Any digital camera that will work as a mountable hard drive works off the shelf under Linux. Including my HP that I bought a couple of days ago.
It's not a matter of the OS supporting anything, really. It's a matter of 3rd parties producing products that support standards. Like the USB hard drive standard. To me, that's how I buy peripherals these days. Not "does Linux support it" or "does Windows support it", but "does it use a common, open standard like USB?"
So goes my digital camera, keychain drive, mp3 player, etc, etc, etc.
Can someone write, and can some consumer want, an OS-specific application that makes some things easier for them (like file transfer)? Sure. So long as it's not as idiotic as the software Canon used to package with their cameras (insert ZoomBrowser shudders here.. why oh why didn't I just teach Dad what "My Computer" was??), more power to em. And so long as they don't REQUIRE that software, everyone's happy.
If Episode 2 grosses more in one year than Episode 5 grossed in seventeen, the old formula is a hard sell.
ESB was released in 1980, and I'm not even old enough to have paid for my own movie ticket then. What were tickets back then, $1-2? Today we're paying $10-15 a ticket. I sure as hell HOPE a movie released today can make several times what a 24 year old movie made, seeing as tickets are an order of magnitude more expensive.
Oh, and before everyone jumps on the "17 years of profits" bandwagon, please note that ESB wasn't exactly a first run movie for those 17 years. As I recall, it was released only twice on a large scale.
I hit college away from home and the smoke and I felt as if I was completely disoriented and unable to concentrate on anything
I really hope there's far more than you're saying in your post that makes you think you had/have ADHD. What you described is just about every single college kid's experience.
Of course, many of them use drugs to help cope with the situation, too:)
Completely offtopic, but I figured I'd share my experience with you.
That router is complete crap. I mean, utterly. I bought 2 of them during the boxing day madness. The first worked fine, until we put a WEP key on it. Suddenly, nothing could pass traffic through it. Windows, Linux, different cards, nothing. Spent several hours with no success.
So I figure, hey, a $15 wired router (and WEPless 802.11 in a pinch), what the hell. Until I tried gaming, webcams, or anything noticably suceptible to packet loss. Turns out this thing is horrendous for it. I was getting disconnected from IRC servers several times per *hour*, while another client on the same IRC server on the same ISP, on the same MODEM (thank you Shaw, for 2 IPs:) was on constantly.
Tried the other one, exact same problems. Ended up returning them, because quite frankly I've never seen a worse piece of networking hardware, short of something that doesn't work at all. For fun, try running a ping for a while.. every second or so should work (-t flag in Windows if you've not a handy *nix box). You'll start seeing packet loss pretty quick, and insanely high return times occasionally. Like 1000 ms to your ISP's gateway. It was killing a steady 5% or so of my traffic, and the same tests run in front of the router worked flawlessly.
Word of caution. Unless Winnipeg just got the bad batch:)
Outside of Toronto, and maybe the Montreal-Ottawa area, it's true though. At least when you compare to the US. Once you get past southern Ontario, you don't hit another city of > 500,000 people until Winnipeg, and that's ~2500 kms away. Another ~600 kms till Regina, and another ~700 till Calgary. Then, it's ANOTHER ~1200 till Vancouver.
Most of the US population doesn't live with the nearest city being a full day's drive away. Most Americans I know can't fathom not having another large urban centre within a 2 hour drive.
You know, mods, when someone puts the word "troll" in their nick, you're supposed to pay attention.
The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
Here's an application for you: there are more than 4 billion people on the planet. When we're all hooked up, what do you suggest? Do you really think we'll all be online behind some uber-NAT devices 50 years from now? Have fun using your cell phone/PDA/personal whatever when you and 1000 of your neighbours are all sharing the same IP, and you're using a protocol as complicated as *gasp* FTP (hint: NAT breaks more than it fixes). Really, please share with us what the "shortcoming" of too many address is. Overkill, it may be. But how does it hurt the protocol?
The problem with a 64-bit network prefix is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
The whole point of IPv6 addresses is that we can do more EFFICIENT routing, as opposed to the hodge-podge of rules we have today. IPv6 routing is FASTER than IPv4.
This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Wow. A whopping 3.4%. Now, in the real world, a lot of us use MTUs > 1500. So we're talking just over a single percent. Stop the presses! Oh yeah, there's this neat thing called header compression, by the way.
Knoppix is *almost* there. I've recently been playing with it, and other than a lack of shortcut to the correct script (say, "Install Knoppix to Hard Drive" or something), your steps are precisely what I've done. Well, I'm still at step 2, but whatever. So far Knoppix had a better time with the video on my laptop than any other distro (unsupported ATI chipset, need to use the stock VESA driver, but most distros end up with a shitty resolution and "letterboxing" around the entire screen).
It's actually pretty amazing just what Wine's been able to handle so far. An MFC game I wrote a couple of years back works perfectly, in fact better than it does under Windows (multiple sounds override each other in Windows, but under Wine they finish playing before the next one starts. Also, the sound ends when the game closes, as opposed to in Windows, where even with the application closed, the sound continues to play until finished). I've ran a bunch of console emulators and they perform nicely, if a bit slow. Pathing issues seem to crop up; I assume I need to configure Wine a bit more. It's fun to run things like Internet Explorer and WinZip in Linux, I have to say:)
Other than the lack of a quick "install knoppix" icon, and the fact that the partition tool (cfdisk) isn't exactly ready for my parents to use, it's pretty much there. I've been converting people at school for the past week!:)
And if I see another "Flat screen" CRT, my head is going to explode. Sorry, suckers, but a flat FRONT of the screen does not make a flat television/monitor. Bulging out 2 feet to the rear isn't what I'd call flat.
There are many reasons why I like LCD, but I'm sure there's something they lie about with those, too:/
When I got my first laptop recently, I figured everyone would ask about the meaningful features on it. Screen size, hard drive size, does it have a burner, battery life, weight, hell, even "how much RAM?".
Instead, most people ask me what kind of video hardware it has. When I tell them it uses shared video RAM I am almost always told "you got ripped off". Riiiiiiiight.
Just to add another data point, the alpha ran just fine on my 9000. Maybe not at the highest quality, etc, but hey, it's an alpha. I'd expect the final product to run a bit better anyway.
I remember how excited I was that the game was playable on my 486DX33
Quake was playable on a 33? Huh? My 486 at the time was a 100mhz monster with 16mb of RAM, and it could hardly load the game. It then stuttered along at 5 or 10 fps. It sure looked pretty, but it was hardly playable.
However, you've made me realize just how much my PC gaming life revolves around id, and how little I care about other games (seemingly, anyway). I got my first PC (the above 486) to be able to play Doom(2) at a nice screen size and speed - before that I was quite happy on various Commodore/Apple machines. My next PC (a screaming 200mhz MMX Pentium) I got because the 486 could play Duke Nukem 3D just fine, but couldn't handle Quake or Quake 2.
id hasn't released diddly in the way of new games lately (sorry, but Quake 3 seems more like a demo to me), so I've had another new cpu or 2 since the 200, but lately I've been putting off getting a new system (especially the video card) because I'm waiting to see just what Doom3 will want to run decently.
Bush has no interest in men on Mars, this is a political statement designed to make him look "presidential" in the JFK way
Well, JFK didn't really mean it either. He had no interest in the moon, and it never would have happened except for one thing: he got assassinated.
So here's the deal. Those of us that actually want to see a Mars mission, let's wait. If Bush makes his announcement, we ice him a few months later. The nation can then spend the next few years trying to "honour the vision of a slain president".
And hopefully, it'll give you something to smile about, instead of whining about every possible thing you can think of:)
The real difference between the Republicans and Democrats when it comes to spending is which segment of society gets the handouts.
I always thought it was which segment of society is PAYING for the handouts.
I used to be against public funding of things like professional sports arenas/stadiums - until I realized that at least those that can afford $100 a ticket are likely the ones footing the bill for the building in the first place. I find it hard to argue against government giving money back to those that gave it in the first place, unless we (as individuals) have some god-given right to take money from others whenever we don't have enough for ourselves.
The colors of the Viking lander, especially in the US flag on it, are mismatched and discolored. When the hues are remapped in a paint program to the correct colors of the flag, the sky turns blue.
Or in a room with coloured floodlights? Or anywhere where you're not getting pure, "white" sunlight?
*gasp!* Things don't look their original colour! Know why? Because if you illuminate something with red light, it will be tinted red. Take an American flag, shine a red light on it, and OF COUSE the colours will be wrong. Mars' atmosphere is naturally tinted red (all them oxides in the air scatter the blue wavelenghts), so by the time light from the sun gets to reflecting off any object, you're getting the same effect. Removing the red gives you the same effect as if you had (ready for it?) taken the picture in sunlight as seen from Earth!
Hell, 1.4GHz is only twice as fast as the Xbox processor. The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
I call bullshit, troll, or somewhere in between.
You're telling me the next gen consoles are all planning on a 7ghz CPU? They better not be planning on releasing until 2007 or so, if that's the case, and they want to keep their consoles under $300.
People who have no interest in Max Payne or GTA VC just might want to play Burger Time or Space Invaders.
Hate to burst the fun bubble, but if you just want to play Burger Time or Space Invaders, you can run MAME on a PSX, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, or hell, even a GBA. You don't need a 1.4 ghz anything unless you're trying to play some (relatively) recent games in MAME.
Would be a lot easier then adding a MP3 player to a cell phone
Actually, to add an mp3 player to a cell phone is trivial. Just add an mp3 decoder chip (about $1 in bulk, iirc) and possibly some audio hardware depending on what the cell phone comes with already. Most phones have that these days. Storage is about the only issue, and phones are starting to come with CF cards and whatnot anyway.
Adding a cell phone to an iPod? Add in a keypad, antenna, all the cell h/w, microphone...
I swear, the size of one's iPod hard drive is now the "I've got the biggest dick!" of the 21st Century.
Actually, for some of us, it has little to do with bragging. I couldn't care less if you're impressed, unimpressed, or want to assassinate me because of the size of my mp3 player (which incidentally is not an iPod). I do however enjoy not having to reload my player on a semi-regular basis, just to keep what's in it fresh. If you don't use yours that often, or enjoy repeating the same music, more power to you.
Having said that, the thought of a $150 ($canuck) mp3 player that fits in a pocket, and holds hours upon hours of music, means I'll buy one for sure. Be nice to have something that I don't mind if I break or lose it.
Click the Knoppix CD icon on the task bar. There's an option to save Knoppix settings, tell it to save to your USB key. During this process, it tells you just what you need to do to load those settings. You have to type in a command at the boot: prompt (the next time you boot, natch), something like "knoppix home=/dev/sda1". Done. It loads from there.
I've just started playing with Knoppix tonight, and I gotta tell you, I'm sold. THIS is what Linux should be.
Re:Not oil on the moon, but it IS worth more , lol
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 1
Holy christ. K, mods, nuke me away. I never thought someone would actually post 20-some entries about the same thing, in one story.
Re:Not oil on the moon, but it IS worth more , lol
on
Dreams of the Moon
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· Score: 1
I'm not sure if it's ironic, or just plain stupid, that there are so far 3 posts talking about the helium-3 on the moon, and ALL of them are moderated as "Redundant".
Shouldn't there at least be one post that's not redundant, for this to make any sense?:)
And now that I look at it, I disabled virtual memory... Why am I getting page faults? My RAM should not be paging, unless I'm not understanding what paging is. Explorer is page faulting about every second, it's really kind of disturbing, considering this computer is devoid of swap space.
Disabling virtual memory on a Windows machine is the kiss of death. The OS just isn't designed to run that way, regardless of your 2gb (or whatever) of RAM that should otherwise be enough. I suspect your page fault issue may be a side effect of this. I haven't tried it since the NT days, and that was spectacular, the errors you could get. Keep in mind though, page faults are perfectly normal, and healthy on a paged-memory system. It's the lovely "invalid page fault" that Windows reports that is an error. To my limited knowledge, Windows will always try to access virtual memory of some sort. Maybe it's faulting on a page that it thinks it swapped out to disk, finds nothing on disk (of course), and boom?
Oh, and as for the issue with spyware, if you have Kazaa installed, and it's popping up "IEXPLORE" windows, that is precisely the spyware I was referring to. It isn't really explorer that's using up all of your memory. It's Kazaa. Even when you think you've closed it. Buggery little thing, it is.
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Any digital camera that will work as a mountable hard drive works off the shelf under Linux. Including my HP that I bought a couple of days ago.
It's not a matter of the OS supporting anything, really. It's a matter of 3rd parties producing products that support standards. Like the USB hard drive standard. To me, that's how I buy peripherals these days. Not "does Linux support it" or "does Windows support it", but "does it use a common, open standard like USB?"
So goes my digital camera, keychain drive, mp3 player, etc, etc, etc.
Can someone write, and can some consumer want, an OS-specific application that makes some things easier for them (like file transfer)? Sure. So long as it's not as idiotic as the software Canon used to package with their cameras (insert ZoomBrowser shudders here.. why oh why didn't I just teach Dad what "My Computer" was??), more power to em. And so long as they don't REQUIRE that software, everyone's happy.
If Episode 2 grosses more in one year than Episode 5 grossed in seventeen, the old formula is a hard sell.
ESB was released in 1980, and I'm not even old enough to have paid for my own movie ticket then. What were tickets back then, $1-2? Today we're paying $10-15 a ticket. I sure as hell HOPE a movie released today can make several times what a 24 year old movie made, seeing as tickets are an order of magnitude more expensive.
Oh, and before everyone jumps on the "17 years of profits" bandwagon, please note that ESB wasn't exactly a first run movie for those 17 years. As I recall, it was released only twice on a large scale.
I hit college away from home and the smoke and I felt as if I was completely disoriented and unable to concentrate on anything
:)
I really hope there's far more than you're saying in your post that makes you think you had/have ADHD. What you described is just about every single college kid's experience.
Of course, many of them use drugs to help cope with the situation, too
Completely offtopic, but I figured I'd share my experience with you.
:) was on constantly.
:)
That router is complete crap. I mean, utterly. I bought 2 of them during the boxing day madness. The first worked fine, until we put a WEP key on it. Suddenly, nothing could pass traffic through it. Windows, Linux, different cards, nothing. Spent several hours with no success.
So I figure, hey, a $15 wired router (and WEPless 802.11 in a pinch), what the hell. Until I tried gaming, webcams, or anything noticably suceptible to packet loss. Turns out this thing is horrendous for it. I was getting disconnected from IRC servers several times per *hour*, while another client on the same IRC server on the same ISP, on the same MODEM (thank you Shaw, for 2 IPs
Tried the other one, exact same problems. Ended up returning them, because quite frankly I've never seen a worse piece of networking hardware, short of something that doesn't work at all. For fun, try running a ping for a while.. every second or so should work (-t flag in Windows if you've not a handy *nix box). You'll start seeing packet loss pretty quick, and insanely high return times occasionally. Like 1000 ms to your ISP's gateway. It was killing a steady 5% or so of my traffic, and the same tests run in front of the router worked flawlessly.
Word of caution. Unless Winnipeg just got the bad batch
Outside of Toronto, and maybe the Montreal-Ottawa area, it's true though. At least when you compare to the US. Once you get past southern Ontario, you don't hit another city of > 500,000 people until Winnipeg, and that's ~2500 kms away. Another ~600 kms till Regina, and another ~700 till Calgary. Then, it's ANOTHER ~1200 till Vancouver.
Most of the US population doesn't live with the nearest city being a full day's drive away. Most Americans I know can't fathom not having another large urban centre within a 2 hour drive.
My Lyra is supported by literally every audio application written for the PC/Mac platform. How, you ask?
:)
It's a USB hard drive. I don't need any fancy program to use it, I have the ultimate in choice. Drag and drop. Works in Linux, too
Why can't vendors work more towards this model?
You know, mods, when someone puts the word "troll" in their nick, you're supposed to pay attention.
The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
Here's an application for you: there are more than 4 billion people on the planet. When we're all hooked up, what do you suggest? Do you really think we'll all be online behind some uber-NAT devices 50 years from now? Have fun using your cell phone/PDA/personal whatever when you and 1000 of your neighbours are all sharing the same IP, and you're using a protocol as complicated as *gasp* FTP (hint: NAT breaks more than it fixes). Really, please share with us what the "shortcoming" of too many address is. Overkill, it may be. But how does it hurt the protocol?
The problem with a 64-bit network prefix is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
The whole point of IPv6 addresses is that we can do more EFFICIENT routing, as opposed to the hodge-podge of rules we have today. IPv6 routing is FASTER than IPv4.
This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Wow. A whopping 3.4%. Now, in the real world, a lot of us use MTUs > 1500. So we're talking just over a single percent. Stop the presses! Oh yeah, there's this neat thing called header compression, by the way.
Knoppix is *almost* there. I've recently been playing with it, and other than a lack of shortcut to the correct script (say, "Install Knoppix to Hard Drive" or something), your steps are precisely what I've done. Well, I'm still at step 2, but whatever. So far Knoppix had a better time with the video on my laptop than any other distro (unsupported ATI chipset, need to use the stock VESA driver, but most distros end up with a shitty resolution and "letterboxing" around the entire screen).
:)
:)
It's actually pretty amazing just what Wine's been able to handle so far. An MFC game I wrote a couple of years back works perfectly, in fact better than it does under Windows (multiple sounds override each other in Windows, but under Wine they finish playing before the next one starts. Also, the sound ends when the game closes, as opposed to in Windows, where even with the application closed, the sound continues to play until finished). I've ran a bunch of console emulators and they perform nicely, if a bit slow. Pathing issues seem to crop up; I assume I need to configure Wine a bit more. It's fun to run things like Internet Explorer and WinZip in Linux, I have to say
Other than the lack of a quick "install knoppix" icon, and the fact that the partition tool (cfdisk) isn't exactly ready for my parents to use, it's pretty much there. I've been converting people at school for the past week!
And if I see another "Flat screen" CRT, my head is going to explode. Sorry, suckers, but a flat FRONT of the screen does not make a flat television/monitor. Bulging out 2 feet to the rear isn't what I'd call flat.
:/
There are many reasons why I like LCD, but I'm sure there's something they lie about with those, too
A lot of it is bragging rights.
When I got my first laptop recently, I figured everyone would ask about the meaningful features on it. Screen size, hard drive size, does it have a burner, battery life, weight, hell, even "how much RAM?".
Instead, most people ask me what kind of video hardware it has. When I tell them it uses shared video RAM I am almost always told "you got ripped off". Riiiiiiiight.
Just to add another data point, the alpha ran just fine on my 9000. Maybe not at the highest quality, etc, but hey, it's an alpha. I'd expect the final product to run a bit better anyway.
I remember how excited I was that the game was playable on my 486DX33
:)
Quake was playable on a 33? Huh? My 486 at the time was a 100mhz monster with 16mb of RAM, and it could hardly load the game. It then stuttered along at 5 or 10 fps. It sure looked pretty, but it was hardly playable.
However, you've made me realize just how much my PC gaming life revolves around id, and how little I care about other games (seemingly, anyway). I got my first PC (the above 486) to be able to play Doom(2) at a nice screen size and speed - before that I was quite happy on various Commodore/Apple machines. My next PC (a screaming 200mhz MMX Pentium) I got because the 486 could play Duke Nukem 3D just fine, but couldn't handle Quake or Quake 2.
id hasn't released diddly in the way of new games lately (sorry, but Quake 3 seems more like a demo to me), so I've had another new cpu or 2 since the 200, but lately I've been putting off getting a new system (especially the video card) because I'm waiting to see just what Doom3 will want to run decently.
Sick.
Bush has no interest in men on Mars, this is a political statement designed to make him look "presidential" in the JFK way
:)
Well, JFK didn't really mean it either. He had no interest in the moon, and it never would have happened except for one thing: he got assassinated.
So here's the deal. Those of us that actually want to see a Mars mission, let's wait. If Bush makes his announcement, we ice him a few months later. The nation can then spend the next few years trying to "honour the vision of a slain president".
And hopefully, it'll give you something to smile about, instead of whining about every possible thing you can think of
The real difference between the Republicans and Democrats when it comes to spending is which segment of society gets the handouts.
I always thought it was which segment of society is PAYING for the handouts.
I used to be against public funding of things like professional sports arenas/stadiums - until I realized that at least those that can afford $100 a ticket are likely the ones footing the bill for the building in the first place. I find it hard to argue against government giving money back to those that gave it in the first place, unless we (as individuals) have some god-given right to take money from others whenever we don't have enough for ourselves.
The colors of the Viking lander, especially in the US flag on it, are mismatched and discolored. When the hues are remapped in a paint program to the correct colors of the flag, the sky turns blue.
Or in a room with coloured floodlights? Or anywhere where you're not getting pure, "white" sunlight?
*gasp!* Things don't look their original colour! Know why? Because if you illuminate something with red light, it will be tinted red. Take an American flag, shine a red light on it, and OF COUSE the colours will be wrong. Mars' atmosphere is naturally tinted red (all them oxides in the air scatter the blue wavelenghts), so by the time light from the sun gets to reflecting off any object, you're getting the same effect. Removing the red gives you the same effect as if you had (ready for it?) taken the picture in sunlight as seen from Earth!
No conspiracy here, it's just optics.
Hell, 1.4GHz is only twice as fast as the Xbox processor. The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
I call bullshit, troll, or somewhere in between.
You're telling me the next gen consoles are all planning on a 7ghz CPU? They better not be planning on releasing until 2007 or so, if that's the case, and they want to keep their consoles under $300.
People who have no interest in Max Payne or GTA VC just might want to play Burger Time or Space Invaders.
Hate to burst the fun bubble, but if you just want to play Burger Time or Space Invaders, you can run MAME on a PSX, PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, or hell, even a GBA. You don't need a 1.4 ghz anything unless you're trying to play some (relatively) recent games in MAME.
Well, at a possible $399 usd it's priced much like the 3d0, so you may be right. And we all know how successful that venture was :)
Would be a lot easier then adding a MP3 player to a cell phone
Actually, to add an mp3 player to a cell phone is trivial. Just add an mp3 decoder chip (about $1 in bulk, iirc) and possibly some audio hardware depending on what the cell phone comes with already. Most phones have that these days. Storage is about the only issue, and phones are starting to come with CF cards and whatnot anyway.
Adding a cell phone to an iPod? Add in a keypad, antenna, all the cell h/w, microphone...
I swear, the size of one's iPod hard drive is now the "I've got the biggest dick!" of the 21st Century.
Actually, for some of us, it has little to do with bragging. I couldn't care less if you're impressed, unimpressed, or want to assassinate me because of the size of my mp3 player (which incidentally is not an iPod). I do however enjoy not having to reload my player on a semi-regular basis, just to keep what's in it fresh. If you don't use yours that often, or enjoy repeating the same music, more power to you.
Having said that, the thought of a $150 ($canuck) mp3 player that fits in a pocket, and holds hours upon hours of music, means I'll buy one for sure. Be nice to have something that I don't mind if I break or lose it.
Some of us buy laptops :)
Click the Knoppix CD icon on the task bar. There's an option to save Knoppix settings, tell it to save to your USB key. During this process, it tells you just what you need to do to load those settings. You have to type in a command at the boot: prompt (the next time you boot, natch), something like "knoppix home=/dev/sda1". Done. It loads from there.
I've just started playing with Knoppix tonight, and I gotta tell you, I'm sold. THIS is what Linux should be.
Holy christ. K, mods, nuke me away. I never thought someone would actually post 20-some entries about the same thing, in one story.
I'm not sure if it's ironic, or just plain stupid, that there are so far 3 posts talking about the helium-3 on the moon, and ALL of them are moderated as "Redundant".
:)
:/
Shouldn't there at least be one post that's not redundant, for this to make any sense?
Damnit, here comes Offtopic
And now that I look at it, I disabled virtual memory... Why am I getting page faults? My RAM should not be paging, unless I'm not understanding what paging is. Explorer is page faulting about every second, it's really kind of disturbing, considering this computer is devoid of swap space.
Disabling virtual memory on a Windows machine is the kiss of death. The OS just isn't designed to run that way, regardless of your 2gb (or whatever) of RAM that should otherwise be enough. I suspect your page fault issue may be a side effect of this. I haven't tried it since the NT days, and that was spectacular, the errors you could get. Keep in mind though, page faults are perfectly normal, and healthy on a paged-memory system. It's the lovely "invalid page fault" that Windows reports that is an error. To my limited knowledge, Windows will always try to access virtual memory of some sort. Maybe it's faulting on a page that it thinks it swapped out to disk, finds nothing on disk (of course), and boom?
Oh, and as for the issue with spyware, if you have Kazaa installed, and it's popping up "IEXPLORE" windows, that is precisely the spyware I was referring to. It isn't really explorer that's using up all of your memory. It's Kazaa. Even when you think you've closed it. Buggery little thing, it is.