Darn companies making their products a mispelling... I guess it's my fault for adding to to my spell-checker.

Ok, now I'm curious. How did you spell discrete? I can only think of 'discreet', the company that makes 3DS Max, but they didn't spell it wrong, discreet is a different word with a different meaning than discrete.

If you didn't spell it 'discreet', I can't imagine how you spelled it.

(and yes, it is a slow day here... %))

Heh, 2.72 for me. Why fix something that's not broken?

I was wondering if the first "warning" from these sites was just a lot of talk or if they were ever going to follow through with it. Glad they gave it enough time and hopefully this will end those dumb exclusive demos. I've never downloaded an exclusive demo based on principle, but of course I never sent a letter or anything to the companies so I suppose my own protest was never heard.

And what's up with Fileshack being on the list? "Do as I say, not as I do" kind of thing, I suppose. Says a lot about the character of the site in general.

Crashday is going to be bad ass.

Right click and "Save target as..." or whatever the equivalent in your browser to download the Yo-yo link the way Blue has it.

2. Indiv, I believe it was you who I was talking with about a AGP card running in PCI mode? I finally looked last night and had the EXACT same issue as you did. Thanks for the tip!

Hey, cool! Glad you got it fixed. Kind of a bummer to find out that you've been running in PCI mode all this time, eh? At least, that's how I felt.

A couple other things to try if you can't find the process that's serving up the ads...

In Internet Explorer, go to TOOLS | INTERNET OPTIONS. Then click SETTINGS and then VIEW OBJECTS. The window that comes up shows all the plugins that piggyback on IE (like Flash, Java, Quicktime, ... Gator...). I don't recommend taking out anything you don't recognize unless you know what you're doing, but certainly if you see something like Gator, remove it.

If you really know what you're doing, you can also go to the command line and type netstat -a. This command lists all the ports that your computer connected to. Those ads have to be served up from somewhere, so your computer has to be listening for incoming ads on some port or connecting to a site to pull the ads. Hopefully it's some bizzare port number--if so, just type it into google (like search for "port 22325") and chances are somebody else has posted solutions for getting rid of whatever program is doing it.

Last, take a screenshot of your desktop when one of the ads pops up, paste it into mspaint or Photoshop, save it as a .JPG, and then upload it to some web space. Link to it in the "Out of the Blue" topic here and maybe we can figure out what's causing it then. It's something that you installed, either knowingly or by mistake--it's not some sort of Windows XP vunerability (I say with 99% confidence).

I'm a post-secondary student who regularly gets A's on essays/term papers and is consistently complimented on my writing abilities.

Could be that your instructors don't grade based on grammar. If you got 5/10 on that test, you probably have lots of little grammar mistakes that people "in the know" would find distracting. An interesting thing about grammar is that if you take the time to learn 5% of the rules, you'll fix 90% of the errors you make. Or who knows, maybe the test is just crap.

Who made up this "subjunctive mood" crap anyway?

So... the line "Kill all the Haitians" is offensive and must be removed from the game, but it's ok to leave in the part where you actually kill all the Haitians?

Bizarre.

I don't have that motherboard, but all you should have to do to enable dual-channel DDR is put the RAM in the correct slots. Generally, you put the RAM in slots 1 and 3 to enable dual-channel DDR. There shouldn't be any bios settings to enable the second channel, it should be automatic.

Take out all other RAM modules except your dual-channel DDR RAM, and then try each slot configuration. I guess that motherboard has 3 RAM slots, so try 1st and 3rd slot, then 1st and 2nd if that doesn't work, and then 2nd and 3rd.

Woo, happy birthday to Doom! Ahh, the hours I spent playing Doom deathmatch. Probably surpassed only by the hours I spend playing Quake CTF.

They made some of the best games ever.

So how did you find out there was a problem?

On day I was looking through the display settings, I forgot why, but I noticed in the nVidia tab of the display settings there was an "Adapter information" setting. It said my card was set to PCI mode. I thought that was odd, so I opened up dxdiag and went to the "Display" tab. Sure enough, AGP Texture Acceleration was disabled.

I did a quick search on the internet and found out that sometimes the AGP drivers aren't installed automatically. If you search google for "AGP drivers", the second link is to Intel's AGP drivers. I downloaded their driver package and boom, I'm at AGP 8X now.

Along with the latest AGP/IDE/ETC. drivers that come from MB manufacture. This can help performance and stability ALOT!

I had installed XP (from 2k) a month or so ago and I just found out a few days ago that it hadn't installed the AGP drivers. Quite a bummer to realize that my 8X video card was running in PCI mode. And nothing in device manager indicated I was missing drivers. So I guess the moral of the story is to check that all device drivers were installed properly when you install XP.

On the other hand, I got zero improvement from AquaMark even after I got the card working in AGP mode.

For me the text of the bodies for the news blurbs on the main page is just about the same as before, but the heading text (the title of the story) is small (smaller than the body text). The time/date of the post and the "post comment" link are really tiny.

Running IE, desktop at 1600x1200 with large fonts, if it matters.

I win! Fatality!

Toasty!

2004 is only 25 days away.

And lasts for 365 days.

Wow, that's some interesting stuff, Bronco. Google rocks. I particulary like the first mention of Star Wars: Episode 6.

I wish Lucas & Co. would get the thing going a little faster.
I can't really imagine waiting until 1997 to see all nine parts
of the Star Wars series.

Well, I know what I'm going to be reading for the rest of the day...