vendors. Note you'll not get as much GB's for your GBPs if you go this route, but you'll get higher performance using fewer drives, so if this is what you value go for it.

Hence RAID5!JBOD is just a bunch of disks, RAID0 is striping, RAID1 is mirroring, RAID2 is bit-level rather than block-level striping and is no longer popular (mem to choose a large block size in RAID0 if you are storing/manipulating large AV files), RAID3 is byte-level stripes with a dedicated parity disk, RAID4 ditto but block level, RAID5 is block-level striping with parity data distributed across all the disks is the array & it is currently the most popular method. When having large numbers of disks, RAID6 which is ditto but with the parity data stored at two locations so it can survive two disk failures! Then there are all kinds of nested RAID levels like RAID0+1 (two HDDs in RAID0 stripe, with another two disks as a RAID1 mirror of the original), and RAID10/1+0 which does a similar but opposite setup (stripe across drives that are locally mirrored), RAID50/5+0

2. Oh I see you mean power consumption, doh, sorry. Well you could always power it up with a cheap 2nd PSU or even an external one (I use a laptop-style PSU for my ext USB convertor etc!).Also I forgot to mention that NCQ (& some other neat features) is NOT on all SATA drives, or even on SATAII drives, which don't even have to be at 300MB/s either `... there's a whole load of can-o-worms on this! I think anand or ace had a good explanation a few months back. Basically SATAII are a set of recommendations, not a standard or anything .. I think it is a new name for the working group too. SATA-300 etc basically states the speed, and the manuf's must state the features separately.

Hi sparx, Yep, no probs. If you have the appropriate PATA & SATA controllers (either onboard or on PCI) it's just a matter of pluggin them all in. The OS sees them as normal drives .. except Linux which treats SATA drives as SCSI ones, but that's another matter! Nope, often SATA drives have both the old Molex PATA style power connectors, along with the new thin SATA power ones too :-). Even if there's only the SATA ones, convertion is simple (either DIY or I think I've seen many dirt cheap convertors online) but that's probably not necessary at all anyway! It depends on the drive's model (I've seen a review of a PATA drive beating out high-end SATA ones in certain benches!) wrt how the cache algorithms are defined & how much cache etc ... and also on the usage model wrt if it's a server then maybe the larger queue algorithms of SATA may be handy. For desktops, the NCQ queue algorithms may be handy in getting the right sequence of data off the disk in terms of what's closest to the head at the moment etc. It's best to check out & compare individual models. WD raptors are SATA only and are rated as the highest performing desktop drives ... but I don't have access to one so I couldn't say for sure ;-). Also, if depends on what you are going to do (video needs high bandwidth, whereas gaming often needs fast access times along with a reasonable amount of bandwidth, etc etc).

Well the ink on the paper towels seems to me like a good thing .. at least it seems the cartridges themselves are OK and aren't dried up or something. My old-ish Epson C44UX inkjet was the same. I tried the old safety-pin/hole jobbie, and I also tried to squeeze the carts to pour a LITTLE bit of ink into where the cart's hole met a small protrusion (that pierced the carts) within the head-part ... but I remember it took ages to get the thing printing properly again .. and I also remember it was very messy & frustrating (to the point where I vowed never to use it again .. and moved to a cheap HP laser which had more paper jams than any printer I've ever dealt with .. but that's cuz I was desparate to do manual duplex using el-cheapo thin/lightweight sheets!!). Damn, sorry for the divergence/rant.

Hi golgothurteen, they mention: "The Lumenlab DIY 15" Projector is a REAL projector with a high quality XGA LCD panel, a powerful Metal Halide lamp and REAL projection optics. The so-called projection TV kits are simply a cheap fresnel lens that you put in front of your television; an image is projected, but not a watchable one". It's definitely not worth paying for "their" info ... I've seen drawings/schematics for these types on some forums a few years ago. I've seen the Fresnel+TV kits on an online TV tech show, and the "quality" was worthless. These guys say they use proper optics etc. What they are doing is basically projecting a bright lamp through a normal LCD (rather than one on a chip) and then using the lens to focus the image crisply on a wall/sheet. I remember the forum thread I read mentioning problems of heat being the main issue .. and one guy built a bunch of fans in his. All of these sites sell "howto's" that should really be free .. and they are just there to then sell their own wares! Other options I read about include the use of a cheap OHP with an LCD display, and both transmissive & reflective LCDs ... Kam.

Yeah, I've seen loads of these, both DIY types & premade, and there are tons of different features available too.The most basic would be:1. DIY drill/tap acrylic to mount HDD from underneath2. mount rear sockets with cheap IDE to USB (or eSATA)More common/advanced would allow both internal (p/s-ATA cage) & external (USB or eSATA) mounting.Most advanced ones have autonomous RAID1 backup etc .. but I can't see the point of those, much!There are also ext cases for 2.5" laptop drives with tiny USB & power interfaces ... had a sturdy metal case too. Not sure if it's that easy to DIY when you get to smaller drives.