ScinteX

My dsl is "half a meg".... so in your Browser's language thats usually "60K". It is usually that all of the time except for the odd second when it goes to 61K 8) Remember it is 576 Kilo-Bits-Per-Second... not Bytes. Therefore divide by 10 and you have a more understandable measure- usually 50 to 60K per second. 500K a second would be a 5meg line.... as for the contention, yes thats usually 50:1 for homes users, 20:1 for 'busienss broadband' as they term it, however a SDSL connection is even lower, at 10:1 or 5:1 or even 1:1 if you have the odd £500 a month spare

The turtle! hehehe oh yes that will be the bright green Alcatel speedtouch then mine was ok but it was just so ugly

Hi ryoko, Is it not as simple as right clicking your 'blank' partition/disk and clicking 'Change drive letters and paths'? If I do this on my primary (none active) partition I can quite happily change the letter. Maybe it is the case that you do not have a label for the volume? My 'drive C' didnt have a label until recently - and thats only because an application made me type one in. This was just a matter of right clicking the drive -> properties then typing a new label in the blank field. Where I am looking at currently is: In control panel -> Adminsitrive tools -> computer management Then: storage ->disk management Hopefully you can mount a drive in here.

Just a thought but maybe try: Installing DirectX 9.0C (click 'Download' on the right hand side of the page that opens) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/detai...;DisplayLang=en That ATI patch you applied is quite old since it uses Catalyst 3.9 drivers. Currently we are on 4.8, with 4.9 Beta being available due to 4.8 drivers being a bit slow with Doom 3. ATI 4.8 drivers are here (release notes say that these drivers support all AIW variants) Click 'Download' that is on the 'High Speed (Cable / DSL)' row: http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/winxp...&submit.y=9 If you want to run 4.9Beta (ive had no problems yet) then they are available here (click the link towards the top of the page when it opens): http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4547.html That should sort you out

Hi Waffler, It sounds pretty odd to me! Silly question but you are sure that you have unplugged the line to your old modem? Its possible that your pc is still using your old modem! Or at least, IE is. Assuming thats ok (and im sorry if ive offended) you could try a speed test: http://www.dslreports.com/stest This should give u a fairly reliable result. It seems like your scenario could just be bad luck. What i mean is that it is possible for you to have joined a bad gameserver and then downloaded your game from a poor performing server. If you use the Opera browser it shows you how fast data is being recieved which is handy. It could be Windows Update that is automatically downloading an update...hence its using up the bandwidth. Maybe worth checking out. Sorry I cant give a one stop fix! All the best

Oops, so ok our posts crossed It looks like that CPU is fully supported- after all it's an Intel... and it fits in the hole ok... and the FSB is supported (533). I'd send it back, after all what else can you do? You know your PC works with the other CPU so your know every other component works. The HP a600y series supports the celeron 355 so it's not unknown in the world of HP. Sorry matey but I'd throw that CPU back at the shop

This might be of use: http://www.msi.com.tw/html/support/bios/note/boot.htm To get the correct BIOS update, find the appropriate link.... although your board is OEM so that's why it isn't on the MSI site, and is on the HP site. Therefore I am assuming that with the link above and the BIOS update from HP (or whichever manufacturer made your PC) you might just be able to sort it all out. If that fails, then yes it probably is knackered. That MSI mobo uses the Intel 845X chipset- where X is either none existant, D,E,F or G. Each supports different speeds of RAM (hence the difference on the HP site that thatsteveguy noticed) The only way to settle this is for you to use something like the Intel Chipset ID program to ID your chipset properly. Then you can find out what the maximum DDR speed is. Apparenly Intel 845G can support up to DDR333 (PC2700). Anyhow, even if your mobo supports DDR266 and you are using DDR333 it will just run slower.

oops missed one issue! Just read your 1st post on this subject: Its true that the ICH5 chip makes the two disks appear as one however its dead easy to partition it. I use Acronis Partition Expert which chops the disks up quite nicely indeed. I did wonder how it did this so i did some testing and it appears that the new partition was spead evenly over the 2 physical disks. Ive had no issues with this at all and it functions just like any normal single disked machine.... i forget about the RAID most the time. ---- Scin

Hi, Thought id add just a bit of additional info should anyone be looking at this and thinking that they might like raid 0 too! I found the easiest way of getting fast disks at a reasonable price is to buy a motherboard with support for sata raid. This comes usually in the form of a chip from intel, highpoint or promise... as Alec said. Its then as simple as connecting the drives up and running the software on the chip itself. My setup below was dead easy. Got 2 western digital drives (the smaller 36Gb Raptor), connected them to the sata connectors Booted up the PC and pressed CTRL-I which took me into the software to setup the array (intel ich5) Configured it (its kinda obvious when u r doing it) Rebooted with the XP CD in the drive and bob's your aunty it works- XP merrily installing on the array. Of course you have to load up the raid driver during the setup (press f6 when the message is shown at the bottom right at the start of installation) Now i have (just ran these tests without any kind of special setup, and i have been using my pc all day): About 187Mb per sec (burst) Around 105Mb per Sec sequential read ...at a response time of 8.8ms. Only puts on 2% CPU load. I think this performance is well worth it- for example if you run just one SATA or PATA drive you will see around 60Mb per sec sequential read. So sata raid0 is not that far off double the speed. Ultra ATA looks like its just down on SATA150. Anyhow that should give you some idea on the stats. If you want some realistic measures... my PC boots into XP Pro in about 14 seconds from when i press the on button. At least 3 or 4 seconds of that has to be POST! And it isnt just down to my RAM and CPU, this type of setup is quick. Have fun guys

I think really it's Solaris you're after 8) Only kiddin' Apache or IIS is they way to go. Maybe worth just researching the most appropriate option for you- depending on what you intend to do with your website

Thats certainly something to bear in mind- something that I do (that I'd highly recommend) is to get your hands on a copy of Norton Ghost. If you do a complete rebuild then you can create an image of your new work of art and then that can act as a reliable backup when required. Also good for those 'its going a bit slow and I havent a clue why' moments! I create a separate partition (thats a slice of hard disk that has it's own drive letter) so it's a fairly simple affair to restore this image should it be needed. Then I create another partition that holds all of my personal files. Therefore drive C: just has XP and installed programs/games on it. I recently tried Service Pack 2 for XP and when it went a little wrong I simply restored my Norton Ghost image and the machine was back to how it was previously. I see heat was mentioned- this is so true! Airflow is always a good thing. Maybe worth having a peek inside your PC and giving it a quick vacuum since the case fans probably dont have dust filters on them.

I guess there are two areas to consider here. 1- did the games run ok when you 1st got this PC? 2- Do you join in with most of us and spend hours tweaking and fine tuning?! To be honest I'd rattle through the most common scenarios. Off the top of my head: Scan for viruses, spyware, trojans etc. etc. Run scandisk ('Error Checking' in XP)- right click your hard disk in My Computer -> Properties -> Tools tab -> Error Checking -> Check Now button. Do a defrag (I use Diskeeper) but he XP one should be ok. Download CCleaner -removes junk files. The same goes for Spybot and Ad-aware. Google can find these for you (its our best friend) So that's the files/disk/nasties sorted -I have probably forgotten something- I am sure someone will suggest other things you can do Next thing is maybe you have excess tasks running in the background. These are typically programs that can hog resources- so called 'update' utilities are one- anything that is hovering by the clock needs checking out. Of course there are genuine ones too. Next is Antivirus- try to find the option to scan 'recommended' files when doing a real-time scan. Your PC could be scanning every file it opens. An update of the graphics card drivers is always a good idea- go to the vendor's site for these. Same goes for the motherboard- get the latest chipset drivers. Maybe you can find a guide about how to setup DirectX and OpenGL - you might have all of your settings set to high quality which may be making things appear slower. A slightly more risky operation is disabling unneeded services. Be really careful with this as it can all go very wrong! (Of course don't hold me responsible!). Black viper's guide is useful since it has a 'safe' option. You can try out a few of the many tweaks for XP- typical ones are turning off the Themes in XP, not using a large desktop image etc. Of course backup the Registry so you can restore if you make a mistake. If you get scared at any point just give it a miss or do some research to work out exactly what you need to do to accomplish something. I guess that's the basics. To be honest it could be anything nibbling at your system. Hopefully one of the above will sort that out. Good luck! -- Ad

Hi, This is my 1st post (blah blah its a pleasure etc. etc!) Anyhow I have noticed that many people are concerned about XP SP2 and what it actually does. More by coincidence than design my machine appears to have DEP deactivated, along with the pesky MS firewall. Therefore you could somewhat argue that the upgrade to SP2 was fairly pointless! Anyhow for you guys wanting to disable DEP you can specify this in the BOOT.INI file (run MSConfig from the Run command) and add in there: /noexecute=AlwaysOff My boot.ini actually has /noexecute=OptIn in it! So I suppose the question is how did this happen? i have minimal services started (most of them are disabled and only a few on manual) so maybe this is to blame. I'm thinking that really I could just leave DEP off seeing as this was how it was before. As a double check i tried some problematic apps (yahoo messenger V6 and Stardock Bootskin) and I haven't seen a warning anywhere. A handy check for DEP on your system: http://www.user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~normanb/ To be honest this whole scenario isnt really a problem for me personally (yet), although you may actually be wanting DEP activated so it could well be.

Now that's a very good point. You are porbably right- after all my world is solaris and oracle! As i type this i have just spent a whole 6 minutes in Norton Ghost! SP2 appeared to be the 'creeping death' - seemed ok last night and earlier today but it gradually made my system slower and slower. The final thing was that my network connection broke and I couldn't create a new one. For some reason the DHCP service kept being disabled and then XP was moaning about WMI (or lack of) and insisted that i restore from an earlier System Restore point. That's all very well apart from when your earlier restore point is pre-SP2! All this seemed to happen after some benchmarking in Doom 3. Anyhow I am not going to join the Flaming XP2 cart- SP2 looks good. Maybe i dont understand enough about it just yet in order to get to it's full potential. Thanks for the wise words indeed

just a thought but where was this SP2 update from? I had a similar problem with RC1 where it really wrecked something to the extent where the RPC service couldn't start... = a rebuild I have however had no problems as such with SP2 Final -apart from DEP being off by default but there we are! I also went for the the full 266Mb download and not the slipstreamed one- maybe this helped since it might be possible that the odd update was showing as installed but might not have been properly installed. You could try using Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer just to clarify the integrity of the installed patches and then go from there.