Admiral LSD

Quote: As someone else had mentioned, the 9800 gets 10fps on doom III over on Hard's review............. i am doubting that for some reason... They forget to read the second page. The problem is in ATi's Catalyst 3.4 drivers (which haven't even been officially released yet), when 3.2 was installed instead better results were seen. HardOCP conveniently forgot to mention the fact Cat 3.4 is prerelease software in their article as well...

Quote: 499 bucks they can keep it..

Does Nero have the capability to directly import Winamp playlist files? Using the playlist file itself would be the easiest way I would think since Winamp playlist files a plaintext and have the complete path to the song stored in them. Failing that, do utilities exist that'll convert a Winamp playlist into a format Nero can handle directly?

Quote: LOL Admiral LSD This topic was posted in the "Games" section for a reason, hehe. I know Hair-splitting aside, if it doesn't require a Power Macintosh and you have access to a real physical Mac (to get the ROM from) you could try using a Macintosh emulator like Basilisk II.

Quote: Fullthrottle MAC version on Windows XP? What is this Full Throttle MAC, some kind of tool for speeding up my network card? Or is it perhaps something I can use to improve reception on my satellite TV system?

The main problem I have with current SATA implementations is that most of them connect via the PCI bus and this'll hurt performance in the long term. The exception is the SATA implementation in Intels new i875 chipset which is integrated into their ICH5 chip and connected straight into their hub-link architecture and not through PCI. The other problem I have with it is the drive situation is a mess with price, performance and capacity varying all over the place. At one end, the cheaper and larger SATA drives are outperformed by the best (and more reasonably priced) PATA drives and at the other you have the Raptor which is well and truly where SATA is headed but it's high performance is offset by it's low capacity and high price (USD$160 for only 36Gb is outrageous). SATA needs broader chipset integration and for 10,000rpm drives like the Raptors to become much, much cheaper (to the point of rivalling PATA drives) before it'll become seriously competitive with PATA. Most of the current SATA implementations will be obsolete by then so buying into it now is a waste of money. If you're serious about it now though, avoid the PCI solutions and go straight for Canterwood, it's the best short-term implementation out there. Me, I'll stick with my 120Gb Caviar SE and sit firmly on the sidelines.

The only two things the Asus an Abit nForce2 boards really offer over their competition are SATA and dual LAN, neither of which are all that useful and given these come at a USD$30-50 price premium (The 8RDA+ can be had for as low as USD$85) they're not really worth it and I honestly can't recommend either of them.

Unless you need SATA (and theres a fair chance you don't), the EPoX 8RDA+ is cheaper and has a similar feature set. The only exception is dual LAN but this isn't really all that useful. It also has 6 PCI slots, something no other nF2 board I'm aware of (save the FIC AU11 but that doesn't really count) does, the rest have between 3 and 5 PCI slots and/or a CMR slot.

Running Windows 95, 98 or Me

Quote: ive been over there and tried all the solutions. Nothing has worked. Get the same stupid sound cracking/corruption problem no matter what. Are you using the drivers from the nVidia site or the ones from Windows Update? The latter are supposedly better. If they don't show up in the Driver Updates section of Windows Update you may have to go digging in the Windows Update Catalog which you have to add manually to Windows Update: http://www.theeldergeek.com/windows_update_catalog.htm

If you think it's bad under Windows, wait until you see the shocking nature of the Linux drivers. Until I started hanging around on the nForcersHQ forums (I suggest you take your question there as well, you'll find plenty of people who can help) and got a huge reality check on it, I though nVidias drivers were "teh win!!11" myself.

What privacy? Online privacy is and always will be a myth.

I having trouble with Excel 2002 on my folks machine (a 600Mhz Celeron with 256Mb RAM running Windows XP SP1a). What's happening is that normally, when you double-click an excel file in Explorer, Excel will start and load the file but now, for some reason it doesn't. Excel loads, but the file won't. You can open the file manually from with Excel afterward so it hasn't hung up, it just won't load the file. I've repaired office, reinstalled it and even uninstalled and reinstalled it manually but still nothing. Short of a complete reformat, is there anything I can do to fix this?

Nesticle has a Win32 version, I got it here but it sucks (anyone know how to make ROMs expand to filll the whole screen when you go above 320x240?) and as it's discontinued, it isn't going to get any better.

If you created a System Restore point just before installing WMP9 you can simply restore WMP8 that way but if you didn't, you're SOL as MS don't include an uninstall routine for WMP9 (which they warn you about when you install it so for once, it isn't their fault).

It doesn't really matter if the poll doesn't work, just post your answer as a kind of "written" poll. My first 3D Accelerator was a PCI Diamond Viper V550 based on the nVidia Riva TNT which I would have bought about 3-4 years ago. During that time I never had a single problem with and loved the level of support I got for it from nVidia long after Diamond had left the picture. Over the years, I made plans to replace it, again with various nVidia based options as reviews still put nVidia based cards ahead of the slowly dwindling competition. Ultimately, it got to the point where in order to upgrade the video card, I'd need to upgrade the entire system. That was about two years ago. To cut a long story short, I bought an ATi Radeon 9500 Pro this time around as I didn't want to spend an awful lot on a new video card and there was nothing nVidia based anywhere near what I was prepared to spend that matched it.

Even the nightly builds of 0.6 are far better than 0.5 and previous releases. 0.6 surprised me, after years of using crappy Mozilla derivative after crappy Mozilla derivative and with earlier versions of Phoenix doing little to change that, 0.6 made a pleasant change. Downloading and rendering are reasonably fast now (only took them 5 years to get it right...) and the new theme is a definite improvement over the old. It still suffers from the same blandness and lack of flair that the boring, minimalist types have wet dreams over but thats easy enough to change (in theory at least. As the Moz guys have no idea how to write tight code, the only way for them to make Phoenix smaller was to start chopping of bits and pieces left, right and center and one of the first to get the chop was the Mozilla skin engine). The pop-up blocker is a touch over-sensitive though, it blocked at least one pop-up I wanted and while fixing that is relatively simple (you can maintain a list of sites that the pop-up blocker will ignore) it shouldn't be necessary as the blocker should be smart enough to make it unnecessary. The filesize also needs more work. At around 6Mb, it's now a third smaller than it was when I first used it (9Mb) and half the size of the regular Mozilla (12-14Mb) but when Opera can pack more functionality into a package half the size again (3.2Mb) it indicates theres something seriously wrong with their coding methodology

You might also want to take your question here as it specifically deals with situations like this: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/index.php The head admin is a real dickhead but if you ignore that then theres some fairly useful info to be had over there.

I haven't missed your point, it just wasn't relevant. If nVidia weren't already releasing Linux drivers for its graphics cards (or they were as dodgy as the nForce drivers) I might have agreed with you but the very existance of the nVidia Linux graphics drivers (and the ease at which they seem to have been ported to both IA64 Linux and FreeBSD) shoots your argument to pieces. If kernel changes make driver development so difficult why then, up until fairly recently, have there been precompiled binary drivers for virtually every major Linux distribution (all of which use different base kernel versions) and then after that, why did nVidia recently move to streamline the installation process to make it even less distribution dependent? The graphics drivers would also indicate that nVidia are have both the money and the resources to put into the development Linux drivers for its products. Finally, given that the Linux drivers share a fair bit of the same code as their Windows counterparts and that there are already decent drivers for AGPGART and the APU on Windows it shouldn't be all that hard to rig up something similar for nForce2. All this makes the lack of decent Linux support for nForce2 inexcusable and its no one else's fault but nVidia's.

Whats the easiest way to tell whether an XP system is running Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 1a if both still have the MS JVM installed? The System Properties still say "Service Pack 1" and the System Information tool shows both the SP1 machine and the SP1a machine as having the same version of XP. Is the lack of the MS Java VM the only real difference between SP1 and SP1a or is there more?

After trying a couple more things (installing an Excel update, running "Detect & Repair" within Excel) I've finally managed to fix it although I would have like to have known exactly what caused the problem in the first place. I uninstalled Office completely, deleted the two main Office keys in the registry and upon reinstalling Office afterward, Excel files properly loaded when double clicked.

The may be planning on adding a 4th DIMM slot to future revisions of the chipset such the upcoming nForce3 for Athlon 64/Opteron or maybe even future versions of nForce2 but to my knowledge, the current crop of nForce2 boards, including the A7N8X Deluxe and my EPoX 8RDA+, only have 3 DIMM slots.

I just checked and that isn't it, the entry on the folks machine looks identical to yours apart from the fact theirs is installed in the folder "Office10". I guess my folks'll just have to open the excel files manually until I can be bothered reformatting it again...

Quote: you may also think about two matched pairs of 512MB sticks, RAM is pretty darn cheap, even PC2700 That would be kind of difficult consdiering nForce2 boards typically only have 3 RAM slots and only 2 can be used if you want to get full performance from dual-channel mode. As for sound, don't by a sound card until you've at least heard the nVidia SoundStorm on the A7N8X Deluxe (which, unless you really need SATA, isn't really worth the money).

According to MS though, if you install SP1a on a system that already has the JVM installed (either via Windows Update, seperate download or SP1) the JVM isn't touched. If that's the case then, is there any real reason to install SP1a over SP1?