I had an X1900XTX in my pc, and just installing the drivers didn't even enable hardware opengl acceleration. Instead I had to manually edit xorg.conf to disable some other feature for it to enable. Movies decoded in the wrong colours. I had to manually switch gnome from aiglx to xgl to get beryl to run on it, and it then after a couple of minutes it frequently blacked out new windows (inc. menus) and frequently crashed.
Dunno which ati drivers you were using. Fortunately I was only borrowing the card, and switching to an nV 8800GTS was like a breath of fresh air.
Although, you're right that Maxtor drives are still available, but they're not getting any larger than 320GB, even though everyone else has 500GB, 750GB or even 1TB drives out already. Maxtor DID have a 400GB (and maybe a 500GB) drive before they were bought, but now they've only got a 320GB model as their largest. This is also suspicious, because it was Seagate that used to have a 320GB model, Maxtor's was only 300GB.
I put a lot of emphasis on games because that's what a "home" pc tends to get used for.
Of course if you aren't a typical home user or you are a business doing other intensive things, then it's different.
If you're doing video encoding (and want it to be quick) then you could do with as powerful a cpu, and as fast ram and hard-disk as you can get (with a minimal graphics card). I'd recommend a dual or quad core (depending on budget) with plenty of DDR2 memory, in a motherboard with an onboard gfx chip.
With your complaint about not being able to put SDRAM in a modern motherboard, that's because SDRAM is old and the motherboard is new, simple as that. Technology has changed. You couldn't put simms in a motherboard that took dimms when that changeover happened either. You can't put older AGP cards in a modern (ok, not quite so modern any more) AGP slot because the voltage changed. Several times in fact.
Oh, and a word of advice: Don't buy multi-socket boards (eg AGP and PCI-e), they're often horrifically slow, overpriced, incompatible and unstable.
Admittedly the 160 I have is a low-end series 10 not a series 9, so it might not be affected by whatever causes the failures.
Though you can't buy maxtors any more anyway, they've been bought by seagate and the brand is being used only for the usb external drives (which have a very good reputation).
I bought a microwave recently, and specifically avoided the dial ones because they have NOT got it right. If the instructions on a pot of rice pudding says 650W for 45 seconds, it would be nice if my microwave would actually let me choose 650W as the power and exactly 45 seconds instead of "high" and "somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute".
I've got one with a keypad that you type the numbers in on, but it still only offers wierd presents for power "10%, 25%, 50%, 80% and 100%" and forces you to push "power level" before you can put in the time.
I've owned 10 maxtor drives in recent years, and I'm using 7 right now. It was only certain models of maxtor drives that failed, the 40-120GB (diamondmax 9?) versions. The 20, 160, 250 and 4x300GB disks I have are all working perfectly, and have been for at least a couple of years (even longer for the 20GB one).
I wonder what they did to cause so many failures of one series of drives?
Don't be stupid. Nearly no motherboards are BTX (in fact I'd forgotten about it), nearly no-one uses the 64-bit abilities of 64-bit cpus, nearly no-one properly uses more than one core (most games only use one, and those are the only intensive tasks most people run), and IDE isn't dead just yet.
But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world. You can still choose not to upgrade, and all you'll miss out on is the "high detail" setting in new games. If you'd prefer, you could buy a games console for playing games on, (the xbox 360 gets most of the games), and keep your pc for playing the games you already have and surfing slashdot. Though you'd slowly pay that way, because console games are more expensive than pc games.
A lot of modern motherboards support plugging in a ps2 keyboard / mouse while they're on. It doesn't take a lot of circuitry.
And even older motherboards have short protection on the socket, or just plain disable it if there's nothing plugged in when the board is powered up.
Though this doesn't apply to ALL motherboards, and with cheaper ones (generally with a via or sys chipset) they can go boom when plugging a ps2 device in while they're on, even now.
Indeed. Here in the UK, PC games are frequently £25-£30 and xbox 360 games are £40-£45.
Even if it's the same game with a simultaneous release date. Even if they used a cross-platform game engine and the PC version has an explicit option for using the xbox 360 controller.
Microsoft must be taking quite a cut of the money for that kind of difference.
I have a 2x Athlon XP 2400+ Thoroughbred machine using the same XP->MP trick. Though I used conductive paint, because the pencil didn't work for the version of the chip that needed the gap filling in instead of joining the dots on either side.
It's not as powerful as a modern Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (which is also 2x 2GHz, and I also own), and uses at least four times the power (and produces four times the heat), but I love it because I actually worked to build it instead of slapping together some parts.
Oh, and an interesting fact: A dual-cpu machine will run quite happily with two different speed cpus, but it screws up applications that use the rdtsc instruction as a timer unless they're constrained to a single cpu. Though the "/usepmtimer" boot.ini option could sort that one out.
Because NPD has decreed that June has 5 weeks. Their "June" ran from the beginning of the first week in June for 5 weeks, 3rd June - 7th July, including an entire week (1st July - 7th July) that doesn't even have a single day in June.
I have an AMD X2 3800+ (s939), 2GB of ram and an nVidia GeForce 8800GTS all in an nForce 4 motherboard, and drivers for all of it are available for both Windows XP x64 and Ubuntu x86-64.
My 250GB Windows disk is overflowing with major games, and all run wonderfully. Except for the occasional one I have to crack, either because it's too old and tries to load a 32-bit driver (understandable) or the company went for a shit copy-protection system that tries to load a 32-bit driver (eg Overlord). That's not such a big problem as I crack most games anyway.
My Linux install is reasonably new (Ubuntu 7), and already has launchers for 8 commercial games on the desktop. Admittedly a couple are running in Wine, but they still run well. Neverwinter Nights and UT2004 are examples of native linux games, EVE online and steam are running in Wine.
So far I haven't found anything that doesn't work well on a 64-bit OS. Well, except copy-protection.
Drivers have to be 64-bit for a 64-bit OS because they have to be able to talk to the devices through physical ram, without any translation. There's no easy way around this, especially for high bandwidth devices like graphics cards.
32-bit software works because it was ALREADY USING virtual memory, so mapping the app's 32-bit virtual memory to 64-bit physical addresses isn't a whole lot different to mapping to 32-bit physical addresses.
As for antivirus, I think that one was a difficult choice. Antivirus programs use hooks into the lowest levels of the windows kernel to be able to scan files as other programs request them, so as the kernel was 64-bit it makes sense that everything that hooks into it should be 64-bit as well. It's theoretically possible to hook a 32-bit program into a 64-bit one, but would have been quite difficult to do.
To be fair, most printers that are/were cheaper than their ink cartridges did't come with a full cartridge, only a sampler (1/4 or less of the ink than a real cartridge).
IIRC it was a specific few models of maxtor that liked to die, particularly 80-160GB drives.
I have an older 20GB and several newer 250GB and 300GB maxtors and none have died (except one that the delivery man dropped and was replaced free). Before I got these I had a couple of 80GB and a couple of 160GB drives, and those have ALL died now.
He didn't necessarily need to be running no AV, as most AV software only blocks specific viruses. Even if it is millions of specific viruses, most of which no longer even work, they still miss anything they don't know about.
Another vote for autoGK here. DVD-Decryptor the original dvd, then run autoGK, choose the decrypted dvd files, choose your desired output size and start the encoding. Most dvds compress down to 700MB easily without losing too much quality, or 1400MB (2 cd) for longer/better films.
Though I'm shocked at how much more the French are paying for Vista, despite how bad the UK has it compared to the US they have it even worse.
It's not just Vista though, it is everything electronic/software: eg on Amazon.fr a ps3 costs 599.90 ($815.86) vs £399 ($804.21) in the UK or $499.99 in the US. That's a good $200 more than you can account for with tax.
Actually, that's the UK price, and includes 17.5% tax and import / export tax and "screw the British" tax (we always pay more for anything electronic or software/games).
Slashdot Mirror
Add isohunt and eztv to your list of places to look.
That page uses font tags to do the colouring, and doesn't seem to close ANY of them, so FF gives up on rendering it after a few lines.
In fact don't TFTs use marginally more energy to display black?
I had an X1900XTX in my pc, and just installing the drivers didn't even enable hardware opengl acceleration. Instead I had to manually edit xorg.conf to disable some other feature for it to enable. Movies decoded in the wrong colours. I had to manually switch gnome from aiglx to xgl to get beryl to run on it, and it then after a couple of minutes it frequently blacked out new windows (inc. menus) and frequently crashed.
Dunno which ati drivers you were using. Fortunately I was only borrowing the card, and switching to an nV 8800GTS was like a breath of fresh air.
I said "bought by Seagate", not "bought Seagate".
Although, you're right that Maxtor drives are still available, but they're not getting any larger than 320GB, even though everyone else has 500GB, 750GB or even 1TB drives out already. Maxtor DID have a 400GB (and maybe a 500GB) drive before they were bought, but now they've only got a 320GB model as their largest. This is also suspicious, because it was Seagate that used to have a 320GB model, Maxtor's was only 300GB.
Maxtor itself is nothing but a brand now.
I put a lot of emphasis on games because that's what a "home" pc tends to get used for.
Of course if you aren't a typical home user or you are a business doing other intensive things, then it's different.
If you're doing video encoding (and want it to be quick) then you could do with as powerful a cpu, and as fast ram and hard-disk as you can get (with a minimal graphics card). I'd recommend a dual or quad core (depending on budget) with plenty of DDR2 memory, in a motherboard with an onboard gfx chip.
With your complaint about not being able to put SDRAM in a modern motherboard, that's because SDRAM is old and the motherboard is new, simple as that. Technology has changed. You couldn't put simms in a motherboard that took dimms when that changeover happened either. You can't put older AGP cards in a modern (ok, not quite so modern any more) AGP slot because the voltage changed. Several times in fact.
Oh, and a word of advice: Don't buy multi-socket boards (eg AGP and PCI-e), they're often horrifically slow, overpriced, incompatible and unstable.
Admittedly the 160 I have is a low-end series 10 not a series 9, so it might not be affected by whatever causes the failures.
Though you can't buy maxtors any more anyway, they've been bought by seagate and the brand is being used only for the usb external drives (which have a very good reputation).
I bought a microwave recently, and specifically avoided the dial ones because they have NOT got it right. If the instructions on a pot of rice pudding says 650W for 45 seconds, it would be nice if my microwave would actually let me choose 650W as the power and exactly 45 seconds instead of "high" and "somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute".
I've got one with a keypad that you type the numbers in on, but it still only offers wierd presents for power "10%, 25%, 50%, 80% and 100%" and forces you to push "power level" before you can put in the time.
Rant over.
I've owned 10 maxtor drives in recent years, and I'm using 7 right now. It was only certain models of maxtor drives that failed, the 40-120GB (diamondmax 9?) versions. The 20, 160, 250 and 4x300GB disks I have are all working perfectly, and have been for at least a couple of years (even longer for the 20GB one).
I wonder what they did to cause so many failures of one series of drives?
Don't be stupid. Nearly no motherboards are BTX (in fact I'd forgotten about it), nearly no-one uses the 64-bit abilities of 64-bit cpus, nearly no-one properly uses more than one core (most games only use one, and those are the only intensive tasks most people run), and IDE isn't dead just yet.
But still, you're right that you will need to completely replace your pc to upgrade though, and while quite annoying, it's not the end of the world. You can still choose not to upgrade, and all you'll miss out on is the "high detail" setting in new games. If you'd prefer, you could buy a games console for playing games on, (the xbox 360 gets most of the games), and keep your pc for playing the games you already have and surfing slashdot. Though you'd slowly pay that way, because console games are more expensive than pc games.
A lot of modern motherboards support plugging in a ps2 keyboard / mouse while they're on. It doesn't take a lot of circuitry.
And even older motherboards have short protection on the socket, or just plain disable it if there's nothing plugged in when the board is powered up.
Though this doesn't apply to ALL motherboards, and with cheaper ones (generally with a via or sys chipset) they can go boom when plugging a ps2 device in while they're on, even now.
Even my bios supports my usb keyboard.
Window XP supports my usb keyboard in all modes, including safe mode and even the recovery console.
Windows XP is 5 years old, and it wasn't the first edition of windows to fully support usb.
So stop talking crap.
Indeed. Here in the UK, PC games are frequently £25-£30 and xbox 360 games are £40-£45.
Even if it's the same game with a simultaneous release date. Even if they used a cross-platform game engine and the PC version has an explicit option for using the xbox 360 controller.
Microsoft must be taking quite a cut of the money for that kind of difference.
I have a 2x Athlon XP 2400+ Thoroughbred machine using the same XP->MP trick. Though I used conductive paint, because the pencil didn't work for the version of the chip that needed the gap filling in instead of joining the dots on either side.
It's not as powerful as a modern Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (which is also 2x 2GHz, and I also own), and uses at least four times the power (and produces four times the heat), but I love it because I actually worked to build it instead of slapping together some parts.
Oh, and an interesting fact: A dual-cpu machine will run quite happily with two different speed cpus, but it screws up applications that use the rdtsc instruction as a timer unless they're constrained to a single cpu. Though the "/usepmtimer" boot.ini option could sort that one out.
Because NPD has decreed that June has 5 weeks. Their "June" ran from the beginning of the first week in June for 5 weeks, 3rd June - 7th July, including an entire week (1st July - 7th July) that doesn't even have a single day in June.
I have an AMD X2 3800+ (s939), 2GB of ram and an nVidia GeForce 8800GTS all in an nForce 4 motherboard, and drivers for all of it are available for both Windows XP x64 and Ubuntu x86-64.
My 250GB Windows disk is overflowing with major games, and all run wonderfully. Except for the occasional one I have to crack, either because it's too old and tries to load a 32-bit driver (understandable) or the company went for a shit copy-protection system that tries to load a 32-bit driver (eg Overlord). That's not such a big problem as I crack most games anyway.
My Linux install is reasonably new (Ubuntu 7), and already has launchers for 8 commercial games on the desktop. Admittedly a couple are running in Wine, but they still run well. Neverwinter Nights and UT2004 are examples of native linux games, EVE online and steam are running in Wine.
So far I haven't found anything that doesn't work well on a 64-bit OS. Well, except copy-protection.
Drivers have to be 64-bit for a 64-bit OS because they have to be able to talk to the devices through physical ram, without any translation. There's no easy way around this, especially for high bandwidth devices like graphics cards.
32-bit software works because it was ALREADY USING virtual memory, so mapping the app's 32-bit virtual memory to 64-bit physical addresses isn't a whole lot different to mapping to 32-bit physical addresses.
As for antivirus, I think that one was a difficult choice. Antivirus programs use hooks into the lowest levels of the windows kernel to be able to scan files as other programs request them, so as the kernel was 64-bit it makes sense that everything that hooks into it should be 64-bit as well. It's theoretically possible to hook a 32-bit program into a 64-bit one, but would have been quite difficult to do.
To be fair, most printers that are/were cheaper than their ink cartridges did't come with a full cartridge, only a sampler (1/4 or less of the ink than a real cartridge).
IIRC it was a specific few models of maxtor that liked to die, particularly 80-160GB drives.
I have an older 20GB and several newer 250GB and 300GB maxtors and none have died (except one that the delivery man dropped and was replaced free). Before I got these I had a couple of 80GB and a couple of 160GB drives, and those have ALL died now.
Is this the same as what you've seen?
He didn't necessarily need to be running no AV, as most AV software only blocks specific viruses. Even if it is millions of specific viruses, most of which no longer even work, they still miss anything they don't know about.
Another vote for autoGK here. DVD-Decryptor the original dvd, then run autoGK, choose the decrypted dvd files, choose your desired output size and start the encoding. Most dvds compress down to 700MB easily without losing too much quality, or 1400MB (2 cd) for longer/better films.
I like how it says "Product: iPhone Condition: Used" :)
And slashdot has eaten the euro symbol again.
Though I'm shocked at how much more the French are paying for Vista, despite how bad the UK has it compared to the US they have it even worse.
It's not just Vista though, it is everything electronic/software: eg on Amazon.fr a ps3 costs 599.90 ($815.86) vs £399 ($804.21) in the UK or $499.99 in the US. That's a good $200 more than you can account for with tax.
It's also why I haven't bought one.
Actually, that's the UK price, and includes 17.5% tax and import / export tax and "screw the British" tax (we always pay more for anything electronic or software/games).
The French price is 339 ($461.04)
Including 19.6% tax, or 283.45 ($385.49) without
Amazon.co.uk page on european tax rates