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Pyrion

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Posts posted by Pyrion

  1. 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.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

  4. Dual-core machines won't offer performance benefits over equivalent single-core machines if the single-core programs aren't multi-threaded.

    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.

  5. Explain to me why my 2GHz Athlon XP 2400+(2 GHz) can outperform a P4 running at 2.4GHz, if both have the same FSB speed, same amount of RAM and similar other hardware surrounding it(Basically reducing the difference down to the CPU as much as possible)

    In the context of comparing outdated processors (yes, even my Athlon64 3200 is outdated) to current offerings, no, clockspeed didn't matter nearly as much back then as it does nowadays.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).

    Also, dualcore's only useful if the software you're running supports it well enough, otherwise you might as well be using a single core machine. So they don't add up there :).

    Try playing Supreme Commander on a single-core machine. It's no longer "useful," it's "mandatory."

  6. 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).

  7. 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.

  8. Is it possible to expand the number of normal PCI slots on a computer without spending exorbitant amounts of money or completely switching out the motherboard?

    Yes.

    Do a google search for PCI Riser cards or PCI Extender cards.

    The only problem is that you'd still need some means of mounting the cards in your case.

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