Avalanche

I can't think of a single program off the top of my head. There's several that do the trick, but they are spe[censored]ed for single purposes. virtualdub, tmpenc, etc. The best idea is to just go to www.vcdhelp.com and go through their tutorials. They have info on just about any format conversion you could possibly do, and most of them have freeware options.

Yeah, but I don't see anything remotely like this being listed.

IrfanView all the way. Small, good interface, easy to use. Great list of plugins too, and everything is free.

I just bought and installed a Hercules GameTheatreXP 6.1 channel sound card. This is one helluva card. I love it so far. And great drivers too, compared to the Fortissimo card that my friend got. It doesn't fake 24bit sampling like the audigy cards do. It says it can do 20bit sampling, and that's exactly what it does. And there are more possible input/output options that I could possible use. So far, big thumbs up!

Hey there, I haven't asked a question in a long time, but this one doesn't make any sense to me. I booted my computer today, and Windows 2000 said it found new hardware. I thought this was a bit strange, but I went through the wizard, but it couldn't identify what it had found. Here's what makes no sense. I haven't changed anything, be it hardware or software for a very long time. Nothing, I mean nothing has changed, so I have no clue what this new hardware could be. There is nothing that is mysteriously missing from the Device Manager or anything. What could this be? I'm stumped I'm sorry I can't give you guys more info, but I don't think there is any more to give. Windows doesn't know what it is, so I can't get any real info about it. Thanks, I hope somebody knows something about this.

The Hercules Fortissimo II Digital Edition Or the Upcoming Fortissimo III. Also the Hercules Game Theatre XP, any version. This card has some many input/output options you'll never run out of possibilties. All three of these cards are substantially cheaper than all except the lowest of the line Audigy cards, and the Fortissomo II will still be cheaper yet. I've heard some people have had trouble with drivers for older Fortissimos, but the Digital Edition is supposed to be trouble free. Sound quality is great on all these cards, and according to Hercules' UK site, are all readily available there.

I just reinstalled a bunch of drivers, for my video card, sound card, etc. Turns out it was a problem with my printer driver. No idea what happened to it, I haven't touched it in months. But there you go. Sorry for taking up space in the forums.

That mobo has a Promise controller correct? If it does, then things haven't really changed, still have to install the RAID driver on setup. Not as easy as with a highpoint controller, also not terribly difficult either. I've become a big fan of MSI boards of late. Besides my system I've built several systems with them, and they are great, I just wish they would stop using Promise controllers. Asus is the same. It is well known that the highpoint controllers are better, especially for setup, and they offer straight IDE controller functionallity, ie, you don't need to configure the drives in an array to use them if you don't want to. Sorry for the rant, I guess the answer is, no, nothing's really changed since you set up RAID a year ago. At least not as far as I've seen. I could be altogether wrong here.

I like Sygate Personal Firewall. It is also free, and offers just as much, if not more control over traffic as ZoneAlarm, but it hasn't caused me anywhere near as much hassle as far as conflicts or just plain not working right. The only thing about Sygate that I think could be improved, is the systray icon, it's too basic. I really like the traffic meter ZoneALarn has, it's a great little touch.

fourth

No your right, it's true cable modem intenet access tends to use 10baseT connections, really most providers tend to set the actual limit somewhat lower than that. So bandwidth really isn't the issue with USB, even with a USB 1.1 device, the speed is around the same, maybe a tiny bit slower, but nothing too noticable. The concerns with USB network devices for internet access occur when you have to share the USB resources with other devices. Plus the plug is easily pulled out, and that can lead to some silly problems not knowing why you've suddenly lots intenet, but that is inevitabley follows by a firm palm slapping to your forehead, followed by a "DUH!"

I've got a nic connection here on a cable modem, a friend of mine has a usb connection, on exactly the same service, not 3 blocks from me. The biggest difference I see, is that when he uses other usb devices the cable modem becomes pretty much entirely useless. -for example, if he scans a picture, the modem can't send anything over the usb connection, cause all the bandwidth is taken up by the scanner. Other than that, in a lot of ways it's easier, just like any other usb device, installation is a snap, but I expect you don't worry much about stuff like that. That's all I can say about it.

Well I had a voodoo3 2000 agp for a long time running win2k, using the last official drivers from 3Dfx, before they were bought. You can get them from voodoofiles.com here's a link: http://www.voodoofiles.com/type.asp?cat_id=0 There's plenty of 3rd party drivers to be had at this page too, I've never personally used any, since my voodoo crapped out on me ages ago. Hope this helps.

From my limited experience with desktop Macs, I can say they don't seem to offer much advantage over equally priced PC hardware, but as far as portable systems go, Macs (iBook and PowerBook Titanium)are very very nice indeed. They really do offer equal performance to their desktop equivilants and a PowerBook G4 w/800Mhz cpu and 512Mb of ram costs about the same as a suped up P4 notebook with much the same features. I don't know, I think Macs are pretty cool, they have their place in the market. The publishing industry would be lost without their Macs. PS, OS X is very cool to use. It looks great and seems to be super stable. You can adjust the size of the Dock so it's not so obtrusive. Only thing is, from a cold boot, it takes bloody forever to boot up, at least on my brother PowerBook 667.

Anything by the Coen brothers, right from their first "Blood Simple" through "Fargo", "The Big Lebowski" and "The Man Who Wasn't There" The Coens are hands down my favourite film makers, I love every movie they've ever done. Also Apocolypse Now Redux, not the theatrical cut, since the studio cut out all the scenes that give any meaning to the story, but with the Redux, it shows that Coppola really did understand Joseph Conrad's novella. But I have to say my all time favourite movie is "The Big Lebowski" "You can call me Dude, Duder, His Dudeness, or El Duderino, if your not into that whole brevity thing."

A friend of mine bought a new case for his computer and after he transfered all his hardware into the new case, both his sound card and his video card don't work correctly. His sound card now loses its driverson every reboot and his video card will install the drivers and display 2D just fine, but will not display anything in 3D, opengl or Direct3D No hardware or software changes were made, all he did was transfer the components into this new case. I looked over his hardware install and everything seems fine, the cards are seated properly, and there is nothing grounding to the box. This is a new one on me, it's obviosly related the the transfer over, but how? His specs, as best I can remember right now are: Athlon 1.4Ghz Gigabyte GA-7VTXE+ (kt266a) 512 Mb PC2100 Sound is a Hercules Fortissimo II Video is a Hercules Kyro2 64Mb I'm not sure about the hard drives. Any info you guy might have would be great. I've exhausted all I know. Oops, forgot. He's running Win2k Pro sp2, and we've tried all types of driver versions.

Hey, thanks Uykucu, don't worry about it. I'm glad you've stuck with me as far as you have. I'm gonna give up too. The tech at the shop said he thinks the mobo is fried, and I suppose anything's possible. Oh well. I'm glad you helped as much as you did. This guy has the worst luck with computers, I'm telling you, it's spooky.

Well, he got his system back from the shop, and $85 later, they didn't fix anything, infact the problem is worse. Now instead of just not running 3D, it'll crash the system when you try to play a game (no BSOD or eventlog, just hard feeze), and if you leave it on for more than 5 minutes, the mouse and keybord stop responding, the system doesn't freeze when this happens, I know because when I hit the power button to shut it off, it flashes the "Windows is shutting down" window for a second or two before it turns off. This is getting weirder and weirder. The guy at the computer shop said he's gonna start swapping out components tomorrow and see if any one of them is at fault. I hope for my friend's sake it's not anything too expensive, labour alone is gonna cost an arm and a leg. All I can think is I'm glad my system isn't having troubles like this.

I hope people will still read this thread. Bad news. His old 250Watt psu was just not up to the task of powering his system, with all the fans and such. So he bought a really nice Antec 400Watt. Great psu, on AMD's approved list (well it was, before AMD decided they didn't need one anymore). Guess what? Same exact problem as with the AOpen psu happens with the new Antec. Both the Antec and AOpen are P4 ATX 2.03 compliant psu's, but the old 250Watter was not. Could this have anything to do with his problem? It seems unlikely to me, but I feel like anything's a possibility. Even if some ATX mobos have trouble with ATX 2.03, a board as new as the Gigabyte GA-7VTXE+ should be perfectly fine with it. We took it to the shop, to see if those guys there can help out. This is possibly the strangest issue I've ever seen.

I use it too, although I switched away from ICQ as my main instant messenger a long time before I got Trillian, so I don't even use the ICQ emulation. The biggest issue for me, is that I can't send files over the Yahoo servers, only recieve them. Unfortunately Yahoo seems to be the only decent messenger for the Mac platform, and my brother is running a Powerbook G4 Titanium (great little machine btw), so that's what we use to chat. Problem is I have to send him files by email, but he can send me files like a charm. I hear they are working on it for the next major revision though, which is great. I'm not complaining though, I love Trillian. I tried it a couple years back, I don't remember the version number (in the 0.4 area I believe) and it was just too shaky to use, but the current version is excellent.

As long as your not running a VIA or ALi chipset they all seem to be okay. I've got a friend who is big into video editing and screen capping, so she changes out tuners and capture cards regularly, and the best one for her seemd to be the ATI models. Currently she's running an ATI TV Wonder. She said it had issues with her GeForce4, but the newest drivers for agp on her mobo fixed that up. From what I've heard from her, and other, stay away from USB models, especially if you want to capture video from say a video camera or something similar, they don't have the bandwidth to handle the vid and audio stream with any decent quality for either, but a professional would be using a firewire vidcap device anyway. As far as I know there aren't any tuner cards made for usb 2, so I'd stick with a PCI model. Both Hauppauge and ATI are good, either will be fine, ATI's software bundle is nicer though, and they've really improved their drivers.

Well I think I got it. Thanks CyberGen, I think you had the right idea. But the weird thing is that there is nothing wrong with that AOpen PSU. We went to the computer shop and the guy gave us a couple of the same model to test, after he couldn't find anything wrong. Seems there is a strange issue between that Gigabyte mobo, and that AOpen PSU. We reinstalled his old PSU, which is only a 250Watt, and everything works fine. Now I'm just worried about lack of juice. He's got 4 case fans, 2 hard drives, 2 cd drives, and an Athlon cpu running. I bet if he upgrades his video card to a more power hungry model, like a GeForce the current PSU will bug out. Oh well, at least I got it. Seriously, thanks guys for all the input. This forum is really great.

They sure do. There are devices on IRQ 16, 17 and 19 on my friend's system. Should I take a screenshot of the device manager?

Yeah, that's been in the back of my mind the whole time. The PSU is the only new component in his system since he changed things over to this new case. I advised him to use this new PSU cause it's an AOpen that is on the AMD approved list, and the one he was using isn't. I guess that's the one last thing to check. That would be a big bugger, cause it's a nice PSU, and you can't return just that part of the case without sending the whole case back. I'll give that a shot, plugging the old PSU back in.

No, I know that not using IRQ 11 is not necessarily bad, and I also know that with an ACPI machine manually configuring IRQs doesn't do too much. I was just covering all bases. I mentioned Assign IRQ to VGA because the info on the hercules page for their Kyro2 cards said that it is a good idea to set this. Mainly I am concerned because it's rare to see sharing of IRQs on such a high number. They are shared on IRQ 16. And no, there's no trouble with the bios holding info, I've checked that out. Everything holds fine, even after it had been powered down for over 2 days. I'm gonna tell him to take the danged thing to the shop. Not that I think those guys are more skilled (I know every computer tech in this cruddy town, none of them know much), but they have the facilities to do more indepth analysis. Thanks for the help there, Uykucu.