=NukeBlaze=

^ Its something that they are addressing in SP1.

Aye, it just uses an autostart propriety app as an interface, most likely. Do you have any other computer in the house other than his laptop?

I recommend to just wait till SP1 and the drivers more refined, in the mean time XP does well save for the GUI "Shing-Sparkle-Sparkle" of vista.

^ You can copy a new explorer.exe and winlogin.exe into your windows folder from the VISTA disc if you have been damaged. If you can, just put XP on your computer and get NOD32 for your antivirus, and pick a spyware protection solution(Not windows defender, Try AVG's antispyware for realtime protection, and Spybot and spywareblaster for passive. Its all free save nod32, just don't use for AV norton ,macafee or something equally horrible). Don't use IE if you can, its more prone to infection, get Firefox or something comparable. Give vista another year to become more stable, and the drivers more concrete.

^ Its not that difficult the administrative password on windows XP. Being it a company laptop, they probably locked the default admin account,which is accessible if you boot into safe mode without a password. Being its a work laptop, its owned by the company, so unless you are comfortable I would not bother. WPA is prefered anyway, as WEP is terribly broken security standard. WPA is broken too, but WPA is better for business with MAC address registration. As far as the DS, Nintendo screwed up by using a propriety wireless chipset and not updating its wireless support, but enough rambling on the details. You best option is just to get the wireless dongle for the DS. If you had a router that supported Linux-custom firmware, there might be more you could do, but Belkin's routers are "blah". The dongle will be the quickest and the fewest steps to get your DS working online, so I recommend it.

NOD32 and Kaspersky have better detection rates than Avast, although avast is still good and better than Norton and Macafee in my opinion. I typically use NOD32 on my system since its detection is excellent, it has a small memory and resource footprint, and its automation options are not "stupid".

That stinks if they are prioritizing traffic at the ISP level over there. Lucky, there isn't any packeting filtering over here...yet I recommend upgrading the router firmware regardless. I have had a few wireless netgears drop bricks worth of packets while using multiple connections associated with peers...and generally crap out. A firmware updates helped. Aye, you should. Think of it as Azureus, but without the crappy and bloated java base...a pudding like base it is...But a flavor you won't generally like...Like coffee.

Well, Epox's documentation is terrible, but regardless...Here is a new BIOS version A new BIOS: Released: 2003-05-09 Version: 20030509 You will have to check you current version number by entering the BIOS when the computer starts, or try CPU wizard on the Mainboard tab. This update mentions "Fixed unstable issue when FSB133 CPU is used", of which you have. Two, you should have that stick of RAM in slot 1, which is the RAM slot located closest to the CPU socket on the motherboard. If that is already, or the change does nothing, try increasing your RAM module voltage by one of the smallest increment. If you have any information on the RAM you got, manufacture/model,it would be also beneficial. G'day.

^Aye, that is the reason I said the opposite was a rumor. There is still much to fix, and venders with drivers to mend.

I bought these about half a year ago. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_ce/202-6154117-9811830?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&field-keywords=HD555&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go Sound quality is wonderful, the only problem is that you can hear the flaws in lower resolution music. Game audio is very good, especially FPS for positioning. The headphones are open as well, so sound is more natural. Can't beat the quality of the headphones, especially at this price.

Lets pretend that the 90 days are up and nuke norton. Norton is bulky rubbish. http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039 This removal tool will get rid of everything that is norton, even better than the built in uninstaller. If you want a good AV that has better detection rates and consumes few resources, consider NOD32. Its very good...And you can download on the interblarg as a trial of course...wink wink...I have dirt in my eye. I recommend killing norton first, then we march onward.

I recommend posting both your motherboard make and model, as well as the RAM. Each motherboard has a list of company tested ram modules which are compatibles by company testing. This list does not mean there are other which will work, it is just the list in which they test series of different RAM modules and tell you which work or do not work with the board. I agree with jordan, as I know that some of the older Socket-A boards had some issues with DIMMS, but I also know that some BIOS updates increase memory compatibility. One socket A board I had for a friend did not function completely with the memory I gave it, until a BIOS update expanded its memory compatibility. Depending when they made your board, you may have a very old BIOS compared to the current build on the manufacturer's website. Of course, it could also be something "borked" on the board or the RAM, but I would bet on the BIOS first. Who knows, maybe the RAM needs a little bit of a voltage kick which sometimes works, but I would start on the BIOS and Mainboard Mem compatibility list.

Nifty. Glad to hear you got it working. AVG does a pretty good job on antispy, the only problem is that I have yet to find a program that finds most of them, thats why I usually run the gamut of anti-spy programs. God speed.

^ I replied to your Q above to avoid a double post, but it seems you were quicker than I. THe main reason for using a 64-bit OS is primarily for additional memory addressing. Performance benefits between the two are just not there yet. Just make sure you hardware has 64 bit drivers available if you really want it, otherwise I recommend 32-bit for the time being. The main reason is that adobe's software is 32-bit compiled, hence there will no 64-bit benefit (If any) because of it.

The most tangible benefit for going from 32-64bit is in the amount of RAM the system can address. 32-bit OSes are limited to a 4GB address space which is shared by system memory, Graphics memory(discrete), and other system resources. For example, if you purchased a system with 4 GB of memory, a 32-bit version of windows may only see 3-3.5 GB of the total 4GB of system RAM. As far as Adobe's Creative Suite 3 premium, the upgrade version is more than half less than the full version. I imagine you don;t have an older version. If you attend university, you may want to check to see if you can obtain a academic version of it, as the acedemic version is the same cost as an upgrade version ( $590 USD vs $1190 USD). Aye, but there is a large difference between the two. The consoles have a genuine hardware limitation with the previous which is always in the form of a processing increase, and sometimes in the form of hardware architecture change. For example, THe Xbox --> Xbox 360 went from an INTEL/Nvidia base, to a PowerPC/ATI base through which emulation is done on the 360 hardware, via software, to run legacy Xbox games. The big emulation problem was originally Nvidia's GPU microcode on the new ATI console, which there were certain technical and legal baggage. The only prevention of DX10 compatibility on XP is that MS is not going to put forth any effort for the "Software" limitation imposed by the manner in which they created the vista/Dx10 driver interface. Software is considerably more malleable than hardware, hence the issue with the comparison. It shares elements and conveys an idea, but there is not enough in common to technically compare. After all, you can have two systems with identical hardware specifications that sport a DX10 display adapter, which differs greatly from the console comparison. As the beyond3d article mentioned, if anything is to happen, it needs MS's help of which is entirely lacking on purpose for business reasons. The best thought-based solution they came up with on XP is an openGL 2.0 wrapper on DX10. Personally, I don't really care about DX10 features, its the fact that they shunt it off completely from others running anything but vista that has me critical. But, as I mentioned before, I will attempt to assume a state of neutrality on the issue of wether it was implemented from the get go to serve this purpose under the guise of less overhead.