Pyrion

Yeah. Follow the previously-given advice, don't transcode, it just gets progressively worse.

Budget is $1800? Get a HP Pavilion laptop.

Rerip them and encode in mp3 with lame, for starters just append "-V 2" to the commandline for VBR encoding. This is of course assuming you have the originals still in Redbook audio, or something similarly lossless?

Since the IE coders are paid, it doesn't follow principle to fix problems unless the company pays them to fix them. As a result, the company has to decide to pay the programmers to fix the problems before the programmers even get around to doing it. If the company decides the problems aren't worth paying the programmers to fix them, then the programmers don't fix them, even if the problems are very serious. Contrast to free open-source software, where there's no corporate bureaucracy getting in the way of improving the product. Of course, we could all just put 24-bit PNGs with alpha transparency channels in our sigs and you'd wonder why the damn things don't display right in IE. Not our problem: Firefox displays them perfectly.

And that is why, ideally, you don't rely on a single partition. Reformatting Windows becomes so routine that losing all of one's precious shit ceases to be a problem if you store it all on something other than C:\. You know, as long as the drive itself doesn't die. But that's why you then use a combination of optical media for backups and maybe even a second hard drive. Still though, multiple partitions FTW. As to the original problem, the "thinking light" is the HD access light (it'd be awesome to have a front gauge for CPU usage tho) and heavy HD access on startup is unsurprising for most Windows systems, especially those that haven't been reformatted in a while. My suggestions there are to defrag the drive, and either remove some things from startup, or just remove some things altogether. Even with 1GB of RAM (which is pretty much standard these days) HD thrashing will still occur, especially if you're loading a lot of stuff, and killing explorer.exe won't help because Windows Explorer doubles as the Windows shell. I also suggest replacing Task Manager with SysInternals Process Explorer (it's free), since Process Explorer is a much better tool for figuring out what could be causing a bottleneck in performance. EDIT: Or just use this to figure out wtf is causing the HD thrashing on startup.

The above is why it's a good idea to have some sort of updated active virus scanner installed on a system, even if you generally don't get viruses (like me). Ramp the heuristic up to max on both the scanner and the guard, if you're as paranoid as I am about that kinda crap. The only false positive that's gotten on my exclude list was moo.dll in my mIRC directory.

Wireless networks will always be iffy. Did you do any renovation, moving or construction at the house that would've put something large, solid and/or metallic between the wireless router and the computer you're using? They're also limited by distance, and since wireless is two-way, it doesn't matter if the router itself has a really powerful antenna if your computer doesn't have a good wireless network card with a good antenna. Other considerations are upgrading the router's firmware, or the router itself may just be dying for whatever reason (they are made pretty cheaply nowadays). Also, you finding yourself a victim of intermittent lag in games? Disable Windows' Wireless Zero Configuration service ("net stop wzcsvc" at the command prompt) before you load the game and that shit should stop.

ActiveX. That's the only reason anyone "requires" IE.

Why? I have an ATI Mobility Radeon x700 in my laptop and it's of comparable performance to my GF6600GT. No complaints here.

Although you'll want to have the fastest form of system memory your system supports because you'll inevitably be swapping textures between vram and sysram (yes, even with 256MB of vram, at least with the newer games that practically require 512MB of vram), and there it doesn't matter how fast the vram is, it'll be limited by the read speed of your sysram.

Marginally better. lolz @ startkeylogger on IRC. ZoneAlarm's far better.

I rarely write these things so the fact that I'm actually commenting on a mix shows just how awesome it is. Epic and bouncy, to describe in a few words; this track convinced me of the necessity to burn the whole collection to CD. Now to just get the rest of the family out of the house long enough to enjoy it with the sub up all the way.

This is one of those tracks that deserves to be played eardrum-bleedingly loud (even if you have to violate local noise ordinances), with the sub at full volume. IMO one won't get the "epic" feeling from it otherwise.

Then it's possible that stickies themselves have a time limit.

Doesn't work because the board thinks the file extension is .dir, obviously not an image format.

It only helps if the server normally checks the http referer header before serving external linkage.

One thing to note for Mozilla/FireFox users is that if you change network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0, you trade some functionality elsewhere (like on download sites that check to make sure there's no external linkage) for .jpg/.gif sigs hosted on Geoshitties & AngelFire to work properly.

*two second pause* GOOD!

Love the song, definitely requires a good sub to listen to properly though. Only very small complaint is that the VBR tag wasn't written properly by the encoder.

On first listen the initial thought in my mind was "wow, this sounds like SimCity 3000 music" -- it's the same form of jazz/electronica that I spend so much time listening to. *opens up Nero, and makes more room on a CD compilation for this mix* Outstanding. I've never played the original, but I'm loving this.

Got the full mix. Hmmm... Lots of talent, but the transitions need work. A lot of work.

It's just a lousy excuse for n00bs to artificially inflate their post counts. You don't even need "test" posts in the first place -- just navigate to your last post and refresh.

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I'm finding it difficult to learn to whistle this song (insofar that I've never heard the original) which means I'm gonna loop it for a couple more hours. (Yes, it's that good.)

For some reason I woke up this morning whistling this song and I've been whistling it all day. Just felt like mentioning that.