I need a therapist not a message board

[johnnyw116]

i suffer the same thing , i can buy a W116 in an exelent condition iff i want but i dont  i prefer buying W116's covered with tons off rust instead , it gives me such good feeling working on the W116 and to have the knowledge that the W116 is saved from the junk yard and gets his comeback on the autobahn 

greetings : johnny  .             

[Big_Richard]

i suffer the same thing , i can buy a W116 in an exelent condition iff i want but i dont  i prefer buying W116's covered with tons off rust instead , it gives me such good feeling working on the W116 and to have the knowledge that the W116 is saved from the junk yard and gets his comeback on the autobahn 

greetings : johnny  .             

I love to fix something for the challenge in doing so, even when its cheaper to purchase a new one or completely useless. No matter what it is, I'll have a go.

Recently I replaced the mainboard in a 19" LCD that was given to me, which i have no use for, it was fried. The board cost more than a new 23" monitor 

Interestingly, the same mainboard goes into a range of different panels and comes standard with EDID firmware that suits a 16" panel. A repair shop would probably have the correct software to flash the board to contain the correct EDID information to match the LCD, but i don't have it. So, i have to use a VGA to DVI adapter with 2 pins removed in order to get greater than 1024x768 resolution in windows vista/windows 7 - because these O/S's force EDID adherence regardless of what the monitor driver suggests the monitor can do. All very edumacational.

[WGB]

I'm sure MT you can get pills for that.

Dr Bill

[flutes]

Time well spent on the monitor MT.  I have the carcasses of several old desktop PCs floating around that I use to swap parts in and out as required to keep my media server running.  Only new piece (aside from a steady stream of hard drives) was a RAID card that was worth far more than the box it went into.

And MT good to hear you have your w116 mojo back.

[Big_Richard]

What we do here is have a PS3 in the TV room and run ps3 media server on the XP machine and I just setup media centre server on my win7 lappy. works like a charm for watching/listening to anything. There is also a computer at the TV too for easy on line pizza ordering so as to not ever have to leave the lounge at all - or put up with the crappy web browser on the PS3. Unfortunately one still needs to getup to go to them men's room - I did at one stage have a beer fridge within reach of the lounge too, but that was going too far  

[flutes]

Similar to my setup.

PS3 attached to the TV (there's still an original modded Xbox with XBMC sitting there that I'm too lazy to get rid of!) getting files off the media server that yes is running PMS - that box is so old it's running Win2000 Server.  Luckily it's still fast enough to transcode on the fly, but it struggles at anything above DVD resolution.

There's another computer (XP) in the lounge room that is used for playing music and nothing else.  A couple of years ago I converted the 15" LCD to a touchscreen so it doesn't have a keyboard/mouse.  Works a treat, although my music collection is getting too large, and iTunes is such a bloated piece of crap that it runs a bit slow.

Another desktop for web browsing, several laptops hanging around the place and I have more computers than I need.

Haven't tried the new media centre on Win7 but should give it a go - one of the laptops in on Win7 and I really like it.

[Big_Richard]

in regards to the transcoding, I've never really seen it used much, the PS3 appears to support most commonly downloaded media file formats. The only time I've seen the actual transcode feature being used on the XP PMS machine was with videos recorded on my crackberry or digital camera.

BTW, that PMS software also connects to Xbox 360's which i found very interesting - but then again, both machines use upnp, most likely in exactly the same manner.

Having spent many hours in front of both boxes I'm yet to be shown any real difference in gaming performance. My mate with the xbox 360 introduced me to GTA Iv so i went a got it for the ps3. on the PS3 the draw distance is not restricted at any time, everything is in view at all times and never fades out, on the Xbox 360 draw distance is restricted to say 1km worth of view or so. However, when things start getting exciting on the PS3 the frame rate can drop as low as 10fps or lower when theres lots of visually rich complex action on the screen. This never seems to happen on the 360. Perhaps the 360 version is a bit more conservative on system resources, i don't know.

**having just read a comparison on the 2, it seams the 360's GPU is a hell of alot faster than the ps3's. But wow, on everything in this world there are angry fanboys on both sides of the fence

[flutes]

It cracks me up reading fanboy flamewars on the merits of each system.  Both are extremely capable systems with strengths in different areas.

Re transcoding I realised after I wrote that that I hand't updated the firmware for well over a year until last week (it's not connected to the internet and I don't play many games), so perhaps I'll have better codec support now.

A game recommendation - GTAIV had a lot going for it but I couldn't get into it - no time to get into the story properly and I found it all a bit serious.  On a suprisingly positive review from Yahtzee on Zero Punctuation I picked up a copy of Saints Row II.  It's like all the fun, chaotic, tasteless parts from GTA IV taken out, made more offensive and more fun.  The graphics are nowhere near as good but it was a lot of fun playing it.