Liam

No probs Muzz I'm guessing you'll be using it out and about a bit? Thing to remember with portables is that speed is not king. Portability, durabilty, battery life, screen quality, decent keyboard and trackpad... in a laptop, I'd take any of these over a fast processor and oodles of RAM.

If I recall correctly, Deft was trying to shift one with a Pro-X that needed a pot replacing. All you need now is a geeky friend with a soldering iron and too much time on his hands (**whistles**)

Personally, I don't like Acer laptops. My ex had one, we flew with it a lot -it did not live up to the job. Failed a lot, overheating problems and the screen flexed, leaving an impression of the keyboard on the screen. I hear Acer travelmates are slightly better than the aspire (my ex had an aspire), but they don't look much better to me. And as Deft says, settling for anything less than a core2 right now would be daft. The olds just bought a Turion X2 based Compaq and for everything I've tried, my old Pentium-M is as fast and in many cases faster; core2 is based upon much the same architecture.

I loved the ST150's, so I think you'll be sound with the PD45's. Kudos for not being hung up on brand. As for the mixer, I don't think I can help you simply because the choice of decent mid budget scratch mixers has never been so strong. On paper you'd struggle to pick out any given mixer as 'right', so I say get to trying a few. Besides, if I start dishing out advice I'll only do what I've done for the last five years and tell you to buy a Xone

You can normally change repeat rate in both the bios and windows. But before I launch into anything... what are you trying to achieve here? I'm confused by this 'hold function' business. Hold what?

Wow. Word was that firmware hacks were going to be harder! You seen one? I'm not that impressed, they're a bit slimmer but other than that the size is pretty identical. What they really need is a PSP with a non gash analog controller. The AV output is a very nice idea but they don't bundle the cables!!!

Then it's uphill going home

HTFR continue to deny all knowledge of hooky bootleg represses...

No, that's the highest cannonisation

Which is, of course, the highest recommendation a mixer can recieve...

One of my tech tonearms broke after almost ten years of service. Gonna have to fix it sometime real soon but I don't have space for my setup right now anyway ("between" places at the moment). I used to have the design for a tech straight arm down somewhere, I've lost it but it would be dead easy to draw up another. But for me, doing the mod would be purely "because I can" -I love the feel of an S-arm. Straight arms never have felt right to me, which is dumb when you think about it in "vector" terms. I guess it's just because they're shorter, 'stubbier' to handle -hence the aforementioned sticker problems.

Liam, it's not widescreen it 4:3 ratio 20" screen. Yeah I saw right after I posted, hence the edit. Lol true that, CRT manufacturers stretched the truth to the limit with viewable sizes vs tube size. The thinner bezels on LCD's do a hell of a lot to make them appear larger, too. What's the native on your new monitor? That's the one thing that irks me about TFT's -you really have to make sure they run at native resolution all the time. Interpolation just looks so damn muddy and crappy it's unbelievable. So every fullscreen app -media players, games, the lot, have to support your native res. to take full advantage of the display. My laptop only does 1280*800 which I thought would be a little shy of what I wanted, but actually it's a very well supported res and low enough for most games, so I'm very happy.

Widescreen dimensions are a bit of a scam; the aspect ratio is completely different so in actual area terms a 20" widescreen isn't much bigger than a 4:3 with a 17" diagonal. On the other hand, I resisted widescreen aspect displays on my PC right up until my recent laptop; now I'm a complete convert. They definately convey a better impression of size and are easier on your eyes, I assume that's down to the way human periperal vision works edit: oh wait, that's a 4:3 display you posted. I'm a twat. But at least I'm not the one buying outmoded displays with wacky resolutions. I hope to god that 1440x1050 isn't the native res, that would be a nightmare. Running outside of native resolutions on TFTs *really* sucks....

If you got the spec, Vista flies. And iExist is right, all the "Are you sure?"... "Are you REALLY sure?"... bollocks is tiresome, but considering it means I can trust my olds to not drive their new laptop into a ditch I welcome the addition. Oh, and get a >=2GB flash drive for ReadyBoost. It really is worth the outlay. Mad not to. I've still yet to experiment with how Vista handles multiple audio devices; hopefully much better than XP which is still being a pain in the arse every so often with my USB soundcards

That'll do it. Even a very old HDD platter rotates ninety times a second! Fluid bearings help minimise the friction but nevertheless the heat they generate is phenominal! And people wonder why their RAID stack based systems kick out so much heat...

Check power management settings on control panel; they're changed it a fair bit on vista and I can't be arsed to check downstairs Also it's all over the web and I don't feel like expending energy when more thorough guides can be googled. This is MY power management settings in effect, lol Nah. It's all about clever architecture The Pentium 4 platform was supposed to ultimately ramp up to something mad like 6Ghz, but ultimately the design was a lame duck and died a thermal death so the more effiecient Pentium 3 was ressurrected and revamped as the Pentium M (which you will most likely know as the original 'Centrino'; a family of mobile products including the P-M). These run fast as fuck at low clock speeds. The design has lead to the Core2's and the Core Quads. Cleverer, not 'faster' as such. Thermal limitations are always an overhead, but good design rules all. Speaking of which, my old dept. was working on the development for IBM of superconducting nano-tubes for such chips. Considering superconductivity in laymans terms pretty much means "zero resistance", just think of the possibilites...

Chick: I can school you on cooling, no doubt. I spent far too long dicking around with all that shit for small temperature gains in my formative years; these days I don't really bother beyond the basics. But the bottom line is this: no cooling system will decrease the amount of heat put out by the system. Think about it, the most fundamental law of science is that energy can never be destroyed; heat being a form of energy. Yes, you can increase the speed with which the heat energy is conveyed from the computer, but if your PC runs 500W peak, then when maxed out it will put out almost half as much heat as a small electric fire. Solution a:) Open a window. Partial solution b.) Look at the power saving settings on your computer. Shut it down when it does nothing; allow hard drives to turn off when not in use and be absolutely sure that 'speedstep' is enabled on your CPU (this ramps down the multiplier reducing the power the CPU uses to close on nothing). Consuming less power = putting out less heat. Google for this stuff, it's well documented. Sorry, this probabbly isn't the reply you wanted, but at least my solutions are free...

Never had an issue myself The OG had an ALPHA railglide The updated version had a P&G The current model has a pro-X Which do you have?

MCE is dope. Snag a microsoft remote and a tuner.

Lush. Get it. As per what Decisive said, the GMA950 is actually a very competent graphics chipset, I was quite shocked at how well it performs with games. In fact, I game regularly with mine.

If you finish this, I'll definately make a copy for my bro; he was born in '88

As nice an idea as that sounds, EEPROM flashing is one of those things you just can't trust the end user not to fuck up.

Erol Alkan is pretty sick

It's a spanned ZIP archive. Spanned archives like RAR, ZIP etc. are common in P2P downloads. You need to extract the first file in the set, and it will extract all the others automatically. Get an application like powerarchiver. Hope this helps (Ironically, I once downloaded powerarchiver on a new install only to find it compressed as a rar file)