Quote from Scawen :

I'd like to set up a poll to see how many users use each operating system.

Before I set up the poll, please can you tell me if I've missed out any important operating systems from this list?
I'm not interested in every single version like Vista 64 and so on - that would just be Vista.
(XP x64 is apparently different from XP so that's why I've included that 64 bit version separately)

- Windows 98
- Windows ME
- Windows NT
- Windows 2000
- Windows XP
- Windows XP x64
- Windows Vista
- Windows Seven
- Server Longhorn (2008)
- Server 2003
- Macintosh
- Linux

Not sure how relevant it would be to what you need to know, but would it be of any value to split Linux in to Debian and Redhat variants? Same kernals at the end of the day but significant differences as to how packages are installed I believe.

Other than that apart from Server 2000 I can't see anything missing, unless you want to start counting the likes of OS/2.

Quote from Shadowww :

...2nd: he doesn't wants to gain access to a network, learn to read

Yeah he want's to gain admin rights to a computer he "bought" from his school and the school didn't wipe it and just reinstall the OS with full admin right huh? Sure.. believe the story if you like.. me.. I've heard every story under the sun to try and gain illegal use of other peoples computer equipment. I don't buy it for a second.

I know the issue is solved now but I just wanted to mention a common misunderstanding of PSUs. Just because a PSU has a higher overall Wattage rating doesn't mean it will actually be able to supply the current required for a specific mobo or graphics card etc on a specific rail output.

Changing PSUs is NOT as simple as just swapping a 300W one for a 400W one for example. I've seen plenty of higher rated PSUs that deliver less current to one of the 12v rails than lower rated ones for example.

Taking the requirements of the card in question:

"Minimum 450W or greater system power supply (with 12V current rating of 26A)."

It's the bold bit that's the important part, not the overall wattage of the PSU. If you look at the detailed specs of different PSUs you may very well find 500 or 550W PSUs that can't supply 26A on the 12v rail. Then conversely you may well find another 400W model that can.

Just something to be aware of when choosing a PSU.

This review might be of interest.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/611308/ ... -256gb-ssd-drive-review/2

Would seem that whilst technically there is a significant performance advantage for SSD in real world tests the difference isn't so big.

So you want someone on here to tell you how to break the law, on a public forum. Nice idea

One of the forum owners, send this guys IP to his ISP/School admin and get him the trouble he deserves.

Personally, I've never had any issues with ASUS mobos. They would always be my manufacturer of choice when it comes to motherboards.

Quote from LFSn00b :

Well, a friend of mine and I have a discussion(not a smart one) about what OS should I install on my laptop, or keep the Windows 7 that it currently has.

The laptop's specs:
AMD Sempron +3000 1.8GHz CPU
512MB RAM
SiS 760GX 64MB GFX Card
60 GB HDD.


The thing is that Windows 7 runs slow whereas XP ran decently - but I don't know what should be a wiser choice. My friend here claims Windows 7 will run better on ANY PC faster than XP, or Vista.

I do not believe him, and I am wanting to install XP on the laptop, which it had. Or should I go even more back and make it run Windows 98 SE?

Mostly all I want to do is prove the guy wrong, but also wanting to find a fast solution to make my laptop faster.

Thanks in advance
Niko

Well first off, why on earth is that machine even running Windows 7 when it doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for the OS??

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
  

Put another 512mb (if you can find it) minimum in there if you want to keep Windows 7

As for the question, Win7 is definitely better than Vista performance wise on the same hardware, wouldn't say it was quite as snappy as XP though I've not done a direct comparison, just a XP vs Vista on same hardware and Vista vs Windows 7 on same (different) hardware. I'd put Windows 7 closer to XP than Vista though.

Only issue with XP is that it's not going to be supported very much longer. Though who ever uses microsoft support anyway?

Whatever you do, don't go back to any 9x version of windows, unless you enjoy running out of date applications

download memtest86 here:

http://www.memtest.org/#downiso

burn the iso on to a CD using ImgBurn here:

http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download

Stick CD in drive and reboot machine. Let it run at least one full test run to check for a problem with your memory.

If the memory is fine download and run Sistem Information for Windows here:

http://www.gtopala.com/siw-download.html

Download the stand alone executable, run it and on the left hand menu select "sensors" under "hardware". Do it when you first boot up the machine and watch the temperatures, see if any start to rise.

Also check your machine for viruses, trojans or malware. Scan it with a decent AV and also run Malwarebytes (http://www.malwarebytes.org/index.php) and spybot S&D (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html). When installing Spybot, just install the core application.

Last edited by gezmoor, Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:04.

Pretty difficult to get 32bit OS from any decent computer manufacturer these days. The likes of Dell have been shipping 64bit only OS's for a while now.

Now Windows 7 is out, (with it's full support for 32bit apps), I'd be amazed to see anyone shipping the 32bit version.

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

That system is complete garbage, even for browsing the internet or IM. Don't touch such crappy systems. Celeron...who the hell would buy that? Celeron is garbage.

Celerons are perfectly adequate for machines for browsing the internet, emails and office apps. If that is ALL you need a computer for, you're wasting your money buying anything better. In fact they are overspec'd for such basic computing, hence the rise of the netbook.

Quote from DejaVu :

You could have a much better spec for just a little bit more

You can say that about every price point/spec for computers. You can always spend a little bit more and have a better spec. At least until you get to midrange specs.

To the OP. You do realise that Novatechs barebones machines come without hard drives, DVD drives, graphics, (unless on the mobo), or OS right? Once you've added all that up you're better off going for one of their base machines eg:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/pc/range/icon.html

If you've set the ip address on the machine to static restarting it won't change the setting back to automatic. As far as I know windows doesn't have any kind of running configuration that gets set back to saved defaults when restarted, so a restart won't achieve what you want.

Having said that assuming I'm wrong, can you telnet to the machine?

Go to command prompt and type

telnet <ip address of remote machine>

You'll be prompted for a username and password. Log in with administrative credentials and then just enter the following at the prompt:

shutdown -r -f -t 01

-f : to force any running aps to close
-t : to make it restart after 1 second, (rather than 20)

Machine should automatically reboot and the telnet session will be terminated. All you'll see is that the telnet session isn't responding any more. A way to double check the machine has started to restart is to have another command prompt open at the same time running

ping -t <ip address of remote machine>

this will continously ping the machine in question, when you stop getting ping responses you'll know the machine has started to restart.

Edited to add -

If telnet isn't installed on your machine give putty a try, it's a straight executable no installation required.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org ... atham/putty/download.html

download the first option on the list putty.exe

Last edited by gezmoor, Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:16.

Quote from Jakg :

If you have a distorted analogue signal, the value at a point could be 0.65. Or 0.69. Or 0.63 - That could make a big difference.

In digital if it's 0.7, it's a safe guess it was a 1 - surely this reduces data loss massively?

Otherwise, why don't I spend £500 on an ethernet cable for my PC if it makes my internet look better?

You'd think so wouldn't you? looking at it intuitively like that right?

Unfortunately "reality" isn't that simple. Hence the need for sophisticated and complex error correction protocols and algorithms in digital systems.

To take your example of "if it's 0.7 it's a safe bet that it's a 1", well true, but that relies on the waveform being perfectly square. Unfortunately this isn't what happens in real life. Square waves start to become triangle waves in limited bandwidth systems, (ie any real transmission system), and the slope of the "wave" is what causes the problem. You see to accurately know what the level of the input signal "should" be, you have to know "when" to measure it. The long and short of it is that the receiving system has a real problem determining the value of the input siganal when the signal isn't a perfect square wave. Due to the way digital "input" systems work there is actually a region of levels that are neither 0 or 1. If the waveform becomes distorted enough, (and it doesn't take very much distortion at all to cause a problem), the input system looks at the input waveform at exactly the wrong time and comes up with a value that it considers "indeterminate". QED digital transmission system error.

Edited to add-

Another thing to consider is that digitals binary nature is also it's single biggest flaw. In an analogue system the difference between 0.65 and 0.63 or 0.69 is a distortion level of is 3% and 6% respectively. The difference between an incorrect 0 or 1 is 100% error.

Last edited by gezmoor, Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:21.

Quote from MadCat360 :

Money is not a flaw, it's a darn good solution to a problem.

Agreed. The flaw is in believing that the accumulation of money and material "wealth" is the sole objective, (to the exclusion and even destruction of all other objectives), of our short time on this world.

Quote from Becky Rose :

....The problem is human greed.

Communism and Marxism fail because they want everyone to be equal but the reality is that some are more equal than others. It's rubbish anyway, we're not all born equal ... we're individuals, and that is a completely different thing to equality.

Money never was the problem, it's a scapegoat. The issue is human nature itself, we're greedy. We are prepared to steal, kill, and beat others down to further ourselves.

Funny you mention the issue of human greed and then make an erroneous statement about Marxism and Communism when Marx's (at least) entire ideology was based around the issue of human greed.

Marx never made stated that all people are equal, a testament to which exists in one of his most often quoted statements "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need", which leads in to his ideology of the capitalism being, by its very nature, a method of exploitation.

As for communism. Well even the various commuist factions that exist around the world can't agree on what communism is, so making generalisations about it, (especially from a capitalist perspective), is rather pointless.

Quote from Jakg :

£5 for a cable is a lot (at least for a cheap one).

Digital cables like HDMI are about £2-£3 for normal lengths, and as they are digital assuming they conform to the same standards expensive cables give you nothing extra...

Actually not true. It's a myth to believe that because something is digital it's either 100% working or 100% not. Digital is in fact nothing more than very high speed square waves and unfortunately for the all the hype makers the real world works in analogue and that square wave is going to be affected by all the same issues as an analogue signal would, (in fact in some ways a lot worse).

Anyway, skipping to the point. Emprical testing has shown that better constructed and quality cables improve error rates on digital transmissions, (even over a measly 1m!), and that yes there really are differences between the performance of a cheap and good quality (notice I didn't say expensive!), HDMI cable for example.

None of which is relevant to your question. Here is something I found by googling:

"The RGB signals in VGA and the RGB signals found in a SCART connector are electrically compatible, but the sync signals aren't. In VGA the vertical sync and horizontal sync are carried on separate wires, but in SCART they are both combined into a composite sync signal carried along a single wire. You need to convert the component sync signals into a composite sync compatible with SCART. The red, green and blue signals can be connected through as-is."

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/RGB_Scart

and possible solution:

http://www.sput.nl/hardware/tv-x.html


I take no reponsibilty for the accuracy of the information in the links.

I can't believe any of you haven't read the comments under the video. It's explained there.

Quote from The Moose :

Great example

Here's an even better one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UjQc0dM4H4&NR=1

Compression is the name of the game. It's not the actual loudness that's the problem but the amount of compression that needs to be applied to the master in order to achieve the higher average volume levels demanded by todays music execs.

It just sucks all the life out of the music and robs the musicians of a large part of their musical expression.

Quote from lovretta :

Since i'm not a big fan of metallica, i didn't actually heard how bad it was.

I found this example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRyIACDCc1I
sorry if some of you posted it, but i just cannot believe my ears!

.

First thing I notice, (being an ex recreational drummer), about the two versions is how the CD version looses all of the dynamics and even a lot of the timbre of the high-hat. On the GH version you can hear it peak and decay and how the timbre changes as it does so. On the CD version it's just a mono-tonal splash.

Quote from Forbin :

Do real, intelligent people actually watch these programs?

I don't. QED

Quote from Intrepid :

.....Sport is a way to suppress violence, or a way to satisfy ones need to beat someone else.

Boxing, and MMA are controlled violence yes, but we could argue they are needed. The fact is violence is in many people's DNA and to suppress that by banning sports where they could express themselves in a controlled manner (MMA and Boxing) could do more harm than good.

I have to agree there is definitely an element of truth to that. Just taking Football and Rugby as two similar sports as an example, and comparing the relative levels of violence on the pitch and in the stands amongst the spectators. There is defitely an (inverse) correlation there between the levels of violence in the sport itself and the people watching it.

As far sports where the actual objective is to inflict violence on your opponent is concerned though, I think that's where the correlation starts to become direct again. I've yet to meet anyone that was really "into" boxing or MMA/UFC etc that weren't on the agressive side personality wise. By which I mean no-one I've met has ever not been at least slightly prone to agressive confrontation, (even if just in the form of words). I'm not convinced that the "sports" in question don't encourage such attitudes.

Having said that, it does strike me as interesting that when talking about the actual sports people themselves it does appear to be predomanantly Footballers, (relatively none violent sport), and Boxers (rather violent sport), that end up on the wrong end of the law with regards to violent acts they commit outside their sports.

Quote from Intrepid :

These shows are designed to attract viewers. In ITV's case to attract advertisement/phone vote revenue. That's their primary job. The ignorant ones are those that believe the shows are anything more than that.

I don't see the flaw in 'democracy' here. If large numbers of people are invited to vote for their favourite acts then where is the flaw? People are merely voting for their favourite act for which they are asked to do!

What's the problem? The truth is more people prefer the twins than any other act. That's a truth!

And is it not a victory for democracy? Whilst large waves of media outlets ask the masses to not vote for this act they still stay true to their belief? Surely this is a good thing and in fact expose the show for what it really is about. How is the a bad thing???

I for one think it's ****ing hilarious!

You're right. I should have said "an inherent flaw of democracy." IF that is, the purpose is to make a decision based on merit rather than preference.

With regards to the point of the show(s), I don't really care as I don't watch them. All I ever see is a bunch of people looking for a quick fix to fame and fortune, (in the vain hope it actually might bring them happiness ), and another bunch of people feeding on their naiveté in order to line their own pockets.

Quote from Nathan_French_14 :

Mine can turn into a fist.

Beat that!

Was that irony intentional or did it just slip out?

Unfortunately, unlike a lot of you guys my GF, (wife actually), can't be deflated, packaged up, and posted. Anywhere.

X-Factor, Strictly come dancing etc are all the proof that's needed of the inherent flaw of democracy.
i.e.

Just because a majority of people think something doesn't make it true.

In fact the opposite is very often the case, the vast majority of humans are extremely ignorant. True even when talking about so called "general knowledge" facts let alone more specialised knowledge such as whether someone can sing or dance.

In fact, this thread has reminded me of a signature I used to use on a forum I used to frequent. Which I shall now resurrect.

Quote from Mackie The Staggie :

The Fountain

This is the kind of films I really enjoy, although granted it's not a film for everyone as a lot of people will think it is difficult to follow (which tbf it is). Beautiful cinematography/visual effects, powerful writing, wonderful direction and heck even Hugh Jackman (who is second only to Jason Statham as actors I loath) is on top notch with his performance. I can only say that if you liked Donnie Darko then give this a try, but if you are looking for a switch off and watch movie then avoid.

This will be viewed in 10/15 years time as a cult classic I feel

+1 . I love those kind of films. Not sure I really got a handle on it completley, but I love films that leave me wondering.