Recent content by dustNbone

The AVERAGE person does not need a sound card in 2013. Even the average gamer probably does not. I spend many hours a day in front of my computer listening to higher than average quality music on my PC, with much better than average quality speakers and headphones. For me, there is no question...

OK, so my trusty old Sondigo Inferno sound card pulled a croaker on me (sounds like just a bad cap but it's an old PCI card and probably won't have a home in my next PC anyway), made me sad but also meant I got to go shopping. So I came home with a shiny new Essence STX, which is very pretty...

The problem is that Bluetooth audio is fairly heavily compressed, so regardless of the quality of the output device the best you can reasonably expect in terms of fidelity is not that great. I have never heard Bluetooth headphones that made me happy.

The end result of a proper rip will certainly be more accurate than what makes it out of almost any standalone CD player during playback, as the PC can take as many retries as it needs to get it right without being constrained by the need to maintain a steady output stream. As mentioned above...

Things that get hot enough to smoke tend to change color, there should be a visible mark maybe on the back of the board.

Mine generally stays at 44.1 as CD Audio is the most critical listening that I do most of the time. On the odd occasion that I listen to some higher resolution music I manually reset it to match the source, and I definetly notice the lack of detail in CD Audio when I forget to switch it back...

MATE since they broke GNOME

What is the intended usage? If its just to store media, then SSD caching isn't necessary, nor is a 7200 RPM drive. All 7200 drives will be louder than their slower spinning counterparts so if quiet is the primary goal they're probably best avoided, and all modern 5400 RPM drives are more than...

Well in part I'd guess its precisely because they are the leading manufacturer of drives that they'd have the most RMAs. NewEgg reviews aren't a great indicator either as people are far more likely to report a problem than they are the absence of problems, people are just bitchy that way...

The main reason you want your SSD running AHCI is for TRIM support, without which your drives performance will tend to decrease over time. Also, you gain command queueing which will help performance during heavy I/O activity.

If your SSD failed during a filesystem format it was probably broken anyway.

There is no need for this.

I've never tried to usb install XP, I'd just burn it to a DVD. Sounds like your USB is running very, very slow for whatever reason though, and I wouldn't be surprised if whatever is causing that also caused some kind of other problem during install. Hope it works out for you.

It's possible to slipstream the drivers onto an install CD. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/72185-sata-drivers-slipstream-into-windows-xp-cd.html

Yes, the cabling spec hasn't changed since SATA was introduced.