The simple question thread

[Krynn72]

I figured I'd see if a thread like this would work. I've had a lot of simple, miscellaneous questions that didnt really warrant a thread, so I never asked them. Heres a chance for everyone to ask easy to answer questions.

I'll start :E

I'm about to upgrade my computer and am going to reformat before putting my new hardware in, and then install vista. I have a 300 gig hard drive. Is there any real advantage to partitioning it? I've always partitioned my drives before into smaller, more manageable segments, but now I think I'd rather have one large partition.

 

[CyberPitz]

Partitioning isn't as useful as it used to be. You won't see a large enough 'boost' in read speed doing so.

Now, back in the 98 days....

 

[-Psy-]

There is no performance benefit apart as far as I'm aware. It's just nice to split your drive up into different partitions for different things such as Music and Games.

 

[CyberPitz]

^
That's what I did once, but then I realized it was just a giant hassle in the end, because then I still had to move everything over.....eh, I just decided to make a folder called "FUN STUFF" or something equivalent to hold all my "Things I love that I can just copy to another HDD". I was never a fan of partitioning, as it was just making things more complicated for what it's worth

 

[kineaesth]

100 gigs for porn, 50 for games, 50 for actual work/os, 30for music, 70 for films.

 

[Krynn72]

But what happens when your porn partition gets filled? CHAOS.

K, brb reformatting.

 

[Krynn72]

Ok, so heres a simple one.

Where the hell can I download drivers for my ATI Radeon 4850? Their website only goes up to the 3870 series.

EDIT: Whats this Catalyst thing? Do I want it? I've been out of the ATI game for far too long it seems.

Also, WHOO HOO! I thought that I had a dead 300gig hard drive inside my computer, but while switching everything out to my new case I saw that one of the pins were bent. A little screw driver action, and I now have over nearly one terabyte of hard drive space! And to think, I was about to spend another 100 bucks on a hard drive. Thank god I held off on it.

EDIT 2: Nevermind. I found the hotfix which says its got the driver with it. Works for me.

 

[Krynn72]

We should rename this this thread to "Krynn's questions" haha.

So I got everything installed and what not, and now I'm trying to play Mount & Blade, but im getting this error. It mentions I dont have enough memory, but as you can see (from the performance gadget on the right) I still have 70% of my 4gigs of ram left, so it must be the virtual memory messing it up. I dont even know what virtual memory is though, so please halp!

And heres what I find when I go to the system window in the control panel.

And it does mess up the game I think. Some of the textures turn red.




EDIT: Well, I figured it out after an entire day of scouring the internet. Seems there are two things going on here. Firstly, the game is simply misreading the amount of memory, and runs fine regardless. The texture thing is caused by the drivers for the radeon 4000 series. I have to run the game in DX7 mode until they fix the drivers. It looks blegh.

 

[kineaesth]

My laptop is rather frequently informing me that my usb mouse is exceeding the power output of the hub. WHat do I do.

 

[Viperidae]

Partioning is useful for when Windows dies and I have to reformat its drive to reinstall. That way I don't have to salvage anything, just reformat C (I keep everything else in D, E, and F).

 

[VirusType2]

My laptop is rather frequently informing me that my usb mouse is exceeding the power output of the hub. WHat do I do.

it doesn't sound like you can do anything except -

- ignore it

- get a different mouse

- get a powered USB Hub (requires home power outlet)

- upgrade your power supply


It sounds ridiculous because I would think there is some kind of standard, maximum allowed power consumption for USB devices that don't have their own power supply

 

[No Limit]

I'm about to upgrade my computer and am going to reformat before putting my new hardware in, and then install vista. I have a 300 gig hard drive. Is there any real advantage to partitioning it? I've always partitioned my drives before into smaller, more manageable segments, but now I think I'd rather have one large partition.

I personally like to make a small partition for the page file. This way fragmentation doesn't become a problem. You will want to make the size of your page file 1.5 times more than the amount of ram you have. So if you have 1GB of ram you would use 1.5GB for the page file partition.

My laptop is rather frequently informing me that my usb mouse is exceeding the power output of the hub. WHat do I do.

That's a very bad thing to have happen. This means that you have too many devices plugged in to your hub and they are all drawing too much current. Split your devices up between USB ports. But I would not recommend continued use like this, it could damage your USB port and possibly other hardware. Getting a new power supply will

 

[kineaesth]

That's a very bad thing to have happen. This means that you have too many devices plugged in to your hub and they are all drawing too much current. Split your devices up between USB ports. But I would not recommend continued use like this, it could damage your USB port and possibly other hardware.

I only have a microsoft mouse plugged in... It's stopped doing it currently, though.

 

[No Limit]

I only have a microsoft mouse plugged in... It's stopped doing it currently, though.

Sorry about that, I read that as if you had a hub.

I've seen this error before with a mobile processor using a USB keyboard. Do you have another computer you could plug it in to to see if you have the same problem? I'd say you could probably ignore this but sometimes you might want to be safe rather than sorry. If you have another mouse you could use try that for a while.

 

[Adabiviak]

I got a phone call from a telemarketing recording about satellite dish service. Not unusually weird, but the caller ID was spoofed. At first I thought it was a bug, but it happened twice now. The first time they called as 'Dave's Mower Repair', and when I called them back, they answered as the mower repair outfit, and seemed legit. This time, they called as 'Mother Lode Answering Service' and answered legitimately as such. Isn't it rather illegal to spoof caller ID like that? How do I 'catch' them? I suppose I'd have to press the 'sign me up' option to get around to speaking to a human, at which point I'd have to talk them out of some information.

 

[Barney Fife]

Never be lured to buy something you aren't looking for, even if they try to convince you.
Never give your personal, and, or your financial info over the phone, or online, unless you made the call or logged.

The most scariest thing is, a spoofed email from a popular web sites like Newegg and PayPal telling "You need to update your account" then once you fell for it, lured to a Phishing site. You must delete that email, never open any attachments there may be and instead log to that particular site they impersonated, by inserting the web address and warn them.

Also (and this is what I do) All of my personal info in my computer are all encrypted just to make them that much harder to be obtained.
There are millions of con-artists out there trying to rob you blind, so be very careful.

 

[Adabiviak]

Right. So how might I report them for this sort of infraction?

 

[No Limit]

Right. So how might I report them for this sort of infraction?

At this time what they did is perfectly legal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

Edit:

In February 2008, a Collegeville, Pennsylvania man was arrested for making threatening phone calls to women and having their home numbers appear "on their caller ID to make it look like the call was coming from inside the house."[5]

Brilliant.

 

[Krynn72]

Can DDR2 800 be used in a motherboard that says it uses DDR2 667?

 

[Saturos]

Can DDR2 800 be used in a motherboard that says it uses DDR2 667?

Yes, but the rated RAM speed will be bottlenecked to the MB's max RAM speed.

EDIT> BTW, I just farted as of this typing and it smells really bad. :/

 

[Krynn72]

K thank. Ive got another question though. I'm looking at a mobo that has two pci-e x16 slots, but it doesnt specifically say "crossfire ready" or anything. Does that mean I cant run a crossfire setup?

EDIT: Nevermind

 

[Krynn72]

Another one:

Is it possible to have one program installation work with two operating systems? For example, if I were to be dual booting with xp and vista on two separate partitions and then install Firefox on a third partition, would it be possible to get it to work on each OS?

 

[Eejit]

I think my flatmate tried this. Seems like it works with some programs but not others.
I suspect registry entries can be important for some programs to run. Or something.

 

[MattyDienhoff]

I have a question:

I'm a bit lost when it comes to duel core CPU speed measurements. When a duel core's specifications claim it's clock speed is 3.0GHz, does that mean that's the combined speed total of both cores, or the speed of each one? I suspect the latter, but I'd like to be sure.

 

[DEATHMASTER]

It uses a total speed of 3.0 ghz. That doesn't mean 1.5 for each core, it means it will use whatever it needs to, to get the job done, that may mean using 2.49 ghz in one core and .51ghz in the other for a second. (that example may be wrong but I think thats about how its done).

 

[Sir Phoenixx]

The cores in multi-core processors run at the rated/OCed speed. Each core in a 3.0ghz processor runs at 3.0ghz. The CPU's speed isn't divided among the cores. Also don't confuse that and think a 3.0ghz dual core is the same as a 6.0ghz CPU.

 

[Mad Squid]

Partioning is useful for when Windows dies and I have to reformat its drive to reinstall. That way I don't have to salvage anything, just reformat C (I keep everything else in D, E, and F).

Yep, thats the reason I do it :thumbs:

 

[tschumann]

How many bits in are in a byte? Is it 8 for all intents and purposes?

 

[Krynn72]

Another question.

I have a Asus Radeon 4850 with 512mb 256-bit GDDR3 clocked at 1986MHz. I want to get another one and run it in crossfire, but the card i have now isnt sold anymore so im looking at others. I'm looking at an XFX card with 1GB of 256-bit GDDR3 clocked at 1990MHz. Would these two cards be compatible? And would I actually see the 1GB of video memory, or would it be dumbed down to my other cards 512mb?


Also, I have a 850watt power supply. Would this be enough to power my five hard drives, a quadcore cpu, several peripherals, sound card, tv tuner, and two radeon 4850s safely? It sure sounds like a lot of shit to power when I type it all out. Oh, and also two optical drives. Gah.

 

[Operational]

It's just nice to split your drive up into different partitions for different things such as Music and Games.

I think that is going too far - we have folders for a reason

But I do like to put Windows on it's own small partition and everything else on a partition spanning the rest of the drive. It just makes things easier for future changes or in case anything goes wrong (although my last format due to system problems would be 2+ years ago).

Is it possible to have one program installation work with two operating systems? For example, if I were to be dual booting with xp and vista on two separate partitions and then install Firefox on a third partition, would it be possible to get it to work on each OS?

Depends upon the program, but I think it would work for most programs.

How many bits in are in a byte? Is it 8 for all intents and purposes?

8 bits in a byte regardless of your intent or purpose.

Also, I have a 850watt power supply. Would this be enough to power my five hard drives, a quadcore cpu, several peripherals, sound card, tv tuner, and two radeon 4850s safely? It sure sounds like a lot of shit to power when I type it all out. Oh, and also two optical drives. Gah.

I think 850 should still be fine for all that. My 850 Watt PSU powers 4 hard drives, quadcore cpu, several peripherals, sound card, two optical drives and a 8800GT without problems if that helps.

 

[Warped]

100 gigs for porn, 50 for games, 50 for actual work/os, 30for music, 70 for films.

oh man are we the same person??

 

[Top Secret]

8 bits in a byte regardless of your intent or purpose.

Unless you're a hard drive manufacturer. In which case it is 7.8125 bits in a byte.

Such a stupid marketing ploy they have going on there.

 

[VirusType2]

Using Avira Anti-Virus, I suppose it scans everything as it downloads and when you access the folder or something, so do I need to scan things manually as well?

Sometimes it seems to catch things as they are downloading, but other times it catches them during a manual scan, so I don't feel confident in its autoscaner. But it's a pain in the ass to scan everything all the time and it adds up to a lot of time scanning things that should have already done.

 

[Operational]

Unless you're a hard drive manufacturer. In which case it is 7.8125 bits in a byte.

Such a stupid marketing ploy they have going on there.

Well to be fair there is a bit more to it than that. Firstly they do say 8 bits to a byte where they differ is in the prefixes of byte, eg 'kilobyte', 'megabyte', 'gigabyte', etc. When computing borrowed the terms they used them slightly incorrectly due to computers using a binary numbering system instead of a decimal one. For example kilo means 1000, so 1 kilogram = 1000 grams but 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes.

There is a push by some to bring the computer prefixes in line with the standard definitions.
Naturally marketing departments everywhere are leading the charge for [strike]annoying marketing reasons[/strike] purely noble ideals of SI unit integrity.