DjCalvin

This is what I have, and it sounds somewhat similar to your setup.I have 2 xbox's one in the bedroom and one in the living room. the reason for 2 is that I have them modded and I use Xbox media center to play content from my dvr in the living room to my bedroom tv when my wife and I cannot find anything on tv at night. The Living room one has the same setup, but is used to play games. (sadly we use it as a SMS and NES machine through emulators)Both xboxs are hooked up to a wired network. Cat 5 run throughout the house to the router downstairs. 2 computers in the office, 1 gaming machine and 1 graphics workstation. both wired to the router in the basement as well.1 laptop in the office which is wireless. the wireless is hooked up to the wired router with a 172.x network and the wired is 10.x this defines the networks and helps to keep prying eyes away from the wired portion.I originally looked into moving the xbox's off wired and onto wireless, but the cost drove me away.They are $100 a pop for the wireless gaming network adaptors from microsoft/linksys.I use the netgear prosafe line of routers as they support up to 10 VPN tunnels and have a decent SPI firewall. I just got an old nokia firewall im gonna hook up sometime this week in front of the network as a 1st line of defense. But the kicker is, all 172.x traffic must have a vpn to get to my 10.x network. I would really suggest sticking with wired for your xbox just for the cost alone, if you already have a wired network, dont shell out the money for wireless just for an xbox.You can always bring the cat 5 up where your CATV or Phone comes up as well, makes installation a breeze.Good luck- C

My cable company sucks, and I rely on 3 of my neighborhood's unsecure wireless networks to be able to finish up any work I am doing before i can call my cable co to tell them its down. (goes down a couple times a week, but they "never see a problem") I have left letters in their mailbox telling them step by step for each manufacturor how to enable wep and select a password. have any of them done it? no.Im not looking around on their network, and I have told 2 of my neightbors that i have hopped on their dsl connection for about 10 min a pop and they strangely are ok with it.One neighbor about a year ago was so happy that i showed him how to enable wep that he bought me 3 cases of beer that summer for a cookout we were having. He came up to me and told me that this was for helping him out with his wireless network. I still do not trust wep completely as there are wep crackers out there.You want security? go wired.You want speed? go wired.You want convience? go wireless. Thats the only upside to wireless. I can go outside in my garden and still have great connectivity while i am working.I have both a wired and a wireless network. They are both on completely different ip ranges, I only have my laptop hooked up to the wireless network. If someone has a couple hours to kill and wants to crack my wireless, they arent going too far unless they have the static routes. And hell, I';; give em a beer for trying.(yes i know their are always to find broadcasting traffic)

Google all the way.Ive just been introduced to google desktop, and other than 3 hours indexing my system, im loving it so far.doesnt use much memory or cpu and its quick.bye bye MS seach.

Here you go. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ This is what I gave my dad when he ran across the same problem with my 17 yr old stepson finding his porn on his laptop. He has been using this and loves it. Just remember to use a strong password. (8+ characters with caps, numbers and special char's) or they will find a way to brute force it in hours if you are away. (the're are pw crackers for everything these days) The downside is that it is shareware, and costs $30 to purchase, but for sanity, $30 is worth it to some people. (my dad included) here's the description from softpedia: AB Folder Hider description AB Folder Hider is a powerful hide folder software that can password lock your personal files and folders. You can use AB Folder Hider to stop other users from opening your personal files, or you can completely hide your files until a password is entered. It is very useful to keep your personal files away from others. It is also a powerful guard folder or hide folder software. AB Folder Hider can lock folders and files in a flash. It is very useful to keep your sensitive files away from others. It makes your files unaccessible and undeletable. It is also a powerful folder guard software. AB Folder Hider works on all 32-bit windows such as Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP. AB Folder Hider is very easy to use, everyone can master it in 5 minutes.

you want the 15 pin d-sub. as far as dvi goes: DVI will give you a crisper resolution when hooked up to an lcd monitor or a DLP setup. as long as you are not using the vga output, and using an adaptor to convert to dvi. DVI is a pure digital signal, and today's lcd's look a hell of a lot better on dvi. I hooked my pc up to my tv about 6 months ago, when i hooked it up to the analog vga, the computer recognised my tv as a monitor, but my max resolution was 1204x768. I slapped the dvi cable on there, and right away i noticed a huge difference in color and brightness. and i was able to put my resolution into native 720p (1280x720) -C

This may sound stupid, but we have seen a big difference in a couple datacenters this way. Check your speed duplex settings on the computers vs the switch. most switches are set to auto/auto by default. and so isnt most nic's.. change them to manual settings. if your switch goes 100 full, set that on the switch and on your machine. - C

But, what that does not mention is that heavy power users will more or likely hate VOIP for home use. Try this on for size for an example i have seen. Household example: Jimmy (18) is home playing his favorite MMO game online. Bobby (45) is working from home and his company gave him a voip phone Cindy (13) is web surfing. Jane (43) is trying to talk to her mother in foriday on the home VOIP line. Can you guess which person is using up the most bandwith? Its Bobby, who's company gave him a voip setup for working. He's using 36kbps upstream for a phone call on his company's voip and Jane is talking on the home voip. 2 voips dont make a land line. I have pulled out 3 vonage sets from people's homes that complain that other people cant hear them when someone else is using up a lot of bandwith. Unless you have a 4-5mb UPSTREAM connection, it sucks for power users. avg "lets surf the web" people will love it. - C

Please do not take this the wrong way. Its your video card, time to throw out the old thing and get yourself a real video card. Heck anything above a $75 Nvidia FX5200 will play most games on the market right now. If you have updated the drivers, reload directx (yes 9.0c is the latest as well) - C

Here goes my take on WOW.1st off, I believe it is worth the $12-15 a month depending on how you pay. Most mmo's are in this range anyhow.I started life in mmorpg with EQ about 4 years ago and I played for about 6 months, I never got into it that much. I honestly cant say why.. i dont remember.I tried out DAOC which a friend reccomended, didnt like it.I gave up for a while Till FFXI came out. OMG this was an awesome game. Until you tried grouping with someone if you played on an off schedule (i played in the morning) I couldnt find an enlish speaking person in the game at all. Then they introduced the language translation, which imo was an awesome move. made playing with folks a heck of a lot easier. Then Xmas came and FFXI hit the market big time. I found it riddled with rude, annoying kids. Stuff that when i was a kid, my mother would have slapped me silly for. I quit FFXI after about 6-7 months and 1 expansion pack. Mind you, I loved the game, but hated the players. Motor city online came out.. (beta) Ahh that was fun but didnt last. I played City of heros for a while, but found it repetious and boring.Then 1 day, an e-mail came to me asking me if i was willing to be in the beta for WOW (i was a beta tester for COH and FFXI) I hopped right in and loved it (even after a good 20 server wipes thoughout 7 months of closed then open beta) I stopped wow after the final beta ended and gave it a rest for a while.I played the Matrix online beta, and didnt like the combat system at all. so i dumped that.Then Wow called me back about 2 months after launch. Brought a new character up to level 40 (alliance)and dumped that for the horde on stormscale, and i have been there ever since.Dont get me wrong, wow has had a LOT of shortcoming with their HP blades. (they get too hot, too easy)and resulting in server downtime, but that has decreased a LOT within the last year or so.The great thing with wow, is the customization. There are so many mods you can toss in to help your game out significantly, while not enabling you to "cheat" per say, or even for that matter have an advantage over someone who plays with the normal UI.The one downside of wow, and during beta they said that this wouldnt happen, but it has... Is End game content. If you are not in a 200man guild and raiding weekly, you will get nowhere at 60.need a key to defeat a dragon (oxnyia say for example) get ready to spend weeks trying to find groups to get everything you need to even get to her, nevermind actually defeat her.Casual gamers beware, it gets pretty lonesome at 60. I have 2 lvl 60's currently (both warriors, 1 tank 1 damage dealer) and a slew of lower levels from lvl 2 (my bank) to lvl 30 (one of my mages)Low levels rock in wow, they really do. up unitl 45ish, the game is an absolute blast, it gets downright hard after that.Please note, Im a casual gamer, I play maybe 10-12 hours a week on average, vs the people i see on there and know personally that play for 8 hours a day 6-7 days a week. So it took me a while to get to 60 (about 40 days a character of play time) thats a whole friggin month plus some.Give wow a chance, the people for the most part are nice, and if they arent, you can always turn off the barrens chat (wow'ers will know that one)I have helped 7 people get addicted to wow, now if i could only get my wife to play.. :PTake care.C