Search results

I'd start with the i5 3300 and back your way into the rest of the parts based on the budget from there [that PDF is atrociously hard to read]. Get a decent motherboard [4x DDR3 1600 slot should be plenty good, and DDR3 1600 RAM is relatively cheap/common], and maybe an 8 or 16GB DDR3 1600 kit...

Not sure if you are still taking suggestions, but I would find the cheapest 22nm i5 you can [Just ordered one on newegg a few days ago for $180 shipped, I think]. 8GB RAM should be fine unless you think you'll be streaming a ton of stuff simultaneously to machines that all require transcoding...

sounds almost like a VSync issue [EA's in-house engines occasionally have issues with that sort of crap, especially on large-scale open-world type stuff like BF3 & NFS]. What sort of settings do you have set in-game?

We just got a new GTX 650 for the A/V machine at church, and it seems to be pretty stout...and if you get the vanilla versus the Ti, you can find them for closer to $100 after MIR [or the Ti is right at $150 if you want MOAR CORES!!1!]. On NewEgg they have the Glaxy 650 Ti for $149.99 after $10...

My guess is setting it to the IP will make it work on the laptop, but break on the desktop. Are you using absolute paths to pull the JS/CSS, or relative paths?

I'm with mikeblas: Run a timer at small-ish intervals [if it only has to pop-up on the hour, try 1 minute intervals?], have it query the system time, and compare system time against an array of defined "alert times", and if system time == alert time, throw the alert. As for persistant...

What are you streaming off of [protocal & server-side setup, eg: RTMP/FMIS]?

what, exactly, would you prefer people use in place of JavaScript?

buy a sony. they are cheap, and if you rip a bunch of them open, you'll find sony/NEC make the vast majority of the parts for the others

i know handbrake has support for utilizing whatever audio track[s] off the original disc you want...but it sounds like you are trying to add a track that didn't come on your disc?

being someone who shorted pins on the old socket 604 Xeons to enable clock settings in the BIOS on his Asus board....I can assure you it is NOT worth it. All the heat/power issues you run into OCing a gaming system, you run into at half the gain in a dual processor system. Just buy something...

Doesn't the HDHR3-US [non cable card] support analog & digital? If so, you could add one of those as well [you can run multiple devices on the network], versus having to slap a wonky analogue card in your machine, or get any funky IRblaster setups going on with a DTA

Avoid a nikon coolpix. They have horrendous low-lighting due to small/cheap sensors [unlike an expensive nikon, that has the best sensors in the business] You can find older [10 mega-pixel range] DSLRs for about that price on ebay [I just sold my alpha a100 for $150 last week, or i'd offer you...

Depends on your needs. If you just need to access/use the machine at home, just do RDP and use port-forwarding and call it a day. If you need access to files/drives from home remotely...then things get more complicated and VPN, FTP, or countless other acronyms come into play

I would actually ask why you need extra speed on a storage drive? RAID is nice...but as someone who lost a semester of college work [programming & papers] to a blown RAID-0 array...I can assure you that they are finicky beasts and if you have an SSD for the OS, and an SSD for your games &...

I honestly think you need to upgrade the chipset/buses to see any big gains if you already have an SSD. New motherboard, CPU, and some RAM...everything else will likely still work [unless you have an AGP GPU...then things may get squirrely]

Movie Maker all the way. I think MP4 support was added with...Vista? It's certainly in Win7 [and I think it is multithreaded now, so encoding doesn't suck too bad]. If it's something she really enjoys, you can usually find premiere elements relatively cheap shortly after adobe launches the...

The dells mentioned above are nice [this was typed on my 6510], or if you want something flashier [the Latitudes are admittedly very "bland" looking], maybe one of the newer win8/touch machines [prices will inevitably drop on 1st gen models soon, as CES is going on as we speak]

We've always used F5/BigIP at work, as well [ad-server platform type stuff]

What about the Phantom Lap Board :rolleyes:

The motherboards for Xeons will eat you alive...and tend to not be very...um...gamer friendly? They typically are short on PCI slots and don't let you tinker too much in the BIOS with anything performance/speed related. And they cost an arm & a leg.

XBMC is definitely the "techie" choice. You can make it do almost....anything. My biggest thing was the Roku + web-player support from Plex that pushed me that direction. I do miss the nice skinning/themes of XBMC. Plex is way behind in that regard.

for watching blu-ray, anything recent that isn't an IGP would likely suffice, unless you need 3D. 650/60....560/70. As for what format to keep, I do MP4 simply because I'm lazy and can load them up on my mobile devices, too...but I'm not sure it much matters so long as it works for you. I...

I've been really happy with my Galaxy GTX 570 [plays BF3 & NFS: Most Wanted pretty nicely], and it's plenty quiet for me [and hasn't yet had to kick into "hurricane in a bottle" overheating mode with the fans] And I second Danny's notion on cases...you can get "quiet" for reasonable...but...

putting a 690 in a micro ATX sounds like a tight fit and a thermal nightmare waiting to happen...especially with an aftermarket heatpipe/dual 120mm heatsink. Also, I'd put the games on the SSD, personally....128GB should fit the OS plus several games, and drastically cut load times for you...

No error messages/crash logs? Also, what version of windows, and how many monitors are you running on?

Powerpoint is what keeps people upgrading. 2010 was the first powerpoint that supported video backgrounds, for instance. But yea...this is stupid. I understand 1 concurrent user...but why lock it to a single machine?

or you could cheat and use a middle-layer for testing and have all the requests wash through a PHP script to retrieve them. That should be easy enough to remove, and then that middle-layer script [PHP/ASP..whatever] could control the path to look through.

VLC handles all those filetypes, and I think can trim & resize...but I don't know about merging. That said, while not ideal, you could merge in VDub, and then transcode to something better in VLC...or there's always AfterEffects or that sort of thing [the "overkill" you mentioned :) ]

do NOT buy a cheap nikon, as they have abysmal low-lighting [I too, had a cheaper s-series coolpix, same as blackbeasst]. Canon or Sony would be my reccomendation, unless you're adventurous and want to try some of the newer Samsung Galaxy Cam type stuff That said, I sucked it up and shelled...

Many media center apps [Plex, XBMC, etc] have remote control apps for android/iOS...as for actually launching it remotely, that might require something more...I got lazy and just usesplashtop to remote into my machine from my droid and launch what I need, then use PlexRemote to run plex from...

Plex is, IMO, better [lighter, cleaner, faster, etc]. It is actually forked from XBMC a while back, so it shares a lot of features, functionality. One thing it lacks is not being as skinnable, but I feel it more than makes up for it with it's web-player, Android/iOS/Win8 apps, and it's ability...

well...I guess i should probably dust first. To avoid embarrassment :) I'll get something up here this weekend

If you can find an HP TouchPad on ebay for cheap, they can be made to run Android 4.0 relatively easily now, and it's quite stable [early builds drained power even when off, and bluetooth was, to put it lightly, a joke...all seems well now, however]. Nice thing about them, is they work with most...

Some BIOS have a "default video adapter" boot setting, and by default it may still be trying to boot to the onboard IGP. Also worth asking, is if the card has any lights/fans, and if so, do they run/work when you boot the machine?

Love the cooling solutions and how quiet they are. And my 570 would like to be demoted to HTPC/alternative duties