Recent Posts

8176

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Registry Cleaning Software

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 09:56 AM »

Even removing some obsolete entires without defragmenting will speed up your system.

I've never seen an effect of doing that, and it doesn't surprise me. Windows uses a binary search when looking up keys, which means that even to look up a key in 4.2billion keys it needs to look at maximally 32 keys.

Of course deleting some keys means a little less disk use, but the gains there are very small.

Applications will sometime wait for nonexistant service links to respond before timing out.

THAT kind of problems can be substantial though

8177

General Software Discussion / Re: What IRC client do you use?

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 09:50 AM »

I don't follow the jump from X11/Xorg to win32 and back.

-housetier (September 28, 2006, 09:14 AM)

That probably was a bit confusing

I just meant that everytime I've tried X under linux, with or without accelerated drivers, etc, window resize has always been very laggy. One little game had 100% CPU usage when resizing (and not just "artificial usage", it really bogged the system down), other applications have "controls that lag into place".

XChat brings that lag to win32...

8178

General Software Discussion / Re: What IRC client do you use?

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 09:02 AM »

mitzevo[/url], and [iurl=#msg38224]f0dder[/url]: there are some known "issues" with gtk on windows. I do not know of a solution unless you are willing to juggle with several versions of gtk until you find one that works.

-housetier (September 28, 2006, 08:58 AM)

I'm not, I just want something that works . Laggy window resize is very typical of anything on X11 (XF86 and XOrg anyway), but XChat is particularly bad, at least on windows.

One should take the source and make a native win32 port of xchat...

-housetier (September 28, 2006, 08:58 AM)

I wonder how easy that'd be...

8179

General Software Discussion / Re: What IRC client do you use?

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 03:09 AM »

I find XChat to have extremely lagging redraw on resize, which is enough that I just can't stand using it.

No matter which client I've tried, I always end up back with mIRC, even though it's somewhat of a pig. But it works, and it's comfortable

8180

General Software Discussion / Re: foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 02:56 AM »

kimmchii: foo_dsp_delta doesn't work here (foobar2000 0.9.2), and then author's page doesn't work either.

The thing that irks me about foobar is that it's so... messy. All those tweaks and extra downloads from small & obscure sites, if you don't like the vanilla looks. And the very lacking documentation, so you have to resort to forum-hunting. I've become too old for that . Luckily it does work okay out-of-the-box.

(Too bad musikCube hasn't been updated for ages, that's a nice & interesting player as well.)

8181

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Registry Cleaning Software

« Last post by f0dder on September 28, 2006, 02:41 AM »

I've never seen any advantages from running registry cleaners. It's a lot like snake oil, wonderful placebo effect... at best. The really wonderful thing about system breakage is that it happens silently, obscure, and you don't find out until weeks later, when for some reason windows installer fscks up.

defragmenting the registry, however, can bring some decent speed boost - but that shouldn't come as a surprise.

8182

Living Room / Re: Hungy Space: today's flash game

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2006, 05:27 PM »

Oh, the jelly game is really visually pleasing... but the sfx suck, and there's no background music - a shame, really. Also, it feels a bit laggy on my 4400+, even though CPU usage was a lot lower than flash games usually tax it - weird.

8183

General Software Discussion / Re: foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2006, 04:38 PM »

superboyac: can you post some info on how you have configured foobar? I used to use winamp, but after realizing that I don't care about skins and don't use visualizations these days, I've switched to foobar. Default setup seems pretty okay to me, although I wouldn't mind albumart or something

8184

Living Room / Re: Hungy Space: today's flash game

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2006, 06:53 AM »

hateyou.
FRUSTRATING!

8185

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: 20% Discount on PerfectDisk and other products from Raxco till Sep 30

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2006, 05:32 AM »

Nice

Too bad the UI has gone ugly with the release of v8. Or well, perhaps "uglier". Still doesn't change the fact the PerfectDisk is the best defrag app for NTFS I've found yet, though.

8186

Official Announcements / Re: --> SEPTEMBER SOFTWARE DRAWING RESULTS - POSTED!

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2006, 05:31 AM »

I got a cody figurine!

* f0dder does the happy dance

allen: Dina for the code

8187

General Software Discussion / Re: My favorite software! What's yours?

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2006, 05:29 AM »

The first app I install on a PC on witch I have to work is Total Commander.

-Mark0 (September 26, 2006, 07:20 PM)

Heretic! xPlorer^2

8188

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: McAfee for free

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2006, 05:45 PM »

I just don't want to have a virus infection or a sluggish machine... I feel safer without any AV than with McAfee. False sense of security and all that.

8189

General Software Discussion / Re: Read which Linux distro users think is best and why ...

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2006, 05:31 PM »

I guess those xgl effects are cute, but while it looks smoother than regular X11, it still looks a bit laggy/sluggish. I guess I'll have to try out on my own hardware, though.

8190

Developer's Corner / Re: Wotsit's Format: The Programmers File Format Collection

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2006, 05:03 PM »

It's a pretty good resource, I've been using it for years. I think I first stumbled upon it when I was still using pascal, but it can't be that old? :O. Hm, copyright from 1996, perhaps it can, then

8191

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: McAfee for free

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2006, 05:01 PM »

I wouldn't touch it unless they paid me to.

8192

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer and Svchost

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2006, 04:58 PM »

To what relates to disk it is in DMA mode.

If your disk is in PIO mode, disk I/O will be very CPU heavy. Windows XP will revert a disk from DMA to PIO if it senses errors, which usually means your disk is dying (or that you have a faulty optical drive on the same IDE cable).

I think this has to do with what is installed by Microsoft mainly related with OS copy validation ( windows genuine validation(?)). But this is my opinion. I'm not an expert.

The copy validation, silly as it is, should still be pretty light. You might want to use Process Explorer to find the svchost process that has high CPU load, then find which thread it responsible, and see which executable file this thread belongs to...

8193

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: TextMate - Mac OS X Coding Heaven

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2006, 05:05 AM »

One thing I can already see I dislike about mac: having the menu bar at the very top of the screen instead of per-application-window. That's a long way to move your mouse on a dual-monitor 1280x1024 setup if you have the app window in the lower-right area of your right screen

I've heard a lot of mac users praise TextMate, but it's feature list doesn't seem that impressive to me. I might just be missing something though

8194

Official Announcements / Re: Upgrading forum software on server to rc1.3 today.. be prepared for issues

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2006, 05:00 AM »

Let's cross our fingers

8195

General Software Discussion / Re: Your Newest Favorite Firefox Extension :)

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2006, 04:43 PM »

We also maintain a list of bugs that impact porn surfing

Hah!

8196

Living Room / Re: 'Hactivism' Group Launches Anonymous Browser

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2006, 04:42 PM »

Perhaps no installation tracks, but what about cookies and temporary/cache files?

8197

Post New Requests Here / Re: PPMd ZIP packer/extractor (i.e. WinZip 10 compatible)

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2006, 04:41 PM »

I'd just avoid .zip as much as possibble - especially those extended formats.

I use (standard) .zip (created by WinRAR) when I need to distribute small things, because just about everybody can open zips, and WinXP even has built-in support for zip.

When I need to send files to people, I use RAR. Better compression and good speed, and all people I send files to use WinRAR anyway

If I need to do a setup for something larger, I'll probably choose LZMA - cab, 7zip or nsis. Although RAR is still a viable choice, since at least the decompression algorithm is free.

8198

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer and Svchost

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2006, 04:36 PM »

If it's doing heavy disk I/O, changing it's priority won't help that much.

Sounds like something is wrong with your system anyway, you shouldn't have that heavy disk activity for that long at startup. Do you have any heavy antivirus package? Do you have antivirus at all? Is your disk in DMA or PIO mode?

8199

Living Room / Re: Windows Passwords

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2006, 09:10 AM »

I personally use fSekrit for passwords and the like - for some reason I've never been a fan of those "password autofillers". With fSekrit I know exactly what I get, even if it means a bit of manual copy/paste work

8200

General Software Discussion / Re: Anyone know a good mov (Quicktime) to Mpeg converter

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2006, 12:53 PM »

I got mediacoder working, mov->mpeg. Fuzzed out with some errors at first, but I made it work by tweaking settings. Pretty messy GUI, but it worked. Unfortunately quality settings for video didn't seem to work at all, output was always pretty bad (yeah, transcoding *is* lossy, but doesn't have to be *that* bad).