Bursar

Are your serial ports enabled in the BIOS? Are they configured correctly in Windows (Baud rate, parity and data bits)? Check the settings with what the software is expecting.

Don't think so. I installed them other day when I put in a Ti4800SE card, and got the warning about the drivers not being signed. I suspect it's because there is a section in the drivers where you can override refresh rates. We all know what MS thinks of that...

For filtering, try SurfControl WebFilter. I use this at work, and it's great. Blocks access to all the naughty sites, and you can also filter out undesirable extensions. Not that cheap, but then you need to protect yourself. It's possible someone might well view a site that causes offense to one of your other customers, and then you could be in trouble. By blocking these sites, you're taking steps to lessen this risk.

Have you tried creating a playlist of the movie files, and then calling Medi Player with that playlist as the command option? Don't know if it would work, as I just hate Media Player. One of the most unfriendly bits of software to use.

Quote: My voltages dip when the system is under load. That's quite normal. What really matters is how much they dip by. If it's about .25v then you should be OK. But if you're losing around .5v or more, then you could have problems. Can you get your hands on a branded power supply for testing? Something like an Antec should give you great results. Also, some combinations of motherboards and power supplys just have problems working together. If the power supply is a bit erratic, and the board is a power hog, then you will have problems. Upping the power supply to a 500W may not make any difference. It all comes down to the ability of the PSU to deliver constant voltages. A cheapo 500W PSU will probably be worse than a branded 350W.

Have you run a speed test on the drive inside your burning software?

Not really. I think they're just called DVD cases

A jewel case is a jewel case. A clam shell case is one of these: http://www.blankdiscshop.co.uk/acatalog/cshells.jpg

I just setup a clean WinXP machine the other day at home, and after installing SP1, there were about 20 additional patches that needed to be installed. Most of these will be rolled into SP2 when it becomes available. Once that happens, it should be a case of installing SP2, and maybe a couple of extra IE patches and you're done. But then the pre SP3 patches will come out...

The copy you purchased should be bootable already. If you had XP Home preinstalled on a new PC, you should have a recovery CD, so you don't really need an XP Home CD. If you're asking about burning naughty copies of the software, you're out of luck.

Well, as I mentioned in another thread, I'm making an arcade cabinet. I haven't started on the cabinet itself yet (MDF is being delivered on Monday), as I figured it would be much more fun to build the control panel first. Here are some pics of the work so far: http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp1.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp2.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp3.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp4.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp5.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp6.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp7.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp8.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp9.jpg http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp10.jpg As you can see, I only have sticks and buttons for two players at the moment, but I will buy the other ones once my bank balance has recovered No comments about it being a bit messy or anything, as this is just a prototype made of chipboard. It's a complete nightmare to work with. The PCB thing is an I-PAC, and allows me to wire in all the joysticks and buttons for 4 players. It then connects to the keyboard port on the PC. There's a pass through connector on the I-PAC that allows a keyboard to be hooked up at the same time. I'm about half way through the wiring at the moment, but am off out for some birthday celebrations I should have it done by tomorrow and will post some pics of me playing various arcade games on it

I've just knocked up a couple of webpages that chronicle the construction http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade As you can see, I've moved on a little bit and have put in a couple of the front panels, and the monitor shelf. I'm thinking I might leave the back of the cabinet open just so that there's more air getting around the PC and monitor, but I'll see how I get on.

This PC I'm using has an oboard LAN which I use for connecting the machine to a LAN. It also has an XL card in it for my cable modem. The only reason I'm doing it this way is that I can move the LAN card to different machines, and the modem won't have to learn another MAC address. My network connections are fairly rubbish though as I'm still using a 10MB hub. Been too much of a cheapskate to upgrade it though. It's mostly used for ICS, so 10MB is plenty for that. Functionality wise, I don't think you'll notice any difference.

Been nice here in St Ives (near Cambridge, not the other one on further South!). Been sunny all weekend, but not very warm. Nice to feel the warmth through some glass, but not so great to actually be out (unless you're doing something energetic). Spent the weekend building my arcade cab, but it's been mostly indoors work. The thing is too big to build outside and then lug up the stairs into its final resting place. Let's hope this means the start of Spring and an end to the dreary weather. I think I have a feeling that the UK weather will soon change again though (and probably for the worse )

Quote: * Probably won't need a Super High-End one for those games... & that is ALOT of CPU horsepower you're applying to that beastie man! (I am HONESTLY surprised your putting P4 power into it... seriously!) It is a fair amount of horsepower, but some games such as Metal Slug have a shed load of action going on at once, and they can suffer from slow down. The old Athlon 1.2@1.33 had trouble keeping up. I figured I might as well give it a boost so it can cope with any newer games that come out in the forseeable future. Things like RaveRacer are fairly heavy on the system as well. Quote: Well, the advantage of a higher end video card would be antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Honestly I don't know if MAME natively supports AA/AF or if there is a compile that does, but when I switched on AA/AF in ZSNES the difference was amazing! Food for thought, anyway. P.S. The cabinet looks amazing! Reminds me of the four player Gauntlet style machine... Currently it's a GF2U, but it should be upgraded to a GF4 4800SE in te not too distant future And you probably won't be surprised to learn that Gauntlet is exactly the reason I built a 4 player cab over anything else

Well, originally it was going to be an Athlon, but I think I've killed it I never got on with that AMD stuff anyway, so it's back to Intel for me It's going to be a P4. Not sure if it'll be a 1.6 or a 2.53 yet. Depends what I decide on when the bits arrive. As for graphics, the cabinet will be plain black. I did think about printing off some large graphics for the side, but it's fairly expensive. I will have a marquee across the top though. Not sure on final design, probably a MAME one. I'm also planning on a few graphics around the monitor bezel, but again, haven't given them a huge amount of thought yet. The PC will be running MAME with a complete ROM set (err, 3700 odd games I think), Daphne (for the laser disc games such as Dragons Lair, Space Ace and so-on), and a couple of other bits and bobs too.

Bit of bump for this thread After starting this project last August, I've finally found some free time to start making real progress Here's some pics from last august: This is a pic of the planned control panel. This is a prototype that I made from chipboard - cheap and cheerful. As you can see, it's going to have 4 players, and be a bit of a beast http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp1.jpg This is the panel with controls for players 1 and 2 installed. http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cp9.jpg Then there's the side panel (well, there's 2 of them ) http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/side1.jpg And that's pretty much how it stayed for 6 months. But today I got stuck in and started bolting things together: http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/cabframe.jpg There you can see the basic shell coming together, and here's another with the prototype control panel placed on it http://www.philspcmods.com/images/arcade/framecp.jpg Tomorrow I hope to get a bit further and start fitting some of the panels to fill the case in a bit. Then it's onto the final control panel. I've already made the panel top, just need to move the sticks and buttons into it, and order the extra bits for players 3 and 4. Hopefully now the nights are pulling out again I should have it done fairly soon

What are you doing when the error occurs? If it's from IE, then it's likely a problem with the webpage you are viewing. If it's something else, you'll need to give us a few more details.

Well the reason I asked was because I was adding a CD-RW drive and was curious about the best way to hook everything up. I know that previously connecting an ATA66 and an ATA100 device would cause both drives to run at ATA66 speed. As I said, I was told here that that problem was fixed in the ATA standard. I don't know if it's true, it's just what I was told. Aha, just found something: Quote: Connector Assignments and Color Coding: For the first time, the 80-conductor cable defines specific roles for each of the connectors on the cable; the older cable did not. Color coding of the connectors is used to make it easier to determine which connector goes with each device: Blue: The blue connector attaches to the host (motherboard or controller). Gray: The gray connector is in the middle of the cable, and goes to any slave (device 1) drive if present on the channel. Black: The black connector is at the opposite end from the host connector and goes to the master drive (device 0), or a single drive if only one is used. There are a couple of reasons why this coding was done. It is not a good idea to connect a single drive to the middle connector on a ribbon cable, because the "stub" of left-over, unconnected cable causes signaling problems. With Ultra DMA this "stub" connection is not just "not recommended", it is illegal: a single device must be at the end of the cable. The other reason is that since these cables support cable select inherently, the position of each drive on the cable matters if cable select is being used. With these two needs combined, it just made sense to design the cable so that drive positioning was explicitly clear. Independent Master/Slave Device Timing: Hard disk controllers on modern systems support running the master and slave device at different speeds, if one supports faster transfer modes than the other. Some systems, however, especially older ones, do not. If you are using two devices with radically different maximum transfer rates, and the chipset doesn't support independent timing, you will slow down the faster device to the speed of the slower one. The ability of an IDE/ATA channel to operate a master and slave device using different transfer modes is called independent device timing. The hard disk controllers integrated on modern chipsets all pretty much support independent timing, as do modern add-in controllers, but this was not always the case. Independent timing can be an issue if, for example, you upgrade an older PC and get a new, high-speed drive, but want to continue to be able to use the older one on the same channel with the new one. If your system does not support independent device timing, and you use a newer hard disk that supports PIO mode 4 on the same channel as an older hard disk that operates only at PIO mode 0, the system will knock down the PIO mode to 0 for both drives. This will hamper the performance of the newer hard disk. The lack of independent device timing on many older systems is one reason why placing ATAPI devices like CD-ROMs on the same channel as a fast hard disk is usually not recommended. (It should be pointed out that we are talking here about the interface or external transfer speed of these devices. Reducing the speed of the interface only causes big issues if the effective interface speed becomes less than the sustained transfer rate of the disk. For a full discussion of these issues, please see this page.) Again, today's chipsets all pretty much support independent timing, so this is less of an issue than it once was. Hope that clears it up for everyone

For the speed thing, I was under the impression that things would slow down if you mix older ATA 33/66 drives with ATA100 drives, but I was informed on this very forum that such problems were fixed in the ATA standard quite some time ago. Hope that helps. As for the colour coding on the IDE cables, I've just checked several websites and the manuals for a couple of motherboards that I have here, and they all say the master drive is connected to the black connector. Champion also agrees with me. Who should know better now eh?

With an ATA100 cable, the blue connector goes to the motherboard, the master drive on the end on the cable (with the black connector) and the slave goes in the middle (to the grey connector). Not sure what happens if you change these things around (which is what jimf43 is suggesting), but what I've written above is the 'proper' way of doing it.

The FireGL line are aimed towards 3D rendering. They have extra hardware in them to deal with the 3D geometry, lighting and so-on. This isn't the same as the functions used in games though, so they won't give you uber-frame rates in your FPS of choice. For 2D graphics (which is what Photoshop does), he's going to be better off with the 9700 card. But to be honest, most of the donkey work is going to be done by the CPU and RAM.

Desktop refresh does not equal DirectX refresh. They are seperate. You might be better off giving up with the Windows settings, and downloading PowerStrip. It will let you create all kinds of custom resolutions and refresh rates.

It might be easier in the long run to setup an extra folder in Outlook, and have the rule move all spam emails into that. You can then have a quick scan through it, move out any you want to keep, and then trash the rest. Doesn't exactly answer your question I know, but it's a work around for the short term at least.

In that config. there probably wouldn't be much to choose between RAID and non-RAID. It's a bit of PITA, but you could always run Sandra on the drives to see what score you get and compare that with the other numbers it shows you. That should give you a rough idea of any difference. You could also ask if someone has a similar setup to you but no RAID to run Sandra and give you their results to compare.