Christianb

I sold my Promise Raid controller and it was the smartest thing I ever did even after taking a loss from the original purchase price. That thing was nothing, but trouble. Promise FastTrack 100 EHCK! FastTrack my A S S: FastTrack to system crashes and data loss. -Christian

Personally I think it's worth the dough! You can treat your Hard Disk image like a zip file if you get ghost or drive image! In the sense of a zip file that is you can add and or remove files from your backups, which is wonderful. Think about it, if you get that freeware program and everything is peachy, but you overwrote some file with an older copy the only way to get it back would be to overwrite everything else. If you have Drive Image or Ghost you can just write back that one file. If you follow the hyperlink I posted it'll cost 6 dollars for Ghost 2002 OEM + 4 dollars shipping. Surely you can afford that? -Christian

Thanks Adamjackson, He is right those are the two most popular titles. Often you can get Norton Ghost bundled with Norton SystemWorks Pro for the same price as Ghost Personal edition so you might want to shop aren't. You can almost always buy Norton SystemWorks Pro (it has to be Pro to come with Ghost) for about 30 dollars and it comes with Ghost the same exact version! I think either CompUSA or BestBuy had systemworks on sale this week for 30 dollars with your choice of any DVD in the store. But I don't know if it was the Pro version or not. In any event here are some good prices for ghost: Search DirectDeals for Norton Ghost. -Christian[/url]

Hi Pmistry, Yes I remember Packard Bell all too well. I had the second worst row in the Windows Consumer Hardware lab while at Microsoft: The Packard Bell isle. The only thing worse was the Compaq row, which our most senior tester hard from obvious reasons. The poor guy not only had the worst computers, but he also had the most by a significant margin. I had 26 computers and he had + or - 35 depending on what was working . It's okay though David was a dick head so maybe what goes around comes around after all . We were testing consumer upgrade scenarios from Win95, 95a, b, and c, and 98 to 98SE. -Christian

Sorry HipShot, Although I gotta admit it's kind of funny, because taking it back a few years is exactly where it belongs. Compaqs don't swim well in unfamiliar waters. -Christian

I am curious about what sort of products we can expect from HP and Compaq. Will compaq get better or will HP become worse? -Christian

I presume that the modem is one that came with the system. Just an FYI Compaq has a long history of making low quality, unstable, and unsupported proprietary hardware. Consider yourself lucky if there are drivers for 1 OS beyond the time the machine was released. In summary if I were Rainman I'd studder and tell you Compaq sucks. -Christian

Hi thewizard75, Just so you know Microsoft natively supports all their hardware in every OS that proceeds the release of a given device. I know I used to work there. They take that very seriously, because after quality, it's their second biggest selling point. -Christian

Hi Jules, First off I've just about never had any trouble getting my sidewinder to autodetect in Windows 2000 and prior versions. I am talking about the GamePort version of the Sidewinder game pad 1.0. I think you might try the latest SoundBlaster PCI drivers, because the change to PCI could be the issue. All of my soundblaster cards have been ISA based. I also think that my Ensoniq chipset aka SoundBlaster 64 worked fine. However your SOundblaster PCI is not an Ensoniq chipset so the two should not be compared. If all else fails just buy a SoundBlaster AWE64 ISA it'll cost you all of ten bucks (assuming you still have ISA slots) . Other solutions would be to get an Ensoniq PCi sound card, or buy the USB edition of your game pad. the first two are most likely the cheapest. Be sure to utilize PriceWatch and CNET Shopper in your search.

Ahh it's the old I forgot to stop the timer routine . I'm sure I've done that one too, but my personal specialty is never starting it in the first place .

Oh I almost forgot here's the URL to that survey I posted here. You'll notice that 11 people said they liked SP3 and one person said no! That's pretty darn good . Ciao Amigos, Christian

Hi Tomay, Thanks for sharing your opinions just an FYI. We are talking about Win2K SP3 and not WinXP SP1. That being said I conducted I poll in this messageboard about a month ago and about 90 percent of people said yes their experience was positive after installing SP3. So go for it . However do it wisely, just make a backup before hand, that way if you don't like it you can always switch back. I recommend making a backup in a 3rd party application, because if you use the Service packs rollback feature you'll be stuck with 100-300 megs of old files that will only slow down your computer so store a backup of your boot partition on another drive. If you don't have a backup program I have noticed that there a couple of sector by sector freeware backup utilities. I'm sure somebody else could name one for you. I am happy to share a utility with you by Microsoft called RawRead, but please note that this is an internal tool and not a commercial product. That being said it's very easy to use, runs in dos, supports only Fat12/16/32, is slow, and can't resize partitions. In fact if you resize your partition and try to restore it'll fail! This program also works great on floppies for those who want it. The usage is simple: To save an image: D:\Images> RawRead C: 11-5-2002.img /a /b /c /v To restore an image: D:\Images> RawWrite 11-5-2002.img C: /V The /V verify that the data was written correctly. /A I believe only captures allocated clusters. /C is for compression anb /B I'll have to look up . /B scans the fat for bad clusters. I don't think it scandisks first, it'll just fail if you have bad clusters so run scandisk first okay . Defragging before hand will also speed things up a bit and lower the image size. Click here to download RawRead 3.02 By the way I don't thave the RawInfo.exe file. If somebody has that please post it. I have the version that just reads and writes partitions RawInfo.exe will let you find out information about the image saved, I don't think you can view the files or anything it just tells you the geometry: Fat 16, 200320 Clusters or something. Also a little note on the command line switches /? will list them so don't worry if you forget them. Ciao, Christian

I'd just like to say Google work great for me under Windows 2000 SP3, w/ IE 5.5 SP2 and all the latest hotfixes. Cheers, Christian

Yes I guess it's a sign of the times more than anything. We are all at the mercy of a bunch of technologically advanced angry twelve year-olds bent on world domination. -Christian

True I'll have to concede to that .

Wow I'm amazed a hight traffic website like google doesn't have DOS attack protection like Microsoft: C:\>ping www.microsoft.com Pinging www.microsoft.akadns.net [207.46.230.220] with 32 bytes of data: Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Ping statistics for 207.46.230.220: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms , but then again neither does Yahoo.com so maybe Microsoft is just paranoid. I'm sure that protection comes a behavioral cost. For example they have lost the simplest way on earth to test response times, but they can afford really cool tools like Segue SilkPerformer. -Christian

Just an FYI Internet Exploiter is always running, because it's components are being used every time you view folder in my computer or Explorer. -Christian

Hi Clutch, Thank you very much for the offer, but I sold the thing about a year ago. I love it when users make drivers though. That's the best thing that ever happened to hardware. When user supported drivers exist companies are unabled to force people to buy new hardware, because what they already have is truly adequate. -Christian

Sorry VideoBruce that sounds like you increased your issues not lowered them. IE6 isn't stable enough yet for my PC. Until there's an IE7 I'll go ahead and stick with IE 5.5. I'll let everyone else test IE6 for Microsoft. -Christian

Could be . Well I gotta admit. I will be trying out Winrar 3.00 after all these rave reviews. I would like a better self-extractor and in the past I have noticed that the WInrar ones are pretty good. I think I got some w ar ez that had a Winrar self-extractor. Dont' freak it was actually a copy of Chessmaster 4000 that I donwloaded. I had purchased that title when I was about 14 and either my dad accidentally threw it away by clearing off his desk or we lost it when we moved. I don't know which, but it was certainly lost and I know I didn't loan it to anyone I only had it for a couple of weeks before I lost it . That is not say that I've never w a re z'ed anything that I didnt' have a right too. Sometimes I like to trial commercial applications that don't have demos available (stupid Co's). Also there are applications I used in high school I still can't afford like 3D Studio R4 and Autocad R12 that I already have and or would consider warezing. Does anyone have AutoCad R12? You can use your handy dandy Winrar Self-Extractor?

That's fine Adam. I just hope that you're making time for other important things in life like companionship. People on messageboards don't give hugs and kisses you know ? Well this kind XOXOX, but it's not the same.

Cool thanks for posting the Primera site. You're definetly right about the personal use bit. The cheapest one is $1,039 US. Crazy, Christian

Actually that's just an element of the installation. Dont' worry about it DirectX 6 and higher will do version checking (DX 5 and lower won't) so just click okay and nothing should be overwritten. The Forsaken folks are just making sure their app has the required D3D API 6.0 + installed. Since you have 8.X your all set. If things did happen to get screwy afterwards just re-install DX8. PS I got Forsaken and an Orb for like 30 -50 bucks in a package deal years ago. However, I didn't like the Orb as much as my keyboard. I think the orb would be fun if everybody else had one that would even the playin field, but I just couldn't give the accuracy and speed of response I'm used to using the ORB. I mainly played Descent II multiplayer in Dos Glide which was excellent. Afterwards, since I usually played at night I would feel as though I was moving around in 3 Dimensional space. Good Luck and Happy Gaming, Christian

Ya I know it's not the most ethical thing in the world. In fact I've registered my Winzip, which is what I use. However the mischevious litle child in me likes to crack shareware and trials. It's a challenge if you will, but please don't send me apps and ask me to crack them. I rarely do it, and I only do it for myself.

Hi VB Guy, For the record the best place to get coding help is probably Protonic if you want to ask a question. If you want sample code then head on over to PlanetSourceCode. Actually it sounds like you have done something programatically to make that happen. By default VB applications are never modal. In fact it isn't even an option unless you're coding in VB 4.0 or lower and you've written a 16-bit application. Make sure you're not using "AppActivate" or "SetFocus" using a timer. Also I suppose this could be the result of a dialog box set to vbSystemModal, does a dialog appear when the app hops back on top of everything else. Another workaround would be to minimize it and or pause it's processes when it loses focus or is minimized. -Christian[/url]