Pythagoras

My taskbar, winamp, and editpad (a text editor) all have "always on top" selected. After a few minutes they will just randomly slip to the bottom of everything as opposed to the top and stay there. I havent found anything at ms's knowledge base, does anyone have any clue what could be up?

You know the most humorous thing about computers is that a majority of the time there is a hardware problem it can be attributed to fans - the simplest working part of a computer. Who would have thought that we could come so far, put millions of transistors on a square inch, and everything comes crashing down without the almighty fan.

Well if you are a tech-savvy gamer Id definetly use 2000. If you are uninterested in such things and wish to remain ignorant then go for 98. If you are actually deciding for a next comp, wait for XP, it will likely please you greatly.

Anyone have any problems running the new half-life version in win2k? It keeps locking up for me when Im joining a game, then will baloon ta take up 130 megs of RAM or some such.

As a side note in the insane madness that was the rush to get the Half-Life and Counterstrike patches I got the NMDA worm. I never opened an attachment in Outlook, so I am assuming that the worm came from some illegit sites out there offering infected versions of the HL patch or it came from some files (videos) I downloaded from bearshare. The reason I think it was probably the Half-Life patch is that a couple times, after downloading the full patch from some italian server (www.gib.it) and I executed the file, the installization wizard informed me that the patch wouldnt be installed because the file I downloaded was a few megs larger than expected. Lesson: be wary of dling from untrusted sources.

Do users really wanna buy a new OS when it seems that 2k is running along fine, and even ATI finally has decent drivers for it? Are there any new technical (non GUI) innovations worth speaking of? Will the OS flop like ME? Is MS screwed? Is MS targetting to broad of an audience?

Can anyone help me, I click a window in the taskbar and it just flashes! It doesnt take the focus, and instead I have to minimize what is in the focus and find that stupid window. Whats goin on!?!?

What the heck, its back to normal again.

It seems at least with the links on this page the option is there, 3rd from the top under "Open in New Window."

About multi processors, cant you simply assign one process to one processor, one to another? Will this work? Or is it more complicated than that? I assume that both processors would utilize the same resources (RAM HD etc) so that could complicate things... but couldnt you design an OS that implemented this?

Im curious if anyone has had any luck getting Gettysburg to work with the compatibility kit? Anything special about getting it to run?

Quote: Basically, we need to turn the Middle East into a big hole. Yeah! we should do the same to the midwest and south because of the militia groups! Oh wait NO WE SHOULDN'T!

Quote: Nato have decided yesterday evening (European time) to fully apply article 5 of the Treaty for the first time in 52 years since the creation of the organisation. At least 16 nations will eventually go to war together. I think this is a HUGE turning point for American foreign policy. It has been said that when "empires" start having to increasingly act defensively to protect their "holdings" then they have past their prime. Now Im wondering if this will begin a new age of American dominance through championing against terrorism and rooting out the terrorist elements througout the world, or will the US have to act increasingly defensively to maintain its infrastructure and economic/cultural dominance? I also think that I have a greater understanding of what the WW2-Depression error people went through, and why they are generrally more patriotic and appreciative. The things we gen-xers and younger take for granted were torn from us and others, and I think all of us have a greater appreciation for the fragility of life and of freedom in the world. Its also inspiring to see how helpful people can be in a crisis. In VA Beach where I live we get a fair deal of hurricanes, at least a serious one every few years, and Im always warmed by the amount of neighborlyness people have when the city's infrastructure has been destroyed. Unfortunately, however, it tends to go away when things get back to normal. Still its nice to know that the jerk yelling at you on the interstate is another human being who would pull you from the rubble like anyone else.

Everyone go to www.amazon.com and donate some cash to the red cross.

The most important thing in a crisis like this is to not sink to their level. Search for justice instead of revenge. Realize that showing scornful vengance is exactly how they want you to respond, they want to sink you to their level. They want you to hate them, their family, their ethnicity, their nationality, their everything. Once you get to that point you allow yourself to become a monster completely controlled by vengance, and you are no better than the terrorist.

So ATI is annoying me. I love the All in Wonder 128 32meg I have, but Ive concluded ATI will never get off there duffs and give me drivers worth their name. But Id like your opinion on who will give the best support for 2000 (and XP in the future). Does ATI give decent support to the Radeon All in Wonders? I noticed they supported 2k on release... Opinions? Recomendations? Grievances?

Quote: Yeah I know its not win2k's fault per say... but if I use a win98 box I NEVER get the message. No matter what time of the day it is. I searched the web also and many people claim the same thing. They say only in win2k do they get this. Sometimes its worse for others. So that tells me its definitely an issue with the way starcraft was programmed. It wasnt fully tested on windows 2000 ( obviously ). It would be dumb to blame win2k when we all know win2k is superior to win9x in every way. Its only the software developer who is coding the apps to utilize win9x and not win2k. .... battlenet is just a server... Actually connecting to battlenet and finding games and using the chat works perfectly. Its just when trying to join a game does this error show. This is defenitly and issue on the client end not a problem with battlenet. Since win98 works perfectly. Its like this, you can do nearly anything in Windows 98. Ive heard of stories of people coding, and running a progy and overwriting all of the shortcut names on there desktop, or in some cases over writing the system kernel. This is because Windows 98 sucks and shouldnt even be called an operating system. Anyone that develops for (especially on) Win 95/98/Me is playing with fire. Anything that doesnt work in Win2k is ussually because of flawed software design and in my experience those programs are generally buggy no matter what OS.

Quote: Have you had a look at the ASUS geforce2/3 Deluxe range? - they have built in tv-tuner/vid in, s-vid/composite out (supports a rather nifty twin view feature like Matrox's dual head technology) and even some funky 3d glasses. Unfortunately the win2k drivers currently limit the video out functions quite drastically (have to disconnect your monitor for it to work ), however hopefully this might get changed in the future, and both 2d and 3d performance is excellent under win2k, and the tv tuner works fantastically. Really... hmm. I had a feeling that ATI had patented the h*ll out of the All in Wonder idea. Maybe I was wrong. Well I suppose it comes down to everyone will have to support XP (if its not a failure) and XP will become the common OS in PCs so XP support will become paramount...

1. Are you in Direct 3d mode? On certain video cards (ATI) Madden's Direct 3d is crazy/choppy/weird. Try turning on software mode instead of direct3d, it should be somewhere in that screen that pops up before the game loads with Madden saying "Hey! This is my game!" I had problems with Madden 2k1 and direct3d, but everything works fine (though not as pretty) in software mode. If this doesnt work, come back list you comp's stats for us.

I know the second startup control-panel progy is a good one to have, a big help.

I cant get it to work. Havent tried recently after some compatibility updates and SP2, but Im not sure.

Ok so sometimes I go to a site (like the Free AMD stickers link in another thread) and an ad pops up and the process "savenow.exe" starts taking up 15 megs of RAM. After closing the window the exe stays resident and I have to end-task it. I think I have uninstalled a program "savenow" a trillion times, is this program being installed without my (admin) authorization? Is this illegal (in the legal sense) if the os or someone else is jamming this down my throat?

so thats what all those bear-share updates are doing!

Quote: Lazy is the wrong word. Tecnically Impossible is more fitting. bascially they needed MS to make a patched version of some system drivers to make win2k see the PCI bridge correctly on the Fury MAXX. MS couldn't make it work either, so a Win2k driver never emerged, although a driver appeared that simply used the 1 chip, ignoring the other. As for drivers, I can personally say that the drivers at ATI have improved massively since the rage pro days. Except for the DVD player has never worked for me in win2k (but ATI didn't write that). Seems to be an incompatiblity with my mobo, win2k, and the DMA mode used by the player. It works in 9X and XP The only point to note is that the drivers have been fairly solid, Most of my scene demos work, except for those hardcoded to the Nvidia versions of OGL and D3D The performace is always the exact same with new releases. No Detonator style injections. However rumour has it the Radeon 2 will ship with Unified Radeon drivers. Ditching the legacy Rage128 code. Although I doubt it will happen to be honest. Or it will just be the current drivers that happen to be compatible with the Radeon 1, so that makes them "unified". Perhaps another part of it is the fact that ATI makes both the chip and the card. So if you buy a matrox card w/ nvidia chipset, you got two companys and the labor gets divided, but ATI makes cards and chips so its harder to have to work on both... Maybe its a half baked idea. 3dfx made cards and chips, how was there support?

Tnx, shouldnt spyware things be illegal?