Pyrion

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.

It didn't take much convincing on my part. My previous ISP, IDT.net, gutted their call centers for this region such that the only number I could dial was a Zone 3 number (toll charges apply, even though it's still in the same area code), and since I was on all the time, I ended up accruing massive phone bills on top of the charges for the dialup service. I ended up going without internet access for a couple of months while waiting for Cox to upgrade the area to HFC in preparation for rolling out Cox@Home service. Once they got that done, dad called them up and we got the full service. Still with Cox, even though the Excite@Home network died years ago. What kept my parents paying was the speed, after I had networked the house and built additional computers for everyone else to use. It's a basic utility at this point.

You likely cannot, as IIRC HP Pavilion laptops tend to only run the ATI Mobility Xpress200 IGP. Kitsuta is correct. The most you'll be able to upgrade is the RAM and hard drive, cuz that's all that's really designed to be upgradeable in a laptop.

If they're not heavy users, how many pages can you honestly expect to get out of a cartridge before it dries up and clogs the nozzles? Toner doesn't dry out. Plus you have more moving parts on inkjet printers, moving parts that are made out of plastic and thus aren't designed to be very durable. I used to replace an inkjet printer every couple of years because the damn things would always break, and it would cost more to fix the old one than it would to buy a new one (they're practically given away cuz all the profit is in the ink cartridges).

May I personally recommend you ditch inkjets altogether and get a color laser printer? Even if it doesn't have photocopier and scanner capability, you'd be wasting a lot less money in the long run with laser toner as opposed to color ink ($50 a cartridge for ~250 sheets versus $70 a cartridge for ~2000 sheets). I have a network-capable HP Color LaserJet 2600n, went for about $400 at Fry's (plus an $80 5-year service contract) and the toner cartridges are $70 apiece. But the good news there is I bought it almost a year ago and I have yet to need to change the toner cartridges out. I figured two years before I spend ~$280 for new cartridges, which is basically just like getting a new inkjet printer, since that's about how long they last anyways (for me at least). Plus, if for whatever reason the prints get wet, laser toner doesn't bleed.

Uh huh. AFK = "away from keyboard (but not really)," because if one were really AFK they wouldn't be able to type that. IMHO = "in my humble opinion," albeit everyone that uses IMHO is not being humble. Even IMO is redundant; better to just say what you intend to rather than prefixing the statement with a useless IMO. TTIUWP = "this thread is useless without pics." Self-explanatory.

I use threaded mode on all vbulletin forums I frequent, including this one.

Super Scope 6 - Blastris B theme. (disable voice 6) Tetris & Dr. Mario (SNES) - Fever theme. Marble Madness (NES) - Level 2 and level 3 themes. Super Mario Bros 2 - Overworld theme. SimCity 2000 - Credits theme. StarFox - Controls theme.

Switch to uTorrent?

Yeah, there should be bootable ISOs downloadable at the memtest86 site. They're not that big, take maybe a couple seconds to burn to a CD and run automatically on boot. A full test takes about half an hour.

Newegg has several of those types of motherboards in its combo lineup. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Brand=1517&N=2010200446+50001517&Submit=ENE&Manufactory=1517&SubCategory=446 That specific board isn't among them, though. Maybe try Pricewatch?

Good to hear, still though, if there's anything you want backed up off the drive, now's the time to do it.

The file will remain read-only if a process is using it. If your torrent program is still active, that's why you can't alter the file. EDIT: You might also consider trying this program out, if you've turned off your torrent program and it's still refusing to let you alter the file.

Not really, AFAIK. Just to change your remaining PATA hard drive to single (particularly if it's a WD, as they're anal about this sort of thing), and don't hook up any other devices on that PATA bus, as PATA slows the maximum transfer rate to that of the slowest device. So if you have an ATA100 and an ATA33 drive on the same bus, both will access at ATA33 speeds. If you really intend on saving the data, disconnect the dying hard drive and wait on trying to recover stuff off of it until after you've got Windows installed on your new drive. Then hook it up as Slave (remember to put your working drive as Master). Then boot into Windows normally and try to get whatever you can off of it, though you may want to check each file for corruption once it's all copied off, cuz I ended up losing files on a now-dead drive despite successful copying to a backup drive. YMMV though, if the drive's dying as mine did, then it may end up unaccessible by the time you try to get everything off of it. Course, I saw my previous hard drive's death coming several days away, when Windows spat out a CRC error (followed by a systray balloon saying it had stepped the drive down to ATA66) for no apparent reason.

Yes, switch to threaded mode. Quick reply will automatically be enabled for the post you are currently viewing.

Arguing in PPR. Figures, really.

Yeah, that's what I meant by chassis style. Pretty much everything except the processor, ram, hard drive and optical drive (that to a lesser extent) is specific to the model, thus the only place you'd get a replacement motherboard from is the company that built the laptop in the first place, and chances are they don't sell replacement motherboards, just replacement laptops.

Laptop mainboards are, pretty much for all intents and purposes, impossible to replace on the open market (or at very least, I don't see them for sale at Frys or on NewEgg). There isn't much profit to be made in laptop parts outside of processors, hard drives and memory because everything is customized for a particular chassis style. Particularly if the warranty is up, it might make more sense to just buy a new laptop and then transfer the contents of the old drive to the new laptop.

Yeah, after enjoying the state taking "its fair share."

Happens on every other vBulletin forum I frequent.

QFT/E. Seriously. Little quirks to get used to here and there but nothing to complain about. Heh. Moving to Vegas?

If it's not powering up at all, then my late-night theory is that the power connection is somehow severed, be it from corrosion, wear, a sudden jolt... whatever the case, even with the power cord attached, you've been running off the battery? It ran out of juice, and now the laptop won't start up cuz there's no way to recharge the battery (nor start the system) if there's no power making it to the laptop from the AC outlet. If I've got the story right, then sending it to the manufacturer is about the only thing you can do. EDIT: As for your second question, yes, you'd need some sort of converter to hook up a 2.5" laptop hard drive to a desktop PC.

1600x1200. On a more serious note, if I were to make a New Year's resolution, I'd take your second one, cuz I've got room for improvement there.

The posts per page means next to nothing when you use threaded mode. Sure wish there was a separate setting for depth in threaded mode though, so I don't have to keep clicking "more replies below current depth."

Ten characters, apparently. Another minor problem. On the main forum listing, where it shows the username of the last person to have posted there, that link doesn't point to the user's profile, but instead triggers a command to load the profile of the current last poster. So assume there's some rapid-fire posting going on in a forum. You click the link expecting one poster's profile to show, and instead you get the profile of whoever was the last poster at the time that you clicked, which won't necessarily be the user displayed. EDIT: This behavior is the same on the thread listing for each forum. Chalk it up as another annoying vBulletin quirk, I suppose. :/