Messages

1276

General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...

« on: November 14, 2007, 11:33 AM »

It is good to realize that Mike Lin is still working [Edit: or is he?]- I used a lot of his programs in the previous century. Do you use the Startup Control Panel, as well?

-Curt (November 14, 2007, 09:03 AM)

Yes. Also Startup Selector. I looked into better alternatives to StartupMonitor and found a few but the difference in resource consumption was HUGE. It's nice to see an app that constantly monitors several things sit at 0% CPU utilization. I'll take the retro stuff over state-of-the-art crapware anyday. 

1277

General Software Discussion / Re: Scott Finnie unimpressed by NOD32 ...

« on: November 14, 2007, 07:16 AM »

NOD32 let me down once when it failed to detect a trojan, tarnishing its spotless image (and to some extent my peace of mind). It was the startup monitor + firewall combo that came to the rescue instead. Startup Monitor has saved me more times than any AV over the years. I'm not going to be daft and claim it's a solution but it is a very effective supplement.

1278

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use Desktop Widgets?

« on: November 12, 2007, 10:08 AM »

I recently changed the position of the box and can no longer see the HDD LED - tried HDDLED Indicator which has tiny (movable) always on top lights for logical drives, physical disks or a single all-in-one light. It can optionally blink in the system tray or blink the keyboard scroll lock light (helpful if the monitors are off) - it's the only widget-ish thing that I think is unobtrusive+useful enough to last on my system. Very low on resource consumption too.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Searching for the best read-aloud software

« on: November 10, 2007, 05:42 PM »

Try Neospeech (Kate), Realspeak (Jennifer) and Loquendo voices. Curt's right, the free voices are all crap.

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What's the Best? / Re: Master Category List for the "What's the Best" section... please help finali

« on: November 10, 2007, 02:00 PM »

Would it be possible to add a "What I use" kinda page to each user's profile? We could have dropdown lists for softwares in every category, much like the polls with an option to add a new software for that category. The total stats gathered from the profiles could be shown on the what's the best page as "What DC'ers are Using", I know if I was looking for some sort of new software that's the page I'd wanna visit over any other online. DC needs to centralize the wealth of ideas/opinions on the boards. Perhaps we could have a (moderated) "related threads" section under each category too so the major threads for that category are easily accessible.

Sorry if these suggestions overlap others, I know there are a lot of thoughts flying around on this topic.

1281

General Software Discussion / Re: Is there a way to clean all windows drivers to allow for a change of motherboard

« on: November 10, 2007, 11:27 AM »

IMO, since your new hardware is up and running you're in the clear. The BIOS holds some pretty significant settings which can sometimes be turned off by default, for example my current BIOS disables 32 bit file transfers on all HDDs as default, significantly slowing down file operations unless enabled. You really can't comment on hardware underperforming till you set it up right.

I upgraded the mobo on an older PC a couple of days back, XP wouldn't boot - booting off the CD & using the Repair function fixed it.

1282

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« on: November 09, 2007, 11:44 AM »

Hehehe! No. FWIW, I love FB2K. 

1283

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« on: November 09, 2007, 10:52 AM »

The next version of foobar2000 is not a perfect software product, but it's a step closer towards it rather than away from it so I don't see why one would feel the need to boycott it.

Because the current version meets all my needs and I have far more productive things to do with my time. I'm not recommending the approach to everyone, just saying it's best for me.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Is there a way to clean all windows drivers to allow for a change of motherboard

« on: November 09, 2007, 10:39 AM »

I wouldn't expect Windows to slow down just coz you upgraded your mobo + drivers, not unless you upgraded to a different Windows version. Have you tweaked your BIOS for optimal settings?

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General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« on: November 09, 2007, 09:52 AM »

Reinstallation is not a problem at all - you have to just dump the installation folder to the install location, the program settings, tabs/playlists, library are taken care of - I don't think it gets much simpler.

About losing some settings on upgrading, the onus of backward compatibility lies on the latest release. I agree, some work is required but the last release seems to have caused this particular issue rather than resolved it.

1286

General Software Discussion / Re: File synchronization: moving away from incremental backup (HELP!)

« on: November 09, 2007, 09:18 AM »

I'm pretty certain Second Copy checks each file too coz they warn you of slowdowns when you enable realtime mirroring.

1287

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« on: November 09, 2007, 08:05 AM »

You're the kind of guy who goes to AA meetings and tells people about the great new Scotch you tried, innit?

It's a personal thing, Dirhael. The version I'm currently using does everything I want it to, including synching with my iPod. I installed the new release and immediately lost my customizations and I really have no patience for that sort of stuff so I got rid of it. I'm sure I'll take another look at it when I have a bit more mind-space, the only reason I'd upgrade right now is if a player was giving me better _sound_. 

1288

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« on: November 09, 2007, 02:00 AM »

My solution is to keep a lean and mean app and a full-featured one.

Examples:
Photoshop & Paint Shop Pro 5
Firefox & Opera
Winamp & Foobar2000

That way I don't feel like I'm cheating myself on speed or features and end up using the faster app over 90% of the time, Firefox being the obvious exception. Newer versions get tested on the main system (no virtual machines here...) but when it's time to upgrade the drive image, the last backup gets restored and only the good stuff gets on.

1289

General Software Discussion / Re: Perfect Software?

« on: November 08, 2007, 06:20 PM »

Compupic stopped being developed years back and it's still my first choice of a gallery-based graphics viewer. Photodex even had a mad-fast DOS graphics viewer called Sea, wonder how many people here tried that one...

I have an OCD like a lot of others to go with the newer,bigger,faster software but whenever I've combated it and decided to stick with an older version, the decision has invariably paid off. I'm even going to try and boycott the FooBar2000 upgrades. Lets hope it doesn't go the Winamp (sucks the llama's ass) way.

I'm sure I'm not the only software fan who experiences these info-overloads either, we've all seen enough good programs go down the crapper.

1290

Living Room / Re: Multiple monitor setup - need some guidance

« on: November 06, 2007, 04:49 PM »

The card was recognized by the BIOS (it displayed the onboard RAM) but XP kept showing a "not enough resources" error in Device Manager, it however was unable to show me specific resource conflicts and wouldn't even allow me to change the allocated resources. Some people online said what you just told me, others seemed to resolve the problem by increasing the AGP aperture size (no idea how that worked) and yet others by upgrading their BIOS chip.
I did manage to upgrade it to a P3 board with a 4X slot (old hardware is SO hard to find  ) and now it works.

1291

General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use Desktop Widgets?

« on: November 06, 2007, 11:58 AM »

Yeah, it wasn't psycho-hungry like a badly programmed desktop search engine for instance, but it constantly consumed a fair share of my resources. I could afford to spare them for something genuinely useful which it simply wasn't.

Reg their forums, I know how clannish/blindly loyal people can get sometimes... it's best to leave them be. 

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General Software Discussion / Re: Do you use Desktop Widgets?

« on: November 05, 2007, 01:31 PM »

Like so many others who've posted here I had a brief fling with widgets before realizing that they were mostly useless to me and banishing them forever.

I tried a few and Konfabulator Yahoo seemed the most polished (as far as looks are concerned anyway, under the hood it's an ugly resource hog).

One thing I like about widgets is that there are quite a few made for relaying live info on current sports events.

1293

General Software Discussion / Re: xplorer2 won the Epsilon award

« on: November 05, 2007, 12:44 PM »

Right on!
Great app... hope this inspires Nikos to enhance it. 

1294

Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Create a containing folder by right clicking on a file

« on: November 05, 2007, 11:44 AM »

Merci

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Post New Requests Here / Re: IDEA: Create a containing folder by right clicking on a file

« on: November 05, 2007, 12:39 AM »

ak_ I really think the program needs to start looking for the (.) starting from the right and not the left, lots of files one downloads have names like Program_x.x.x.exe - the current logic just slashes off everything since it seems to look for the period from L-R.

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Living Room / Re: Multiple monitor setup - need some guidance

« on: November 05, 2007, 12:27 AM »

Thanks Lanux, I upgraded to a GEForce 6200 [512 MB). It's identical to the Geforce 5200 as far as output jacks are concerned but the DVI output isn't lacking.

Right now my challenge is to make an older PC with an AGP 2x slot accept the now unused 5200 which is 4/8 x... don't suppose there's anyway to put off a mobo upgrade.

1297

Living Room / Re: Multiple monitor setup - need some guidance

« on: November 02, 2007, 12:26 PM »

Got a DVI to VGA adapter but the display is really dark and ugly and the icons displayed seem to have what can only be described as "stretch marks" 

I suppose the display card's just not good enough... I'm giving up on this one for now - will get a new PCI card later.

1298

Living Room / Re: Multiple monitor setup - need some guidance

« on: November 02, 2007, 08:26 AM »

Thanks tinjaw, that helps a lot!

I realised I have onboard graphics besides the spare PCI card and have been futzing around with those, only to find out that one doesn't support the resolution of the new monitor and the other doesn't support the refresh rate. A DVI 2 VGA adapter it is then.

1299

Living Room / Multiple monitor setup - need some guidance

« on: November 02, 2007, 05:26 AM »

I have an Geforce FX5200 display card. It has three outputs: VGA, S-Video & DVI.
So far I have used the S-Video output for playing movies on television. I'm really not interested in this anymore but would like to hook up an additional LCD monitor. Since the monitor only has a standard VGA input, how should I go about it without buying a new card? Will I get adapter cables for S-Video to VGA or DVI to VGA, which of these is preferable? My main concern is getting some noise in the output because of an adapter. The TV output does have some interference which I tend not to notice after a while but with a PC monitor this would be unacceptable.

The other option I can think of is to hook up an old PCI adapter side-by-side. Would my primary adapter be less efficient if I connect two monitors to it? I know, lots of questions but I'm quite clueless when it comes to hardware. Any suggestions would be muchly appreciated.


Edit: How about a VGA splitter?

1300

General Software Discussion / Re: SyncBackSE vs. SuperFlexible

« on: November 02, 2007, 02:27 AM »

Those interested in a mirroring tool with a good looking + v.user friendly interface may want to check out Second Copy. Sadly, it's not free.