resopalrabotnick

most vista sales came off preinstalls? o rly? wow. what a shocker. unlike xp, where most sales came from, oh, wait, those were mostly oems topo, right? just like 2k, 98, 95 prolly 3.1 too windows 2 was probably the last one to go more over the counter than preinstalled. and that was way back when the 286 was hot shit.

first off, windows vista never flopped. it didn't sell like hotcakes, but it is a solid moneymaker. people reverted back to xp? so what? they still bought vista to begin with. as for making any judgement on win 7, i think that has to wait before any facts about it are revealed. the only sure thing known atm is that it will likely support some form of multitouch interface.

head over to the alienware site for some nasty overclocking. for their top of the line rig they take a core 2 extreme specced at 3.2 GHz. they slap a watercooler on that badboy and are in cahoots with intel to deliver them cpus that are above average and then run the 3.2 at 4GHz.

just so we're clear... if the card fails the gpu releases the magic blue smoke?

then head over to a home furnishing store or something and get yourself a plastic cutting board of about the right size and use that. it's stiff, light enough to lug around in the bag and it should insulate enough to keep your hardware from cooking your hardware.

not my idea. and usually the vents are on the side, not the bottom of the lappie.

btw, there is a certain time after submitting a post that you can go back and edit it using the modify button. although i am not sure what ca3le has that set at right now...

granted, as yields for the high speeds increase some may end up downgraded... but you have no way of knowing which ones... so you have to go by what the mfr says.

good advice here. an added bonus is that coax connectors can be easily replaced with a minimum of tools.

for some reason i had this flashback to the scene in "the abyss" where the guy has a green lightstick and is told to cut the light green, not the white cable... but seriously. don't go judging a book by its cover, or a cable by the color of its mantle. if you want to spend twenty bucks on a blue cable, well, i can get me some for a few bucks a pop. they might even carry a signal. sometimes. and if you have more extra cash lying around, there's some prime florida swampland going cheap, and i hear the area is going to be developed reaaaaal soon... th op gave some sound advice in recommending to use good quality cabling. but go by what is printed on the cable or the box it came in, not by the color of it. (you can order cables in pretty much any color you want) and expensive is not always better. take monster brand hdmi cables. the will set you back hundreds of dollars and give no improvement over bottom of the bin cheapo brand cabling. (as long as that cabling is standardized to the hdmi specs., this is where labeling of the cable comes in. it might look cheap, feel cheap, taste cheap, but if it is specced right it will do just as well as the expensive stuff.)

well, i remember seeing a water cooled laptop heatsink for $6... http://digitalcomposting.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/water-cooled-laptop-stand-6/

I put faith in the fact that if intel sells a cpu rated at e.s then that is the speed they will guarantee it to run properly at. anything beyond that puts it into a state that might work, but fails to meet intels criteria for everyday operation. I also put faith in the fact that if a cpu will run at a certain speed reliably intel will not rate it at a lower speed, because thatwould cost them money. as for your example of the p4d, it just shows what I said. you might be able to run a cpu far beyond specs but in your example that would mean more than doubling the thermal load. and that would require some robust cooling to prevent frying the cpu. and I am jusr cautioning as I would caution someone that told me he was looking to install a large turbo kit on some compact riceburner. yes, it can be done. but it will decrease engine life and heavily stress the rest of the car. it is a tradeoff.

not to rain on your parade, and congrats on getting it figurd out, but take a look at those numbers and think it over. you are running the components out of spec with stock cooling. the added heat (be sure to look at any temp monitoring options you have, and remember, temp at idle <> temp at load) may well cause immediate or delayed problems. having oc'ed the cpu as you stated means you are running it 340 MHz over what intel says it will reliably do (and remember, they test them after making a batch to see how fast they will go to determine the highest price they can charge (faster = mo' money) this is why the fastest chips of a new model are much more expensive when they first come out, manufacturing has to be brought up to speed and any kinks ironed out to increase the percentage of higher clocked chips gleaned from each batch) but that absolute increase of 340 MHz only gets you a theoretical maximum increase in speed of ~7%. (due to other factors this theoretical increase is never really experienced in the wild) so you can upgrade cooling to increase your safety margin or simply take the money that would cost, put it in the bank, put the box back to stock settings and save for a major upgrade down the road. then again, no risk, no fun...

imo the brand isn't as important as the specs of the specific module. and overclocking is always hit or miss. for example, the different speeds of cpus of the same type are due to final testing in manufacturing. while making a say 3 ghz cpu the mfr will end up with a bunch of cpus that will not run at that speed due to flaws in production. these are then tested at lower speeds and sold as a lower rated cpu. overclocking relies on the fact that a chip that is classed as x will run 100% stable at that speed. by putting it out of its spec by raising the voltage and clock speed. well cooled it might run stable at the new speed or not. trial and error will give you the speed at which you can run your compionents at with an amount of stability problems you can live with. bear in mind that any overclocking will usually risk damaging components by stressing them too much.

and not so long ago people told you to buy amd if you wanted to overclock...