Freidog

So, that particular model was made in 3DS Max5. It's a fairly popular commerical modeling / animation program but you can do similar work in many programs. For commercial software, Max obviously, Maya, Lightway Softimage XSI, Cienama 4D, many others. They run from a few hundred for a student license to many thousands of dollars. Blender is a good (probably the best) fully functionally free modeler / animation, if memory serves blender also support a scripting language - python or perl something of that ilk - to let you do complex interaction / animations. 3DS Max and maya have free editions

Running out is a subjective term, there are more than enough IPv4 addresses for the internet to continue to grow for probalby a decade or two. It's the distrobution of IP addresses that's the problem. IBM owns the 9.x.x.x block, about 16.8 million addresses. Similarly a lot of the companies (and government agencies) involved in the early developement of the internet have massive 24 bit blocks of addresses allocated to them, many many times what they could ever hope to use. So now developing parts of the world, china, india, africa, dont' have free access to the large numbers of addresses th

It can go either way, it's just a large list of names and their associated IPs. The most common is name -> IP. When you type in a url in your browser, it sends off a DNS request to which the reply is the IP of the server hosting the site. That allows your browser to establish a TCP (or other protocol depending on the type of connection you want, HTTP, streaming media, FTP whatever) connecton to the server.

A CD isn't tied to a key. With a valid XP home OEM CD key you can successfully install from any XP home OEM disc onto any computer. So yes as long as you use a CD key specific to that machine (ie the MS product code on the case as you suggest), you should be able to install from any disc of the same product and activate it.

yep, go with Venice: lower power, better memory controller, SSE3 and cheaper what's not to like?

there are a couple ways to do it I think. There is a logoff script in windows, you can edit it under the group policy snap-in the Microsoft Management Console (start run MMC, add group policy as a snap-in to console root). Under windows settings in there you've got scripts log on and log off. You should be able to invoke bat files and I think .vbs files from those. But I've never actually done that. There's also the option of running your own file when you want to log off and after the backup utilities / everything you want to run is finished, call a shutdown utility like PsShutDown (I thi

if you're not gaming, 1GiB is overkill. The venice core chips can handle 4 sticks ok (sometimes you have to drop them to 2T command rate), so if you need to go to 4x256 you can. Any of these (obviously you'd want two of the single 256MiB sticks).

Well, I'm not a fan of the OS partition anymore. It's really just not neccessary to reinstall windows 2000/XP that much anymore. If you need to reinstall the OS, you have to reinstall all the applications as well, so just back up your data to a CD-RW or flash drive, maybe keep an image of a basic OS install, ie windows, office, other vital software you have, most drivers (I leave out video drivers, they're updated so often you'll do that on a clean install anyway), that sort of thing.

I take it, you've never actually used a 3D Labs card. Those are 'professional' 3D cards meant for 3D animation / modeling or CAD type work. It's probably fairly comperable to the 7800 GT, at least in OpenGL. Direct X support has never been great for these types of cards (becuase a lot of the time they're running on something other than windows). But for any gaming, the 7800GTX is the faster card. At one third the cost.

Quoted for truth. In addition to being fairly inaccurate (or at least far too generic. 25W for a HDD? HA, 8W-12W read write for most IDE/SATA drives, over 30W at spinup for the same drives), the lack of specific rail breakdowns makes it worthless. Especially considering most modern computers draw between 75 and 90% of their power from the 12V rail. What good is recomending at 300W PSU if you go buy one with 12A @12V for a 6600GT and a Venice chip? ( Which can easily need 15-18A @ 12V depending on drives and fans)

Seems like it's made by super flower and resold by Aspire (amoung others probably) which is good thing, Super Flower makes some pretty good quality stuff. $30 is a reasonable price for an LCD temp monitor + fan controller. The question is how much do you get out of the temp monitoring. It can be helpful to monitor a few devices if you really think you'll be stressing them, the PSU and ram (if overclocked / over volted). Maybe you want an ambient case temp. But the likelyhood of it providing substantial usefull information is slim. Straight fan controllers that support 3-4 fans are readily av

The differnce between really good ram (2-2-2-6 like some XMS is) and really bad ram (3-4-4-8) is meaningful. The differnce between really good ram and pretty good ram (VS 2.5-3-3-7, and really it should do 2.5-2-2 no trouble) is pretty minimal. There were a few good tests on ram latency, that I have since lost the links too, that would probably put the difference in the range of 1-3%. Something I sincerely doubt you'd ever actually be able to notice without a whole suite of benchmarks to tell you it was slower. Only real advantage of top quality ram is that it overclocks better.

The Wisper II is a bit on the lower end of the quality scale from Enermax (not bad, but you can do better). Since you're not going for an SLI motherboard (good call) you won't miss the second PCIe power connector. NoiseTaker 485.

Norhtwood 'A' and Northwood "B" (except the 3.06B) did not have HT enabled. The 3.06B was the first desktop chip to have enabled, the Northwood C line (800mhz FSB models) followed suit.

why not just replace the fan then? A decent fan (60 - 92 mm in that range) will run you under $10.