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I lost interest the moment my eyes came across "email marketers".

Wonderful....let's 'fix' all the email programs so it's easier to send out spam that's even more annoying than one used to be able to do.

Is there any sound logical reason why this game was classified to be North America only?

MrCrispy, I never used OneCare. I was just passing along what I had heard. This new beta is supposed to use the same engine as their corporate/enterprise product and is supposed to be quite good.

For those who missed out on downloading the beta when last I checked one could download it from Softpedia.

EDIT: Found where I heard OneCare wasn't all that great. MrCrispy, you link to AV Comparitive's latest Retrospective/Proactive test. However, their latest On-Demand test did not show OneCare in such a flattering light:

http://av-comparatives.or...t/ondret/avc_report21.pdf

MS OneCare scored 87.1% on the On-Demand test ranking them 16 out of 17 participants. That's awful. Hopefully, MS will rise to the challenge and do better in future tests.

Speaking of TV, two issues:

1) If you are going to name your channel something descriptive of the type of programming you show then by George, stick to the description of your charter! Example number one, the American Movie Classics channel. What used to be a wonderful glimpse into the best of movie-making over the years has turned into a programming schedule that's at 50% crap. If I'm browsing your show line-up, AMC, and my on-screen programming guide is showing me that all of the evening's movies are rated at one (!!!) or two stars, you need to fire your programming director!

My second example is an easy pot shot....a channel specializing in science-fiction has no gosh-darned business airing programming consisting of reality shows and professional wrestling!

2) Annoyance number two is something that cropped up in the last 6-12 months. Apparently Sony made a deal to buy 'something' that gave them ownership of a lot of syndicated TV shows. Now every episode of every one of those shows has a trailing Sony logo at the very end of them implying a, "Hey! We made this!" even though the show quit production months/years/decades before Sony ever bought the intellectual property.

Sub-annoyance of the one above....sometimes you'll watch a syndicated show and you'll have up to 8 (!!!) of those little trailing logos after the show ends!

Oh, and while I'm here: Annoyance Bonus Round! Movies and TV shows sometimes have little clever things that are shown during or after the ending credits. Sometimes I just want to see who played what part. Good luck being able to enjoy any ending credits on TV anymore! The ending show is squished down to an out-of-proportion sliver of the screen while the next bit of programming is given the majority of the screen also out-of-proportion!

ExtremeTech never impressed me. A lot of their articles seemed to be more along the puff piece variety or suffered from vagueness or errors. However, this move has more to do with the way publishing is done these days rather than the web site itself.

Ziff-Davis is a lumbering dinosaur of days past while the faster, much more agile journalists and web sites that are smaller, but able to respond much more quickly to changing needs have been nibbling like raptors on the heels of this brontosaurus (and others of its ilk) for a long time.

kartal, what I seem to have the best luck with is ACDSee. It can view almost any graphics and video format while doing it with a pleasant user interface.

Total Commander can do it, too, but I'm pretty sure you aren't that hard-core about your files.

sajman99, you seem to be up on this type of software. Hopefully, you'll let us know which program(s) you think are the best at detecting dupes (and why). I could really use a good dupe-finding program, but would really appreciate an opinion from someone who has tried them all.

How many drives to do you want your NAS to have and what's the price range you are willing to pay. When it comes to NAS units the more features it has the bigger the price and there's a steep incline when it comes to prices on these things. You can go from the $150-200 range to the $1,000-$1,200 range without much effort.

I'm going to be watching this new AV from Microsoft with keen interest. Their last AV product didn't have a stellar record with its detection rate, but I'm hoping they got their act together this time so I have one more free option to recommend to people who are reluctant/unable to pay for an AV program.

Innuendo, some time ago I had something similar with what you have proposed, but almost nobody used it, so I removed it.

Makes sense, I guess. After all, your target audience is a group of people too lazy to search out this software for themselves. What in the world make me think they'd have enough motivation to click a link?

The FF extension is more intuitive (it has colors) and more accurate, in my opinion. None of the link checkers can detect parked domains and this is the biggest problem.

Sounds like you need to be using one of those link checking programs that can actually tell if there have been changes to the site the link points to since its been checked last. A domain disappearing and morphing into a parked domain would be caught by something like that.

If it was just about upgrade pricing, did the old one come with 'lifetime' upgrades promised?

No lifetime upgrades, but a promise of being able to upgrade at a 50% discount. Not only does this company not want to honor the 50% discount, but since there are no links to the new site or new program on the old site they want to make it as hard as possible for their existing customers to take advantage of any offer at all to upgrade.

And I don't care if a program is the best in its class or not if I cannot trust the company publishing it.

I have DVD-RB and it's great.  Esp. if you have quad core you don't mind using HC with best profile, since it runs 4 copies! I'm too stingy to shell out for the paid encoders at this point.  Maybe if I get a liquid nitrogen cooled TV or something I'll think about it.

If you tried any of the paid encoders you'd be very disappointed. I've tried them all and HC is equivalent or better in every situation.

Personally, I think the best Alt+Tab replacement software is Windows 7.

I have done it a year ago, maybe it is time to do it again...

Maybe you need some "report this link as broken" links...or at least a "report a link as broken" on each page. At least then people could give you a head's up when a link is dead.

On a related topic, if someone's looking for ways to shrink down DVD9 discs down to DVD5 for back-up purposes I have to say there's nothing better than DVD Rebuilder Pro from http://www.jdobbs.com/.

Only reason there hasn't been a new version in such a long time is because at this point the software is feature complete & bug-free. No one's been able to suggest anything that needs adding.

Whe

But it's kind of digressed, (as is usual here ), into what people think is the best as asked back here.

I always end up using Nero for both situations. I keep meaning to find something more advanced, but it suits all my current needs in that regard.

/quoteEdit: I found a link that says they switched it on starting with driver 8.12 - still, the performance gains currently aren't anything that couldn't be achieved through code optimisation.
[/quote]

I don't believe them.    They've said they have 'switched it on' in the past and someone comes along and hacks the converter to run on some integrated graphics chipset and there's no improvement at all.

I would have mentioned the ATI convertor, but I thought he was looking for a DVD authoring program rather than a video transcoder.

Oh, and to let you in on ATI's dirty little secret, their convertor doesn't use the GPU at all. When it was first released it was said it would get the ability to use the GPU at a later date. We're all still waiting for that day to come.

I was not offended by the clip, but I'm glad it was removed as it might be a catalyst for unwanted situations/conversations if one were to have that up on their screen and a small child wandered by and was wondering what the grown-up was reading.

Anyway, carry on...

One of the side benefits of Aero on Windows 7 is with black text on slate window frames one's name is much more difficult to make out in the title bar.

Oh. 

That makes much more sense.

P.S. At home I often forget about it, unfortunately.

That screenshot is funny, but I'd think at home everyone would already know your name, wouldn't they?

If you like that jammo, you'll probably also like the fact that a lot of stuff (Windows Mail, MSN Messenger, etc) aren't even included at all with the OS. If you want any of them you can download Windows Live Essentials. Windows 7 is definitely more streamlined than its predecessors.

Reports say there may be an RTM image by Monday.

4.  When I make a phone call that is answered by a recording that begins with a long list of #s to choose from, that correspond to the alternatives they offer, none of which ever meet my needs.

Two more suggestions:

1. Hit 0 (zero) for an operator. That almost always works.

2. Don't make any selection. After repeating the voice menu a couple times some systems will assume you have a rotary phone and kick you to an operator.

That's the only thing I don't care for with Total Commander. When I'm out and about with my laptop people can look over your shoulder and find out your name.

Some Dells have proprietary sockets for the PSUs, but they were supposed to have gotten away from that and use standard pin-outs. The words is anything around the time of the Dimension 8400 and newer use standard pinouts.

However, a lot of their models still use proprietary form factors so while a standard PSU will work, you aren't going to get an exact fit into the case like the old one.