Christianb

Hi Tom-Boy, I have no idea what features are causing what you'll have to figure that out for yourself. If some of the pictures are coming out okay and some aren't that doesn't prove much at all. Different seens will take advantage of different 3D functions. However if it works at first and then starts failing that could be some sort of buffer overrun issue or something. Also have you written the technical support for the developers of your game yet? Good Luck, Christian

Please explain the context under which you'd like to lock people out? Are you trying to lock out network access to your files or local access (that is from other users of your system?)

Yes InnoSetup is the bomb . -Christian

I also wanted to mention that an old AOPEN board I had (glad to be rid of it too!) Video Ram caching enabled in the bios by default. This made my system crash like nobody's business. You might look and see whether or not this illogical feature is enabled. Cheers, Christian

Hi Mr Guvernment, If you're getting errors like that during startup you ought to download a memory testing application. There are tons of them. The easiest thing to do would be to disable the "Quick Power On Self Test" in your bios. This would cause your bios to do more rigorous testing of your system memory during POST (Power on Self Test). If you get a memory error from your bios you can almost guarantee that the problem is in fact memory related. Hell you could even get lucky and find that you just didn't seat your memory perfectly when you installed it. However, that isn't too terribly like on DIMM based systems since it's harder to not seat the ram correctly. Good Luck, Christian

Hi Alec, Actually Ghost 2003 might work with "Any" RAID array, via windows compatibility and drivers. However Ghost 2002 definetly does not. Whatever the case I highly recommend you check for compatibility with your controller on Symatec's website. If you can't find just ask their support people. They're pretty good about helping people although it often takes a couple of days to get an answer. -Christian

Hi Mirch, Why don't you temporarily make your power user an admin, make the change you want and then dilute your permissions. Why not just run your PC as Admin? The marjority of security flaws aren't related to the level of permissions the current user has. -Christian

Hi Tom-Boy, Perhaps Hypersnap DX doesn't support capture with the latest DirectX and or OpenGL APIs. Alternatively there could be issues with a particular 3D function, for example perhaps you can't take screenshots when bump mapping is enabled due to some bug in Hypersnap, DirectX, or the DirectX driver. Are you sure you're using the most recent copies of your game and hypersnap? -Christian

First off Iomega sucks and I would never recommending buying or using any of their products for anything, but a paperweight. That being said I would uninstall whatever driver you tried to use and then install the most recent drivers available at Iomega's website. Furthermore why are you still using NT 4 get Windows 2000 already. It's faster, it's more stable and if you have a Pentium 2 or better with 256 megs of ram or more I think you'll agree. -Christian

I recall there being a way to get Windows XP Pro for 50 bucks if you pass yourself off as a system Integrator. Which well I am, but I only integrate my PC and a few friends and family . However for me I used to work at MS so I just have friends buy me things with their MS employee discount and mail them to me and then I re-imburse them and thank them profusely .

Quote: As long as everybody is happy with what they got at home. A little competition never harmed anyone and nobody wants Intel to become a hardware Micro$oft. Hi Tomay, I'll agree with that. I like competition too, I just choose to "bend it over" sometimes with both Intel and Microsoft . Why not just upgarde your CPU too? What a waste of money, and selective power. An old mobo costs almost as much as new good one so why not get something new and slap a new CPU on it too? Let slot1 die please Trust me you'll never miss it once you see Sol.exe load on that P4 2GHZ! -Christian

He's right burner's aren't really OS specific. The bundled applications, and possibly driver add-ons may however be. For example I don't think Plextor Manager works in WinXp, but the drives will without the add on software. In terms of software stability I've had really good luck with Easy CD Creator 5.X. If the drive doesn't come with Nero or Easy CD Creator I personally wouldn't buy it. You might pay more attention to the RW speed that the R speed. Because one day if media costs ever drop everyone will prefer RW writing to R writing. Make for damn sure the drive you get has some sort of buffer under-run prevention. I have a plextor 16/10/40 and mechanically it's a piece of shit so I won't be recommending that drive. I'm on my third 16/10/40, because they are mechanical nightmares. Hopefully the newer drives are more stable, but I wouldn't count on it, because newer hard drives aren't so they must be using cheaper mechanical componentry to keep the price down. Good Luck, Christian Blackburn

Quote: Not unless you want to end up like the goatse man... Thats the overall effect of paying Intels ridiculous prices. I'll agree that Intel ain't perfect. However, they're a company and companies are composed of humans so what do you expect. I do like AMD's practices of allowing users to upgrade their CPUs for generations without having to buy a new mobo. However the fact still remains that Intel makes the most stable hardware, with the best drivers, and best developer support. Hell Intel even has their own version of C++ to allow companies to support their processors without having to become experts on their CPUs. The simple fact that Intel has the majority of the market share ensures the best hardware utilization in Games and also the best stability, because more testers will be using Intel based systems than AMD. Furthermore the cost of a particular product isn't paid at the cash register, it's when you take it home and try to get it working and then it sorta works or crashes. When a product doesn't work correctly you have to spend hours, days, weeks, months, etc.. just to get it working that's the true cost of hardware and that's why I avoid generic craption whenever possible. Simply put, Intel is expensive at the register, but you get what you pay for and with Intel you're simply buying more. -Christian Blackburn

Quote: Oh MY GOD... That simple. 8) pulled out the controller. Connected both drives Mb-idectrl'er/ghosted/put target in as source/booted flawlessly. Just to incredible to believe. I thank u all for the inputs on this thread unvaluable source of help as usually Denmark 10-4 out Hi Dankux, You're welcome I'm glad it worked . -Christian

If you do upgrade your motherboard the most stable would be Intel and the best stability/ feature combination would be an Asus board. Intel boards are the most stable for obvious reasons they make the architecture, they make the CPUs, they make the nics, they make a trillion pieces of good quality hardware that are all compatible with each other. It's a win, win situation for you. Also I used to work at MS in the Windows Consumer Hardware lab and we'd have intel test machines and we'd test out the latest versions of windows for hardware functionality on Intel evaluation boards. I highly recommend getting an Intel, because it releases all the interupts correctly and of course receives the most testing by MS, followed by Asus. Why not get an intel board that comes with a video card as part of the chipset, play whatever games it is you want it to work with and see if it's fast enough. If it isn't then you can buy a video card right away or wait until you can afford something better, since the onboard video card will at least allow you to do more necessary computer operations (e-mail, web, office, etc...) Good Luck, Christian Blackburn Good Luck, Christian

Hi Gang, I'm not even sure why anyone would even do this, but I've come across maybe 2 or 3 DIVX files on from KaZaA that I'm unable to play back. Basically these DIVX files are using Windows Media Audio V2 instead of Mp3 for the audio. I have Divx 5.02 Installed on my Windows 2000 SP3 system. Aside from this I'm experiencing absolutely no other audio or video playback problems. As far as I know the divx format is supposed to be encoded with MP3 for audio. I think that's part of the DIVX spec. So I don't even know why people are encoding these files using WMA anyhow. I have tried to play them back in both the DIVX brand "DivX Player 2.0 Alpha" and Windows Media Player 7.1, neither of which will play back the audio. I don' thave any WMA 2.0 audio files to verify whether or not I just have a problem with them in general. However I know that Windows Media player will download a codeq if it's not installed and one is available, and I'm pretty sure that WMA 2.0 sound would come with Windows Media Player 7.1 since it's the most recent non beta. I can however play Windows Media v8 files without any trouble. If anyone has a V2 audio file I would love to try and play it? Or if you happen to know of a player or codeq I need to install that would also help. Thanks for any and all help guys, Christian

Hi Tomay, Thank you for the audio filters. Unfortunately neither of them added sound to the files I needed. Here's the file I have it's DIVX and WMA 2 not AC3. Do you know what one I'll need for that? Thanks for the help all the same, Christian Blackburn

Hi ChewyCaCa, Do you mind if I ask you what your name means? I hope it's a joke about chewbaca, because Caca (in Spanish) isn't anything I'd ever want to be chewing . Okay here's something you might try: You could enable exclusive mode for your mouse. Right click over the .EXE or .COM file that launches your game and choose properties. Then navigate to the tab in the picture below and enable exclusive mouse mode and click OK. Please let us all know if that worked. So we'll know for future reference. I just recall seeing that option I don't think it's ever helped me though. I have heard of people having a problem in dos games where their mouse is stuck in a the upper left region (one of the corners any ways) and no matter how much pressure or time they applied to moving in out of that region it just wouldn't go. Perhaps SP3 fixed that, but who knows. If you still can't get your game to work. Try one of the following emulators: 1. Virtual PC (the best by a large margin) 2. VMWare (cool program has a few different features than VPC, like the ability to take a screenshot). 3. Bochs (still a complete X86 emulator, but this is cryptic and difficult to set up, I've personally never was able to install my own OS, I could only run their lame command-line version of Deluxe Linux). The nice thing about Bochs is you can choose what CPU you want to emulate whereas every body else pretty much requires you to emulate a specific PC. 4. DosBox (this is the most intuitive dos emulator out there, but the problem is it doesn't support almost anything yet.) Nonetheless you might make it the first one you try, because it's free and easy to try out. Just read the readme. Good Luck, Christian Blackburn

I will agree that XP is stable, comparable to Win2K in that respect, but considering that it doesn't offer any features of note that Windows 2000 doesn't have. OK it has burner support, woop, I have EZ-Creator 5 which can do ten times more. There's no reason why not to wait a a year or two for Microsoft and it's guinea pigs (end users) to work out the bugs in WinXp without me. Don't get me wrong if I bought a PC today I'd specifically ask for WinXP over 2K , but right now there's just no motivating reason. I've used XP a lot and like it, but seeing how I suffered early edition data loss on Win2K I think I'm going to pass on a similar fate with XP. I like that you can format a bootable floppy in Win2K though, however when are they going to get off their asses and realize that CDs are our floppies and allow you to format bootable CDs from the shell. -Christian

Hi clutch, I think you're right for the most part, lagging behind on software is the safest way to go. I didn't start using Win2K until SP1 and really that was probably too early. As I did suffer some data loss related to a bug in their software RAID functionality. However it must be compared with what was out ther at the time both WinNT4 and Win98SE were far less stable than Win2K so I think it was the right choice. Even with the data loss I consider myself to have been better off with win2k. What think I liked about Win2K most was that you could have a session of notepad open and not have to worry about your system crashing before you'd have a chance to save a .txt file. Also Windows 95 Gold was still far more stable than windows 3.1 and featured considerable improvements in usability and performance. If I had to do that over again I would have installed Win95 sooner as well. Nonetheless, I consider both of those exceptions to the rule. In general I was until there's a 5.0 out before I'll install a 4.0 of a given application. That way I figure all the major bugs have been patched, and any issue that went unresolved are known by their support staff and are hopefully in a FAQ on their website. -Christian

Hi Mr Guverment, If you are blue screening with just office and you have Office 2000 SP3 and Windows 2000 SP3 then I would say you have definetly have a hardware/driver issue, because both office and win2k have gotten pretty darn stable lately. -Christian

Tell me if the players and encoders aren't stable yet, and the there just about aren't any files available encoded in it yet, why not wait until it's stable and doesn't suck? -Christian

Thanks for the reply. Ya I figured the Adaptec stuff would work they put a lot of money into their solutions. Can anyone comment on whether any of adaptec's IDE RAID Solutions work as well. I presume they would, because if Adaptec is smart and well let's face it they a flock of prodigies then they probably just mapped the IDE interface to SCSI for their IDE RAID Solutions. Cheers, Christian

Quote: i used to get this error often - even just sitting there staring at my desktop - BAM! B.S.O.D with that error. i then went back to 28.** drivers and no probs. - for a while 0 then started again! anyways, one day it just stopped! so no clue what it was for me. as i format so often and try out so many new apps. Hi Mr Guvernment, I'm the same way I'm still using driver version 23.11. It seems to be working fine, so whatever I'm lacking I'm not missing it . Although the idea is for drivers to perpetually improve and sometimes they do. There's often no point in upgrading if you don't have the latest bleeding edge version of DirectX. I don't so why add code and CPU time to my display drivers? Perhaps other things have been fixed. I will break down and try a more recent release one of these days, but for now I'm happy with what I've got. It sounds to me like you need to slow down and install no more than 1 application per week. Observe what happens and make changes more gradually. You can always keep a log of your changes and ones you plan on making and do them in some sort of order. However based on the fact that you said you re-install all the time you would be well served to get a good backup solution and become religous about it. Anyhow that's my two cents worth on the subject. Good luck and I'm glad the crashing went away even if you dont' know why. You might try to do whatever it was you did before, run old apps and see what caused it, but if it's some program you don't even have installed anymore then I guess it really doesn't matter . Cheers, Christian

Hi dankux, I'm a big fan of Ghost, because it just about never fails. That's of course really important in terms of data reliability, wasted time, and possibly wasted CDR media. I returned my incompatible hunk of junk promise raid 100TX controller over that very issue. Promise should pay Norton some bucks and get native support for their controller. However they haven't and according to their tech support staff, they have no plans of doing so. I am however speaking about the Dos 2001 version of Ghost and things may have changed. You see the promise RAID Controller and promise IDE controllers both use the same IDE interface with the bios. This interface isn't a complete emulation of Intel's ata 100 IDE Controller so when ghost tries to treat it like one it won't work. Ghost is fast, it's also proprietary and supports Intel IDE controllers natively and presumably AMD too (don't know, because I'm an Intel fan . My advice to you is to try a different brand of IDE Controller. I hear HighPoint has better compatibility, but I can't back that up, because a salesman told me that (and we all know they lie sometimes . Can someone comment on whether any HighPoint solutions work with Ghost or Drive Image? Additionally should this guy just switch to Drive Image and will that work the Promise controllers? I would also like to dispell that your NT Loader is the problem. Basically if you change IDE controllers or motherboards in Windows 2000 or higher you're flat ass stuck re-installing the OS. My advice is leave the boot drive on your motherboard's controller and put a newer larger drive on the controller and move as much over there as possible. If you don't mind re-installing then do so, but considering you're using a promise IDE Controller, so it's already proprietary crap, why not just do a Promise Raid array or somebody else's? If you're going to go incompatible do it with pazazz! If you don't believe me or have any questions regarding what I've just told you feel free to call Promise and perhaps they can be of help in finding a compatible backup title. I think I had to wait a long time though to talk to someone like 30 minutes or more. The other thing about installing promise controllers if you're going to take my recommendation and keep that piece of garbage (yes I'm allowed my opinions too then you should connect the boot drive to your motherboard. Put in the promise controller without any drives. Install the drivers and then reboot. If everything is stable (ya right!) with the controller card in there restart again and plug in a drive or more to the controller. You may also need to do some sort of setup in the Promise Controller's Bios, I dont' know if the Non-Raid versions have their own UI via a bios or not. Also can people reply with RAID Controllers that actually work with Ghost or other backup titles I'm very interested in that? Good luck, Christian