brainsoft

I though I had killed my PS/2 ports some how, they used to work when I got the mobo, but one day they didn't anymore. I don't know what happened, but I always felt sure I messed something up somehow, and have since been forced to use a USB mouse an keyboard. All that occured months ago. A few days ago, while running XP, I decided test out my PS/2 ports and see if they worked. I couldn't remember why I had stopped using the PS/2 port + adapter for my Explorer. I only remember being very upset that I had damaged my mobo, would have to use a USB keyboard AND take up both my USB ports. At the time I couldn't use my Strategic Command anymore, I was quite depressed. Anyways, the other day I plugged my mouse back into the PS/2 port with the adapter, and much to my surprise the mouse worked, and since it worked, I left it there, freeing up one of my two USB ports. Over the past week or two XP had been giving me considerable CD related grief, so yesterday night I reformatted and installed Win2k again. Everything was going smoothly, until Win2k booted up to the GUI portion of the install process. I grabbed the mouse to click the "Next" button, and the cursor stubbornly refused to move! After completing installation with the keyboard, I moved the mouse back to the USB port and everything was running perfectly again. Unfortunately I was unable to check the PS/2 keyboard port as well, as I sold my old keyboard with my old computer. I know know that the PS/2 mouse port works! XP used it just fine, no problem at all, but when I reinstall Win2k the port appears to not work! Does anyone know why on earth my PS/2 port would work in WinXP but not Win2K?! PS: This is an A-Bit BP6.

As far as I know Abit has withdrawn support from Canada. I wouldn't bother RMAing it anyways, I couldn't even go a week without a computer much less 2.5 months! Anyways, I can survive. When I get my own USB keyboard I will definatly get one with a small hub in it, 2 ports. That way I will still have USB ports avaliable. I'm also thinking about going back to XP. My movies are choppy on Win2k for some reason, I think it may be WMP, even though I have WMP8 on it here now. I just hope I can tolerate the problems XP has with my burner. Perhaps a fresh install would fix that, I never did a fresh install after I got this burner, I just replaced a ghost image. I'll upgrade to XP and see what happens, and if nothing works, I can replace the partition with my Win2k ghost image. hmmm.

The new Trillian is SO much better! All it needs now is a good history and I'll switch to it full time! Alex, for customized non-standard programs, a uniformly applied theme is generally the best route to please the audiences eye. Take Trillian for example. Many things are different colours, but they all go together! I'll check it out, as I just said in my emial =)

And that theory doesn't work because the mouse USED to work just fine. grrr

That not allow here from SHS you dont it on MS web page now do you

WinXP is required? We'll see about that!!! Thanx for the link =) Hmmm, It's outsmarted me this time, but I will prevail.

removing /fastdetected didn't work

Sorry for the confusion Alex, I have never seen that mouse before. Mine is the Explorer, the big grey one with the red tail light! Like so: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouse/ie_info.asp It's the older version though, the buttons are larger and it only scans at 1500 Hz, not 6000 like the new one. I didn't know there was a ps/2 to usb adaptor, I thought I had just misunderstood you.

I am using it as USB, it's the only way I can use it in Win2k. You're not using it as USB if you're using the adapter; you're using it as PS/2.

It's a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer. I'm going to try using newer drivers, if there are any, but this is the first explorer, the x-06, not the x-08 that they sell now. Windows has no problem detecting it a USB. I find it strange that an OS wouldn't know how to deal a standard input port like PS/2.

Quote: I have lost my reply twice now, so I will be even quicker than I had planned after I lost my reply the first time. Anything that seems like an attack isn't one, it is just said quickly, without extra words to avoid stepping on anyone's feet. Yea, I know I said I was going to be quick, but quick is a relative term too. That reply is atleast three paragraphs shorter than my original reply was going to be, so it is "relatively" short.

I have lost my reply twice now, so I will be even quicker than I had planned after I lost my reply the first time. Anything that seems like an attack isn't one, it is just said quickly, without extra words to avoid stepping on anyone's feet. In my lost reply I had a section clarifying how I'm not here to hurt anyone or make them feel dumb. I stand by that, making you feel stupid is not my goal. As for the Ph.D. part, I don't need a Ph.D. to recognize a poorly constructed or cumbersome sentance. I have excellent gramittical skills, wish my spelling skills were at the same level, and if you could talk to my teachers and peers, they would support me in saying that. Where I old enough to have a Ph.D., and interested in English as a field of study, I would consider pursuing a Ph.D. when I complete university. If you would like me to prove myself, you have but to ask; I am more than willing to go through some of your sentences with you and point out grammatical errors. If you would like to improve your english, I will leave you with one very important grammital element to consider: sentance fragments. You can research this yourself if you like, and I am more than will to help you out if you need it. Nothing in this universe is right or wrong. Nothing is impossible. I follow those 2 simple rules as I live my life, and try to keep an open mind whenever possible. I am not trying to tell you that the way you speak english is wrong, all I can do is compare it to other ways of speaking. For this discussion, the only way I can analyze your speech is to compare it with what is considered "normal". Normal is a relative term and has relevance only within the frame of reference that it refers too. The frame of reference I speak from contains people that have been speaking only, or primarily, english for the majority of their lives. These people, like myself, are fluent speakers of the language and have very little difficulty understanding what another means or is trying to say. The most important thing you must consider about english grammer is that it's rules were designed to fit this frame of reference. I asked you earlier what your native language was, but you never replied. I am fairly certain that you were not born in an english speaking environment, and can say this fairly confidently because the grammatical practices you follow are not "normal", thus do not follow the currently accept way to speak and write english. This isn't me saying this, this is just the way it is. There are certain rules and guidelines for the english langauge and you break too many of them to be an educated adult raised in an english speaking environment. That leaves two options. You either aren't educated, which I highly doubt, or you haven't lived within the "norm" long enough to obsorb it all. Typos and spelling mistakes are inevitable on the internet, but the meaning is usually quite clear if taken in context with the rest of the text. Whole sentances can usually be decoded in a similar fasion, though not always with such ease. Could you please decode this for me? This is one of the sentences that I had trouble understanding, and your last port did nothing to help that. I've looked at it long and hard, and can't make heads nor tails of it. Quote: Originally posted by brainsoft: For example, from your post above: "What my program does, is tell Speedisk from the time you logon to your OS?" What, are you asking us how your program works? Your sentance start off as a statement, "this is what my program does," but some how ends off as a sentance. If you removed the first comma things would be a little better, but the second half of the sentance is the stumper for me. You're saying that your programs tells Speedisk from the time you logon to your OS. That doesn't make any sense though! If you said WHAT your program tells Speedisk, the situation may improve. Then you start off a range in time that the program will do whatever it is that needs to be done. The time range starts when you logon to your OS, but doesn't have an end, and is somehow a question; that just isn't proper english. I'm tired now and have re-typed this message too many times now. I appolgize if I have offended or confused you, I am just trying to understand you, and perhaps help you improve your english. There are many people who view constructive critism as an insult, but you don't seem like that type seeing how you responded to user input with your programs. I'll leave you with something to think about: Normally when someone feels accused of something, they will try their hardest to deny it while supressing, to the best of their ability, whatever it is they are accused of. Being completely honest, did you try to make yourself as clear and concise as possible in your last message?

You make a lot of questions into statements, I have a headache now You don't need to verify everything that you say with us. If you're telling us something, then TELL us, not ask of if it is so?? See, you do that a lot (with the question marks where they don't belong), like I just did to demostrate. For example, from your post above: "What my program does, is tell Speedisk from the time you logon to your OS?" What, are you asking us how your program works? Anyways, that's very interesting, the parts of it that I understand atleast. I'll usually set speeddisk to realtime priority and got to bed, so i have no idea if they fight. And I'm running Win2k now, and for while, so I won't be able to test it out.

I have never heard of this XP feature. Is it something that is done automatically and by default, or is it something that must be configured?

I would be quite interested with such a patch! Remember my messages about this, in the other big thread I believe? I could really use such a patch. I'm not running XP right now, have gone back to Win2k for sanity's sake, but I'm sure I'll be with XP again sometime!

Quote: Well, that's your opinion, again, you know? I mean, yes, that is your right... but some folks they may have run tests with, and they DID do this alot especially back in Windows 95 testings, their majority of testers on 14" units? MUST have told them otherwise... They do test & from samples of testers, cater to the majority I imagine, to make sales. I know that not mant people are running on 14" monitors, but I don't feel it is right for those who are to be hasseled every time they turn on there computer to "fix" there resolution. There is nothing wrong with 640x480, and to this day I have no seen anything that NEEDS 800x600 or higher. Windows is one of the very few OSes I can actually say that about and that's always impressed me. Quote: Besides... how hard was it for you to change it, with rightclick on your desktop & up to 1600x1200 you go! It ISN'T a problem for me on this computer, but the other computer I mentioned, the one I was talking about used a 14" monitor. Whenever I started it up, I'd get this stupid error bubble in the system tray telling me that my resolution was wrong! As you can see, that still bothers me and I don't even have to deal with it now. I would understand if there was something that required the higher resolution, but there is nothing of the sort! If something ain't broke, don't fix it! It should obviously be an option to use higher res, anything else would be murder, but to not have the option to go lower?! Why on earth would they stop you from going down to 640x480? No research in the world could prove why they SHOULDN'T ALLOW users to use a lower res if they want to. Quote: There is or can be no such thing... I didn't say anything about there being anything, you confuse me to great extends with this one.... Quote: (I can show you letters from folks, by the dozens stating otherwise! Who do you think I will be swayed by the most? I did on the first program APK 3dFx Tuning Engine, omit the ability to use low res std. colored buttons. I did not know the technique of skinning them that year for example. ON the second one, folks like you asked for it, I put it in, the APK Cd-Rom Alarm Clock, I learned it to cater to folks like yourself's tastes.) You're doing it again (bragging)

Here for instance http://www.microsoft.com/unix/ie/downloads/recommended/ie5/ For Solaris and HP-UX

Microsoft....

Quote: You could turn them off & elect to use non-gradiated ones... I did not know how that was done at the time of the writing of this one! I learned later how it is done. Too bad, but live and learn eh! If I could have turned them off I surely would have. Quote: Relative term. Depends on your tastes. You're what I call a minimalist, who likes std. looks in programs. I would guess you do not like Microsoft Media Player 7-8x, ZoneAlarm, & others designed along WAY non-std. interface design. Personally, I do like them. Matter of taste/opinion! Actually I quite like skinnable programs and non-standard designed like that, they're fun, yet functional. I guess the problem with yours was that it was only a little bit non standard. Usually the small things bother me, something that is just a little out of place. Let's say something is normally in one place, and get's moved across the room. Usually in my mind, that object isn't out of place, it merely has a new place, but if it's just moved an inch or two it's out of place and needs to go back the way it used to be. That's the way I look at programs like yours. They give the impression of trying to be fun or cool looking, but don't pull it off because they're not different enough or use something as plain as a simple gradient. A common theme is more attractive then a collection of seeminly random coloured gratient buttons. Give them rounded buttons, with an even shading or shadow or something, use the same theme for all of the program. In all honesty, it looks like the Teletubbies were the artists in your programs. It's not that they're different, it's that they're not professional looking. Quote: Well, I figure if THIS site recommended it,and it still does, making it into PCWorld, Chip of Germany (hardest people on software I know of in Germany, real quality fiends, not in looks, but technology used), and onto Cd-Rom distros etc., it was not bad. In fact, I shipped it with like 30 folks statements on its effectiveness, showing between 5%-35% gains in speed. You really need to stop blowing your own horn. You come off as someone who is trying to prove to everyone how good he is, even though you're a nice guy. "See, my programs got all these little awards, see!" To many people those awards don't mean very much. The awards don't show that you have a good program, just that such and such magazine liked it. If you have lots of little awards like that, it means that more people like your software, not necessary that it's better in any particular fashion. I can appreciate the challenges of programming, I'm learning at the moment, and my life is aimed at software engineering. I can understand that you can't please everyone, and I'm not saying you shouldn't be proud of your awards, because you should be proud of them, but please stop waving them in the air, it is very unbecoming of you and makes your message very difficult to read through. On a completely different note, just for my curiosity, what is your native language? I'm sure it's not english, i'm just curious as to what it is. Quote: Games... games are Intel's future now! You can BET they are helping John Carmack & others like him develop SUPERHIGHEND games that eat CPU cycles like a hungry dog eats meat!APK I agree, it certainly isn't going to be an OS any time soon, that's for sure! XP has pushed it up to the 400-500mhz range, but it runs just fine on 333. And they've pushed the screen resolution up to 640x480. That actually really bothed me. I was running XP on a second computer on a 14" and I wanted to put my fist through the monitor every time it started up because MS was telling me that 640x480 wasn't good enough. I did not see anything to show that it NEEDED higher! I like high res, hell, I run it mine at 1600x1200 (my gf says it's too small, bah!), but i don't like being forced to use ANYTHING. Yea, anyways, so games are the answer, I agreed. They need either one really big game that everyone will love, or a big influx of games for everyone, all of which need behemoths to run. The "DoomIII" was just speculatio I'm not refering to the tool tips, but the buttons themselves. Take a blue to white gradient button, with white text. The white text ends up in a nearly white background. As the blue decreases, so to the ease of reading. Quote: Relative term. Depends on your tastes. You're what I call a minimalist, who likes std. looks in programs. I would guess you do not like Microsoft Media Player 7-8x, ZoneAlarm, & others designed along WAY non-std. interface design. Personally, I do like them. Matter of taste/opinion! Actually I quite like skinnable programs and non-standard designed like that, they're fun, yet functional. I guess the problem with yours was that it was only a little bit non standard. Usually the small things bother me, something that is just a little out of place. Let's say something is normally in one place, and get's moved across the room. Usually in my mind, that object isn't out of place, it merely has a new place, but if it's just moved an inch or two it's out of place and needs to go back the way it used to be. That's the way I look at programs like yours. They give the impression of trying to be fun or cool looking, but don't pull it off because they're not different enough or use something as plain as a simple gradient. A common theme is more attractive then a collection of seeminly random coloured gratient buttons. Give them rounded buttons, with an even shading or shadow or something, use the same theme for all of the program. In all honesty, it looks like the Teletubbies were the artists in your programs. It's not that they're different, it's that they're not professional looking. Quote: Well, I figure if THIS site recommended it,and it still does, making it into PCWorld, Chip of Germany (hardest people on software I know of in Germany, real quality fiends, not in looks, but technology used), and onto Cd-Rom distros etc., it was not bad. In fact, I shipped it with like 30 folks statements on its effectiveness, showing between 5%-35% gains in speed. You really need to stop blowing your own horn. You come off as someone who is trying to prove to everyone how good he is, even though you're a nice guy. "See, my programs got all these little awards, see!" To many people those awards don't mean very much. The awards don't show that you have a good program, just that such and such magazine liked it. If you have lots of little awards like that, it means that more people like your software, not necessary that it's better in any particular fashion. I can appreciate the challenges of programming, I'm learning at the moment, and my life is aimed at software engineering. I can understand that you can't please everyone, and I'm not saying you shouldn't be proud of your awards, because you should be proud of them, but please stop waving them in the air, it is very unbecoming of you and makes your message very difficult to read through. On a completely different note, just for my curiosity, what is your native language? I'm sure it's not english, i'm just curious as to what it is. Quote: Games... games are Intel's future now! You can BET they are helping John Carmack & others like him develop SUPERHIGHEND games that eat CPU cycles like a hungry dog eats meat!APK I agree, it certainly isn't going to be an OS any time soon, that's for sure! XP has pushed it up to the 400-500mhz range, but it runs just fine on 333. And they've pushed the screen resolution up to 640x480. That actually really bothed me. I was running XP on a second computer on a 14" and I wanted to put my fist through the monitor every time it started up because MS was telling me that 640x480 wasn't good enough. I did not see anything to show that it NEEDED higher! I like high res, hell, I run it mine at 1600x1200 (my gf says it's too small, bah!), but i don't like being forced to use ANYTHING. Yea, anyways, so games are the answer, I agreed. They need either one really big game that everyone will love, or a big influx of games for everyone, all of which need behemoths to run. The "DoomIII" was just speculation, it COULD be something else, though I doubt it, but it certainly was amazing to see, from a crappy quality quicktime file. I want to see a large high res, high definition movie of it, I love drolling over stuff like that. Give AquaNox a chance if you can, the graphics are quite impressive.

All those colours make me dizzy Alex If any of you haven't known it, IE IS avaliable for selected UNIX platforms...

The reason I didn't like your program was purely cosmetic. I didn't like the pictures for buttons along the button, I didn't like the banner at the top, and I didn't like the shading behind the words. The white text fading into a white background is very hard to read. I don't like all those pictures scattered around where they're not needed. Take those things out and it looks good and normal, and I probobaly would have used it for a fairly long while. It worked okay I think, I just couldn't stand looking at it was all! ------------------------ I'm not talking about heatsinks at all anymore, I'm only talking about the physical CPU. I'll look for a link for you to read up on lapping of celerons and the 3 layers in the metal caps. -------------------------------------- Yea, I wouldn't buy Celeron's, but when you want a cheap SMP rig that can still MOVE, and you're offered a BP6, and 2 Celeron400s, for designing a website you don't question, that's for damn sure! I wouldn't trade my Dual system for a single cpu system of double the power. My next system will be dual as well, I'm looking at Dual amds, but that won't be happening until next summer at the earliest. My system still stacks up against nearly everything, and the computer industry is so slow lately. People don't have any particular reason to buy a new computer, and software engineers aren't making software that that needs a faster computer, for fear that no one will buy it, because no one needs to buy new computers. Someone needs to make the most killer awesome that EVERYONE MUST HAVE, and needs 2Ghz of power. Only something with the balls and brilliance enough to do such a thing will pull the computer industry back up like it used to be any time soon. AquaNox does push the envelope though, as one of the big GF3 titles, it has basically taxed my system to to the extreme. It's not something that is so great though to persuade me to want to upgrade. If I can't play it, oh well, I have dozens and dozens of other games to choose from.

I'm sorry, I have a hard time following through your messages sometimes. I never thought about the space needed later on. If everything is perfectly ordered, and completely packed to the brim, any file that expands later on will get fragmented. Therefore, remove all fragmentation and sprinkle them around the drive, with like 60% at the start and you get the most optimum layout? If that's the case, then you have made a very compelling argument on the behalf of Windows Defragmenter. Speed isn't an issue for me, I simply run these tests at night. There are many things I like about Norton. One of them, which I seem to have missplaced, was the option to move all directories to the top of the drive. As it is I have directories scattered all over my drive, and neither piece of software has done anything about it. ------------------------------ Maximum PC? You mean May 99, Volumn 4, Nomber 5 that I have sitting on my desk? I just re-read through the article and see that I misunderstood it slightly. Intel devoloped those things to lure MS into a partnership with them, all they wanted all along was to make sure they had a hand in keeping people motivated to buy faster CPUs! I remembered the part where MS forced Intel into not running with their own API, NSP, but forgot the part where that ws exactly what Intel wanted. Kind of like the Sun coming out at night. Wouldn't that be rude? MS still tried to bully Intel to stop them from "invading" MS's territory, Intel just planned it that way. clever fiends they are.

My intel heatsinks are aluminum too, neon blue, came with these 2 Celerons. I have Golden Orbs on them now, also Aluminum. I know the actual caps on the cores have copper in them, though many people would never know this first hand. If you have ever lapped a Celeron, you know that when the top goes copper, then starts turning silver again, you STOP!!! Sanding through that 3rd layer, layer, the second aluminum would render your cpu usuless even as a good paperweight. I lapped my GOrbs and the Celerons, it was actually quite cool seeing the metal layers in the core cap. Mirror, 1000 grit sandpaper, cpu upsidedown on top, sand sand sand. I made them smooth like Mirrors, same with the orbs, perfect connections, appsolutly beautiful. I didn't realize how NOT flat a heatsinks or cpu really are until i went through my lapping phase. I wish I had a digitial camera, I would love to show you the picks from it, it's quite cool. And it's quite COOL... hehehe! Well, not that cool, perhaps more like cool, Hey! I recognize that program! I used it once. No offence, I thought it was ugly and fairly useless compared to the things I ended up using, but it's cool talking to the guy who made it. I found it in my search for something to OC my Voodoo3. I couldn't use the 3DFX overclocker, it only works on Win9x unfortunately, even today with the x3dfx-c guys having taken over driver devolopment/hacking. I agree entirely with Aluminum, and all the theories behind it don't intrigue me like that did back then, but my only realy point up there was to make people question Tom's integretity. I do not believe for one second that Intel or nVidia paid Tom for a favourable review, i just feel that that;s the way he feels. If any of you want to see the CPU burnout comparision video I'll gladly find it, I know exactly where to get a link for it. It's funny watching that t-bird smoke, but also sad Well, good Converstation, I agree as well. Spent all afternoon mentally dualing, and now it's time to go fry my brain with some video games. hmm, AquaNox? Or BattleRealms? I know! Wolfenstein it'll be for now, then I'll go try to make AquaNox run. Those are some sweet graphics, but I've never had to drop the graphics to the floor to play a game, not since I got my V3, and certainly not since I got my V5.

Many good points indeed! The problem with AOL would be the use of their network. If I use Trillian to connect to AOL servers, I am using their network, a network which they have to spend money to maintain. The ICQ/AIM network isn't cheap to maintain, and I know they gotta be loosing money in the venture. The advertising helps off set that a bit, but programs are a means to an end, kind of like media giants owning large portions of sports teams. I'll explain that part sports part if you like, it's something that most people won't think of, a teacher of mine pointed it out once. Anyways, if I use Trillian to connect to ICQ or AIM, I am using their network, but they are not getting a single sent of my my money! I don't see any of their banners, and I sure as hell didn't sign up for AOL, I would never pay for crap like that. They are getting absolutly no return from me for the money they put into their messaging network, they certainly don't want that. ------------------------ For MS buying technology, there is obviously a lump sum and royalties of some sort, but MS carries a lot of weight and can make lots of people do what they say, usually within the law as well. Hell, they bullied Intel! If they hadn't, you wouldn't see the name Microsoft next to the name DirectX. Some companies beg to help ms, and others beg not to, that's just how powerful MS is. -------------------------------- Speeddisk! Speeddisk is great. I was playing around with SpeedDisk and Windows Defragmenter, doing some tests of my own last week and discovered a few interesting things. Defragmenter is named for what it does: it moves files around the hhd puts all the fragments of files side by side. Doing so improves performance, as the hdd doesn't have to to seek for the other parts of it. As fragmention increases, so does system performace, though obviously not at a 1:1 ratio. Defrag puts the files all over the disk though! SpeedDisk on the other hand prioritizes an alternate approach to increasing system performance. Speeddisk, while also designed to rearrange fragments of files, is called an "Optimizer." Optimum performance is their primary concern, and the approach Symantec took was to move everything to the very beginning of the disk, while sorting it out. The start of the disk in the disk maps of these programs is not the same as the start of a cd as many people assume. The start of a CD is the inside... hhd's start writing from the outside though! The logic is easy to follow: The disk spins faster at the outter edge. That's why a 50x cd-rom isn't 50x, it's 50x MAX. 50x is the fastest the drive can read data off the cd: at the very outside of the disc. Although obviously spinning at the same time, the actual velocity of the outter edge of the disc is much higher than the center, therefore more data will pass a fixed point in one second. The drive can only read data so fast though, so the spindle speed is adjusted to compensate, by slowing it down in the middle, and taking it up to full speed near the end. Anyways, first and for most, Speeddisk wants everything at the outside of the disk, so that everything can be read as fast as possible initially. Obviously it also defrags, but in my tests it was no where near as efficient at it as Defragmenter. Packing them all together also saves slack space because there aren't so many beginnings and ends to the file blocks. Here, I'll give you some numbers to demonstrate. Drive C: before hand, 15% fragmentation, after running through SpeedDisk, 4%! That's pretty good eh? Next, I ran the same drive through Defrag. Before: 4%, After: 0.1%. That's even better! It doesn't show much though, just that's it's quite good at what it does. Defrag took my nicely packed, yet slight fragmented drive that Norton optimised for me and put all the fragments toghether. Unfortunately it put them all over the drive! In the end, it LOOKED like it did before norton laid it's hands on it, but was completely defragged, save ONE small file. Other than that, it was 100% defragged. I certainly didn't want those files scattered all over the freaking drive though, I want them in order, AND at the start of the drive. So, I decide to run the disk through Norton again. I figure the files are already in order, not I'll just let Norton sort them out and pack them all at the front of the drive! It seems like a good idea, doesn't it? Well, it did to me, so so I did it. My results? Before: 0.1%. After: 5.0%. yes, that's right, 5%!!!! Norton actually fragmented my files! Granted, they were then all tightly packed on the outter portion of the drive, the pieces of files were all over the place! I ran similar tests with my Drive D, a 30gb, where the other is only 4 with similar results. It didn't get down to 0.1%, there are a LOT of large, cd sized files on it, and it certainly didn't stay that way as I move many GB of data through there every week. Anyways, there's my experience with the Windows based Defrag and Norton SpeedDisk 2002, take from it what you like. :0 d=)

I certainly am not buying a Copper heatsink, it's the cost for me, The rest doesn't matter. For regular usage either would work just as well. If you don't OC it won't make any noticable difference to system performance, and very little even if you do. To fill the roll that is needed here, Aluminum is definately the way to go. i just wanted to make sure that everyknew was aware of the heat conducting abilities of copper. Quote: I used to believe that too, this test & experts in metallurgy & electronics convinced me otherwise... as well as the tests I showed above from a reputable tester. I'm obviously not going to argue with the metallurgy experts, but I do have a thing or two to say about our good friend Tom. Everything you read is written with a bios, even newspapers, it is unavoidable. The sign of good reviewers and reports is their ability to withhold most of the bias in their articles. Tom often is unable to do that and I will never accept what he writes as unbiased. For instance, Tom was biased against 3DFX. It appeared in every single one of his GeForce/Voodoo articles, and I know a few people that have based their believes of the cards at the time his writtings. At some point in the past, 3DFX did not give Tom a first class ticket to some event. They still paid his fair, it just wasn't 1st class like we was used to enjoying. Ever since then he has harboured a grudge and it came out with every review he wrote. He obviously couldn't lie about facts, but he often trivialized Voodoo features that were most impressive by industry standards, and vice versa for nVidia products. I have always felt the nVidia based cards have been faster, but Voodoo cards have always had higher image quality, sometimes because of Glide, but often not. I have seen him trivialize FSAA, while hailing T&L, even though FSAA could be used everywhere (certainly at a performance boost), while T&L is coded in the software. I saw that happen too many times and people assuming him to be a reliable source have built their "knowledge" on flawed preconceptions of a biased writer. That's in the past that 3DFX can no longer haunt his sleep, but I saw an example of it again a few weeks ago. I don't know if any of you have seen the video he made comparing 4 different cpus, 2 of both Intel and AMD, and what happens to them and to the computer when a heatsink is removed. My problems all lied with the Pentium 4 example. In the video you see a mobo, with CPU and hs/f,a nd directly behind that a monitor. Someone is playing a 3d game, i think it may be Quake 3, I couldn't quite tell. He takes off the cpu, the computer slows down extremly, but doesn't freeze. I can believe that actually, that not where my concern lies, it lies in what he did next. The next thing he does is remove the heatsink and hold a lazer thermometer directly above the core. On the display you can read some very low number, like 24. That is a small problem, but even more of a problem is the fact that you can't see a red dot on the core. In the other 4 samples you see the red telltale dot of the thermometer, but there is no dot in the P4 one. Why isn't there a dot? How can he take an accurate reading of the core temperature without the thermometer even pointing at is? Very suspicious indeed! After he takes his reading and leaves the computer running for a while, he replaces the heatsink to see what happens to the gaming performance. When he had taken it off, the game in the background got very very slow, and that's understandable. And it goes to follow that when he puts the heatsink back on the game speeds back up. That makes sense right? Now, what get's me is how on earth is the game almost twice as fast has it was before he took the heatsink off in the first place? The light isn't pointed at the cpu, and the games ended off running faster than it did before hand? That doesn't seem right at all to me! I'm not surprised about the burning up amds, I've seen it happen to a friends, no surprise there, but I have a VERY hard time accepting that the P4 runs at 24 degrees under what SHOULD be heavy load, atleast under 3d gaming load without a heatsink, AND speeds up after the heatsink is replaced! I was under the impression, by companies like Intel that a large copper () heatsink would be required, and seen proff for it. I know now that the P4 quite cool, but I remember the early P4s. Did they really change the design that much after the messed up the initial releases? They already had to add a bunch more pins, I can't imagine the temperature went down at the same time. Anyways, I don't trust Tom's reviews take them with a grain of salt. I'll read them often, to see what he has to say, but I will never ever ever use them as a primary source, or even a large one, for my infomation. ------------------------------------------ One more thing about the copper/aluminum stuff. The metal caps on the tops of my Celerons are, you guessed it, ALUMINUM!!!!!! Right underneath is a layer of copper, and another layer of aluminum though.... both elements have their uses. A layer of copper is between two layers of aluminum.... and in between my aluminum heatsinks and the warm Mendicinno<sp> cores. Just some food for thought