lorddraxar

About a week ago my Sound Blaster Live! Value (hey the 1st model) burnt so now I get to work with the integrated CMedia audio card. Problem is noise ratio, with crackling during volume changes (winamp, games)... and even worse very very bad buffers so sound breaks in Morrowind and such. To add to the burden, the ADS Instant DVD stopped working like a charm because the clock of the integrated card is *very* bad. So, I decided I need a card. It's my sound system after all! I got access to a local store that sells Audigy 2 OEM cards for an affordable price (very), but I'm wondering... I got an ASUS A7V333... amazing board but I had problems with VIA chipsets and it got a VIA KT333 chipset. Question is: Does the Audigy 2 card produce the same crackling, distortion and even sound difformation found on the Live Value serie on VIA chipsets? And is the NT kernel support better than the Live serie? Would be glad to hear from your experiences!! By the way here's my system summarized: ASUS K7V333 ASUS GeForce FX 5200 128Mb RAM 512 Mb RAM DDR Macronix Ethernet Network Adapter 10/100 ATi TV Wonder VE ADS Instant DVD Back-UPS CS 350 Chenming Black Tower Enermax 350W Power Supply (two fans) the other devices are irrelevant

You're starting from Windows 98 SE? No wonder you got crashing problems... For that Linux thing however... Keep in mind that while most of Linux distributions like Mandrake, Fedora Core or SUSE are simple to use, Linux is still more complicated than Windows so you may want to read a little about linux before starting, otherwise you could get stuck. As for the hardware... Linux is not exactly power hungry and should run on any Pentium (or 386 in some distros) with about 128Mb of RAM. The specs you got will require you to use hardware based encoders unless you want frame skips when recording in DVD quality. The program you are looking for is MythTV. I do not use it however because I got an Adaptec VideOh card, and SageTV does a much better job, however it only runs on Windows... but since it's JAVA based, maybe they will make it available to Linux (cross fingers). MythTV can use either software encoding or hardware encoding. But in your case, unless VideoCDs are your only targets, you must use a hardware encoder. I sugget Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 or PVR-350 for they are supported under Linux. They also produce DVD quality MPEG2 streams. For the game thing, WineX is the program you need. It's now called Cedega and made by Transgaming. For the DOS based games, try DOSBox, but that one requires a fast CPU, since you got 1Ghz, you might be able to run old games but it will probably require some tweaking. For running Age of Empires, Cedega should do more than it's job. You only need dual boot if you actually want to KEEP Windows. If you choose to do so, Windows will be selectable from GRUB (a menu that will appear before starting your operating system). A Linux switch is viable only if you know what you're doing. Most of the time, little configuration will be required, but since you want to do PVR, I suggest you read documentation before trying. If you are a computer newbie, maybe you should resort to WinXP. That one doesn't hang too often (I'm suprised you still use Win98 with such machine!).

Well, to make them work you actually need two things. First, the emulators, but you already got these right? Since your computer most likely does not have a compatible interface to read the cartridge containing the game, you will have to "dump" it into a binary file. These are commonly called roms. There are two way of getting these. First you can get a special piece of hardware that can read the cartridge. But these are becoming difficult to get. ... or you may try to seek these images on the net. However nobody can help you with this. With a bit of imagination you will most likely get some. The CD based consoles aren't that hard however since your CD (or DVD) drive can read the original CDs. Try not to use copies these usually don't work that well anyway. Hope that does help!

You can go for an advanced PVR card with built in MPEG chips. The problem with most of these card are the use of proprietary software. Since the card itself cost a lot, the softwares are buggy and in almost every case, you are stuck with it. I personnaly got a ADS Instant DVD... these make very good looking movies in realtime but you got only two or three capture programs... And drivers aren't that good. But I manage to always get it working... These might actually be too much trouble for you. In fact since you only want to make very good transfert of your home movies, get any TV card which support high resolution and use a program that makes MPEG afterward like TMPEGEnc. Realtime encoding can never be better than slow two pass software encoding. Realtime encoding cards are better with VERY casual use... like me I use it as a VCR and fill books of CD each year. The Ati TV Wonder looks an attractive choice but better stay away from it... I got one and the drivers aren't especially spectacular, and it only does 240 line vertical maximum. It can be unlocked with an open source drivers but it adds a lot of garbage. Not very good. The Canopus ADVC-100 is a wonderful card that would give you standard DV feed but it's over your budget (250$)... Next are ASUS TV Tuner cards... only 50$ if you look well.. These got good reviews and are cheap... You can even make realime capture if you choose a good software (but these does not include MPEG chip inside) but they do full DVD resolution (752 * 480) Oh my! I'm writing a new Lord of the Rings there... Time to shut up! Hehe Hope it give some you some clues

Blue leds, laser and such looks much better if the center of the case is free from wires. So I just bought a box of plastic ties, and ran all the wires along the case sides, I had to install a few hooks for it to be perfect, but if you have long enough cable, no cable should be able to obstruct the window. I have an Enermax myself and the cables are long enough to be run along the side below the powersupply and horizontally out of the window, but you need to install your drive in the upper part of the case. I did on a ChenMing full tower case, so should be feasible on any case I guess hehe (except for giant server cases hehe)

Basically, you're trying to boot a partition that is on a different disk than your first... Unfortunately, Windows Bootloader has some inherent limitations. Altough you can do the boot sector trick to boot another partition in the same disk, going to another disk probably require a better bootloader. You could try xOSL, available freely at www.xosl.org, it uses an entirely graphical interface and should prove very useful. It has almost the full power of LILO but you don't have to edit any config.

Well I had this problem very long ago... Didn't use Win98 for years but this was caused by a bad motherboard driver... Update all of your drivers. You might also check your ACPI settings in the BIOS setup. This issue can be resolved with better drivers I already had it. And you only need to turn off your CPU for about 10 seconds really. The hardware is long dead by then... If it's not the case, you should check the temperature inside the case too...

Usually if the machine is well configured, you will see a USB 2.0 Hub under the Universal Serial Bus tree in the Device Manager. The name may vary especially if you got a ViA based motherboard.

Time for another impossible question! I currently have a Geforce FX card with 128 Mb... the low model with a fan... I noticed that while games use beautiful pixel shaders to produce water waves and such, the surface of the water isn't updated... It isn't that bad if your looking at the water in Morrowind and stand still... But if I move, I quickly realize that the surface isn't updated... so I see reflections of mountains just beforce plain land... and such.. Unreal Tournament 2003 exhibit the same problem and Unreal 2 too... exact same problem.. the surface pixmap is not updated before about 30 seconds... Looks like I'm missing some of the great effects... By the way I had an ATI Radeon 9000 before, and exhibited the same problem (the EXACT same problem). Any ideas? By the way my system is as follow: ASUS A7V333 AMD XP 1700+ 2 * 256MB DDR333 (total 512 mb) ASUS V9520TD GFX-5200 128MO DDR TV-OUT/DVI integrated CMEDIA 8738 HD 80Gb 7200rpm (2mb cache) Sony DVD-ROM 8x LG 16-10-40 CD Burner ATI Tv Wonder VE All drivers were updated, all updates applied (Windows Update) DirectX 9.0a

I've tried buth card and for the price, I'd say you're better off with a Radeon 9000... This card is cheap, is DirectX 8 compliant, yes the pixel shaders work with the new Catalyst drivers... The GeForce 4MX seems to be slower, most of the time you can't tell the difference. However the Geforce4 is DIrectX7 so you'll lose quite a bunch of very nice effects! And no, you don't need to plug it to the supply and it doesn't seem to be power hungry. I even ran it with a 250W PSU... BUT you might check the Magic FX... of the GeForce FX5200. It performs much better and it's not much more costy.

Well I finally got it... Worked far better than expected. The popping issue is gone. Buffer are okay even got some new environnemental presets wow... at least got to have some fun with them about 2 minutes... Not so many games use this extensively hehe. Just hope the Instant DVD works okay again but I guess it will... Will know tomorrow when I record this week's Robotwars Long live to Mr. Psycho!!!

Well I assume you are running Windows XP... Most of the time, the black screens are due to video drivers problems or sometimes old functions no longer supported. What video card have you got? You should check you have the latest drivers. A little visit on Windows Update shouldn't hurt too. In the setup of Diablo II, disable Direct 3D acceleration. Anyway you will see VERY little improvement. You could also try to lower the acceleration level of your video card. For that right-click on an empty location of your desktop and chose properties. Then go to settings and chose advanced. Go to Troubleshooting and lower the acceleration level. See if it solves your problem!

IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is typically an hardware failure, or a driver failure. I would be surprised if a simple program would do that. FIrst I would update the network card drivers to the latest as they might handle some strange behavior rather badly. Some program also uses drivers to extend their possibilities. While these drivers don't point to any hardware, a programming error may trigger this. Are you using some anti-virus to filter your sent mail? You may also want to update Pegasus Mail and/or opera. Altough they are different products, they may share a common "driver"

Eh well in Tools / Internet Options / Security Check the Security Level of Internet If you are running a firewall try disabling it to see if it works better.

Well if you don't have a UPS I strongly recommend you do get one, the base models are inexpensives. Unlike what most people think turning off the hard drive on a workstation is a bad idea. Most drives die because the motor starter breaks, the bearing at the center of the disk inside the drive isn't supposed to pose any problems before minimum of 5 years... 50 years in the more expensive disks... I personally never seen a drive die because the bearing was too much used. I did however see many drives with starters broken. I just have 4 stacked in drawers, the data surface is perfect but they won't start anymore. (well they do if I try a lot of times, not very usable) Your motherboard is also made of several circuits panel glued together. The current PCBs got 4 or 5 stages of circuitry. Big variations of temperature will tend to wear off the board. But turning it on 24/24 also have some dangers which can be resolved. First make sure your motherboard will shut down if your CPU temperature gets too high. Life expectancy of your fans are the lowest. Unless you are on a very tight budget, it's a good idea to replace the fans every year. Also watch your temperature sometimes, a good rise of temperature usually predict trouble with your components.

I guess you won't see any improvement. It's like asking if you would get a better image output on your TV if you plugged it with a S-Video to RCA connector. The converter just keep the needed signal to your VGA monitor and throw away the unneeded info.

If the computer is a SlotA based P3 or P4, you know the CPU is plugged in a slot ans if perpendicular to the motherboard, then usually if the CPU is dead, the cpu fans are too... Some boards have diagnostic lights, but since you didn't mention, I guess there aren't any... But could you tell the model of your motherboard? I saw a lot of MSI based board (the K7T-Turbo most) just dying for no apparent reason. It might seems stupid but... remove the CPU then power the motherboard again. When lacking CPU or memory, most boards just beep. You may also check that your lithium battery is working, just test it with a voltmeter (5V scale). I don't know why but a lot of board are just plain dead when that battery isn't connected properly. (rust on the contacts may disable it)

You might as well want to try WinRoute. I did use it when I had a dial-up internet connection. While I found it limited for some games, it did work well. It even has options to block the connection in some hours so it won't stay connected all night long. WinGate also does that but its stability is still an issue.

When installing the Windows XP Service Pack 1, we lost the ability to use our roaming profile. A search on the knowledge base revealed that SP1 now requires the ownership of the directory pointed by the "User Profile" field. So I did take ownership and the only users having rights on this directory are my account and the "SYSTEM" account. Both are set at full control. Now the profile loads just fine! But when I log off, the system keeps telling me it cannot update the profile because of insufficient rights. Now of course my server profile is now about 2 weeks outdated. Anyone got idea of how to fix this? By the way I did try setting the profile on my hard disk to test, (I used one of my shared directory) ans the exact same behavior occurs. By the way here's how we're set up: One Windows 2000 Server (10.10.0.5) One Redhat Linux machine (10.10.0.1) with ip masquerading the DCHP loan ips from 10.10.0.0 to 10.10.0.254 (excluding 1 and 5) the DNS are those of my ISP the Gateway are set 10.10.0.1 to enable routing We had to add a modified HOSTS file to add the following lines 10.10.0.5 onyx 10.10.0.5 onyx.local (onyx is the domain name) it was required to avoid waiting like 2 minutes before being able to logon and the roaming profile would refuse to load sometimes setting the DNS at the server IP also solve the problem but it disables the router (now the internet wouldn't work) Ideas anyone? I need that profile to update

That did work! While recreating the directories I did notice something awkward. While the directory was owned by the account that used it, some parts weren't. So I did recreate all the profile tree and took ownership with the corresponding account. Now everything just work perfectly again... I must have moved some data in the directory tree that was owned by Administrator. That would explain the errors. Thanks a lot APK!

There are a few things you could check... Most of the times, repetitive computer lockups are due to ACPI problems. When you say after 30 minutes, is it 30 minutes idle or when working on it? In the Power Management icon in Control Panel check settings like automatic standby of such... Is your laptop a Compaq or Toshiba? Those needs special drivers becauses their ACPI management is different from a standard PC but the Windows XP installation will not see the difference... Ultimately check in the Device Manager under the computer tab which time of computer has been detected... Hope that does help a little bit

You might try Ad Aware : http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10045910.html?legacy=cnet It can remove a lot of the nasty publicity you might get on the web. Running an anti-virus would certainly not be bad! It might not be a Trojan, because as BBA said there are a little more subtle but it might well be ads. Those are usually programmed with haste.

Try to remember, have you installed something special the day it occured? If you can't remember, you could always go to Start / All Programs / Accessories / System Tools / System Restore The restore points usually have a description under them, that might ring a bell. You may also restore your computer to a date you remember it worked flawlessly. (Remember you can undo your restoration afterwards) If that doesn't help try removing your ati card and run on the integrated nforce. That might also eliminate some possibilities. A problem on the nforce too would probably mean a general AGP failure. At the last resort, you might flash your bios...

Your problem is a name resolution problem. That explains why no one can see you, or why you can't connect manually someone's resource. But you still can ping them because you do know their address. For example you can do: ping 192.168.0.1 But you can't do ping toto (I suppose the computer's name is toto) Okay now, now... You got two Network Adapter... What is the role of your PC? From what I understand you got a full router Linksys... Therefore the second network adapter is NOT needed. It would help if you told me the model of your router.. I have no idea if it's a 8 port, 4 port or even 1 port that needs a hub to work... That is, if the internet is shared on a hardwrae router, you only need ONE network adapter on each pc... getting a second one could hint a strategy of wiring... Let me explain by a schematic: PC1------------- H PC2------------- U ----- ROUTER -------- MODEM --------------- ISP PC3------------- B PC4------------- . If this is your case, (the hub might be integrated in the router) you dont need a second card. In fact the second card could lead to some problems. Keep me informed :x

OFFICIALY Microsoft says there's no now. But in fact there are programs that can do it for you. http://www.cracks.am/s.x This site has a Password Recovery Tool... Just choose Accent Word Password Recovery 1.02 Note that this site has an overwhelming amount of publicity, some of them not suitable for everyone. You must also be aware that if this document is not yours, you are breaking the law of private property. I just hope that it's for legitimate use. Peace and Prosperity