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Does anyone have an opinion on Zalman power supplies? In Oz they're currently cheaper than Antec TruePower (I'm looking for something quiet, yet reliable).

If you have noticed the thread in the Tech Support forum, I have to replace at least three Epox 8KHA+ motherboards with bad capacitors. The boards are just over two years old and the distributor has told me "no dice" with warranties. They have offered me replacement boards for a bit over US$35...

When opening a PC to replace the CD writer - and purge it of the loathsome zip drive that lurked in its shadows - we noticed the tops of most of the electrolytic capacitors were 'corroded' and bulging ... The motherboard was an Epox 8KHA+ purchased in October 2001. Before the zip :eekers: drive...

I'm concerned that AMD's latest Performance Rating claims originated solely in the marketing department rather than having any basis in engineering. As background, here are the actual clock speeds of various Athlons: Model Cache FSB Clock Multiplier % XP1600 256MB 133MHz...

I have the option of buying a couple of the new Gigabyte GA-7N400PRO motherboards at a fairly reasonable price (about USD110), considering how much gear comes with them. However, I've balked because the only review I could find (at Overclockers NZ) found that the multiplier unlocking didn't...

I've been hunting around for a cheap or free email client, and wondered if anyone had tried one of these: InScribe/i.Scribe - It's regularly updated and is becoming increasingly competent. It's also available for Linux. FoxMail - Chinese, but seems surprisingly good. This is the best...

Has anyone else experienced instability problems with Opera 7.11? I can't seem to surf for more than a few minutes without it splattering. Tried cleaning it off and reinstalling from scratch, but to no avail.

Does anyone have ExcelFIX or a similar utility to recover corrupt spreadsheets?

LOSTCIRCUITS has a comparison of eight different PC3200 modules. It's particularly interesting for some of the technical explanations that Michael Schuette includes. I've run some tests that confirm his assertions, at least with my setup. CAS 2.5 and 3 perform identically on my sample...

I'm interested in what other people think this PC is worth: Athlon 1000 (Thunderbird) ThermoEngine with Papst fan Soltek 75KAV 512MB Kingmax PC133 SDRAM Seagate 40GB Barracuda IV (~6 months old) Panasonic FDD Samsung DVD or Sony 8x4x32 CD-RW Gigabyte 64MB GeForce2 MX PCI modem (Lucent) 10/100...

This is a topic from Hell (it involves PC Chips). One of my suppliers has referred someone to us, so I'm trying to do my best by him. He has a P233 on an Amptron(?) 'BX Pro' motherboard (circa 1998), which runs Netware 3.11 satisfactorily. :o It purportedly has 4 SIMM and 2 DIMM slots (I can't...

Found this and other interesting items on Everything Isn't Under Control This particular piece is from "Pathetic Attempts at Office". 8)

Came across this site: http://www.hippocrates.com.au/grander.html Clearly, this is the product we've all been waiting for. Did you know that Nature (and the Grander Penergiser) uses Planetary Energy to cleanse water? Or that "Filtered, purified, bottled, tap, bore, rain and distilled water have...

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/09/1049567739732.html

I realize it's an obsolete benchmark, but has anyone noticed that Winbench 99 Business Diskmark spits the dummy with Athlons over about 2150MHz? I don't know the exact point, just that 2200MHz and up causes it to have a wobbly at the end - about interrupts and changes in CPU speed.

I thought that nForce 1 was dual channel DDR-SDRAM, but it doesn't seem to make any difference on this board. Is there some secret to it, or has Asus short-changed me? Are there any other settings that Buck, e_dawg, etc could suggest for smooth operation of this board? BTW Buck, I know you use...

Although I prefer midi-towers for most applications, I do feel they waste a lot of space. Searching for an alternative, I've become all fired up over the "Tiny Tower" range from Yeong Yang. Like Shuttle's SFF (Small Form Factor) PCs, they only have room for one each of FDD, HDD and CD/DVD...

I've read that the latest versions of this board have replaced the dual DIP switch with a single switch to control the FSB range. That is, you can no longer select 100/133/166MHz, but only 100/Other. Or is it the other way round? I found seemingly hundreds of clueless individuals with the...

Does anyone know? I seem to recall LiamC being unhappy with the 40GB version as well?

In particular, Gigabyte GA-7VKML. There's also Shuttle and ECS boards kicking around with this chipset. It appears to be KT266A with integrated Savage 8 :roll: graphics. I'm also curious about low-cost nForce 1 implementations such as Asus A7N266-VM. I saw one review that suggested stability...

This is a thread for people to share their experiences with different cooling fans; a sort of group therapy where you can pillory brands or models that caused you pain and suffering. There's a lot of hot air in fan specifications and claims. Air flow always seems to be overstated and noise...

This is a caution mainly for Australian readers, although the product concerned is exported to a number of countries. Legend PC2700 DDR-SDRAM modules are currently incompatible with Epox 8RDA+ (nForce 2) motherboards when run at their rated speed of 166MHz. Legend is working on the problem...

I just received a couple of Gainward MX440 video cards, or at least that's how they were described. Imagine my shock when examining one of the boxes and reading: "64MB SDR" Disbelief reigned (surely Gainward knows what it's doing?), so I tried one in an Athlon 2000. *&!@#!$%%!!!! 3DMark 2001...

Opera releases "Swedish Chef" version of browser: http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2003/02/14/ Unfortunately, it only works its magic with the MSN front page. :( I wish it was an option I could toggle at will. :mrgrn:

The afflicted PC is a P350 with 192MB RAM running Windows 98. MS Word starts normally and loads documents quickly. However, it can take a staggering 45 seconds or so to close them, even unmodified. The documents are not large; the problem occurs with half a page. According to System Monitor...

When first connecting a USB mass storage device (a digicam in this case) to this particular PC, the info dialog saying it's adding a drive hangs - yet the new drive really is there. It works subsequently, but when you go to 'stop' the connected device, the dialog hangs. If you physically...

I installed the latest version of Ahead's InCD (v3.51.61) on a couple of older PCs (450 & 350MHz) running Win9x, and noticed the PCs seemed to become sluggish. I finally got around to checking CPU Utilization on the P450, and found it peaking at 25-30% every 5 seconds! Although presumably less...

A customer phoned me complaining that "the internet stopped working" when their PC was upgraded. This translates to an error when using Netscape 4.7: Alert! Did not find a converter or decoder. I dropped in for a look, and everything worked perfectly. The customer apologised profusely. But...

I really expected Groltz to notify us, but it looks like I'm first. For those who weren't paying attention, this is a complete rewrite of the rendering engine that should cope with dynamic HTML and all sorts of crap - er, I mean clever web design. So far, it looks like a huge improvement. I'm...

This is slightly different from Merc's fleet challenge, so I thought I'd start a different thread. I've decided that much as I dislike propagating Intel's spawn, any new motherboards I use should have USB 2.0 (I'd like them to have Firewire too, but that's a bit tougher). Actually, it would be...

I've been playing with an Epson C61 (C62 in the US and sells for about US$80 after rebate). It's way, way better than I expected. But what I want to talk about today is speed. 1. A4 photo (10.67x8" plus margin for all you metric-phobes) with maximum options: just under 16 minutes. This excludes...

I took a call today from a guy trying to get some Win2k workstation talking to a Novell Netware server. After he'd calmed down a bit, it transpired that he had to login locally to Windows as Administrator before he could attach to the Novell server as a valid user. At least that's the garbled...

I'm a little surprised that no-one commented on the news that IBM and Seagate are plotting to reduce SCSI warranties. Does this mean that everyone accepts both the reduction and the collusion?

Here in Oz, we're accustomed to paying more for high-tech goods than our more advanced cousins in Europe and the USA. But recently I observed an odd disparity in Canon pricing. I'd appreciate any confirmation or enlightenment. I adjusted these prices to US$ after allowing a small margin for...

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5178705%255E15306,00.html I'd use this to question the pro-Dell sentiment that some people here occasionally display. No doubt this will be yet more ammunition for Red Hill et al. ;) For several months now we've been receiving telemarketing calls...

It's important to remember that different manufacturers use quite different techniques for depositing the ink onto the paper. In particular, there is Canon's 'bubble-jet' system where the ink is heated, and Epson's microscopic piezo impellers. Consequently, the ink formulations are radically...

I don't mean to endlessly regurgitate news here, but this has got to be one of the offbeat stories of the year. http://abc.net.au/news/2002/09/item20020919182421_1.htm

I found this quite interesting: http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s679426.htm The guy reminds me of Jubal Harshaw from Heinlein's 'Stranger in a Strange Land'.

And what general purpose inkjets really can print photos? There is the 6-color photo printer range from Epson and the option exists for some Canon printers. My reading is that HP equivalents are running third by some margin at present. Plus there's the issue of wild horses and selling HP...

What's a good (easy) way to disable IE5.5/6 in Win98? A client wants to restrict web access but permit email access for a particular employee, as well as solitaire et al. Apparently the employee has been unable to surf and play in moderation, so her employer wants her to go cold turkey. I...

Another brilliant article from Dan: http://www.dansdata.com/gz012.htm

Arstel strikes again, for those of us foolish enough to live in Australia. This "unscheduled outage" will be two hours minimum. I thought the accompanying screenshot just about sums it up (check the legend, ignore the "some problems" crap - the entire country is affected). In case you're...

I can't wait for Coug to wake up and post this as news, so here's The Inquirer article that pulls the threads together. Van Smith is proved right yet again! At this rate, even his prediction of the end of Intel might start to sound plausible. :wink: Rarely has someone been caught with their...

Does anyone either know, or would like to guess, what is the largest hard drive capacity that will work with an Epox EP-51 MVP3E-M notherboard? Epox has kindly deleted all references to this board from their website, but I'm fairly sure it uses the same BIOS as the EP-58 MVP3C. It would be...

An intriguing article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,769645,00.html

For those who wondered about Hollywood's seeming obsession with people lighting up: http://www.msnbc.com/news/792113.asp?0si=-?cp1=1&cp1=1 Sorry, this is the MSN version of the story. I have a less colored account in a newspaper, but I don't feel like typing it up. I believe the original...

Although far from the best in this genre, I'd like to share a review of the movie Dragonfly with you. I don't believe SF readers could ever read it otherwise, so morally I think it's okay to quote it here. Feel free to contribute other reviews of any film. ;)

I see that that crafty human behind Tea and Tannin has engineered a double whammy. I wondered why he was using Tea instead of Tannin for certain things. :wink: Congratulations, Tony! May your omnipresence extend ever onward. The SF experience just wouldn't be possible without you. Here's to...

The first successful operational scramjet test just completed in South Australia. The engine reached about Mach 8. Here's some background: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/future-01a1.html The official site: http://www.mech.uq.edu.au/hyper/hyshot/ And here's the dissappointly brief news...

I'd like to share this piece of writing with you. Amongst its many outstanding qualities, the tribute to commas that this single sentence embodies must be singled out for special commendation. Enjoy. And this: From 'The Divided Heart', by Eileen Sherman. They're best if read out loud, but...