[internisus]

This is ridiculous. Can someone tell me how to boot Windows in Safe Mode? I can't figure it out and I need to in order to apply a... patch.

Also, the performance is odd. Scrolling through a notepad file yields a refresh rate like a wave, and I had the help and support search go unresponsive on me. Could it just be because I have the Windows CD in my drive?

CPU temp is stable, btw.

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Nevermind about safe mode, I got that.

Cuba don't make me wish I had Vista. That's just mean at this point. But okay, I can ignore things I don't like. I'm good at it, actually. I just want to own and customize every aspect of this baby, is all.

[internisus]

uTorrent, I choose you!

Still installing drivers and such.

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Great, thanks! Those are all useful. Your theme is okay, but it doesn't change enough for me. I'll look at Windowblinds and see if I find anything.

So... I'm in my roomz, surfing your internetz.

My initial setup is less than ideal. Wire lengths keep me from sitting in the corner on my bed while using the keyboard and mouse, and my tray is cumbersome to pick up and set down on the floor again. I have an idea or two; I just wanted to BE ONLINEZ and to do a few things like update my BIOS and use my motherboard's backup utility. But basically, I am here using this computer and it is spectacular to be doing so. I am very grateful. I expect this to change my life; thank you all very much.

BUT I have a few niggles. Most recently: At a glance, I do not have sound in the front headphone port of my case. I may have fucked up when I felt out the audio header. Perhaps I need to go through the software my motherboard came with. I'll work on this in a minute.

More importantly, my CD/DVD drive seems kind of sluggish in the reading of things. I had downloaded what I thought was a firmware upgrade for it, but it turns out to be just a pdf about a .bin-reading update program and a .bin file; no means to actually do anything. I'm not sure it would matter anyway. My perspective might be a little off since I'm not used to reading data directly off CDs (usually I copy it to the HDD first); I just kind of expected everything with this machine to be mind-blowingly instantaneous.

Most importantly, as a test, I played the first episode of LOST as soon as I had Cyberlink's PowerDVD installed. LOST is extremely vibrant, and I had high hopes, but the playback was terrible. The framerate seemed kind of off, the colors were horribly dim and washed out (I know: I fully intend to play with the settings on the monitor), and, most worrying of all, there was a grainy texture to the picture, sort of like I was watching from film reel or I could see the decoding happen before my eyes. One thought that occurred to me is: Am I, at 1050x1680, far enough into the realm of HD that normal DVDs (non-HD and non-BluRay) are upscaling and fated to ugliness? I've never even seen a BluRay movie or an HDDVD being played, so I don't really know the difference. Another thing is that I actually got some black framing at the top and bottom of the screen despite using a widescreen monitor. Finally, the blacks in the video were all very gray. For reference, right now, here on SB, I am seeing some very healthy looking blacks (lol). I think this may be related to the way general effects, like with nVidia's installation softs or the Windows Welcome fade-in, look really lousy. Just being in and using Windows looks excellent, and this is DVI, so what is wrong with the DVD playback? Note that I still have to go through software that came with my mobo and card, but I wanted to put this out there.

Okay, I'm off to back up this early, stable build, install antivirus, firewall, and ad-aware, and take care of some other business.

Really, though, to hell with these little kinks: thank you, guys.

[internisus]

That could work well for me. I had envisioned something darker (I'm so used to the white-on-black of SB, and it's nice on the eyes, I find), but that future look might be nice. I'll give it a try.

I decided not to bother with the BIOS update. Searched for Winflash, didn't find a strong authority, couldn't run the program I wound up with, and figured it's not worth the risk anyway when things are running fine.

[internisus]

Hey, you see the folder names here?



Those are the kinds of folder names I want. Just COMPUTER and SYSTEM and DOCUMENTS and VIDEO and IMAGES and AUDIO and so on. Is that picture staged somehow, or is there a way for me to have things like that without fucking up Windows and the way programs automatically structure themselves?

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I'm impractical; you can say it. =*(

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lol I've already found Spyware =(

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But I'd still know they're there.

It's not important; I'm not being that serious about this. I'll come to customize my own organization over time.

[internisus]

Wait, you mean to say that a codec pack will affect DVD viewing as well as formats like avi, mpeg, and divx? I didn't think DVDs worked the same way.

[internisus]

Ugh. I can't make use of the Steam EVE Online long trial or lower subscription price because I had a trial account a year ago that will never disappear. So I guess I need an email address I can use, right? Anyone have any suggestions for a throwaway email address to last me a few months until I get my own domain or something?

Edit: I'll probably go with Yahoo or AOL, I guess. I should stop asking questions I can easily answer for myself.

[internisus]

Oh, I didn't know I could take an alt account with them!

[internisus]

I spent the last few hours tweaking software and configuration settings as well as monitor settings to try to improve video. After a little while, I realized that Cyberlink PowerDVD kind of sucks for some reason because DVDs look much better in Media Player Classic. They still have a grainy quality that I can't seem to shake no matter how high I turn my video card's noise reduction for DVD playback. Also, the onboard sound tears with climactic, orchestral music, and I can't get a good EQ generally, so everything sounds off to my ears, like dialogue is coming through a tinny radio that happens to be attached to an oafish subwoofer for the odd explosion, rush of wind, or what have you. I'm never going to meet the struggle of fitting another expansion card into that cramped case, so I guess I'll have to keep tweaking. I'm very open to suggestions though.

It seems like this machine is going to be better for gaming than home theater use, which is disappointing because I fully assumed that quality DVD playback was a given with this kind of power and with the reputation of that motherboard for having good onboard sound. But I am looking forward to doing some gaming. I'm downloading some games now from Steam. It takes many hours at the speeds I get. In the meantime, I'm going to bed.

Edit: Oh, yeah, everything within Windows is running great, now. My sense of causality must have been messed up when that was going on with the notepad shearing. CD/DVD drive seems plenty adequate; I'm impressed with seek times on DVDs. Everything's great, overall. I have a shitload of options with the videocard, and sort of a few for onboard audio. I've messed with the monitor a good deal but haven't found harmony yet; some settings are better for Windows while others are better suited to movies. My only gripe at all really is the DVD video and audio experience. By the way, as a test, I downloaded a HL2 Ep2 gameplay vid in HD from Steam; it looked gorgeous. Totally different from the DVD.

Should I just lower my resolution? Are the DVDs just a lower definition than my actual Windows environment?

The sound is a worse issue, though, to be honest.

[internisus]

What would I need a wireless card for?

[internisus]

I have been using an Nvidia Control Panel program that has tons of options, though I do want to check out this Purevideo thing. I have been using Media Player Classic and not CyberDVD for awhile now and changing settings in that program, as well.

[internisus]

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I'm alright with the DVD I'm getting now, I think. It's still grainy, but it looks pretty decent. I'm using CCCP and Media Player Classic, and I spent a couple of hours just tweaking color settings between the monitor and hardware. Audio isn't bad, either. I settled on an EQ profile; distortion is less noticeable, and bass has been culled in general, although specific events sometimes create crazy bass. But if I try to anticipate those. I'll lose valuable bass overall. This seems to be as good as I can make it. It's not bad.

Played Portal today. Max settings. Looks great. Grinned and laughed the whole time, and the end credits blew me away. Bioshock is actually disappointing, on the other hand. It looks terrific, but it has a sort of plastic character to it, and I hate a lot of the animations, such as the way the avatar's hands look or how you hold your wrench. Playing on hard and without Vita Chambers. A lot of things about the game bug me, especially since I'm such a big SS2 fan, and they add up to an overall feel I don't like. I just finished the medical pavilion and took down my first Big Daddy, which I only managed by getting him stuck on a corner. For some reason, my machine gun, which sucks for everything else, damages him better than armor piercing rounds. This might be because my aim is lousy and he's a big target. Anyway, the game made me feel exhausted, and I'm reluctant to move on because I couldn't find the key to get into the apparently optional dentist's office although I've explored everything so far. The limited slots for new plasmids are also making me crazy.

I think I won't be really wowed by what my hardware can do until I get CoD4, which probably won't be for another couple of weeks because money. Right now, I'm going to play EVE for a bit and then take a HL2 fix before going to bed. I found my Star Wars prequel trilogy DVDs while rummaging in the attic, so I might have a SW six-movie marathon tomorrow.

[internisus]

Hey guys. I got my new mouse, the MX518, and it seems pretty cool so far. Looks very good for gaming and has lots of features to map tasks to buttons. So things are going very nicely; I have a problem, though. I'm trying to copy (large amounts of) select folders to my hard drive from another computer also using Win XP that is sharing my router. I've used the network setup wizard to setup a network, and I've manually set all the folders I want on the other PC to shared.

The problem is that, when I open Network Places on my computer, I only see a small number of the folders I had selected to be shared. Furthermore, when I copy those folders, Windows actually creates folder-shortcuts to the other computer; I don't see any way to actually copy the files and folders to my hard drive. Any suggestions?

I'm also trying to optimize bittorrent (using utorrent). Apparently, I need to setup port forwarding because using a router means I have no static ip address. So next step is I need to call my service provider and ask for the domain name server or something because the router changes that information to be the same as the ip address. The whole thing seems pretty convoluted and a pain in the ass; I really wish utorrent would just automatically find an open port every time I start the program.

[internisus]

Port forwarding is what I'm trying to do in setting up a static IP; but to set up the static IP I need the correct domain server name (I think), which is why I need to call the ISP. As I understand it. I don't have any way to access my (old) router like through software or my web browser or anything; if I could open it up like it was just a modem I would, because I have good protection. I'm using Comodo's free firewall, ADV's Antivirus, and Spybot. The other networked computer has Norton's Symantec Internet Security running in full force.

I have no idea what UPnP is or how I would enable it on my router. It's a really old router.

[internisus]

Trust me; it's not cute. It's embarrassing and debilitating.

But okay, I managed to get into this Westell service thing by typing in the default gateway shown by ipconfig. There were a number of options available in there. I found one that said Single Static IP Configuration, and I enabled it for my computer. The modem reset and came back online. But ipconfig says the exact same thing as it did before, so I don't know if it worked. Edit: Although a connection summary in the Westell service thing shows unique numbers for an IP Address PPP and both the primary and secondary DNS.

How would I know? If it did work, how do I now forward a port for utorrent to use?

I still need help getting my stuff off the other computer, too. I can't figure out why I'm not copying the files but instead creating shortcuts, and I can't see any reason why only some of them are showing up in the first place.

I've always thought networking stuff to be a pain in the ass.

[internisus]

Okay, before I retry the options I can see having read your advice, let me say two things:

I found a Service setup utility in the router config thing. It has a list of all these pre-set services, many of which are online games, for instance. But utorrent (or any bittorrent) is not among them, and I don't see a way to add a service. You would think that would be there, but I didn't see it. I recognize NAT, so maybe I'll figure something out in a different part of the config.

As for file transfer over the network, holding ctrl while dragging is what I did and what led to the folder shortcuts. Incidentally, I seem to have screwed up by deleting the shortcuts I made because I now have nothing appearing in My Network Places. I really have no idea what to do to just get the stupid files across the network. It should be really easy.

[internisus]

Just FYI, guys: The bittorrent issue is fixed. I didn't realize it at first because the icon doesn't change from "warning" to "green okay!" until like ten minutes into the program's runtime, but after messing with the router thing bittorrent seems to be perfectly happy. Download speeds are much better; I hit 35kB/s last night!

I still can't get networking to work for file transfer. I have access to the printer, but not the files on the computer. I have run the network setup wizard on both comps and the workgroup for both is just WORKGROUP. Just trying to do it as simply and straightforwardly as possible, so I went ahead and shared the whole C drive on that PC. I've got nothing in my network places here. I think I'm going to call a friend tomorrow and ask for his help; he knows networks and xp pretty well.

[internisus]

BTW, things are great. I haven't taken the time to customize and organize and get programs and stuff because I'm just enjoying things. Only problem I have is that I don't have enough time to just use this machine.

Here's my temporary desktop. It's a touch ironic, of course, but it actually looks really good.

[internisus]

=D Hey, if one of you finds me a 1680x1050 version of Dali's [url=http://www.chevyhd.de/Images%20Bilder/Dali%20-%20The%20Elephants%20(Large).jpg]Elephants[/url] and that one's gone!

anyway it's ironic because anime girls in bikinis on desktop and bleach but it's also a way for me to not have to actually choose a wallpaper just yet.

[internisus]

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I've spent all sodding day trying to get the most simple network running so I can copy my shit, and I'm really frustrated. Each of the computers can see itself when I browse for computers in the workgroup, but neither can see the other, and they should because the workgroup names are the same.

So I'm wondering if I can simplify this even further by removing the router from the equation. Can two computer that connect directly to one another with a typical LAN cable transfer files?

By the way, I took some time this morning and optimized utorrent. A speed test shows that my DSL connection yields a staggering total of about 90 KBps download speeds and 16 KBps upload speeds, and using those numbers and a few online guides I've managed to tweak utorrent to the point where I can have it downloading one torrent at a time at a steady 60+KBps while allowing reasonable internet browsing speeds, which is great because it means I can leave the program running all day (unless I'm trying to download something else or stream video) without feeling bad for anyone trying to use the other computer sharing the connection.

I was affronted by an image depicting my average internet speeds compared to national averages, however. Well, at least I know that I've got a faster connection that 8% of the country.

[internisus]

I'm also thinking about buying a killer Gamepad soon. It should be PERFECT for playing EVERYTHING. Cave Story, Braid eventually, PS1 games that I will emulate from my game discs because I don't have a PS1 memory card to stick in my PS2, maybe space combat sims like Freespace if possible, etc.! So what's recommended? Not rich, mind you.

[internisus]

Oh, well, that's straightforward enough. Do you find it well-suited to more PC-oriented games, though?