I am going for vacation soon, and I am carrying a hard disk full of movies and a projector with me.  Our vacation home has an old AMD Athlon PC, running Windows XP. Average video memory. It's a year-2005 spec PC. Dunno specs as of now, I'll update the post when I get there.  SPECS AS PER MEMORY RECOLLECTION:  3 GHz AMD Athlon processor, single-core 1 GB RAM 64/128 MB AMD Onboard Graphics Windows XP Professional.   The thing runs VLC media Player without hiccups, though I am half sure it won't do that with my movies-all of them are 1080p or 720p minimum.   Would the PC be able to play a 1080p movie?
120439
I was wondering how low you could go with hardware that would still be able to smoothly run HD movies.  My current plan is around $215 CAD w/o a hard drive: Intel Pentium 4 @ 3.2 GHz - 1GB DDR/SDRAM - 512MB X1600 Pro AGP - 350W PSU - ECS P4VXASD2+ - Bluray/DVD-RW drive.  As for the hard drive, could I just get a 7200RPM IDE HDD? Also, I'm planning on installing XP Pro SP3, unless Ubuntu somehow has an advantage.  I'm not wanting this to be a media center only computer... just want it to be a normal computer with just enough oomph to play HD movies.  Thanks in advance.  EDIT1: Forgot to mention that the Bluray/DVD-RW drive is SATA, but I was planning on getting an SATA-IDE adapter or a PCI card with SATA.  EDIT2: Oh yes... if I get a PCI card with SATA, would you then recommend I use an SATA hard drive as well? That would leave all the IDE ports on the motherboard unused... is that a good idea?
64936
I have a Toshiba A100, which I upgraded to 4 GB of RAM. The hardware startup indeed shows 4 GB of RAM, and I recently installed Windows 7, just to see how it behaves on it. So far so good, it displays 4 GB of RAM. Not that I tried to use it all, but it displays it. Previously under XP, I also would see 4 GB of RAM.  But under Ubuntu 9.10 (32 or 64 bits), it only displays 2.9 GB of RAM. And my kernel is the "pae" compiled one, which is supposed to do the trick to work around the 32-bit CPU limitation.   How can I get Ubuntu to fully use my 4 GB of RAM?
24432
If we can access (64*4) 256Kb of memory at a time in 8086 and you can move those segments around, what is the use of the remaining memory? Some say that we can move around the segments but what is the benefit of moving around the segments? Still we can't use the whole memory...
44819
I've got an Asus P8Z77 motherboard with a core i7 3770 processor, and a Geforce 660 video card. I'm running Windows 8.   While I primarily use the latter, there's situations where I want to use the HD4000 video adaptor built into the core processor - for example where I want to take advantage of quicksync. How would I do this?
8066
I have Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) OS installed. My motherboard is able to handle up to 32&nbsp;GB of RAM.  I recently upgraded my computer to 20&nbsp;GB of RAM, but the computer says installed RAM is 20&nbsp;GB (16&nbsp;GB usable).  I have four slots on the MB, and I installed two 8&nbsp;GB RAM closest to the CPU and two 2&nbsp;GB RAM on the remaining slots.  I made sure the RAM are the same (DDR3 1600&nbsp;MHz)  What am I doing wrong? Why am I seeing this issue in my computer's Control Panel Home?  Just in case it matters, I also installed GTX 770 GPU 2&nbsp;GB memory.  Here is the specification on my motherboard: .
108322
The problem I am experiencing is that if the battery is not present, the CPU is automatically throttled.  I have done some searching and have found that this is apparently by design, "in case the power supply cannot supply enough power, so the machine won't shut off."  Now, here is the problem.  I can't put the battery back in, because it started swelling up like crazy.  I can't really justify the cost of a new battery for a machine this old and I can't really afford a new computer, so I'm stuck with this machine.  It still works, but throttled back, a lot of things like flash video players are almost useless at the reduced CPU usage.  I don't really care if the machine shuts off if the supply can't keep up with power requirements.  My understanding is that this really should only happen if the supply is mismatched, i.e. from an adapter designed for a smaller machine, but even if its not it is just as intolerable to have to reload netflix every 30 seconds when it loses sync than an occasional power loss would be.  Besides, it is already losing power every time I need to move it somewhere.  So, what's the solution?  There has to be some way to override the throttling, right?  By the way, I have already tried sudo pmset -a dps 0 but that just gives me a usage message.
106276
I've looked around for a good desktop rig to suit a 2K budget computer focused on graphic design/ rendering  capabilities, but I'm have trouble finding exactly the type of setup that I'm looking for. If anyone is a hardware guru and has a great understanding of how to extract the very best GPU power and Display quality from a budget, and don't mind throwing it into a new egg wish list for me, I'd truly be grateful. Here is the setup I'm looking for:   Triple, high quality monitor display Performance based on the idea that I'll need to handle high resolution and many layered images within photoshop Performance based on the idea that I'll be using Blender to render 3-D Designs, which is able to use GPU to render 3D models.  Performance based on the idea that I will likely have 30+ browser tabs open, be running text editors in the background, and be doing all of these things at once, and need the setup to be able to handle it all with no sweat.    I have a TB of external memory, so that should save some cash on memory that doesn't need to be accessed with a great amount of speed, but the 2K does need to cover the three high quality monitors, a large tower with room for upgrade, a disk drive, a mouse, keyboard, and USB ports.   *Edit:  I think the builds suggested here will be helpful many users seeking rendering machine setup suggestions. I hope this fit's the format, and of course, isn't a duplicate question. I've looked and not found a satisfactory answer anywhere on StackOverflow! I thank you all ahead of time for your suggestions!  New: Thanks for the suggestion to move this to superuser.com! I reposted it here:   Thank you for your answers everyone, I was able to change the terms of what I needed to search for to meet the 2K budget thanks to all of your helpful advisories. The user-base here is far beyond the quality and knowledge level of any website in the world, in my opinion. Thanks again!
26789
Apologies if this question has been asked many times before... but I can't find a duplicate.  I'm helping a colleague prepare a Powerpoint presentation. We have no control over the computer that it will be delivered from (we simply hand the PPT file over beforehand). I am making an assumption that it will be running Windows 7 &amp; Powerpoint 2010, as we are.  As I understand it, Powerpoint will embed and play quite a wide range of video formats, if the relevant codecs are installed on the PC. Because we don't control the PC we need to assume that it has nothing installed that doesn't come automatically with Windows or Powerpoint - but which formats are these?  To put it another way: What video format can we embed in Powerpoint and be confident that it will play on any Windows 7 PC?  Thanks.
62440
My girlfriend bought a laptop last week. It's a core 2 duo with 4 GB  We installed vista 64bit, and one of the first things we did was right click on "My computer" to see gthe properties. Immediately we noticed something strange about her RAM, the line said: Installed memory (RAM): 4,00 GB (3,68 GB usable)  I told her not to worry, thinking it must be something about the laptop hardware (considering her vista installation came from the same DVD as mine, and I never noticed anything like that on my 4 GB desktop). One hour ago, it got worse. We looked at Properties again, and it now says: Installed memory (RAM): 4,00 GB (2,98 GB usable)  What does that mean? Are those 1,02 GB missing or being used by the system?  EDIT: There is a possibility that the sytem information is wrong. I just noticed that it reports an intel T6500 processor, when it's actually a T6400.  How can I find out how much RAM is really available to the system?  EDIT2: Checking the resource monitors, it says 1003 MB are reserved for the hardware. Is that good or bad? Thanks
30807
I have to upgrade the RAM on 8 different desktop PCs - each of them with varying specs, different ages, different manufacturers, different motherboards, etc. I'm pretty sure they don't all use the same type of RAM.  I've been doing some Googling, and just can't wrap my head around how to determine what type of RAM I will need. I think the main issue is that I don't understand what the different types of RAM are (DDR, DDR2, DDD3, PC400, PC3200), the different speeds, the different physcial sizes (160 pin, 184pin, etc), SIMM, DIMM, DRAM, SDRAM, dual channel, single channel, etc. If you consider the many different permutations that the above can result in, you will understand my predicament.   Is there are good website/online resource that explains modern RAM (ONLY the last 5 years), without explaining all the way back to the 1990s, 1980s or even earlier. Is there are free tool that I can download to help me determine what type of RAM I need to purchase? Is there any other advice/suggestions that could be useful/helpful for me to get past this problem.
56488
I recently bought a new laptop with following configuration   CPU: Intel i5 2450 RAM: 8 GB DDR3 GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 520 1GB   I've setup a virtual machine using VirtualBox with Windows 7 as guest. I want to use my (host's) graphics card in it but the virtual machine is only showing 128 MB of video memory.  I am using Bumblebee and start the virtual machine using   $ optirun VBoxManage startvm "Windows 7"   Please suggest me how should I use my graphics card for 3D acceleration in virtual machine.
39935
Given that I am building a home computer from scratch and I have several components (MB, CPU, HDD, Video, Sound, etc) which have specific power requirements, is there a formula for me to calculate the size/capacity of the Power Supply I will need? I want to be able to expand the setup later on also...
37570
So I am running on Windows 7 (64-bit) Home Premium with 12 GB RAM (Intel Core i7 920).  I have restricted the Page File to 400MB since it was eating up a lot of space om my SSD (that is 80GB).   After that I sometimes get the "low memory"-warning, like this, except for the behold-comment:   When I get those warning I have usually a lot of RAM available; when I check Resource Manager I have over 2GB "Free" and over 2GB "Available" - usually more than that.  The diskspace on all my drives have over 10GB free.  So the question is - why does Windows complain? It actually restarted by computer (hard boot) when it happened, and as I said - lots or RAM available.
88934
The general question is: When installing low voltage RAM in a board that outputs a higher voltage to the memory module, will this fry the RAM or will it be like overclocking it?  My specific case is: I have the Alienware m17xR3 laptop with a 2630QM Sandy Bridge board. Currently, I have the stock 1.5 V modules and when I check the overclocking options in my bios, the RAM voltage option ranges from 1.5 - 1.65 V. Is this simply because the bios recognizes that these are the values which my current RAM support and thus they will change when I install 1.35 V RAM or will I have to run the 1.35 V sticks at minimum 1.5 V?  If the case is the latter, would I fry my 1.35 V sticks? Or would they become automatically overclocked and get tighter timings with a higher voltage? Or both? Or neither? I'm a bit lost :p
62826
This might sound like a duplicate but i couldn't find a clear answer in any of the questions answered in this site or any other.  I have a laptop with AMD Athlon(tm) II Dual-Core M320 processor  and it has 3GB DDR2 RAM.  Currently I am having Windows 7 64-bit OS installed.Now i'm about to upgrade it to Windows 8.I was wondering whether i should go for a 64-bit one or 32-bit one...  Now i know that 64-bit Operating System is better if you have a RAM higher than or equal to 4GB. Since i have a processor which supports 64-bit would it be a disadvantage to go for a 32-bit OS?   Which Operating System Would be best for me, X64 or X86 ?
77051
I have a Toshiba Satellite L855-S5240.  The current specs are:     Intel® Core™ i5-2450M Processor2.5 GHz, (3.1 GHz with Turbo Boost   Technology 2.0), 3MB L3 Cache      Mobile Intel® HM76 Express Chipset      Mobile Intel®HD graphics with shared graphics memory      Configured with 6GB DDR3 1333MHz (max 16GB) 2 main memory slots. Both   memory slots occupied   I have ordered a 8GB stick and intend to replace the current 2GB stick.. bringing me to 12GB total.  This is the stick:   Will I notice a benefit? Particularly working with virtual machines and overall system performance?
122324
I watch a lot of movie's on my computer which is connected to my TV. Problem is i built the pc to be a gaming computer and it has the power supply to match (1200w).  Is there a way to set it into a "Low power mode" whilst i am playing a movie to use as little power as possible.  I am running -  Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit VLC for playing movies Connect to my TV via a standard HDMI cable