Computer tips

[CrazyOne]

No, this was my primary hard drive. I'm using the one you gave me as additional storage.

Big sigh of reief.... I hooked the drive into the second IDE port where the CD drives are connectedd and it works... so I just have to figure out if the primary IDE port is dead or whether I just need to play with the cables and settings some more.

Thanks for the help y'all.

[Fat boy]

Hey Gary that program that takes out the song lyrics for karaoke came in yesterday from eBay stop by and pick it up when your ready.

[CrazyOne]

Thanks. It'll either be today or tomorrow around lunch. I'll call.

[xrayzebra]

Why no shareware. How about freeware?

[Holmes_Fans]

I have a question which I will eventually get to... We are moving into our new home next week and currently I have our home network of 3 PCs set up with mine be the central hub. I use Network Magic since it came with my D-Link Extreme-G Wireless Router. I love this system because it's easy to use and they seem to respond to customer input with upgrades quite often. But my husband just ordered me a new computer as a present for building our home. He bought me a Dell La ude D820 Laptop with a docking station.
My question is, can my laptop still be the hub of the system since it may not always be docked in the station? Currently I have a 240ghz ext hard drive plugged in to my Gateway computer that we use to download all of our digital photos onto. Or will I have to set up my daughter's computer to be the hub. (This idea scares the out of me). There is no telling what functions she will lock us out of if she gets pissed off.
So just tell there's a way I can continue to be the queen of my computer castle and all will be right with the word.

2Blonde

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A little better explanation is that my computer is the central hub of Network Magic. And I also run all the sharing of files through my computer. We download all the pics into the ext hard drive that's attached to my computer. After all the editing is done the pics make it back to my hard drive for filing. From there some of them make it on to our shared files that I maintain as "shared/for public viewing on the internet and others are for shared/password protected viewing" and some don't make it on to the internet at all. They are either just shared in our home network offline or not shared at all. But for these functions of Network Magic to work, I have to have my hard drive turned on. My question is... using a laptop, will it have to be docked? and can the ext hard drive be plugged into the docking station and be running when I have the laptop away from the office?

Sounds like this program is making you do alot of you shouldn't have to. Your computers should be able to be linked together via the router without any kind of BS software. Just hook them all up to the router, make sure they are all on the same network, and if you want to share files, select the hardrive and enable sharing.

I would suggest uninstalling any program you though you had to have. If your router makes you use it's software to work, then buy a new router. No computer should have to be the 'Hub', and if you don't want your daughter locking you out, then you don't give her the password to the router.

[Re-Animator]

links removed

[CrazyOne]

Dang, Mouse, that looks like you need 20 years of experience in the recording studio to figure it out. I'm looking for a point and zap solution.

[Re-Animator]

links removed

[nacho]

links removed

[sabar]

2) Nothing illegal please

There go all my suggestions.

How about some freeware with full functionality.

Clean temporary files and trash off your PC that would take much longer to clear manually. Don't scrub the registry unless you know the keys you're deleting are not needed.
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Stop Spyware in it's tracks.
http://www.safer-networking.org/

The best filter pack ever. Plays most media file formats and applies common codecs in non-conflicting ways.
http://www.cccp-project.net/

Look at images, mostly for file types like .tga that can't be opened in many programs.
http://www.irfanview.com/

Torrent client, java based!
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

IM from the web instead of downloading bloated ad-infested client software.
http://wwwl.meebo.com/index-en.html

Let's see there must be more. If you can find RegScrubXP and RegCompact.NET those are awesome to cleaning and defragging the registry. Blender is excellent if you are actually into modeling, but I doubt anyone here is. Exact Audio Copy for ripping audio CDs works. There's OpenOffice.org but everyone knows about that.

I use CloneCD to copy game discs. Plenty of DVD rom emulation freeware but that's getting borderline illegal since it all has copy-protection bypassing.

Anyways it's all 100% free, no shareware or try-before-you-buy trash.

[Re-Animator]

links removed

[xrayzebra]

Hey sabar, the Irfanview I have used for several years. It is a
great freeware program and no crap downloaded with it. I wished
I knew how to use it more efficiently and all the stuff you really
can do with it. Know any good information on it.

Another good freeware program is Picasa, downloaded from
google. It doesn't have all the tools that Irfan has but it has
some great features. One being "free" with no junk attached.

One thing I have learned over the time I have had the old
puter is download everything to the HD run a virus scan on it
and then open it. So far haven't imported anything bad. But
maybe some others have better ideas.

One other question. On wireless networks, can you put the
printer into the equation so all computers can access it? If
so how

[2centsworth]

after reading this thread, I have an overwhelming urge to watch Star Trek.

[=RTM=]

=I feel like grabbing my pocket protector and going to radio shack to see what's new=

[Spock]

after reading this thread, I have an overwhelming urge to watch Star Trek.

That is a logical conclusion.

[Borosai]

1) Don't use Windows.

If you must use Windows:

2) Replace the default file manager (at least in XP) with xplorer2 lite http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm. It's a dual-pane file manager...a nice improvement. If you don't like this one, there are others out there, but I haven't used them.

3) If you are looking for a decent anti-virus program, give Avast a try...it performs well and isn't a system resource hog (at least not in my experience). http://www.avast.com/eng/free_virus_protectio.html

4) Although I'm not a fan of it's default appearance, you might want to give VLC Media Player a try, especially if you have trouble playing certain videos. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ I prefer MPlayer, but it doesn't perform very well in Windows (but works great in Linux).

5) Uhhh, don't use Windows.

I guess this turned into a very short list of applications that many people may already be familiar with (and possibly have already been mentioned in this thread), but others may find them interesting. And to those people out there, I say....yay.

[tw05baller]

wtf? this popped up after startup.
???

[Re-Animator]

links removed

[tw05baller]

here

[nacho]

links removed

[baseline bum]

Until you fix them we can't move to step two. Unfortunately the topic starter said no sharing of code keys and does not want any free ware etc... so you do the math.

Freeware 's fine, but I hate bait and switch shareware.

[baseline bum]

1) Don't use Windows.

If you must use Windows:

2) Replace the default file manager (at least in XP) with xplorer2 lite http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm. It's a dual-pane file manager...a nice improvement. If you don't like this one, there are others out there, but I haven't used them.

3) If you are looking for a decent anti-virus program, give Avast a try...it performs well and isn't a system resource hog (at least not in my experience). http://www.avast.com/eng/free_virus_protectio.html

4) Although I'm not a fan of it's default appearance, you might want to give VLC Media Player a try, especially if you have trouble playing certain videos. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ I prefer MPlayer, but it doesn't perform very well in Windows (but works great in Linux).

5) Uhhh, don't use Windows.

I guess this turned into a very short list of applications that many people may already be familiar with (and possibly have already been mentioned in this thread), but others may find them interesting. And to those people out there, I say....yay.

I can't for the life of me compile Mplayer to do x264, which sucks since I have three of the 2005 Finals games in HD and compressed with x264 in a matroska container.

I've tried it with and without ffmpeg, letting MPlayer use its internal x264 and then I tried linking it against the official x264 shared lib... and I cannot get it to play x264. xine does it fine, linking against the x264 shared library. vlc too.

I got MPlayer to render to the framebuffer, to render to a terminal in ASCII (which is hilarious to watch a movie on), and everything else, but I've never gotten H.264 up and running on it.

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Stupid question, but is there a hotkey to hold or something to keep from screwing up the aspect resolution when you resize the display in gmplayer? I don't think I saw anything about it in the manpages.

[velik_m]

Media Player Classic is great for windows.
As far as file managers go i prefer Total Commander (it's shareware), it integrates IrfanView nicely too.

[Borosai]

I can't for the life of me compile Mplayer to do x264, which sucks since I have three of the 2005 Finals games in HD and compressed with x264 in a matroska container.

I've tried it with and without ffmpeg, letting MPlayer use its internal x264 and then I tried linking it against the official x264 shared lib... and I cannot get it to play x264. xine does it fine, linking against the x264 shared library. vlc too.

I got MPlayer to render to the framebuffer, to render to a terminal in ASCII (which is hilarious to watch a movie on), and everything else, but I've never gotten H.264 up and running on it.

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Stupid question, but is there a hotkey to hold or something to keep from screwing up the aspect resolution when you resize the display in gmplayer? I don't think I saw anything about it in the manpages.

As far as x264 files, I had never played them before (that I know of) with either program. However, I was curious to see if there was a problem, so I downloaded a couple of video clips of birds (only thing I could find) from http://www.hbw.com/ibc/, and they both played fine, although I wasn't very impressed with their quality. I'm running archlinux64 by the way.

While resizing mplayer/gmplayer windows, they have always maintained their aspect ratio...including the window frame, so I'm not sure about that.

EDIT: Oops, I just tested it again, and yep, gmplayer has that problem. When mplayer is launched from the command line, it doesn't. Weird. I don't use gmplayer much, so I guess that explains my ignorance. Just don't use the gui unless you are going to watch something full screen...problem solved.

[baseline bum]

H.264 is the best MPEG-4 codec I've ever seen. I have 4 four games of the Finals in HD from the same source, same resolution, same bitrate, and so on, 3 using x264's H.264 implementation, one using XViD, and the difference in quality between them is night and day. I know the XViD rip isn't bad either, because it's consistent with the quality of a lot of XViD rips I did myself on two-pass encoding after doing a lot of experimenting to see what looked best when compressing it.

H.264 is what Apple uses in all their HD movie trailers, although H.264 still looks amazing at lower resolutions too. I have some Spurs games in something like 530 by 300 (or something along those lines) that look significantly better than 720x480 DVDs, while only taking about 1400 MB/game.