levimage

Another thing to look into as we are now in an age of portables - laptops, memory, music, gaming, external drives - is the quality of the product.Sometimes the device might have something inside that is rattling (free floating) that shouldn't be. Other times the contacts on the component board has cheap soldering that is creating an 'Open' where it shouldn't be. This is typical of generic brand devices/enclosures/adapters or products from brand name companies that outsource for their connectors and accessories.So far I've ran into this problem with a few laptop motherboards, power adapters, and USB/IDE/SATA connectors. I had to purchase a low power soldering iron with fine tip and some fine silver solder. It took me more time to disassemble the devices than actually finding and solding contacts.This is just another last minute option before you toss or something to look into while your curiosity breaks it open.

Another software to try/buy if you have the money is. CD Clone/DVD Clone. This software is like a legend when it comes to burning anything under the sun. Is was originally created by Elaborate Bytes, but the product now sells under SlySoft. In the earlier days when there was limited knowledge on copying, copyrights, and copy protection, the software was able to burn images with with similar optical defects, like copy protection. It was not until recently, when a client of my needed to do some backup recording in CD+G (the Karaoke format). We tried a couple burners with no success other software suites. We then tried CD Clone, made some custom settings, burned at a slower rate. Success. Upon further research we found CD+G rely on the recorded sub channel data to show video information while the audio track is playing. If you have approx 47.00 USD and are tired of the limitations of OEM/bundled recording software, give CD Clone a try.

I have been using CD BurnerXP since like forever... probably when DVDShrink was still popular. I used CD BurnerXP to do my CD and DVDs, as well as images.Other software that i use to work with and modify iso's are in this order1) WinISO - I like it cause it reads more of the older format(s) and can backup and inject the boot information.2) PowerISO - There are some iso files online that are stubborn with CDBurnerXP and WinIso, so i try this. (Trial has size limits)3) Magic ISO Maker - If worst comes to worst then I take the time in install this program. (Trail has size limits)4) Microsoft VirtualPC - boot from Virtual OS for testing purposes.5) AutoStreamer - for slipstream SP(s)I never use Nero suites and I tend to have problems with the Roxio and Sonic stuff on client machines sometimes but that's probably cause of old/oem versions, you never know.** The main thing I've just recently noticed with compatibilities with DVD(s) are some dated drives don't support the DVD+R (like this laptop I'm on) Use a program like Everest Ultimate Edition to verify your CD/DVR-RW(s) compatibility.Hope this helps

What brand is your external drive. I know from experience I've had and troubleshooted (ts) laptop drives which are basically what's in the those portable enclosures. Problems I've ran into were power issues (not adequate power, voltage/amps applied to power the device.), some issues center around the usb capabilities of your pc (over even worse the power limitations of some laptops), compatibility of usb 2.0 implementation varies by manufacture.But if your drive is a terabyte it could must be a the full size ide/pata/sata drives in PCs. If the size is that big... is it one drive or is it a combination of hard drives recognized as one drive. If it is the later I recommend you work directly with the original equipment manufacture's technical support. If it is a single drive then you can try third party recovery utilities.On of my favorite and also a free ones I currently use is "Recurva". I use this because of the image preview. Just make sure have another backup tera-byte drive to copy to. If you feel competent in your ts abilities then you can try to recover the FAT (file allocation table). I've only successfully accomplished this twice when i was college. I used the program called Active@ File Recovery in 1999/2000. I lost a few times but it was probably cause I was sure what I was doing then.Just search for the above programs on Google.

Cool, this topic came up. I tried guitar hero and DDR in the mall when i when it came out. My gf was too embarressed to play but these kids kept looking at me like is that all you got. LOL. They may have had experience but I had money, so I spent a few bucks and broke a sweat. It was easy to catch on - eventually they were out of money. On the computer there is a free software which is similar to DDR and you can download the songs for it. I forgot what it is called. But just google for DDR clones.Back to the concept about BBoy and how it would play. I think older consoles could not do much cause of processing power and cable hinderance. Today their are wireless controllers and with Wii - the wireless motion detection. Of course I do not know what the current implementations of gyroscopes/piezoeletric sensors in controllers; but, I believe that will be the lowest common denominator when i comes to video game input. Kinda like what the Wii is now to the NES Power Glove.My controller concept:Instead of mats like DDR it may consist of maybe 2/3 wireless antennas that are within the perimeter of your living room. The players will wear wireless patches (like what is affixed to all merchandise) which have a permanent code in it. These lightweight patches like stickers can be on the fingers, arms, hands, legs, and feet. The wireless antennas will detect in realtime the location of a player via the patches by processing all the triangularity of their location - Similar to GPS. It can simply be calibrated for each user - like the analog of joysticks or a screen of a pda.How it will play:Similar to Guitar Hero you will start out small. Pick out a name for yourself. Earn money, experience, and fame, along with distinguishable titles. Travel to different locals. Ability to initial battles, run from battles, or compete in battles. There will always be a option starting physical fights and or defending yourself. Slowly you learn moves, earn respect, and people to join your crew. Their can be an adult element to the game like: going to bars, meeting partners, making contacts, networking, going to night clubs, concerts, and random battles at those venues.You will unlock moves, songs, and other possessions like cars, clothes, etc.Of course you can use/loose your money, experience, and fame based upon what you do and how you act.Aside from the main game, there will also be some old skool arcade games, old skool songs/remixes, ability to tagg (spraypaint), rap (kareoke), and mix (create your own beats). The tagging can be exported to PNG files. Music you create can be exported to M4a/ogg or whatever you prefer. Also would be the ability to record and save your movements. There can be replays like the EA games.You can create songs, moves, and beats which can be used to compete online or to learn and download from other players.So like if you really can do a headspin, flare, or some really tricked out session, more props to you. The only thing is the liability of the game. I guess there will be an shrink-wrap release of liablity waiver. Once you open the box we would not be liable.Well this is just some ideas on the bboy topic.

So have you created any graphics for your game yet? When you are talking animation would that be like for characters, world, or map? I'm just asking. So would you be doing your original work or modifying existing work? You should use the free program GIMP. I believe there is version 2.7 out now. Check out https://www.gimp.org/ for a link to their download section. You could also search that site called "DeviantArt.com" for graphics, ideas, and such about video game graphics, or to just meet other artists. You can also try to search Deviant Art for GIMP brushes, templates, and other resources. I'm sure there are a good amount of GIMP users at DeviantArt who might offer more graphics help than here. I hope this helps you in the right direction. Levimage

Yeah I need a new backpack. I think I'm going to go for a Photography backpack with cushion space for a laptop. I think I might go with a Tamrac instead of LowePro cause the Tamrac uses better materials and they have more patents as far as function and construction.The battery is find I think. I know some laptops have an ability to refresh laptop batteries but I'm not sure about the Dell D600. If you know of a 3rd party boot utility or something something cool I could try that... or I could just use a voltage meter. :PI also found that my laptop is looking it's metallic luster finish and just the over all structure is deteriorating. I think what also contributes to the hd problem is how I grab it when it's on. Sometimes when I'm moving around for a signal, to the couch, bed room, or just holding it waiting for it to shutdown/sleep, I tend to grab it by one hand (I'm right handed) on the right side of the laptop. This is also where the spinning hard drive is. So might be applying pressure in the wrong location. What do you think?

Actually what it was was the hard drive was going bad. I always have it in standby versus being turned off. Sometimes I forget to plug it in - so it was improperly shutdown. Then again I'm always lugging around my laptop and dslr camera in my targus backpack which is getting old. The cushions are already worn out. So I'm thinking the hard drive errors are negligence on my part. I've had to run the Seagate utilities from a burned cd-r. Apparently I could not get them to run from the UBCD. It always failed to start after the logo came up and unexpectedly quit no matter what options I selected. I had to go to the web site for the apps.So now I'm in the market for another laptop hard drive.

That's what they call it, concept artist. I always wanted to break into the video game industry and be one of those. You know just kick back and do art work. Having some company take care of me while I just do my thing. Well I don't really do any type of manual artwork lately - just computer stuff. I always see gadgets in my photo magazines about color calibration, correctors, pens, tablets, and such. The last time I ever tried on was like in '96 when I visited a computer engineering department at Florida Atlantic University. I did a stick figure drawing of a boxer. I can't really recall what the processing power in the pc's were back then but the tablet was cumbersome for it's size.If I ever come across a good tablet deal I just might skip a camera or computer accessory. LOL Can't have 'em all.

Ha Ha Ha, the cartoon is funny. I went to a few Microsoft training sites when XP/2003 came out. I got some answers to many questions, literature, books, white papers, and free software. What I did notice was the trainers admit there were problems or 'issues' (ms rep), or 'feature set' (ms tech). Anyway a lot of fix up's and work a rounds were from 3rdd party companies. It was amazing what these other ms attendants were using from non ms companies. I liked the part about sharing resources and networking. I think the personal interaction with other users far exceed their ms support. Would I attend another ms training. Probably yes. Just to meet other people like me.

It looks okay. Simple and okay. Okay meaning it could be better (room for improvement). Size wise, I think smaller is better or at least make better use of your image size.I notices your image resides at .imagefilez, the file name is i306808_laniczech.gif and i306942_laniczech.gif respectively, the extension says GIF but the Firefox recognizes the first as a JPEG. Is there some graphic or format transformation when you upload it to ImageFilez I'm just asking cause were talking about the how the image should best be represented.If you save the image as a PNG you can do transparencies better than GIF. But it's too bad IE6 does not recognizes PNGs. I think IE7 does. You should try saving it in that format.

I was trying to clean up house on my hosted account by deleting things I thought were unnecessary or taking up space. I came across this large file called Metadata in .cpan\sources directory. What does this file do or is about? Let me know if anyone knows. I'm gonna back it up and delete it to see what happens.Also on another note. What other files, logs, etc. can I delete on my hosted account to get the most out of the space currently allocated?

After reading the above comments about keeping a pc cool and airflow considerations, I know and admit I don't have the best setup. First of all the case is like 10 years old. It is some sort of pressed metal/aluminum. Though I may not be the aluminum like today's PC's but this case can probably take a bullet. It has an ugly off white paint job which is getting yellow with time. There are some vents in the front plastic benzel and a 2"x10" grate like openings along the whole length of the back side. There is just a little 2"x4" rectangle on both lower side panels. The original fan for that mounts on the inside front is big, awkward and noisy. I unplugged it at first cause of noise concerns when listening to music and gaming, but now I removed it cause of possible air flow concerns and the noise is probably cause of bad motor or lint/dirt in the motor can't be clean.Last year I threw in a new motherboard with a Core 2 Duo setup. The power supply I'm sure barely meets the standards. What's awkward about the power supply is that it blows air inward from the outside. During the mother board installation the manual made certain references to a some pc case standard about installing in a case with a baffle which allows direct air flow across the processor. I don't recall what that standard was. Since I know my tank does not qualify I had to make some minor adjustments.At the time I was drinking some power aid (32 oz. sports drink) and thinking was I can do about this. I then did some measurements on the proper location of where the processor would be in relation to the case's side panel. I traced it the side panel and went outside with some power tools. I drilled some new holes in the case used the sports drink container as the airflow baffle. While I was at it, I then drilled as much holes as I could into the bottom side panels - to bring in that cool air from outside the case.That's how I modified my ugly case to run my new board. I guess it works fine but I'm sure if I had a something like a mechanism with an external HEPA/3M filter and an internal blowing fan mounted with the sports drink baffle, that would take care of my processor concerns.Has anyone done any case altering modifications that help with overall cooling with attention to keeping dust and lint out? I'll try to post some pic's when I have a chance.

What sort of manual techniques did you use to create your work and were there any effects you applied during the post? I tried doing something similar but I am not getting any good results of it looking anything natural. I just take pictures an use Olympus editing software to apply the Art effects like cartoon, oil painting, and air brush.

This looks ******* (pick your favorite adj.) cool. It kind of looks like something like a flying ship from an RPG or anime thing. You should show some of your painting to some video game vendors for feed back from their artists. Have you ever tried painting on a computer pen stylus? I'd bet you'd be a natural if not, maybe pick it up easily.

Yep I like them. I like the fact that you tried to make abstract textures in the backgrounds. The fonts though, they either tend to show their time or skills of the artist. Maybe you can do some vector thing, or stretch, skew, or transpose the individual letters (by fonts on separate layers/then group the words or phrase). You can even try to mask your Gaussian Blurs (GB) with gradients to induce some sort of depth of field. I wish I have the time to do such graphics. I like the those geared toward fantasy art, chicks, and old school video games. I then to think if you use to much GB it start to look like porn blur. I sometimes make that mistake too, after I find out I'm done and reviewing my edits. I think a GB with some sort of fading in an out on an animated GIF would be a cool exception but that's beyond my skills.Some last comments would be to check out some site you do not normally visit and shoot an email as to what fonts they used. Well the best of luck to anyone following this topic and working on sigs or similar web graphics.

Maybe is a bad sector on your hard disk. You should either backup everything you have and run some hard drive utilities to see if there are any bad sectors to mark, do a full zero fill drive, reinstall the operating system, and reinstall all your software and data files. Believe me this happened a hard drive that was clicking, freezing after a while (running the os), and now freezes during the boot. It had over 99 sectors that were bad. Luckly none of my critical files were damaged. I backup everything to a uSB. And repaired everything. I know I will eventually need a replacement but just running the hard drive utilities definitely makes a difference. The excessive heat on my drive and laptop was from excessive hard drive activity from read errors.I hope this helps.

A bad sector is a sector (physical area) on the hard disk which is loosing/lost is ability to correctly record a readable charge (electro/magnetic). This make reading and writing to this sector hard. Warning signs of a hard drive having bad sectors include: abnormal hard drive activity (the drive keeps trying to read a certain area of the hard disk) which makes clicking or other consistent sounds (hard disk heads moving/searching); you pc/loptop no loading correctly, or programs freeze/shutdown without normal error mesages, and/or if you pc/laptop does not boot at times or halts during the boot process. Pro active steps to prevent bad sectors: Don't hit, jar, drop, shake, crush, or press on a hard drive, especially when it is reading or writing. This also applys for a hard drive that has power applied to it via motherboard, usb, or other methods; and that power was removed/shut off (power outtage, disconnected cable) without a proper windows/apple shutdown (powerdown code) or 'Safely remove hardware' (Microsoft)/ Drag to Trashcan (Mac). These commands send the hard drive a hardware command to move (physically) seat the arms which read the data from the discs in the drive. If they are not set. Then you might accidently damage the locations on the drive. Given the drive arms locations they are always in some area of the drive like the: operating system, pagefile, your data, or reading program information. If you are a tech person you tend to take apart pc and have exposed drives, cables, memory, etc. Beware of you, your work environment (vinyl tile/carpet), tools, and other enviornment factors (humidity) which may cause a static buildup and Electro Static Discharge (ESD) on your pc, hard drive, cables, and or work area. Also some tech like the magenetic screw driver tools - watchout they are clear of your magenetic media (hard drives, flash drives, etc.). Magnetic speakers and other charged cables and their plugs may also be a factor. I hope this helps clarify a little and explains some ways to be more cautious when working/fixing PC(s).

It could even be an Energy Saver Setting or Power Sleep/Standby/Shutoff mode in the BIOS. You should check the BIOS and see if there are any related setting you could check for. Another thing to try is see if there may be a browser update or some new drivers or firmware for you network card. I'm not sure if you are referring to a modem, a wireless card, or a nic. let us know to avoid our confusion and also explain how you get connected, who is the ISP, wifi or you Internet Carrier.

I'm curious how did you backup your information to the pen drive? Did you use a windows utility (program), some 3rd party software, or did your pen drive come with some software?If you connect you pen drive to the pc. It'll show up as a drive letter in My computer. What is/are the contents of that drive? Is it one file or a bunch of directories?Lastly, what kind of problems are you experiencing with your PC? Is it not running as fast as expected? Internet problems or possible Virues?I know it is crutial to backup all your files if you suspect any virues, data loss activitiy or emminent hardware failure. Are you just backing up your files or did you backup your files in response to some recent activity?

Also if you are still undecided. Think about what you currently do computing for (PC/Mac), what programs you like to use, and eventually what you want to use; and also, for some people what kind of entertainment you'd like out of it. Then set a price range $1,000, $2,000, or +$2,000. Now you kind a have an idea. Start looking for bargins, specials, clearances, or other online stores that quickly turn over their inventory. Then pick one that meets your needs.Also another side note. You could also look for a laptop with comparible features to a desktop. You might have 1/2 to 1/4 of the processing power as a desktop but at least you'll have portablility and really don't have to worry about power issues (blackouts, dirty power, etc.). If your requirements are not that bad then you could look for new thin-compact laptops which are not as robust as laptops but are built for compactness, battery life, and wireless connectivity.

Are there any games like this where you can setup your own server or setup on a wifi. I think that would be cool.

It could be a driver or compatibility problem. If you are a Vista user, make sure any and everything you install is compatible with Vista 32 or 64. You have to check the proper version. Also read the EULA, read me, and any other last minute documentation, especially on compatibility with Vista or other Microsoft components/technology. Some updates supersede others and/or disable certain compatibility with other software. If you're running OpenOffice make sure you have the latest graphic drivers, check your Java Runtime software/update for compatibility. If this does not help. Check what starts up when your computer loads. Something is not right compatibility wise, not configured properly, or you're stressing the load on your processor/memory. Keeps notes on what you're doing with your machine before any hardware and software additions. If this doesn't work make use of your tech support and/or warranties. You may even have to let your pc sit on the sidelines till newer updates are available - provided this is not a custom setup. good luck

Hi there. I've been reading up on the Xisto forum board for quite some time. I am interested in the free hosting as well as the benefits of collaborating with other people whom have an opinion on some of the same interests I have. In addition to hosting at web site and photo web site, I also do some minor troubleshooting and experimenting with software from time to time. I have not yet posted that much on what types of software or the methods I use for typical troubleshooting and or photography/graphic work. Eventually when I have more free time, a better connection, and more web space I will include, feature, write reviews, and how-to tutorials. Until then I would like to get some feed back on how and what you've been using when you encounter problems, have a projects, or want to accomplish a certain task. I'll check this list from time to time and update my list from time to time. Here are the categories I would like to touch on. 1) Anti-virus, Spyware, Trojan, pop-up blocking, hardening of web browsers. 2) Online software (web browsers, instant messengers, newsreaders, widgets/gadgets, file sharing p2p) 3) Optimizations (Internet Link, HD partitions, Defragmenting methods, typical housecleaning [cleaner like software], 4) GUI Improvements (text optimizers, font suites, themes/skins, icons, screen savers, boot screens, and other graphic user interface improvements) 5) Productivity software (office like, diagramming, communication/collaboration, reference) 6) Multimedia (graphics, photography, media players[encoding/decoding]) 7) Other software/programs (you would like to learn, don't have much knowledge of, seems interesting)

I finally got a chance to see the movie at my gf's house. I didn't get to see it in the theater.I think it was pretty kool, I kept yhinking is this movie for kids, families, geeks, or comic fans. It kind of reminded me of the movie 48 hours with the terrorist bit. I liked the automations, robots, suits, but thought the weapons were cheesy. Robocop had better weapons and explosions for it's time. I guess I'm more of a Transfomer kind of guy. If i had a choice of a superhero to come out it would be... that vampire chick or something Gothic suitable for late teens/adults. Or something else from Darkhorse comics.