Pyrion

Plus laptops generally aren't overclockable regardless of who you buy from.

I would think that technically-speaking, nobody owns the rights to a derivative work, and remixes certainly qualify as derivative works.

No custom avatars. As for sig pics, AFAIK there isn't a postcount requirement to put a pic in your sig. You just need some place to host the image, like imageshack.us for example.

The freezer solution is only worthwhile if you're using a drive that has been running for years that may have built up gunk on the read-write heads that is preventing it from starting up (a repetitive clanging sound on startup, and the drive won't post). Freezing causes the data platters to shrink just enough for the read-write heads to fit, in which case you might be able to run the drive for a couple of hours to get your data off of it, but the drive itself is basically fucked.

It doesn't come with screws? Most do.

http://fanart.lionking.org/wiki/Copyright

I'd be more worried about it getting stolen than it frying due to substandard power generation.

Doesn't matter if they're USB devices. The CPU is responsible for controlling the vast majority of USB devices. That's why USB TV tuners and network adapters aren't that popular with techies, they consume too much CPU and aren't all that reliable.

Check your motherboard's BIOS, specifically for anything involving "spread spectrum," usually for CPU, PCI and SATA. Enable them all and see if the noise lessens.

How loud is the sound output on your system? Cuz what you're hearing is normal if the volume is turned up high enough.

In WinAmp? 782 tracks, 47 hours worth of music. My media folder comprises almost 8000 tracks. I haven't bothered trying to transfer any of this over to my mp3 player (a Toshiba GigaBeat 20GB I got for free) for two reasons. 1. Some of it is still in FLAC. 2. This damn thing only has a USB1.1 connection. When I get finished reripping/transcoding everything back to MP3 I'll dedicate a couple of nights to copying it all over to the Gigabeat (I encoded 8.5GB over the weekend and I'm not yet finished).

Your problem is common to anyone that is using hardware overlay to display the video. In essence, the program is simply putting a nearly black (R16 G0 B16 IIRC) block wherein the extents of the block are where the hardware displays the video. When you attempt to do a screencap, you're only getting that 2D block and not the video. The solution is also pretty simple. Disable hardware overlay. The video might not play as fast or as nicely-filtered, but you'll be able to capture frames.

Unless other processes are vying for processor time. Which is usually the case. It probably won't be noticeable, but it'll be there nonetheless.

In the context of comparing outdated processors (yes, even my Athlon64 3200 is outdated) to current offerings, no, clockspeed didn't matter nearly as much back then as it does nowadays. The Athlon vs P4 debate is all about L2 cache - the Athlons had plenty, the P4s had next to none. That's why a 2GHz AthlonXP would outperform a P4 running at 2.4GHz. The AthlonXP had far more cache, so it could waste less clock cycles on cache clears and subsequent accesses from RAM. Nowadays, both AMD and Intel processors have plenty of cache on them, so the only major differences in performance are the FSB (Intel) vs HyperTransport (AMD) argument, shared L2 cache (Intel) vs dedicated L2 + shared L3 caches (AMD), and the DDR2533 vs DDR2667 vs DDR2800 argument (DDR2667 on a Core 2 actually results in lower performance than DDR2533). Try playing Supreme Commander on a single-core machine. It's no longer "useful," it's "mandatory."

DScaler doesn't. Heck, DScaler doesn't even require the tuner's drivers to be installed.

Defrag that mpeg before you try burning it. If your hard drive fails to keep up, it'll probably spit out a coaster.

What would be the point of torrenting individual tracks? You actually want someone to go through the process of creating a .torrent file for each mix?

Fraps can record 2D GDI+? Since when? I've always used Fraps (registered) under the assumption that it can only capture hardware streams, ergo stuff rendered in DirectDraw/Direct3D and OpenGL.

Because we can use custom sigs instead. That's the tradeoff.

Darik's Boot and Nuke. Burn the ISO to a CD and boot off of that with only the drive(s) you want wiped connected to the system. Takes about 1-2 hours depending on the speed/reliability of the drive and the method you use to wipe it.

If the file system is set up to use very large clusters, then it doesn't inherently matter what the files' actual sizes are. The easiest way to see this in action is to create a blank text file on your own computer, and then check its size in file properties. It'll say size 0 bytes, size on disk 4096 bytes (or whatever your cluster size is set to).

An ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB AGP is as high as you can go then. Though that's probably a bit outside your price range. A GF7800GS would also do it, although the X1950 is faster.

Only way to lower the temp on a laptop is to keep the fans clean (take the bottom panel off and spray the fan out). Otherwise if it isn't locking up, don't worry about it. Laptops these days are more accurately called "notebooks" because you're insane if you put a modern-day laptop on your lap.

With PCI, bandwidth is inherently limited anyways. You'll just have one more device amongst the rest fighting for the same limited amount of resources.

That's my assumption. I've never actually tried this as I've never had great need for PCI devices.