Alien

Quote: Cause there are a LOT of formats that default to media player. I may only play one .aif file or one .au file in the next 6 months, but I wanted all of 'em to use media player 6. So all you have to do is remember to use the Open With->Choose Program->Always Use This Program funtion the 1st time you use a file type & you won't have to do it again. It's much quicker & simpler, as well as less effort & hassle, to do it this way than to try & do it the way you did. Or maybe you just like doing things the difficult way?

I'll agree with you about the layout of Dabs' site - but then I could say the same about a lot of sites - webmasters still design their sites as if everyone was still using 15" monitors @ 800x600 - I wish the lot of them would learn to start using variable sized fonts & set the sizes of frames & tables to adjust according to the size of the window.

Well, thanks to that patch from Windows Update I can now use the hibernate function without losing my ability to use the internet - but this raises a new issue - anyone know how to change the shutdown box so that it shows Hibernate by default instead of Standby. I know you can do Hibernate by holding the shift key down which changes Standy to Hibernate, but as I don't use Standby I'd like to change it permanently.

Hi guys - just thought I'd add my experiences & thoughts on the issue into the mix. www.dabs.com Have ordered from them quite a few times & have no complaints about them. On 1 occasion the company who does their deliveries [Parcelforce] managed to lose something, so they had to dispatch another, but aside from that they've been great. As long as you don't want guaranteed next day delivery then delivery is free & is listed as 1-3 days, but if you order it in the morning Monday to Thursday & they have it in stock I've found you usually get it the next day. Prices are usually good too [though if your order comes to less than £75 ex. vat then you get charged a "small order charge" of £2.95 ex. vat] BTW - about 8 months after I'd bought a HDD & a cheapo Cooler Master HSF [for my K6-2/500] the fan started to sound a bit rattly so phoned them up & them sent me a replacement - without me having to send the old 1 back! Funny thing is that the occasional rattling noise it was making [& yes I did check to make sure there were no wires getting in the way ] stopped of its own accord by the time the replacement fan arrived [i think that was the thing that Parcelforce managed to lose], so now I have a spare HSF sitting around. www.overclockers.co.uk Only ordered from them once, but no probs - prices aren't too bad & they do some of the less boring stuff like rounded IDE cables, fan grills, Arctic Silver, etc. www.eclipse-computers.com Have ordered from these guys several times, initially because they had some amazingly good prices, & the service [delivery, etc] seemed ok, but that was until I tried buying a Radeon from them. I ordered an OEM Radeon 64MB DDR ViVo & stick of 128MB PC133 RAM from them. What happened was that I phoned them to make sure that they definitely still had some in stock & was told that they did so filled out the online order form & submitted it immediately - big mistake. What I should have done is ordered it over the phone - ok, so I would have had to pay an extra £2 surcharge for a phone order, but considering the prices they were offerering it would still have been cheaper than all the competition including the delivery charge! The problem is [as was eventually explained to me] that the website & it's commercial/order-handling bits is kept on 1 server, but that they actually process the orders & manage them with a system run from another server. If the 2 were constantly sync'd then it wouldn't be an issue, but IIRC that is only done about once a day or so, so by the time my order filtered through to the other server they had sold out! But that wasn't the worst of it - It took until 10 days after placing the order for them to admit that they couldn't get any more due to them being discontinued & that they probably wouldn't get any retail versions of the card in either [plus I didn't have the extra £40 for the retail 1 @ the time anyway], so they agreed to send me the RAM & refund the rest. It then took them another 10 days for them to get the money back into my account! Eventually, after a lot of phoning around I managed to find a PC World that had a few of the retail versions in stock, so I went & got 1....which I had to take back the next day cos when I got it home I discoverd that 1 of the fan blades was missing!!!!! Oh, & just thought I'd mention - I just checked Eclipse's price for a retail version [including HSF] of an XP1900+ against Dabs' :- Eclipse - £211.44 [VAT included, but delivery is extra] Dabs - £162.14 [VAT included & delivery is free] I guess their prices aren't what they used to be.

Try removing/deleting any & all mentions of the offending devices in Device Manager, then shutdown & physically remove them, boot up, shut down, then reinstall - has been known to work for me @ times.

OK, I realise this sounds like a crazy question, but WHY on earth did you try swapping the exe files? why didn't you just right-click on a video file, use the Open With function & select the older version of Media Player & select the checkbox that says "Always use the selected program..." & then click OK???

LOL, might be an idea if the guy who made the prog actually used it on his site - the text is fixed size & too small so IE's View->Text Size function doesn't have any effect on it & if you try viewing the page in NS 6.2.x it does enlarge but the formatting's flubbed with the menu overlapping the main text!

I occasionally backup my entire C: partition to another partition with Ghost, but other than that I don't bother backing up most of the time. That may change if the new version of Ahead/Nero's InCD actually works without problems [haven't tried it yet] - I may back up some of my My Documents stuff. As for profile corruption & losing stuff due to reinstall or whatever - I wouldn't lose much - my Desktop, Favorites, My Documents, OE address book & emails are all kept on other partitions - the only stuff that goes on C is Windows itself & the programs I install - so all I'd really lose is my settings for various things like theme colours, & the settings that tell Windows that stuff like My Documents isn't actually on C: etc, but that is very easily put back.

I had this happen just the once - but it was ages ago & I don't remember whether I fixed it or had to redo everything. 1 thing I do remember is that I'm pretty sure it was before I realised I could do perfectly ok with just the Administrator account. Do you have the main Administrator account plus other accounts? Another issue is that my HDD is an IBM 75GXP. I've read a lot about the probs ppl have had with them, though aside from the occasional file or 2 getting corrupted & having to be replaced, & it's possible that this might have been the cause when I had the same prob as you.

Yeah, that's right, rub it in - you with your fancy, slightly newer version that can use that hydravision prog. Grrrr! I tried it on mine because although it doesn't list mine [Radeon 64MB DDR ViVo] in the compatibility list I didn't see any mention of any significant hardware difference between mine & the ones on the list that would account for the ability to use the Hydravision function. Maybe I missed something. <shrugs> Would have been cool though.

Sorry to be a party-pooper, but I installed the newer drivers & the new version of MMC & whenever I tried to record with Video In it crashed about 5 seconds after I hit the record button. I went back to the previous drivers, but still with MMC 7.6, & it did the same thing, so uninstalled 7.6 & went back to 7.2. I might try the newer drivers again with MMC 7.2 later.

thanks for that, I got the actual driver & capture driver the other day [still haven't gotten round to installing them - gonna do it in a mo], but was wondering when they were going to do an update for MMC - glad they didn't make us wait too long. :-)

I think the only reason I'll ever use NTFS on my system is when I get a bigger drive [30GB @ the mo] & have room to play around with video recording & editing as NTFS allows files bigger than 4GB [or so I've heard]. Edit: oops, forgot to add that I would only be using NTFS on the partition that I would dedicate to large video files, not my boot partition or any of the others.

The Enermax 431 is supposed to be good, but [especially as you're using an AMD-based system] the 3.3v is important too - what does that report as?

Sorry to differ with you PP, but not all ISP's work that way - take mine for example - my NIC has a physical address in the format xx-xx-xx-xx-xx-xx [as I have been led to believe that all NIC's do], then the machine is assigned a IP address by the ISP, if Windows can't connect to the ISP [via the cable modem] then it will assign the computer a default IP in the format 169.xxx.xxx.xxx. Other things to bear in mind [based on how my ISP works - other ISPs may vary in working practice] :- As well as the MAC ID [some sort of built in ID code I think] of the cable modem being registered in connection to my account, the ISP also caches the physical address of the network adapter [not sure exactly what it would do in the case of a modem connected by USB]. When the lease period [4hrs for my ISP] expires, the server checks to see if the modem is still connected to its [the ISP's not the user's] network & powered on, if so then it renews the lease of the IP address to that cable modem. However, the "caching" [sp?] of the network card's physical address is tied to this lease, so that if you were to switch network cards halfway through the lease period then when you rebooted & Windows had finished installing the drivers for the new card [if it wasn't already installed] then you would be unable to connect because the ISP's server would take 1 look @ the physical address of the new network card & refuse to allow a connection because it's not the 1 it has you listed as using. Under the above circumstances my ISP recommends unplugging the cable modem for 4.5 - 5 hours so that the server will "forget" about the network card being previously used [because the lease on the IP addy will have run out & as the caching of the NIC's physical addy is tied to that then that should be removed from the cache as well]. In theory you might be able to do this without quite so long a wait by waiting to change your NIC until a few mins before the lease runs out & making sure to remember to completely turn the cable modem off [& when you turn it on make sure you turn it on before turning the computer on] until a few mins after the IP lease is set to expire. Sorry, started rambling there & got carried away. Dunno if any of that's useful to you or to anyone. I would say though that I wouldn't recommend setting the IP for the machine that connects to the net without checking with your ISP 1st because [i'm not 100% sure, but I'm fairly certain] I think this will bugger up your net connection because that IP is the 1 by which your computer is identified to the internet - for example, mine doesn't start with 192, @ the moment it starts with 62, although others within my ISPs range include 192, 80, & I think 82.

I don't suppose by any chance that you've installed Ahead/Nero's InCD software have you? Whilst Nero itself works fine on my system, if I install InCD it does exactly what you describe. That's the only cause I know of.

This sounds a little like the overtaxed PSU issue. What PSU do you have?

Bilston, I believe PinkPanther meant the IP addy for your network card, not that of your internet connection which is different. Maybe someone else can do a better job of explaining this than me.

I think you need a newer graphics card, or go back to 2K. Voodoo2's a dinosaur, let it rest in piece.

Yeah, that's happened to me on a few occasions, but not recently. It even happened once or twice with 98SE, so the theory about it being an NT-based-OS-only thing goes out the window.

Quote: Maybe it's because XP have NTFS 5.1? Which is why I don't understand why it's still crappy with FAT32.

Quote: Set the page file up to a permanent amt., and defrag it. Errrmm... don't you mean defrag then set the swap file, so that the file will be created in 1 contiguous lump? [is easier if you temporarily assign the swap file to a diff. partition or just turn it off, then defrag, then set it to fixed size] I haven't heard of any defraggers that can defrag the swap file in XP - 9x, yes, but not XP.

The only thing I can think of that might be relavent to your situation is if you have more than 1 NIC in there, but only have 1 connected to something - if this is the case, then the simple solution is to disable the unused 1. If you only have the 1, but haven't connected it to your cable modem yet, then there's your prob - hook it up & your prob should disappear [hopefully].

I can't make any comment about Renegade as I don't have it so haven't tried it, but Max Payne runs just fine on my system, despite my specs being below Merkor's [apart from amount of RAM] K6-2/500 TMC TI5VGA mobo [2MB cache version] 320MB RAM [1x64 + 2x128] ATI Radeon 64MB DDR ViVo Sonic Vortex 2 30GB IBM 75GXP PS - never had to run MP in compatibility mode either.

Felix, I realise that the following is a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, but I have 2 things to say to you: 1. Xteq Xsetup 2. Different Partition If you move your address book, emails, etc to a different drive then it doesn't matter how many times you reformat C: your emails will still be fine. I also do the same for My Documents, Desktop, Favorites, etc, but I tend to do those last few with TweakUI. Once you've moved them once you only have to use Xsetup or TweakUI to tell windows to look somewhere other than the default for the various folders/files. 1 thing to note, if you do do this & you want to move your address book make sure you read the specific notes for that tweak in Xsetup before you do it, especially from the 2nd time you do it onwards due to the annoying way that they've done that particular tweak.