rayzoredge

I would have personally re-ordered these features... and actually trimmed some things from it. A lot of applications were just useless, like the Microsoft Network browser. (Who ever used it?) Some items on that list were more like gripes (like how Windows Explorer couldn't do a bunch of stuff OTHER than browsing). Then again, shouldn't Windows be superior as an operating system TO include features for Explorer? - 11. Shut Down I laughed when I read this. It's true that there are too many options to choose from just to turn off your computer... and now Vista offers FIFTEEN ways to shut down? Seriously now. And honestly, I can't tell you the difference between standby and sleep. (Hibernate just saves your state and shuts down your computer, to restore your state that was saved on your hard drive.) 10. DriveSpace I still remember when I got all excited over compressing my hard drive to get DOUBLE my hard disk space. It was a no-brainer at the time, when 2GB HDs were a boon. Then I realized how slow a 266MHz processor was in accessing data from a compressed hard drive. DriveSpace wasn't very keen on choices either... you either compressed the whole drive or didn't. Apparently no one else missed it in XP. 9. Aero (and Vista) It's cool, it's neat, and I'm one of many that appreciates the eye candy. But the fact that Vista already brings existing machines down to slow-poking slugs being so inefficient with system resources kind of keeps most tech-savvy people away. And those that aren't tech-savvy will wonder why their computer is slow right out of the package. 8. Messenger Service I actually don't know of ONE IT guy or gal that uses this for network communication. Of course, e-mail makes this kind of useless, doesn't it? And of course, if you do see this in action, you're probably not part of a secure network. Kind of ironic, really. 7. Indexing Service/Windows XP Search The indexing service slows down your PC, and XP search STILL can't find what you want to find in an efficient way. Lose-lose. 6. Task Manager (End Task) Why does it not just work? Why does it take forever to kill a task? Why, in this time and age, can't we just stop a process or application from running? The world may never know. 5. Notifications Thank you, Captain Obvious. Redundant much? Thankfully, you can turn these off by editing the registry... but then again, who would want to risk that? 4. Windows Update Especially after knowing that Microsoft is very willing to update your computer without even letting you know AFTER you tell Windows NOT to automatically update, I personally disabled the Automatic Updates service. The fact that it pesters the crap out of you isn't much fun either... it's almost better just to install hot fixes manually, or if you're like me, sit on Service Pack 2 and not worry about much as a home user. Simply put: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Most hot fixes and patches are for specific occurrences anyway... and unless you are that 1 person out of 100 that is actually experiencing that problem, I wouldn't even bother. 3. ActiveX Controls (and Internet Explorer) Along with the fact that they are exclusive to Internet Explorer (which is probably a good thing), they are easily the most exploited security threat to most users browsing the web. It almost seems like anyone can write up one with some malicious intent in it... and you know how most people blindly accept ActiveX controls just to get at what they want to get at with no hassle. The fact that Internet Explorer 6 was the basis for loyal Microsoft clients, unchanged for the longest time allowing for hackers galore to attack the browser's many security holes, didn't help out either. 2. Windows Genuine Authentication Authentication sucks. Especially if you have a legitimate program and no one in the Microsoft world is willing to believe you. Not to mention that every time you install a non-OEM version of any Microsoft operating system you have to authenticate it by phone, since Windows isn't likely to have your network controller working with a fresh install. Did I also mention that time just stops if WGA says that your legal copy of Windows isn't legal? 1. The Registry This is definitely the WORST feature of Windows, in my opinion. PC World is right about one mistake bringing an entire operating system down to its knees... absolutely horrendous. And if even advanced users aren't willing to touch this, how is it a good idea to put all of Windows's vital data into one such unstable database? Editing the darn thing is like taking a block away from a Jenga game... - I actually found Paint to be rather useful for quick copy-and-paste work for a screen shot when I didn't feel like waiting 10 seconds for PhotoShop to boot up. Movie Maker is okay for amateur videos... it lacks in features, but I suppose that's what you get for applications bundled with the operating system. (They really couldn't give you everything for that $200+ you spent on the operating system... )

Consider this reposted... again and again on my MySpace bulletin board. Awesome find, jlhaslip.

I has a software. Sorry... that was the first thing that came to my mind when I read your subject title. (If no one gets it just yet, think of Caturday and LOLcats.) Anyway, Sonesay is right. You will need to hire someone with expertise in web development... or YOU could be the person to do it. Xisto is a great place to start with learning some of the important and basic stuff (in the tutorials section), but I'm sure Google will come up with tons of results as far as learning what you need to know to build a website with those capabilities. Look into learning PHP and CGI.

Although I do like both of them, I have to say that I vote for TrueFusion. Saint Michael's light effect is awesome, but it's not very useful if that's all that's going for him. Both signatures are rather washed out... SM's entire signature is rather dark, and it's hard to make out the character. His "HellGate London," although following with the color scheme, blends it into the whole thing. TrueFusion's sig is washed out in the aspect that everything is white-ish. Of course, this makes sense, but it could probably be better if the background was darkened SLIGHTLY to bring out his text and character even more.The text for both are of comparable competitiveness... if that made any sense. I like the crispness of TrueFusion's, but I also like how SM worked on making the text a little more different by adding different colorings to the first letter of each word.I really shouldn't be talking, since I don't even have a darn sig... but there's my critique. Saint Michael: 2TrueFusion: 1

I guess this build wasn't exactly best bang for the buck... since I did a lot of bumping up of components for a little more... and all those "little more"'s added up a bit to the final price. Quad-cores are very comparable to dual-cores IMO, just from looking at benchmarks... but wouldn't having more cores result in being able to do more simultaneously? Such as loading up startup programs and services for bootup? Wouldn't that be worth the $50-70 hike? What's the real-world take on this?I chose Intel too because I like gaming, but I also like being able to work with Photoshop and music and in the future video, and I believe Intel for some reason trumps AMD processors by a bit when it comes to encoding and decoding processes. But I'm interested in what AMD has coming up for its quad core...I'm wondering what the performance comparison is between an 800MHz clock and a 1066MHz clock as far as real-time experience. I know that Windows XP has some sort of problem dealing with 4GB, which would make it a waste of money to throw that much RAM into an XP machine, but isn't there some sort of patch or hack or fix for it?I also love sound... so for me to limit the quality of my music and gaming experience by the sound card doesn't seem very appealing to me to shave off a few bucks. Speakers will definitely be added; however, this is just the core system listed here.

I thought there was going to be a system build category under hardware... Core components: The system costs $1658.88. Just wondering if there are any suggestions to it without raising the bar too much on the price tag. Also wondering how there would be a good way to calculate how much voltage would be needed to run a machine... I think 620W will suffice, but I'm not dead sure. I jumped up to quad core simply because it was only $50-70 over the price of the dual core E6600 and lagged behind on the RAM because I didn't feel like paying $300+ for Corsair Dominators. Can anyone vouch for Dominators against lesser RAM like the Patriot Extremes that I've selected? Is the 1066MHz clock THAT much better than the 800MHz clock? (I don't think it's worth the price hike for slight performance increases... this build is based on the best bang for the buck. Then again, I have no real-world application... it's been years since I've built a PC.)

Thanks for clarifying that. When OP mentioned them as VBS scripts, I was wondering why VBS looked so much like command-line batch files... I thought netsend was to send messages over the network...

This sounds great.It'll keep a lot of topics from making it in and cluttering the General Talk category. Maybe we could possibly add a White Hat Hacking section? It would be kind of neat to train and/or inspire a bunch of people to be network security specialists... I know I wouldn't mind learning a thing or two. Maybe a category under Hardware for new hardware technologies and/or products to keep us updated on the latest and greatest?

How portable is portable? Desktop replacements are rocks. My desktop replacement (the HP zd8000) weighs in at about 11 lbs with the power supply. I don't know of any computers that are good for value that actually are good on performance... it seems that 256MB video cards are the peak of the choices out there for video performance. Then again, Xtreme Notebooks came out with the 917V Accelerator. If money is no object, you might like the fact that it has a 2.66GHz Quad Core processor, 4GB of RAM, and not one but TWO NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GTX 512MB video cards. Then again, at $5000 and the fact that this thing would probably weigh you down like a friggin' anchor (15 lbs with AC adapter). My recommendation still remains with HP, as I only have experiences with HP and Dell. I've own one Dell and currently have two HP laptops, and I can say that after over a year, nothing to complain about except for PEBKAC.

I can safely recommend HP if you're not willing to go Apple... I have an HP Pavilion zd8000 desktop replacement and it comes with a 256MB ATI Radeon Mobility X600, which suffices for decent gaming as well as working with AutoCAD renders (although I haven't tested that yet). Toshiba also has a laptop that is very similar to the one I have, although it features a Duo Core instead of the Pentium 4 processor. I would recommend using CNet's laptop finder tool. Here are laptops that are listed for high performance desktop replacements that may be suitable to your needs that come with XP. Your best bet though will be with a desktop if you want the best performance. Why would you want a laptop other than portability reasons?

I think that it's completely ridiculous how political correctness can be, especially at this time.Just to prevent from unintentionally offending ANYONE, people have to change the way they speak and even interpret things. It's outrageous to think that you can't even use the word "brainstorm" without offending an epileptic person. (Who the heck came up with that?)I thought OP was going to mention the derogatory use of the word "gay" or "midget" or any other words that you and I know very well are utilized in detrimental manners.But "brainstorm?"People need to relax and not have to worry that everyone is out to hate him or her because of what he or she is. It's a serious step-back to be watching our tongues in lieu of simply saying what makes sense at the time. Now, if it was an intentional insult or direct comment towards a person in order to belittle them, that would make sense. But I am not going to change the way that I speak just because someone decides to throw a hissy fit because he or she finds it in the slightest way offensive.Political correctness should be applied to certain derogatory terms, such as "gay." We all know how common it is nowadays for people to say that something is "gay," how it "sucks," or what-have-you. It's unfortunate that a mass majority of people use the word "gay" and/or "queer" to mention something as of bad taste, which would invite a sensible application of political correctness.But "brainstorm?" I seriously would laugh if I found someone offended by that.

I use Tom's Hardware for this AWESOME VGA chart that compares just about every GPU out there running a set amount of different games at different resolutions and settings. Which would lead to how I came up with recommending an HD series video card. You can also take a look at their monthly feature of the best video cards for the cash. They just posted this now... literally. (It wasn't there when I checked this morning.) I would not jump to dual video cards, just simply because you don't get the best bang for the buck that way. A Crossfire configuration will only boost performance up to 40% (correct me if I'm wrong)... and that would be the peak boost. Between having to purchase a compatible mobo, the two cards, and a power supply to support them, not to mention the heat build-up, I would have to strongly recommend a single card. I mentioned the possibility of 500GB simply because people currently save movies, music, hi-resolution photos, and of course, have programs that for some reason nowadays take an astronomical amount of space. I myself have already filled up 80GB on my laptop and a 250GB external. (My laptop only has my programs and games, and the external holds my documents, music, movies, and downloaded programs.) Then again, nothing is stopping this configuration to be updated in the future with another hard drive.

The majority of this thread screams out fanboy all over... just like every other thread on this topic. I actually took a look at the hardware specifications many, many times. I've actually posted about them several times in multiple fan boy threads. Yet people don't seem to realize that both consoles are very much the same, albeit a possible bit of performance in the PS3's favor. (Then again, from what I hear, the PS3 suffers from stutters in frame rates with certain games.) The PS3 uses a seven-cell processor (out of which the PS3 only uses six, with the seventh disabled to reduce costs) while the Xbox 360 uses three processors, all split as dual core processors. The PS3 utilizes the RSX GPU, which is comparable to the Xbox 360's Xenos GPU. (The RSX is slightly better in performance, but the Xenos design allows - if I remember correctly - for an on-die cache of smart eDRAM, similar to how AMD removes the Northbridge step, for faster processing and rendering of data.) Each console has its flaws. I hate my XBox 360 because the friggin' thing died on me via the infamous red ring of death... hardware failure. In my opinion, if you pay $400 for a console system, you should be getting something that works. It's good to know that Microsoft has extended the warranties and taking in consoles for repair, but we really should have to worry about that. The PS3 suffers from a varied number of things, from stuttered frame rates to outright crashes. The first batch was disastrous with PS3's failing outright, but like I said, both consoles have their horrendous flaws... Which leaves the Wii with broken china and televisions, but then again, the problem exists with the bio-interface and not the hardware. Both consoles are virtually the same. The game library is larger for the 360 because it's been out for a year longer, plus it's harder to develop games for the PS3 (as they have to be designed to utilize the six out of the seven cores in the cell processor). Other than that, I don't see any arguing point as to which system is better, hardware-wise. (I still think the PS3 would be overpriced as a gaming console, but then again you are getting a BluRay player.) Until we actually can run benchmarking software to see how both systems relate, there isn't really a way to tell if either system is ultimately better. And of course, if one is better, how much better is it? And does it justify the cost? P.S. If I may be wrong about the hardware assumptions that I made with the processors or the GPUs of either system, please correct me.

Wow. I went through a lot of consoles... * Commodore 64 * NES* GameBoy* TurboGrafx* Atari 2600 * Genesis * SNES * Sega Saturn* Virtual Boy* PSX* Jaguar * N64 * DreamCast * PS2 * Xbox* GameBoy Pocket * Wii* Xbox 360My uncle got me into gaming, and I've kept up the tradition by buying the Xbox and on. The PS2 is a family console.My first game was Lode Runner on the Commodore 64. The most recent game I've played on a console would either have to be Rayman: Raving Rabbids on the Wii (AWESOME game, by the way) or Halo 3 on the Xbox 360 (before it decided to give me the red ring of death).

I was looking at some of your components and if you could bump up some price tags, you can squeeze a bit more performance and capability of your build. For instance, I would recommend adding a bit more (about £25) to snag the E6550. The performance gain that I see is not in the pidly .13 GHz gain, but in the fact that the E6550 has double the L2 cache (4MB vs. 2MB). And we know how important that can be. I also looked at the graphics card and I wonder if you would appreciate the performance boost in gaming with an ATI HD series card. (I figured you would want to stick with ATI for this build so I didn't look at NVIDIA.) Either the Sapphire or PowerColor HD 3850 will be a noticeable boost for less than £15. The important thing to pick out when choosing a video card is the GPU and not necessarily the amount of VRAM that's on it (although it does help with memory-resident renders, such as textures). One more thing to figure out is how much space are you really going to take up on that hard drive. 250GB is probably daunting now, but you could future-proof by a bit by throwing in another HD of the same or snagging up the Samsung Spinpoint 500GB for about £20 more. Advantage of having two hard drives is that you can configure a mirror RAID just in case one fails, and if you go with the Samsung, it comes with 16MB as opposed to the 8MB.

This was pretty awesome. I first started my computer adventures with a Tandy (or a Commodore 64, if that counts)... can't remember the specs, but after that I jumped into Windows 3.1 with Chip's Challenge.Nostalgic and humorous to read some of these, especially the piece of tape for antivirus protection.

Wow. I can't even read that.I see the return function, but does it just call for the strings from the header file or does it actually loop, repeating the first verse and inserting variables and the second verse appropriate verse? I see conditionals, but I don't see an actual loop... it's pretty confusing.My C skills are beyond elementary... so maybe I'm just missing something here.

A marvelous job for a marvelous forum... this is honestly the best forum site I've actually come across, and that's not including the whole web hosting service gig. Happy birthday and keep up the good work, you old fart. Old age doesn't grant you any special breaks.

So from what I understand, it's the RTSP protocol that allows for this vulnerability to happen? I was always under the impression that media files weren't able to harbor viruses; only archives, executables, and any other non-media file did (most commonly ZIPs, TARs, EXEs, etc.).I know that files can be renamed with extensions, but I didn't think that the scripts would execute because it couldn't be opened...So again, I'm just wondering: is it just because of the way streaming media is interpreted by the RTSP protocol?

300 times sweeter than sugar?Keep that stuff away from the States... I can already imagine our preteens and teens finding ways on "abusing" this.How funny would that be to see an entire high school on a sugar high for a day?

I guess that I can correct myself on this, since I'm not entirely sure and I'm just going off of what I've learned. I believe that genetically, an individually can be more masculine or feminine regardless of actual gender. More testosterone and estrogen will yield to more tomboyish or feministic personalities... which would assist in almost guiding someone to become homosexual or bisexual when it comes to environmental or peer factors. But that's just my gibberish... ... and you're right.

I would have to say for now that The Office is awesome for my humor kick, with Heroes as the only show that I actually watch on TV. (I downloaded The Office, as well as my other favorites like Family Guy.)Still have to catch up with 24, The Sopranos, and a lot of other shows I've been meaning to watch...

I have no idea how I can find that funny... but then again, I have a weird sense of humor.That and I'm a pretty boring guy... I think. I have no birthday experiences... yet.

I encourage everyone to spread the word on this site... do your clicks and post this on your bulletin spaces on your social networks. It's an easy way to help make a difference... and it literally takes less than 20 seconds.

This is pretty amazing. I keep it open in Firefox as a tab and go to it to do some words every now and then while I'm online. I try to get 100 grains each day at the very least... I try to post bulletins as often as I can about these things... if you're on FaceBook, you can join my group for an easy reference to free or effortless ways to make a difference in the world. I think I'll post something else I found too in a new thread, if it hasn't been posted already.