[Anoni Moose]

fwiw – the “free” included defragger in windows XP is diskeeper’s, just a stripped down simple version (and is obvious by it’s user interface).

[Anoni Moose]

Although not “integrated” nor free like the scripts and free software discussed above (which I’ve downloaded, thanks!) there’s a program called “Steadyhand” (can be google’d for) that works pretty well in stand-alone mode and is very simple to use (I’m not selling it nor am I connected with them in any way). Don’t know if it has HD support though.

[Anoni Moose]

“US copyright law and practice generally gives a private person the right to duplicate copyrighted material for personal use. That is the general view of US law. I don’t think this issue is contentious at all. You can copy a CD onto an iPod and play it as you walk, in your car, or even at a party at a friends house.”

You can and it’d done a lot I hear, but it’s not clearly legal even though iTunes automates this for you, making it easy to do. From what I’ve read, it’s commonly done but still not clearly legal.

However, copying the CD to one’s ipod does not violate DMCA because CD’s aren’t copy protected and therefore no protection is being violated.

“So, then there is the DMCA. The DMCA says you are not allowed to duplicate copy protected material“.

It may, but it usually isn’t mentioned in that context. It says one can’t break digital copy protection mechanisms. Not sure how black and white that is. If the protection is to invert the 1’s and 0’s would those weak digital encryptions be illegal to “break”?

“This is actually interesting, since the DMCA doesn’t require the copy protected material to be copyrighted for it to be illegal to duplicate it. In other words, if I create a DVD consisting only of public domain material and I include CSS copy protection on that DVD, it is still illegal to make duplicates of the DVD. This is one of the utterly bizarre consequences of the DMCA”.

Not entirely. One can copyright composites of PD information and be protected. It’s not the material itself that’s copyrighted, it’s the grouping (not sure of the word). If someone publishes a book of public domain drawings that someone collected over the years. Someone else can’t just copy the book and publish it themselves — even though the content is all public domain.

Now technically, my quoting of your material above is a copyright violation (sorry!) All publications in the US are automatically copyrighted (even if not a registered copyright), so my quoting of you is quoting copyrighted material — and a duplication thereof. Not legal (although non-registered stuff is hard to get damages for in court, I understand).

Basic jist is that if somebody had to do work to create something, it’s not moral, and probably not legal to get the benefit of that work as a freebie through copying unless the person who did the work gives permission (like putting it in the public domain, etc). There’s always fuzzy cases (like you paid for rights to a copy of material in CD or DVD format, why can’t you change the format of that material’s storage (content itself isn’t being modified).

[Anoni Moose]

If I recall correctly, Anthro was a spinoff of Tektronix where they used to make those kind of things in-house to hold Tek equipment. Trivia.

[Anoni Moose]

Yup, AGP is nearly gone on new motherboards. PCI-express
is about it. When upgrading to an Intel e6600 (Conroe)
processor I had to give my not-THAT-old nVidia 6600GT AGP
board to my wife (upgrade for her machine) and replaced it
with a (fanless) 7600GT. If only I had upgraded my MB earlier
to the “semi-new” (at the time) PCI-E, I’d have saved $150 or so.

[Anoni Moose]

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Someone else mentioned 80G for the ‘C’
drive, and that’s probably a good number.

There’s a couple theories on how to do things. Some might have
you have only a 20-30G partition and have ONLY the OS put there,
then have another partition for the programs. Because programs
always like to default installation to “C:\Program Files” and
because I think it’s a very good idea to go along with defaults,
I’d suggest a ‘C’ drive that includes all the installed
programs that’s maybe 80~100G (which would include your swap file
and your “System Restore” space). Then partition the rest as another
disk. So you’d probably end up with C:, D: (raid), and E: (other partition
of the C-disk). Although in XP at least, they can be changed (although
I’d leave C as C). I put my RAID pair as “V” for my video disk (but
then I’ve five or six drives).

As far as brands are concerned, I currently favor Seagate drives. Maxtor
is the only one that I’d consider one that I’ve had more trouble with
overall. Maxtor was recently purchased by Seagate and the Maxtor brand
name is being retained for use as Seagate’s low-end consumer line of disks.
Hopefully the quality level is improving with new owner.

[Anoni Moose]

How well programs use the dual cores isn’t a matter of “bugs”. Just has to do with how many threads they use and how balanced the processing requirements are between the threads. Seeing as how everything was single-processor (Intel’s “hyperthreading” didn’t count, that wasn’t really useful for reasons we won’t go into here) there wasn’t any real point to making things multithreaded (for performance reasons). But there could be software architectural reasons that things were made that way such that the multi-core processors could take advantage of it. Those that did were “lucky”. Some programs probably can’t be easily made to use more than one core efficiently. Depends upon what is being done. Now that there are quad cores, those using only two threads will only use half the cores, in a couple years, when we’ve ten cores… etc. Having unused cores is good,
btw, your computer remains usable even with the processor-hogging application running. Still some processor left to pay attention to your mouse clicks. 🙂

[Anoni Moose]

Looks good to me. Great MB (that’s the one I use) but with the cheapness of drives nowdays, I’d perhaps make the ‘C’ drive a more normal price-optimized sized one (300~500G) and perhaps partition it to a smaller ‘C’ drive and a larger other partition to use for “other stuff”. Wouldn’t want power work areas in that other section because it’s still the boot drive (you’d use your RAID-0 array for that), but you’d have a lot of storage space for very little additional money. Ideally you’d have a third drive (not the RAID “single” drive or the boot physical disk) where your swap-file would go, but wouldn’t add one just for that.

[Anoni Moose]

With Vegas 6, an Intel e6600 (what I have) should be roughly three times faster rendering than your old AMD 3200+ (I had a 2500+ where the difference was more dramatic). I’m not sure how much slower the e6400 is compared to the e6600, but I think I’d have still expected some improvement, maybe 1.5X with only one core being used. You can try and use the process manager (right click on the vegas process) and set it to like just one of the cores, rather than just randomly switching between them. Don’t know if it’d make any difference (suspect not) but worth a try. Is your disk systems (etc) all the same before/after upgrading?

Selected rendertest.veg results (list is maintained by Glenn Chan):

28s – Intel E6600 Core 2 Duo (Vegas 6d; 2.4ghz, 4MB cache)
SOURCE: Emailed submission.

34s – Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo (Vegas 6d; 35s in Vegas 7b)
SOURCE: Guy Bruner @ https://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=488694&Replies=31

93s – AMD64 3200+ (2004, so probably old core)
SOURCE: PH125@ https://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=256422
99s is Sid Phillip’s report in the same thread.

95s – AMD64 3000+ (2.00ghz, 512kb cache, single channel, socket 754, 2004 core)
SOURCE: ibliss@ https://www.sonymediasoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=256422

[Anoni Moose]

XP home supports only one processor, but it can be a multicore
processor. Supposed to support “one socket” so the Intel Quad
that’s two dual-core chips in one package theoretically should work with “home”,
but not sure. The differences are very small and mostly have to
do with Pro supporting a networking model that one would NOT use
unless forced to (IOW only in big businesses). The remote screen
feature is such that a machine with XP Home can be the “master”
and remotely access a Pro system (have the Pro system’s screen on
yours) but can’t be the “subject” being invaded (some may think
this an advantage).