Avalanche

When I run outlook I usually just load it up, check my email and if there is none to be had, I promptly shut it down. Up until yesterday this hasn't been a problem, but last night I had reason to CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to bring up the Task Manager and I found that I had like 9 OUTLOOK.EXE's running each taking 8.9Mb to run. I've heard that Outlook might leave itself resident in memory after it was shut down, but I've never experienced it doing it before. Is this a bug? Or is there a way to configure Outlook so it doesn't do this? It's very annoying, cause if I truly want to quit the program I have to first exit it, then go into the task manager and end the process for it. Like I said it's never done this to me before, just started yesterday, and no software or hardware changes have been made that might have caused any troubles. I searched back quite a ways in the forums to see if there was a solution, cause I seem to remember another member bringing this one up, but I can't seem to find it with search, so please forgive me if this has already been addressed by one of the many learned and talented members on these forums. Thanks for any help anybody might have.

Hi all. I just installed Mandrake 10.0 and I really like it so far. Much faster and more stable than any other Mandrake distro I've ever used, and easier to work with than Fedora or RH9.x Anyway, I have a bit of a question, that I'm not sure is fixable right now, but I thought I'd put it out there anyway. I can't get the newest ATI Proprietary Radeon drivers to install. I took a screenshot of the the error it gives me so you all can see what is going on. I went to the ATI Help section on their site, and it appears the problem may simply be due to the "newness" of Madrake 10. So below is a show of what it tells me. Any advice? Thanks for any help!

Thanks for the link. I'm kinda curious, this isn't a real support question, but why do you suppose the fonts in OO.o look much better with the default mandrake drivers for my video card than they do with the ATi ones? The site helped a lot, except a I think it's kinda crappy that some of the fonts in OO.o look terrible no matter what you do. The default Times font for example is blocky and ugly, and no amount of anti-aliasing fixes it. I suppose I can't expect the world, for the capabilities of the software, concidering its price, it's phenominal. Anyway, thanks for all the help!

Converters can be had all over the place, but they aren't cheap. I've seen some as high as $400USD. Apple actually makes one themselves they sell for $99USD. They claim it only works on PowerBooks and G5s with DVI, but I have it on pretty good authority (my brother) that he uses one with a PC, and it works just fine. The USB plug just enables the 2-port usb hub on the back of the display, and it works on the PC too, at least that's my understanding. http://www.apple.com/displays/adapter.html This one looks like a "swiss army knife" of adapters, but it would probably do the job just fine. http://mac-pro.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=dviator&Category_Code=cb

Well I just thought I'd finally follow up on this here. Just tonight, I finally got the ATI Proprietary driver installed. It was one of those "stupid problems." All I had to do was install the kernel source off the install cd, and then run the driver install second. It went perfectly. This was the first time I've had to configure X by command line though, that was a bit intimi[censored] I must say, but I just kept all the mouse and monitor settings the same as they were in the original config file (used harddrake to find the settings), and it went smooth as silk. When it was finished, I hit CTRL-ALT-Backspace to restart X, and there I was with fully functioning OpenGL. Very nice, and performance is pretty good too. Now if I could just get fonts in OO.o to look halfways decent...

I've heard of unusual amounts of RF interference coming from home wiring as well. If at all possible, perhaps try moving the monitor to a new localtion, it may be that the house itself, in that area is the culprit. PS. I have exactly that model of monitor, and you are right, for the most part it's excellent, but it is very picky about interference. Although I do have a tv and scanner, ect. around it, I can't put my PC Speaker sub near it, even though the manual with my Altec Lansings claim that the sub is shielded.

I can't offer much help about the motherboard, but as far as the video card goes, all other things being equal, I'd go with the PowerColor card. Sapphire and PowerColor are both first teir ATI manufacturers, so they should both be virtually identical, if not exactly the same. So if you can, getting the PowerColor with 256Mb over the Sapphire with 128Mb would be the way I would go. I just built a system with PowerColor's Radeon 9600Pro 128Mb, and I can tell you that the part number printed on the card is identical to Sapphire's version, so I'd be willing to put money on them being built at the same fabrication plant.

Actually only the 9500, 9700 and 9800 (both Pro and non-Pro) have a power connection. The 9000, 9100, 9200 and the 9600 series card do not require an external power connection.

I don't have much to say about either of those drives you mentioned there, but I must send out a little plug for the cd writer I have in my system right now. It's an LG brand, and was very cheap. It ended up costing just over $50 Canadian, so that would cost no more than $30 US. To be honest I really only got it as a stop-gap measure at the time to replace another writer that died, fully expecting it to pack it in fairly quickly, but it's been as reliable a peice of hardare I've owned, and it's never coughed at any media I've thrown at it. I was very pleasantly surprised.

Hey Christianb, I think the menu you've created there is pretty spiffy, no worries about whether or not Sothink's product is any better. I think that with imaginative use either will suite anyone just fine. I haven't tried Xara's product, but from your example, I'd say it's just as capable a product.

I found this product while searching around for the exact same thing. I tried the trial, and think it's great. Creates a small enough javascript file that those on dial up won't have to wait terribly long for the menu to load, and the DHTML code is infinitely tweakable. It's great if you were wanting animated javascript based menus. http://www.sothink.com/webtools/dhtmlmenu/index.htm

svchost.exe is a generic host process to process executions for drivers and such, dlls, vxds, etc. So it is possible that the problem is with a badly installed, or poorly written driver. I'm no expert, but I was having loads of svchost.exe issues a while back and another member, Nemesis, pointed me to a program called Process Explorer, that when pointed at svchost.exe, showed me all the threads running withint the process and really helped me to track down the issue. You can get it here: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/procexp.shtml

I'm no lawyer that's for sure, but doesn't it matter that the GPL license was written directly into the source code? I mean it would be one thing to release the binaries and call it GPL, but since the code was written from the roots up to be GPL, doesn't that mean the license is valid, no matter what AOL says? I think that may depend on what sort of legal arrangement Nullsoft has with AOL in regard to software development, seeing as the only real reason AOL bought them was to aquire the rights to Winamp.

Since both the binary and the source were released under GPL, I'm not sure what grounds AOL would have in revoking the license. I can see that if Nullsoft had decided to release the binarie as freeware, but didn't GPL the source code, it would be more cut and dried. As it is, it might not be the best idea to get too involved with Waste. It sounds like intriguing software, but until the legal issues of AOL pulling the reins back on Nullsoft have sorted themselves out it may be best to leave it alone. As they say on Slashdot, just my $0.02 On the other hand, I think sombody has already created a section on Source Forge for it, where you can download the binary and the source, so you could go there and search for it.

Well locally here an AthlonXP 3000+ costs about 25% more than the 2.4Ghz P4 800Mhz fsb. That being said a decked out nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard for the Athlon is substantially cheaper than a Canterwood based motherboard for the P4. THere's little doubt that you'd get better overclocking results from the P4, but probably out of the box, at least in DualChannel mode on the nForce motherboard you'd see a bit better performance from the Athlon, but the jury is still out on that one. I've built serveral P4 and AthlonXP based systems, and I have to say that they are very comparable in both price and performance. The Athlon systems tend to create more fan noise though, if that's an issue for you.

You are right, I looked at the wrong column, it's a KT400 board. My mistake. I still think what I said applied, even though I know about the issues with VIA chipsets.

If your Athlon XP 2400+ isn't outpacing your P3 1.13Ghz machine in every respect, then I seriously think you've either got some faulty components or there is some serious mosconfiguration in the OS. But on the flip side you can't expect a 2400+ to perform as fast as you P4 running at 2.5Ghz, the PR rating system may have its flaws, but for the most part I've found it to be a fairly accurate representation of processor speed, as long as you have a decent chipset for the board to run on. And since you are running a nForce2 mobo, then that isn't the issue.

My AthlonXP system here runs 33degC Idle, and never gets about 38 under full load. My best friend has a P4 system with the retail HSF, and it runs quite a bit hotter than my system. Mine is a little louder, but that's not cause of the HSF, I have crappy case fans that run too loud.

Yeah I noticed that wmp9 doesn't do so well with mpeg-4 video, but I just fire up wmp6.4 to play divx and the like. I must say I think it was a good move on Microsoft's part to allow users to continue using wmp6.4 even if they have the later variants installed.

Yeah it's there in the windows components in my add/remove too, but it simply doesn't work. You run the uninstall and it asks you to restart. When you reboot wmp9 is still there, fully intact. Not a big deal as I see it. The executable for wmp6.4 is still there if I want to use it, and wmp9 is head and shoulders above the quality of wmp7/8.

Yes, I think you are missing something. The picture being displayed by media player when playing dvds is grey-ish, as in what should be black is instead dark grey, and all the colours look washed out and dull looking. This doesn't happen with any other media (divx, xvid, or even basic mpeg-2 files that aren't on dvd media), just when playing back dvds. But like I said, it might just be because of my videocard/driver combination, cause it doesn't look like anyone else has this same issue.

Quote: Quote: Media player? - is free and plays dvd's Only if you have a hardware or software decoder installed, otherwise it will prompt you to install one. And it looks all grey and washed out when compared to PowerDVD or any of the other players I've used. Rather ugly I'd say, but that may be because of my video card, it's hard to say. Has anybody else noticed this with wmp?

When I enable the USB 2.0 controller on my motherboard (see sig) WindowsXP detects the controller as a Standard USB Controller instead of the USB 2.0 ECHI Controller that Microsoft says it is supposed to be. Ive searched all over the net, on Gigabyte's site, on viaarena.com, I can't find any info on this. I don't have any USB 2.0 devices, but I do plan on getting an external burner soon, so I'd like to have working USB 2.0. Any help on this would be great. Just a note, I do have SP1 installed, so XP should have drivers for the controller already installed, and I have installed VIA's USB filter patch (even though they are very vague about what this filter patch does exactly).

Unfortunately that's not quite the case. The drivers on the driver cd for the motherboard are for Win2k and WinXP Pre-Service Pack 1. In fact, if you go to the Gigabyte webiste they specifically warn against installing the drivers after you have SP1 installed. It messed with the IDE drivers or some such nonsense. So the driver CD is useless for this.

As far as I know the only way to play mpeg2 is with additional commercial software like a dvd playing program. There are numerous free ones. There's a thread on the forums specifically about that, just do a search. But I did find a shareware dedicated mpeg2 player here: http://www.elecard.com/products/mpeg2player.shtml It's not free, and I don't know the cost, but it's there.