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Hi Cean!Welcome to Xisto!I am sure you will like the community here on Xisto as much as the free web hosting service. The web hosting provides unrestricted access to all of the PHP functions, unlike other free web hosting providers that disable a lot of the functionality that PHP has to offer. As Iniyila says, this is pretty much the best free web hosting that you can find and has been around for quite a while, so you know it is not going away anytime soon.BTW, you may have heard of the old name of the community - Trap 17. The forum was renamed a couple of years ago but a lot of articles out there still refer to it by the old name and have not been updated to reflect the change. Even the Xisto.com home page refers to us as Trap 17. The name Trap 17 was quite catchy and was based on the name of an Internet cafe somewhere in Mumbai. The folks who founded Trap 17 / Xisto frequented the Internet cafe and after the cafe disappeared, this community was formed as a kind of a tribute to all of the good old memories that folks shared out there. I have seen a couple of Internet cafes come and go - one that I went to often in Mumbai that turned into a data entry and software development firm, and another in Hyderabad that seems to be running some other kind of a business but I cannot tell because it is one of those underground shops where the pavement is a few feet above it.Anyway, do have a good time with the community - reading the guidelines and rules threads will help you make the most of your experience here.

Hi!@mobileunlocking: What's an I.C.T.?The way I look at it, school is cool, and in more ways then one. When you compare traditional schools with what we have today, modern schools provide students with all that they need to pursue their interests. Given the fact that school is the way into college, unless you are home-schooled, the experience that the schools provide is just as important as the certificates and paperwork that they hand to you in the end. A school helps instil the values that one ought to have in society while feeding the interests of the students, which may or may not be possible.Some schools teach their students web designing and the students are remarkable in their use of Photoshop! I guess they owe that to the creativity of the young minds. They say creativity peaks at the age of 25, and it is all down-hill from there, so I guess the younger minds could teach the older folk a thing or two about web designing. With the amount of time that the younger folk spend on the Internet, there is bound to be much more creativity among them with the exposure to newer ideas and means of expression.Some schools also have robotics lessons in which they teach students to work with integrated circuits, breadboards, and electrical components, while going into the intricate details of how capacitors, resistors, and inductors can be combined to achieve different effects on the electrical circuits.Schools also have clubs for students to get together with like-minded individuals and it is this association that students should try to capitalize on. I remember the computing club that I unofficially started as school with some of my buddies have had pretty much all of the participants get into software programming eventually. We had pretty humble beginnings, starting with the teacher from the computer science class letting us in whenever we wanted to, and the magic of QuickBASIC. BASIC is pretty much limited to .NET development now but back then, it was used to work with libraries developed in Pascal and C to tap into the graphical and audio capabilities of the computers. I distinctly remember the use of a SoundBlaster library to play MIDI files through QuickBASIC. My point is the clubs in school are a great way to pursue one's interests, be it pottery, web designing, or wood-work (sounds more artistic than carpentry because it is!). Sometimes, in traditional schools, the clubs are unofficial and a kind of an 'underground' happening that takes place right beneath the noses of the teachers who encourage the indulgence in one's interests while at other times it takes the form of clubs formed by more modern schools and encouraged by their committees. Either way, it works out to a lot of fun for the students.

If you are looking at a Linux administrator position at some point in the future, you would want to have some hands-on experience with a server distribution. Try Ubuntu's server edition, CentOS and SuSe. You will eventually want to try commercial distributions too, such as Redhat Enterprise Edition. CentOS is pretty close to what RedHat has to offer because it is based on the same source code but does not include the commercial support through RedHat. Ideally, in a work environment, you would have commercial support for anything you use because when something is broken, you would want to hear from somebody who tells you that the problem has occurred with someone else in the past, and to get the solution or the steps to fix the problem. With the open-ness of Linux, you would almost always find the problems that you have encountered in a knowledgebase somewhere and there would be a discussion board or a forum with some posts about it. As for the books, you ought to pick a Linux distribution that you want to learn and buy a book on it. There's the Redhat Bible if you want to learn to work with RedHat, which is pretty much the most common commercial Linux distribution in data centers worldwide (I don't have a source to cite for that, but it is like one of those things that you just treat as common knowledge and do not really try to attempt to prove, knowing that the results will not be worth the effort since the results would most probably tell you what you already know).BTW, why don't you look into stuff that you do everyday as a Windows server administrator and post questions as you go about doing it on Linux? I'm sure there are folks here on the discussion board who can help you with it, and I've got a VM running a Ubuntu LiveCD if it is something generic. If you do get bored along the way, there are plenty of games that run on Linux too! Try Maelstrom, OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon, but with an open-source code base that was re-written from the original), or even Smoking Guns. They are all free, as we expect most things on Linux to be, and are lots of fun too.Managing some of the more useful stuff on Linux tends to be a part of a Linux administrator's job, such as working with the Apache web server. Apache is the most common web server used on Linux, and arguably on the web (yet another one of those things treated as common knowledge), and is quite easy to use. Many Linux distributions also include a graphical interface to help with making some of the settings, but it is just as easy to peek into the configurations files and poke around till you get it working the way you want it to. On a server Linux system, most organizations do not include a graphic interface to save on memory, not that it is all that much for a server, so you would want to figure out how to use the command line interface. A good book on Linux should familiaze you with the common text editors available, such as vi and emacs. I personally prefer vi for its simplicity, but there are Linux administrators and developers out there who swear by emacs and would rather use emacs than switch to an integrated development environment for their development activities. With such a loyal fan following, you have got to check out the features that the editor provides. Most of the text editors on Linux also provide you with syntax highlighting (or, rather, coloring) while in the text mode interface so you would not really miss the graphical interface all that much when it comes to usability when writing source code.When it comes to Linux, pretty much all of the source is available in binary as well as source code. For the most part, you will not have to work with the source code because you will most definitely find a binary version compiled for the distribution of Linux you are using and targeted at your hardware platform. There are package managers that can automatically install software for you. Have you use the iPhone App Store? The package managers available on Linux are pretty much the same, and guess what - Canonical is developing an App Store for Linux too, so as long as you've got a basic familiarity with it, you have the basics to get started with package management. If the organization that you work at is using some non-standard hardware, you would want to learn to figure out how to compile the source code of the various packages that you would be using, as well as the compilation of the Linux kernel itself. It is unlikely that you would be asked to re-compile the Linux kernel with a couple of extra modules during the first couple of years that you get into Linux server administration, but with the way companies have been downsizing and the economic recession, they just might!In case you have not noticed, Linux does not just run on computers - you can find cellular phones, ebook readers, smart phones, routers, and lots of other devices powered by the very same software that powers the servers at RedHat. For these devices, you might have a couple of patches to support the specific hardware that they contain or to run on the limited memory that the devices provide. In other cases, you might want to run Linux on a 32-bit server and so would have to use a couple of patches or modules to support storage capacity over a certain limit, or to use more memory than the base installation supports. Those scenarios are pretty common in data centers like the kind we find in research centers in India. The research centers are not usually on a deadline and are willing to give novice Linux administrators a go at some of the stuff that other organizations would typically set aside only for the more experienced Linux administrators, perhaps due to their low budget when hiring staff, but that is a great way to learn some of the finer things about Linux.If you are in the Windows world, you are probably aware of the embedded edition of Windows XP which is quite common in the public announcement systems and in the screens fitted into buses and metro railways for displaying the current location of the bus or train to passengers and to people on the stations and platforms. Needless to say, they do not have a Vista version of it because Vista was such a memory hog, but they just might have a version of Windows 7 Starter edition targeting devices with low memory. Now, with all of these Windows devices, you might wonder what a Linux server can do for them. Well, pretty much whatever a Windows server can do for them - you can use Linux to run a domain controller to provide a centralized repository of user accounts and computer accounts, along with the automated deployment of updates and new software that you would normally do when using Windows. In addition, you can also have Linux based systems authenticated with that very same database!There's a lot in the Linux world that folks out there do not use yet because they cannot spend the time in training their staff and do not want to put in the budget to hire staff with the know-how, which is one of the key selling points of Windows on the servers.

Google Instant search automatically detects that you are on a slow connection and disables the instant search feature. It is still not something I would want a search engine to do, nevertheless, and there's a link to disable the Google Instant search to the right of the search input textbox. If it really really really does bother you, have a go at using DuckDuckGo.com - it's a neat search engine that I turn to whenever Google tosses that captcha stuff at me, refusing to believe that I am a hydrocarbon based life form or the *person* sapien species. "C'mon, Google, trust me! I'm human!" Ah, but those are the times when Google doesn't even trust the response to its Captcha because irrespective of what I type in, it keeps tossing that Captcha screen at me, so at the first glimpse of the Captch screen, I would switch to DuckDuckGo.There were other search engines that came and went, and Cuil.com is one of the more populat ones. I've never really used Yahoo or Bing search in the past decade because they don't have the simplistic look that a search engine should have. Bing seems to have taken a couple of concepts off Google, but has yet to figure out that some folk don't want a large image loading every time they visit the page because it takes a couple of seconds to load and people want to have an instant up-there page that they can access to perform searches, unless they are using the browser search feature from the toolbar.BTW, while on the topic of Google, is anyone out there still using Google Wave? Apparently, it was a pretty big hype and it did start off well but then folks just couldn't get off the other means of communication that they typically use. We've got IRC that most open-source communities still use, there's Facebook, and for pretty much everything else there is GMail with the chat functionality built right in. For conference chats, folks use Skype... though it does need a good connection to work correctly.

Everyone has mentioned about the stuff that you can do with C, C++, and C# and there's nothing left for me to say, really. I guess all I can do is complain about each of the three languages :-PCLet's begin with C. It is a quick and easy language to get started with, but working with pointers seems to be hard for many to manage. After you go beyond a few thousand lines of code, the source code becomes unmanageable for the average software programmer.C++C++ was meant to be an extension of C and is backward compatible for the most part. Pretty much anything that you can do in C also compiles and executes perfectly well in C++. But wait, that's a good thing. The negative is that the newer features it provides can slow down execution a bit. Object oriented development is a great way to organize your code and enforce some degree of separation between the various classes in your application (see the General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns - GRASP for how this is done) but all of this includes overhead. You didn't think there was such a thing as a free lunch, did you?C#After having dealt with pointers, crashing applications, segmentation faults, illegal operations, and all of their little buddies, somebody thought it would be a really cool idea to clone Java. Yup, that's right. C# is a Java clone with some aspects of the C++ syntax worked into it. Running byte code (For C#, it is referred to as the Microsoft Intermediate Language) over a virtual machine comes from the Java world and C# has it. The virtual machine provides garbage collection and memory management, just as Java's virtual machine does. However, all of that comes with extra bloat. C# applications are hardly as efficient as C++ or C applications simply because of all that the platform has to offer, but it does make programming easier for novices.I don't have a dislike for any of the three languages. Each has its place. C has found extensive use in system programming - for creating operating systems, device drivers, protocol stacks et al. C++ piggy-backs on the success of C while providing some degree of sanity to the spaghetti code. C# is the language for rapid development on the Windows platform. C# has nothing in common with C or C++ (the name is a marketing strategy!) except for some of the syntax but is in fact a clone of Java. If you want to write software as you do for Java but want to, for some bizarre twisted reason, want to prevent MacOS and Linux users from using it, you can pick C# as the programming language for your project.

Hi!Does anyone play Twisted Metal 2 on the PC? It is an old classic that still is fun to play. It has an option for multiplayer game play over the Internet (TCP/IP), so perhaps we could play a couple of rounds. It's a pretty old game but it runs perfectly well on Windows too.I've been playing in single player mode in the past week, and it seems all of the A.I. (artificial intelligence) players seem to want to gang up on me. Each vehicle in the game has special weapons and it is these weapons that you want to use when you have a clear shot at your enemies. In single player mode, pick anything with a good speed or really heavy armor. Here is the list of cars and their abilities: Thumper (Pink Flame-throwing Car):The character seems a bit out of place because on the car info page, there a muscular African-american dude riding the car, but the car is painted bright pink! If you're up and close, that's no laughing matter because it has got a flame thrower that can cause some pretty extensive damage. The A.I. controlled Thumper tends to use Napalm more often than any other weapons. If you are playing as the Thumper, don't go chasing other cars because the Thumper is pretty bad at turns - with the large turn radius, it is pretty hard to keep up. Spectre (White Sports Car):The Spectre is one of the better cars in the game. It has great speed and the special weapon can lock in on a target, just like a homing missile, and causes a pretty good amount of damage. When controlled by the A.I., the Spectre is not much of a threat but watch out for the occasional blast with Spectre's special weapon... not that you can do anything about it. Warthog (Military Vehicle):The Warthog tends to use multiple missiles, its special weapon, most of the time, but it is relatively easy to avoid if you are driving something that can turn quickly. The Warthog is slow and you can get away with playing peek-a-boo by getting at it when it isn't facing you. When controlled by the A.I., it is not much of a threat. Although it does have a reasonably good armor, a few shots with a powerful weapon will get it to blow up. If you do decide to play with the Warthog, for whatever reason, make sure to use Turbo because this is one slow military vehicle.Axel (Cyborg With Two Giant Wheels):A reasonably armored 'vehicle' (don't know what to call it/him since it's a cyborg and not really a vehicle since the giant wheels are attached in place of his arms), Axel's special weapon is effective but requires him to be within close range. If you play as Axel, run towards your opponent as though performing a joust and just when your enemy is next to you, activate the special weapon to send a shock wave through the ground, causing damage to nearby enemies as Axel yells, "AXEL POWER!!!!" When controlled by the A.I., Axel is difficult to destroy primarily due to the armor, but make sure you don't get too close and he will not be much of a threat.Road Kill (Red Sports Car):This is one of the first vehicles that I managed to use to survive the first level when I started playing, but the special weapon on the vehicle is not really effective. The armor is weak, but can hold up to some attack. When controlled by the A.I., Road Kill is very aggressive and combined with the above average speed, can give you a chase while going at you with a stream of bullets with an occasional boomerang, the special weapon. If you do play as Road Kill, don't rely on the special weapon because it does not help as much as the other ammunition that you can find in the game.Mr. Slam (Tractor):Mr. Slam is one of the enemies you will have to look out for, especially when you are playing with one of the weaker armored vehicles, such as the Grass hopper or Spectre. Mr. Slam may be slow but has one of the most powerful special weapons - the front of the tractor picks up another vehicle and tosses it against the ground causing extensive damage. When controlled by the A.I., Mr. Slam tends to use the freeze blast often and you have really got to watch your radar because if Mr. Slam gets close enough, you are pretty much done for. If you play as Mr. Slam, try to mimic the A.I. by using the freeze blast and special weapon combo to cause annihilation in the arena.Twister (Race Car):The Twister is one of the quickest vehicles and if that were not enough, Twister also has one of the most powerful special weapons in the game. Twister's special weapon requires the enemy vehicle to be in close proximity, but that is rarely a problem when combining the freeze blast with the speed of the Twister. When controlled by the game's A.I., Twister is a real threat but is less aggressive than Mr. Slam. If you decide to play as Twister, you will have lots of fun by using the freeze blast and Twister, the special weapon, combo and will go whizzing around thanks to the speed of the Twister, but watch out - any enemy fire can cause plenty of damage as the Twister armor is very weak. Use your speed to get around and avoid getting close to Axel - you have got to use one of the other weapons in the game to deal with Axel if you don't want to blow up.Grass Hopper (Green Buggy):Grass Hopper is quick and lightly armored but does have a rather powerful special weapon when used correctly. The use of the special weapon is hard to figure out but involves either jumping onto or jumping over an enemy vehicle to cause damage. When controlled by the A.I., the Grass Hopper is a threat so either lose it or kill it. If you have something quick, try to hit the Grass Hopper while going peek-a-boo and if you have something slower, keep your distance.Outlaw 2 (Cop Car):Outlaw 2 is a cop car that uses lightning as a special weapon, effective in close proximity and apparently works through walls. When Outlaw 2 activates the special weapon while going through a tunnel and an enemy vehicle is on top of the tunnel, expect some damage to occur there. When controlled by the A.I., the Outlaw 2 is not a threat. The special weapon is not very effective and does not cause much damage. If you do decide to play as Outlaw 2, which you should not, given the car's weak abilities, you should rely on other ammunition in the game to take out your enemies. The average armor helps keep you alive, but pretty soon the blast will consume you.Mr. Grimm (Biker With Sidecar):Mr. Grimm has pretty good abilities at cornering and an above average speed. Because to the low mass and inertia, Mr. Grimm is great at maneuvering through the track, but watch out for any enemies because the armor on Mr. Grimm is virtually non-existent. When playing offense, Mr. Grimm has the most powerful weapon that does not involve getting into the close proximity of the enemy so if you are up against Axel, Mr. Grimm is the choice among vehicles. When controlled by the A.I., Mr. Grimm is hard to keep up with so use a bunch of homing missiles or a special weapon with homing capabilities. If you play against Mr. Grimm, keep blasting away at your enemies with homing missiles when they are hard to keep up with and when you have a clear shot, blast them with the special weapon. All the while, do watch your back for a stray missile or two because anything your enemies throw at you can cause extensive damage.Shadow (Hearse):Shadow is not one of the quickest but has a good special weapon and average armor. When controlled by the A.I., do not attempt to chase the Shadow while low on health because the Shadow tends to shoot backwards, fending off any attacks. The Shadow is not aggressive so you should not have a hard time with it. When playing as the Shadow, if you choose to do so, stay alert and look out for the enemies around you because although the Shadow has a decent armor, it is not going to last forever with all of the blasting that the enemies would be doing all around you.I have yet to figure out a strategy with Hammer head (Monster Truck) but apparently his special weapon seem to work on contact by ramming into opponents' vehicles. Within the game, you cannot play as Sweet Tooth (Clown's Ice Cream Van) but Sweet Tooth is a threat due to what seems like an the unlimited ammo for the special weapon that Sweet Tooth enjoys. As long as he isn't after you, you will live but when you do decide to take out Sweet Tooth, make sure you are not running low on health.PS: If you do want to copy-paste any of the above content, do give credit where due ;-)

CPU monitoring is simply determining the amount of CPU time used by running processes. You can determine the total CPU usage as a percentage or can determine the CPU usage for individual processes.CPU monitoring is perfectly legal as long as you do it on your own computer. You may find it perfectly normal to monitor somebody else's CPU usage, but there are privacy concerns - for a normal user, if you were able to tell when the CPU usage was high, you could make a fairly good guess of when he or she is using his or her computer and that's a violation of his or her privacy.CPU monitoring does not involve hacking at all, and it certainly is not a device, although you can get devices to plug into your computer to monitor the CPU activity for debugging without having to install software specifically to work with it on the host (the 'subject') computer.If you do want to increase the efficiency of your laptop, the first thing you ought to do is run it in a low power mode. Every vendor gives you a different set of tools to adjust the power saving level of the computer, ranging from a single Maximum performance or Maximum battery life setting to settings for individual components such as the DVD-ROM drive, the CPU, the display brightness, hard disk spin, and cooling fan. The next thing you can do to increase your laptop computer's efficiency is to set a dark desktop wallpaper so when you don't need to use your computer, you can minimize all of the windows and let the black desktop wall paper be shown on the screen, reducing the electricity consumption by the display. If you are using an OLED display, which is quite uncommon, using a darker background image will do you no good because OLED screens do not consume any lesser electricity when displaying darker colors. If you can, use a solid black desktop background and avoid setting a wallpaper because additional CPU cycles would be used in displaying the image. You can take the icons off the desktop too - perhaps create a single folder in which you can dump all of the icons into - to increase the amount of black (and thus reduce the amount of electricity used by the screen) across the screen. You can disable all of the programs that you do not use but run in the background, starting with the ones in the system tray because they are the easiest to disable. Most, if not all, of the programs will have settings that let you prevent the programs from starting up along with Windows. If you do not use an instant messenger, you've got a couple of things to disable right there! On all of your browsers, use the private browsing feature because a regular browsing mode saves cookies, history, and other browsing information to your hard disk drive and writing to the hard disk drive uses up more electricity. Instead, using the private browsing mode will get the browser to store all of the browsing information in memory instead of writing it to the disk drive. I'm assuming you don't really need to save your browsing history or cookies since that's the effect of using private browsing (also referred to as incognito browsing). If you're comfortable with editing the registry and removing programs from the Startup folder in the Start Menu, clean up those lists too. Often, you won't find some of those programs in the system tray but they run silently in the background. Finally, unplug any devices that you do not use. If you have a cellular broadband modem that you are not using, unplug it! If you have an external hard disk drive that you are not using, unplug it. If the external hard disk drive uses an external power adapter, unplug the adapter too because many hard disk drives do not shut down completely even after you have unplugged them from the USB port of your computer. Some USB devices automatically go into standby mode when you unplug them from the USB port of the computer, which is another reason to have them unplugged but if you are not going to use them for a while, you might want to turn them off completely either with a power switch on the device or by unplugging them or by using a physical power switch.To further increase the efficiency, this last one is a no-brainer. Turn off the computer by setting it to go into Hibernate mode when you no longer need it.

I've been wondering... how does the BMW service indicator light work? On BMWs, the owners are reminded of the regular service by means of a service indicator light on the dashboard. How does the service indicator light work? Does it depend on the distance, time since the last service, the state of the engine oil and filters, or is it a combination of all of the above?Also, is it true that the BMW service schedule is less frequent than that of other vehicles? That's the pitch that the sales folk at the BMW showroom tell their customers when asked about the high servicing charges.

Instead of preventing users from viewing content on devices other than those intended, audio and video pirates would simply install another adapter or converter to get the content. Enforcing HDCP doesn't seem to add any value and simply adds to the cost and inconvenience that the regular users has to bear. There's so much that users of Apple devices can't already do, and this just adds to the inconvenience of sticking with Apple.

I would like to add that there was almost always more space on the hard disk drive than one could possibly fill up. I had 80MB on a 386 laptop, and 500MB on an old 486 that I could never fill up. Now, I've got a terabyte of data on external USB hard disk drives and an internal hard disk drive of 80GB that is pretty much full with only 2 GB of free space in which it has a swap file and some temporary data.Later, as we moved to the Pentium age, modems became popular and felt excruciatingly slow that folks would send floppy disks around by snail mail instead of bothering with transfer over modems.

Hi!You should consider using a content management system for your website. if you need to change a link on every one of your pages, you simply log in to the administration dashboard of your website, change one value and click the submit button, and voila! The link has been changed all over the website.There are lots of other cool things that you can do with content management systems too, apart from the fact that they help you put all of your items as entries within a database so you don't have tons of HTML files with pretty much the same structure on the file system. You also get to piece out the various sections of the site so that the markup for each section is in its own file. You can easily add plugins to extend the functionality of the content management systems and that's one of the best things about content management systems because you can add tons of functionality in a matter of minutes!

Hi!The game was fun to play, but I found it hard to get past the spikes. In most side scroller games, the jump and move is the hardest to get the hang of.The game, Alias, is not based on the TV series at all though. The name seemed to suggest that it was. I guess @Tuddy thought the same as I did on reading the name of the game.

@burnegoFor faster Internet speeds, you can contact your Internet Service Provider and get them to upgrade you to a faster package. An alternative is to setup a proxy server for you to route your Internet requests through so the next time you want to request for the exact same resources, your requests would be much quicker. This often helps when accessing web pages from the same web site because typically resources such as background images and icons are shared between pages. Your proxy server can be forced to cache the resources and serve the requests for them through the cache without having to access the server for a specific period of time - for example, Google.com changes their search page logo every day so you know that for all the requests that you make to the Google.com homepage that day, you don't have to contact the server and can have the requests made through cache.If your USB and FireWire speeds are too slow, get an adapter that lets you hook up at a faster speed. USB 2.0 is slower than USB 1.1. Upgrading to a standard that supports higher speeds using an adapter would let your older computer interface with newer peripherals at a faster speed.@MoolkyeYour speed would still be limited by the water resistance, so if you want to go really fast, get rid of the sails, get a hydrofoil, and a really powerful motor.@IftikharIf you are getting a ping response, it simply means that the other host is reachable. In some cases, firewalls prevent the ping responses from coming in or going out, so a ping isn't really effective in those cases.As you are getting a ping response, you would want to check if there is a web server running on the other host - something like Apache, nginx, Lighttpd, or the Internet Information Services (IIS).Are you trying to connect to the Internet or are you accessing a web server on your local area network? If you are trying to reach out to something on the Internet, you would want to check if there are any network proxies that you have to configure. Some Internet Service Providers use proxies either to be able to provide faster Internet transfers by caching responses or to be able to block certain kinds of Internet traffic. It depends on how your Internet Service Provider is set up, so the best thing you can do is contact their customer service helpdesk.

When it comes to laptop brands, I would say, "To each, his own."If price doesn't matter, I'm sure everyone in the forum would yell in chorus, "ALIENWAAAAARE." If you've got tons of money to put into something, an Alienware laptop is what you can get. They will even inscribe your name into a plate attached to the laptop to personalize it. You can go ultra-heavy on graphics and can get a dual-hard drive setup. I'm assuming the weight and battery life are not a concern for you either. If you need to use the computer while on the go, get a car adapter - you can charge up whenever you go out on a picnic and not have to rely on the battery. Although Alienware does belong to Dell, they still have the same magic that they once did, except that their price tag is wayyy over what you would normally pay for a laptop.If you want a computer that you can take with you on hiking trips or for a night out at the desert, you ought to get a Panasonic Toughbook. It can survive a three foot drop without a scratch, though anything more and you could get a few cracks in the case. I'm not really sure if they are durable because I usually end up replacing the power adapter due to worn out wiring every couple of years because I don't use the laptop on a desk - it's either on the bed, or on the lap, or on the boot of a car (those things are really useful unless you have drive a hatchback in which case it's non-existent).I personally prefer the Thinkpads, which were previously sold by IBM and are now sold by Lenovo. Lenovo seems to be promoting its own Ideapad series instead of the Thinkpad series, but that doesn't mean that the Thinkpad is any less of a concern for their engineering division. The Thinkpads are built to last and I've had one from 1998 that ran perfectly well till I have it away a little over a year ago. The Thinkpad 600E is the one laptop that I had for about a decade and it didn't need any repairs!Some folks prefer ASUS, and I would recommend them for heavy computing because you can use the processor to its limits since they take good care of cooling the inner parts of your computer instead of having the computer turn itself off when it overheats.There are some assembled notebooks that you could get too, but I'd be wary about getting them because in some cases the vendor doesn't test the computers to make sure that it can run for extended periods of time without overheating. The last thing you want to have is a laptop that runs perfectly well for about half an hour but needs to be turned off every half hour to cool down. Some laptop manufacturers also use desktop components within the laptops, making the overheating problem worse than it already is with regular laptop components.If you are looking for something ultra portable and something that actually takes it to the extreme, you ought to look at the Sony Vaio. They've got laptops that look like netbooks but are actually complete laptops, with the Core i7 processors in them. They may not be available in all geographical locations, but if you can get one, you would be surprised at how much power they can pack into those little boxes.If you do want to minimize your spending, get yourself a netbook and get a beefier desktop that you can offload the computing to via a network. You would want to get a high speed network though - a gigabit ethernet network and an 802.11n wireless network should give you the bandwidth you need to do the offloading - you can also hook up all of your disks to the desktop and share the files across the network link. Don't expect the same transfer speeds of hooking up the drives to your computer via USB... transferring files across the network can test your patience if you are transferring really large files.

As Anwii suggests, you can donate it and it'll be used by folks in India or Africa.I worked with a group of students in India in developing software for computers that were to be donated to centers in rural India. The fact that many computers didn't have wireless or ethernet ports didn't bother us as we would use the serial and parallel ports of the older computers and hook them up to a server that had plenty of serial and parallel ports through another box hooked up to it (something like USB hub but for serial/parallel ports). Sure, it's a slow transfer, but they wouldn't be playing networked Crysis on it :-D

If you are going to freeze your hard disk drive, don't get it wet - the pictures posted indicate ice all around the hard disk drive, which tells you that somebody actually put the hard disk drive in a small tub of water while freezing it. Whether you decide to freeze it or not, you shouldn't be getting the disk wet, which is why you would want to use some kind of air-tight covering over it. Don't use regular plastic bags to cover it because of the static that could form. Instead, if you have an anti-static bag, that would be a better choice.The freezing idea is great if you are planning to lay down electrical cabling and can put a water-tight covering all around it and cover it up with snow because resistance decreases with lower temperatures (read about super conductivity) but I cannot say that it would work with a hard disk drive.If you do need to keep a hard disk cold while it is running, you could try using liquid nitrogen. There's still the condensation problem that you would want to work out.

The portable editions don't necessarily come with "the guarantee on the box". I tried using Adobe Photoshop CS5 Portable edition because it sounded cool to be able to use Photoshop without having to run the installer - it seemed like a system administrator's dream, except that it didn't quite work like it should. Users haven't been able to run Adobe Acrobat Reader/Professional and Adobe Photoshop Portable at the same time. Apart from that, I'm not sure if portable editions have updates... and does Photoshop (the regular non-portable one) have any updates apart from the CS3, CS4, CS5, ... version upgrades?

ysNoi,Are you here for the web hosting too? You'll have to post a couple of large messages to the forum to be able to earn MyCENTs quickly enough to get started. While in the process though, you would find participating in the forums very addictive and you would get glued to the forum for the community rather than for the hosting. It's how most of the folks happened to come across here - they wanted the hosting, but they stayed on for the community, and now they've got enough web hosting credits to last them a decade!Anyway, happy posting!

Hi! I just created a thread about the possibility of the GPU replacing the CPU, instead of the other way around. Will it happen in the future? Well, if NVidia has its way, that's the path they plan to trod upon. Will Intel take the threat sitting down? You bet they won't - they're already trying to stay ahead of the competition from AMD and ARM - AMD has the advantage of being on the x86 instruction set shared with Intel while ARM hopes to get developers to port their code to ARM's instruction set. It's hard to predict which way things would go - let's built a time machine to find out for sure!

Hi!If you go back in modern desktop computing history, you would notice that a lot of processors that were present in the computer were eventually turned into software and had their processing handled by the CPU. The modem, for example, has its own processor but that eventually turned into a 'soft-modem' which has its processing handled by the computer's CPU. However, the graphics processor doesn't seem to have gone the way of the other processors. Sure, there are computers with integrated graphics as well as dedicated graphics adapters, but that did not wipe out the dedicated graphics solutions. Dedicated graphic processors are becoming increasingly more common in notebook computers and the only area where integrated graphics does perform better is when comparing battery life.NVidia does seem to want to change that - they intend to eliminate the need to have two kinds of processors. In fact, they intend to get rid of the CPU and have the computer run on a graphic processor alone! NVidia seems to be devising the means to get the graphics processor to handle serial processing and switch back to parallel processing of data, as required by graphics processing operations. Don't expect to run Windows on a graphics processor anytime soon though - for that to happen, the graphics processor would have to support the same instruction set as a CPU and that could be a hassle. NVidia can bet Intel isn't going to sit still while NVidia takes an aim at its core processor business - they will continue to offer faster and more energy efficient processors with the competition closing in at their heels with alternate solutions, such as the ARM processors and the graphic processors.

Hi!The drivers that you have for the touchpad seem to be shot. Get a newer version of the drivers, or get rid of the Synaptics drivers entirely and stick with the stock driver that Windows 7 has to offer. If all else fails, get an external mouse or a tablet input device. You've got lots of choices to pick from with mice - there are the three button mice where you can configure the third button to do something, there are mice with scrolling wheels, scrolling wheel mice where the wheel can be pushed as a third button, scrolling wheel mice where the wheel can be pushed sideways for side-scrolling, mice with up to five buttons (does any body know a manufacturer that has topped that?) in addition to the fancy side-scroller scrolling wheel, and mice that have absolutely no buttons or wheels and rely on a touch-sensitive surface for input.A possible fix that you can try is to get into the BIOS setup when the computer boots up and change the pointer input mode to touchpad/trackpad/internal, instead of external or both. Somes that helps but I can't tell if it will solve the problem you are having.BTW, how does the 6 year old Compaq run Windows 7? Does it lag, or do you get a decent run of the new OS? Are you using Windows 7 Basic, or are you using a different version with Aero disabled? I'm sticking with Windows XP on my 4-year-old Thinkpad, mostly due to licensing - I don't want to pay for another operating system license and would rather get a new laptop with the new operating system pre-installed than have to pay to get another operating system off the shelves of a store at full-price (I'd rather have the clean install than an upgrade). Besides, if you have a 32-bit processor that doesn't support over 3GB of memory when running Windows, you are pretty much limited when using the capabilities of Windows 7 along with Office 2010.

Hi!I'm sure someone in the development team of the game Destruction Derby 2 shares your opinion. They had a cheat code - Macs R Poo. I can't remember what it does, but I distinctly remember the developer's explicit expression of hatred against Apple Macs.

Hi!I've had the ill-fortune to have the brakes quit working twice!The first time, it was when the engine died and it so happens that the power brakes only work once while the engine goes off, so the second time the brakes didn't work. Shifting to a lower gear while holding the brake pedal down as hard as possible helps bring the vehicle to a stop, depending on the kind of fault you have with the brake.The second time was after I drove out of a deep puddle, the water probably kept the brakes from working so all I had was the emergency brake and the lower gear.While in normal driving conditions, going to a lower gear can slow you down too quickly for drivers behind you to react, especially since the brake lights do not turn on. The same is the case for the hand brake... when you pull it gently, you would feel you aren't pulling it hard enough, but when you do pull it harder, it would slow you down before the drivers behind you can stop to avoid hitting you.

Hi!I noticed a significant difference between vehicle prices when moving between cities - the cities where the property rents are higher work the extra expense into the price of the vehicle so you can just drive over to another city, buy the car and drive the new car back while getting someone else to drive your old car over (or whatever works for you - hitch a ride, catch a cab, take a bus, then pick up your new car).