Kainz

Cheers for mentioning Beneath a Steel Sky there! Been using ScummVM for the past few months to play Indy/Fate of Atlantis, Sam & Max, and Monkey Island 1&2. Didn't know about Beneath a Steel Sky though woot!

Can't really do a solid comparison of both firewalls. I do however use Outpost Pro, have done since it arrived on the market. It has to be the most flexible and feature packed firewall I've come across out of Blackice, ZA Pro, and my old favourite AtGuard - which Outpost is very similar to. I'd recommend trying out its free version of Outpost v1. Currently Outpost 2 can only be obtained by purchasing it, and no free 'lite' version is planned. Outpost blocks ads, flashads, popups, has huge customisation on a lot of various web elements, the list goes on and on. So far I've got 5 friends to try the firewall with all of them loving it. Never tried Sysgate though.

Mozilla/Firebird seconded here. Since I stopped using my old favourite IE5 in preference to Mozilla & Firebird I've not seen a popup in a very long time, for the post part I've forgotten about them. Combine that browser with the Outpost Pro firewall which also kills ads and you've got sweet browsing

I was a total IE5 diehard until I gave up in sheer fruastration at popups and flash ads. Gave Mozilla ago and was blown away. Then tried Moz Firebird out since it was more quicker and streamlined without the mail client. So far I haven't looked back. Check out its Extensions which you can install too. I'd recommend Tabbed Browser Extensions. Just installed that last night and its amazing how I coped without it. You can move tabs, set them to auto reload, lock tabs theres just so many options for it.

I use RIOsitude, fast and small, it gets the job done. http://www.drilsej.com/rio.html

Yeeehaw! To get MM2 sorted out you need to install the Midtown Madness 2 XP Compatibility Patch, which sorts out a lot of issues with the Gefrog x cards. Without this patch all you get are a ton of teared polygons ingame which is scary stuff lol. Hmm ms's site is a tad slow for me atm, so check out MM2 Central http://www.mm2c.com/files/downloads/

Go for a G200 or G450. Don't know much about the 550+ range. I built this P2-450 with 1 gig of ram back in 1997. Also bought myself an 8mb Matrox Millenium G200 - its an awesome card. 2D was ultra fast and it could even play todays 3D games pretty well (Max payne at low res, Ultima Online's Third Dawn, Half Life:Counterstrike etc). Plus the duel head system is probably the best around, I've used it for quite sometime. Recently I bought myself a Geforce2 GTS. Honestly never seen a peice of junk in my life. Nice and fast in 3D as expected, but its 2D performance is no where near the G200's. On Win2k, I've had more problems with nvidia's buggy det drivers in 1 month, then I've ever had with Matrox's ones which known for their rock solid stability.

Yeah, I've been putting off buying a new HD for a while because I'm really better off building a new machine with todays specs lol, which I'll be doing soon anyways. As for my CD Writer, I've come to the conclusion its bit the dust, even though I've not used it much. I uninstalled and reinstalled Nero again last night, and burned my last 5 cdr's with various sized files all 5 had CRC errors, although my last one had files that actually could be read but the remaining files had CRC errors. Time to remove it and twat it repeatedly with a very large hammer

The 6.4gb is the only hd I have, I've got 1gb of hd space left over. If I had an additional 500mb, then I'd have installed Win98 no sweat. Instead I've got 600mb worth of data here taking up that possible win98 space, which needs to be backed up lol.

Heya guys, I can't see this as a Ram related problem, theres just 3 things that I point my finger at being the troublemaker. 1. Either both our cd writers have died on us 2. The lens has a bloomin big patch of dirt on it (just cleaned mine) 3. SP3 has changed or altered something that is causing this problem. I burned a cdr a few days before installing SP3 and that went perfectly. I'd install Win98 (ack ack) but haven't got too much room on this machine. My HD is only 6.4gb and has a 1gig spare. As for my writer having a problem, it could have one. Its very old but rarely used - only written about 25 cdr's since I bought it years ago. Nick, I've heard of Novatech yeah from a while back, they're just as good as any company though.

Hiya Nick, I've got the exact same problem as I found out last night. Saw your thread so decided to register and respond. My machine is an old one but hugely reliable, my writer is a old Philips 4x one, which has performed perfectly in the past, I only use it for occasional data backups every 4-5months. Anyway, I'm running Win2k SP3 on a P2-450 with a gig of ram. Just last month I upgraded flawlessly to SP3 and everything was fine. This Win2k install has been rock solid from the start and still is. Last night I decided to burn my first cdr since SP3 and under Nero 5.5 it burned at 4x perfectly, the cd finalised and ejected at the end. I've only got Nero on this machine. Upon reading it on both my Philip's cd drive, and my Creative dvd drive, the cd just sits there constantly being accessed, I can get dir listings in Explorer and Dos, I can access the files but they take extremely long to load up. The media I've been using for a long time is pretty good stuff (Philips multipurpse 1-12x). Old cdr's and retail cd's work perfectly in both drives also. I build pc's for living but cd writers were never my strongpoint at all, so i'm lost. I've uninstalled and let Win2k re-detect both drives with no luck. I've just re-written a second blank cdr and its giving out the same problem right this moment. Dunno what to do myself now PS. Must add this. While writing my post above, the cd was constantly being accessed for a stargate episode.avi file, media player generated this message as I ejected the cd - Data Error (cyclic redundancy check)...