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Thanks, I'll check them out. Otherwise, it's looking like a Xonar DX.

I'm looking for a sound card which has a dolby digital or a DTS encoder (either is fine, I'm not bothered which). Is there anything cheaper than the Asus Xonar series, or is that pretty much it? Thanks!

I'm slating nVidia because they are, simply, crap. As I previously stated, they've had 2 years to sort some drivers out. 2 YEARS. It's been 4 months since Vista went gold and was released and their current certified drivers are 90% feature incomplete and unstable, and their beta drivers have...

Well, after nVidia have proven to be worse than useless at writing drivers for Vista I've dropped any plans I had to get a GeForce 8600. The level of incompetance they've shown despite having two years to get drivers written blows my mind - they've lost my custom at least for the immediate...

Just use the keyboard. Delete to send to the recycle bin. Shift-delete to permanantly delete it.

Microsoft will shortly be releasing Virtual PC 2007, for free. Virtual PC, as the name suggests, uses virtualisation to allow you to run a second PC in software on the host operating system. Why is this useful? Well if one of your favourite programs isn't working with Vista and hasn't been...

Hmm. I'm pretty clueless then I'm afraid. It must be something to do with how Windows is handling the RV. Possibly issues with the graphics card drivers or something? The only other thing I can think of would be the cable, but I've no idea what a faulty DVI/HDMI cable might do to the image.

What are these movies? Are they DVDs or DivXs? If you're playing DivX/XviD or similar then what you're seeing are simply codec artifacts you haven't noticed on your monitor - maybe because it doesn't have such high contrast, or because it's smaller, or a combination of both. This is the...

Great news! Glad to see they're still going easy on the enforcements. :)

The memory in use as cache will contain files you recently accessed (and therefore could be expected to need again), bits of the operating system that aren't in use right now but have been at some point or are likely to be needed later and, most importantly, programs that Windows has determined...

You'd be surprised. Vista x64 has dropped support for 16-bit programs finally, so now only supports 32-bit programs (pretty much everything written in the last 5 years or more) and hot off the press 64-bit programs. In addition, DX10 has been rebuilt from scratch which is why it's not being...

I've always liked PerfectDisk, but that's not free either.

Presumably because it's been coded to behave that way while maintaining application performance, whereas in XP its more of a tradeoff. To be honest I'm 100% sure what the changes are in terms of algorithms etc, but there are benchmarks out there showing clear improvements.

That's because OSX displays the amount of RAM in use by programs, and that value only. In effect it only shows the little green bar seen in the screenshots on the first page. Believe me, being based on Unix, OSX does use any spare RAM for cache. Unix is all about efficiency, and it's daft to...

If you're basing your decision only on the license restrictions, then remember that those same restrictions apply to XP as well and always have done.

Yep that's basically it. OEM ties the license to the "device", which microsoft take to mean the motherboard. So you can usually get away with adding a new video card and a new processor etc without needing to phone them, but if you change the motherboard it's quite likely you'll have to ring...

As everyone else has already pointed out, Vista is designed to make maximum use of the available memory which is why it uses all of it. Anything that is being used for cache (i.e. the majority of it in the above examples) can be instantly overwritten at any time by a program that needs it. The...

I love a well reasoned argument.

It depends. On XP they used to let you get away with it a couple of times without even questioning you. For example, I had OEM XP Pro on my laptop. The laptop died, and I decided to see if I could get that CD key to work on a spare PC I had around the place. Not only did it work, it activated...

Heh. Yep, I'm really really wishing I'd bought an ATI card now. ATI have taken the opportunity to rewrite their drivers and control centre, and are genuinely trying to make a good job of it. nVidia haven't even managed to get their newest card working properly, persist in using their godawful...