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They're attention whores with nothing to offer humanity other than a reasonable excuse to reconsider eugenics.

"Yet?"

Have they actually gone about installing Vista, and if so, did they bother to at least try to tweak it much the same as is practically mandatory with XP? Or are they just jumping on the bandwagon because it's currently "hip" to bash Vista?

Home Basic? What, your system can't handle Aero?

Task Manager is stupid for this sort of shit. Switch to SysInternals Process Explorer. Then you can find out if any processes named "svchost.exe" are being loaded by explorer.exe (these are the ones you want killed) as opposed to the normal svchosts that are loaded by services.exe. Process Explorer displays everything in a tree listing, child processes underneath parent processes and so forth. Also hovering over a process name with the mouse will tell you, if it's a service, what services each svchost.exe process is responsible for. Also, read this, and stop bitching about your memory usage. Really, a 30MB working set size for a svchost is nothing. EDIT: This is typical for my system. Vista Ultimate x64.

Hahah yes that immediately came to mind.

Waste of a CD. Play the song back on your computer and record in another program using Stereo Mix/What U Hear as the recording input. That's if you can't find a Nullsoft Disk Writer-like app that handles m4a files.

Don't discount Steam just because it's DRMware. I've been buying a lot of games online simply because I'm too lazy to go digging through bargain bins. Also, Direct2Drive and/or Stardock Central might have what you need.

Okay, then try a different ethernet card. As for disabling SSID broadcasting, yeah, modifying most wireless settings requires you to be directly connected to the router.

Check the cable first. It could be something as simple as a short in the cable. When something dies, and you have no idea what, rule out possibilities in order from cheapest to most-expensive. As for securing your wireless connection, two things manage this very well: enable WPA-PSK encryption (not WEP, WEP can be cracked in under a minute), and disable SSID broadcasting. At least enable WPA-PSK. EDIT: Ideally, the larger your WPA-PSK passphrase is, the better. Common rules for passwords apply here.

Yup. That's how I got my copy, actually. Got it for free as part of a mb/cpu combo and all it was was a little piece of paper with a Steam activation code. Even if you buy the full game at the store, I suspect it'll require an internet connection and Steam account to activate it and actually PLAY it, and you'd then need to let it download the patches.

AFAIK, it's not really an "admin" account, it's a "superuser" account, meaning you run with admin-like privileges but there's a hidden administrator account that basically has FULL ACCESS. Like for instance, full access to the System Volume Information folder, which you don't get even with your admin-lite superuser account. My advice would be to load up SysInternals Process Explorer, instead of Task Manager. That will actually tell you what those svchosts are handling (if you hover your mouse over them).

AFAIK, no. Valve's attitude toward this is "who doesn't have an internet connection these days?"

Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools does that, I think, because I seem to recall using that to ghost my Media drive to a new drive before swapping the jumpers and doing a reformat. That occurred when my 20GB crashed several years ago and I had no way to boot into Windows to do this normally, and the new drive was twice the capacity of my Media drive.

Avoid Sony. Dell is meh. HP is good, although a bit on the pricey side.

LAME 3.97 w/ the RazorLAME frontend. -V 2 --vbr-new

I can't imagine why.

"c:"? If no C drive is showing up, it might need to be partitioned?

"fdisk /mbr" if you're using a DOS boot disk. "fixmbr" if you're using a Windows 2K/XP boot disk.

I dunno. When it comes to laptops, the only things really upgradeable in them are RAM and the hard drive, so any other addons have to go through one of the peripheral buses, be it CardBus, ExpressCard, USB or 1394. USB's the most widely-available so that might be it.

You mean like a USB external sound card? Something like this?

Are you sure it's the browser at fault? How many open connections do you typically have, and do you have your tcpip.sys patched to allow more than ten simultaneous connections?

I honestly don't notice the performance impact, but that's because I'm not running Norton.

Another vote for AVG Free Edition. Tossed aside AntiVir due to that stupid full-screen ad shit they do on every update combined with its very simple statement "we don't do Vista x64." Screw them.

Damnit. I just got mine done (wanted to write it when I'd actually be awake and coherent). Oh well. http://members.cox.net/pyrion_celendil/images/zircon-note.png