darkpark

you'd do just as well with an EMU 1212M card which is only $199 MSRP. To clarify some things, EMU is not creative. creative just owns EMU which create the FX chips for the the creative labs sound cards. the FX chip on the EMU cards is of better quality than the one in the sound blaster cards. Also, Creative just released the Audigy 4 Pro which retails for around 279 USD. check this out: http://www.soundblaster.com/products/Audigy4pro

i guess nobody here liked it huh? *chuckle* i consider myself tolerant and can usually overlook bad plots in movies that have enough interesting action to make up for it but this movie had nothing interesting in it. The storyline was immature, the monsters were silly with the exception of the werewolves which to me were cool looking but too cartoony for my tastes. the main female character was portrayed as a tough person but did little to really help out the main character. anyway, the movie is full of hot air with almost no entertainment value. two thumbs down and two big toes down too.

it'd be nice for a movie to be made that took place before the movie "Pitch Black". In that movie he's a captured criminal being transported to a penal colony, but the ship crash lands on some planet and from there the movie starts. a movie explaining how Riddick was captured and why would be interesting. hell! if some producer were ambitious enough he could make a 3 hour long movie that takes place after the Chronicles, but speckled with backflashes explaining how Riddick was captured, how he obtained the night seeing ability and so forth.

Joe, when you say that you and your wife have different desktops do you mean that you login under a different name/account but onto the same computer? if that is the case than you won't have to install firefox twice. by the way, don't worry about removing Internet Explorer. It is integrated into Windows and way too much trouble to remove. Just don't use it anymore except when doing windows updates, you still need it for that. anyway, head over to www.mozilla.org and download firefox from there.

some greats have been mentioned and so i'll add my own: George Harrison: "All Things Must Pass" classic rock, 2x CDs Santana: "Between Good and Evil" classic rock, CD

I'm with Justin on this. Firefox is great. It is safe, a lot more secure, blocks pop-ups, ads, and a lot leaner. The current version is under 5MB!

i in no way support terrorism in any form, but wouldn't it be amusing if someone started a terrorist organization that preyed on pop stars and/or recording companies that were supporting them? such an organization could use non-violent but distruptive tactics to impede concerts/shows, printing of CDs, and make life miserable for the pop-stars. of course, it is not only pop music that's off sad quality. altenative music isn't bristling with talent either. it seems that about 1/2 of todays alternative (i have yet to understand what alternative music means: hmmm.. an alternative to quality music perhaps???) bands are composed of disgruntled suburban teens that couldn't cope with the pressures of everyday life. needless to say, they don't usually have any talent but young suburban people are able to relate to these bands and as such purchase their CDs.

try Ebay.

i can't agree more with what has been said but i believe that modern music is a reflection of modern man. certainly nobody here buying britney spears CDs but someone is!! the prosac children of this era hold some of not most responsibility to the low quality of todays music. after all they are the ones supporting the low quality musicians (if they even can be called that).

an alternative idea: sell one of your kidneys. *grin* the money you'd get from it would pay for an Nvidia 6800GT and a monster of a computer. hehehe ps: is that Jack that I see on the left?

if in doubt, check out the Doom 3 guide on the hardforums http://www.hardforum.com on an athlon/p4 that is 2 ghz or better with a 128MB video card that's at least a geforce fx5700 or radeon 9600 you should be able to play 800x600 in HQ mode or 1024x768 medium quality. both medium and highquality modes look awesome whether you're in 1024x768 or even 800x600 resolution. my rig consists of... AMD Athlon XP 2800+ 1GB DDR400 memory Nvidia Geforce FX 5700 Ultra i run Doom3 1024x768 in high quality mode. in the timedemo (demo1) i average out 28 fps, but durning actual game play i seem to be closer to 40fps. also, check out the doom 3 tweak guide at www.tweakguides.com VERY informative.

i'm currently living with my folks and have been using headphones the entire time so as not to bother them with my music and games but i'll be getting my own apartment soon. as such, i'll be unpacking my promedias again but i will only be using them for any time i don't feel like putting my headphones on and i only want to use two of the speakers and the sub. can i do this? can i just use the two front speakers and the sub without connecting the rears?

Heck yeah! I had this setup for about a year and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

in reality, whichever video card you purchase your gaming performance will be more than sufficient. sure, the hardcore gamers want the best but the best in the gaming market is usually close to overkill. as for Nvidia, it's possible that their unified drivers are becoming the bottleneck. it's nice to have a single driver set for all cards, but shouldn't they just make a cutt-off at some point and optimize the drivers for a smaller group of chipsets. plus, it would shrink down the size of their drivers too! as it is, their current set of drivers is over 10MB.

If those drivers work for you then great, but if not then head over to nvidia's website and get the WHQL Certified set. I believe the current version (56.72) is certified. WHQL certified drivers are supposedly tested to MS specs so that they are stable. I would also urge you to get the driver cleaner from driverheaven and use it prior to installing another set of nvidia drivers.

what do you consider windows friendly? itunes was designed for windows 2000 and XP. i've tried itunes, but i didn't care for it. it's too bloated for my tastes. if you consider yourself an advanced computer user you could try using Foobar2000. get it from here: http://foobar2000.blogsite.org/ not only does it contain the program but additional plug-ins/add-ons that you might find useful. and you can get some help from the following forum: http://forums.foobar2000.org

this is just some bull$hit threat. nothing interesting here. although, the last message i wrote were actually lyrics from Pink Floyd's Echoes. It's an amazing song on their Meddle album.

And no one called us to the land And no one knows the where's or why's. Something stirs and something tries Starts to climb toward the light. You missed an echo of a distant time.

Whose your daddy??!!! *grin*

Or even seeing things

No, more memory will not improve internet/surfing performance. what memory will improve is windows application performance and games. in my opinion, 256 is the minimum amount of memory to have if you want to be merely functional, but i would recommand that you upgrade to 512MB instead.

when you've got a dead system, the fault usually lies either with the psu or the mobo. to be on the safe size, remove all peripherals (ie: hard drives, floppy drives, cdrom, video card, and any other cards). it should only be your mobo, cpu, memory, and psu. if still nothing, then try the psu. if that doesn't help, than you've got a dead mobo. should the system spring back to life after you've disconnected all of your peripherals than reconnect them back one by one until the system dies again and you'll have found your culprit.

Here's my windows xp desktop which is a home made athlon xp 2800+ w/ 1GB ram and geforce fx 5700 ultra.

i'm definately a pc gamer but i do dabble in console gaming as well. to be exact i own a PS2. i grew up as console gamer (started on the coleco-vision and the atari 2600) but when i gained sufficient IQ i got into computers and computer games. i'll always keep a console game nearby because i prefer car-sims on the consoles (gran turismo and the like) than the pc ones and i love rpg's made by square-soft. (final fantasy!! wooohoo!!!) thos those that own a PS2: has anyone ever bought that Linux kit for the ps2? how is it?

Has anyone heard any complaints on the original Promedias that Klipsch released which were the v2-400 (a 4.1 system)? I bought my pair at a local Best Buy and have had them for a little more than 2 years, i think. With the exception of the control pod crapping out, they've been fault free ever since.