PeterW

XPe licences are purchased with hardware, the hardware manufacturer has an agreement with ms (CLA) which cost about £1500 to set up (includes your dev kit). Then I believe the liences they are purchase in packs of 10, 100, 1000 but I have only ever purchased packs of 100 so I cannot confirm the other pack sizes. The 100 pack of licences is £5600. Are you familiar with XPe? Its not an install on OS, you have to build the OS with the target designer from Windows 10K + components. All your drivers and apps need to packaged using component designer. XPe is typically purchased as part of a manufactured device.

To build (and licence) your own XPe machines you need to buy the dev kit and sign a CLA agreement (about £1500). The minimum amount of licences I have ever bought were in packs of 100 for about £5600. There is nothing wrong with downloading the eval kit and building 120 day eval images to play with.

That drive according to the spec should defo be 44 pin, are you sure that the connector doesnt come off as webman has already said? Sometimes they can be on pretty tight, a small flat head screw driver and a steady hand might be your friend.

I think the text needs changing to 'Networks forum sponsored by'

Are all the other bits known to be good and all you changed was your mainboard? Have you run mem test etc? Are you using discrete graphics or the Intel integrated?

Power options properties, turn off monitor = never ?

Nope Maxtor! And all the Maxtor drives are now from the seagate factories and are seagate models. Only difference will be the name on the drive and the warranty, 3 years for maxtor brand with the 5 year seagate brand commanding a couple of quid premium. I guess the good news is you now get a maxtor price point with seagate build quality Although with hard drive brands it does very much come down to personal preference and hourses for courses

Netdiag who might that be then

If you have an nvidia card and enable the nview desktop manager you can assign profiles for different apps and have them open on a certain monitor or last monitor etc.

Hmm got an Intel technical notification this morning, try these Intel Wireless Drivers Only Do let us know how you get on!

As said already those seem more like desirable specs than minimum, When you say they will be used for a bit of video editing it may benefit to mix the spces (say have a room with the higher spec machines) for this task as you have speced. Then for the rest of the machines I would say a P4 3.0 - 3.2 would be fine with say 80GB HDDs and integrated graphics. What video editing app you using? you migth want to check that it will actually benefit from the deicated graphics as apposed to the GMA 950 onboard. On the servers I would get the Xeon 5100 as apposed to the old 5000 series think the 5110 1.6Ghz is the one your after.

They are going to be fairly close but I would say the Celeron will edge the Athlon in most situations (probably not noticable).

P4 cpus have a thermal cut off so they should cut the system off before they fry themselves. Do you know if its a 478 or 775 cpu? The 775 style fans do have a tendancy to come loose possibly if they have had a knock and its very difficult to tell that they are not pushed on correctly apart from a slight wobble of the heat sink if you wiggle it.

PCI-X is not the same as PCI Express (or PCI-E if you like) ! PCI-X is an extension of standard PCI allowing much faster data transfer speeds. See Here

The install is image based now so consists of copy/expand the desired product from the install.wim image and run the hardware detect etc. Hense the quickness of the install.

I could probably do this for you but wont be back in the office until the 2nd Jan. Can you hold on until then?

I think I'm going to be getting a Vista ultimate late Xmas present for myself I'm not sure if many people will really be bothered with non genuine copies especially if they go into reduced functionality mode every time ms figure out the various patches. I'll let you know whats going on with office OEM editions as and when I find out what the hell is happening with those, at this moment in time it looks like all you will get with OEM office 2007 will be a product key. You will not be given any installation media only the actual OEM will have this for pre installation and ms want it on every Vista PC (will default to 60 day trial if no product key entered). Now the $1 Billion question ? Vista x86 or x64 what will you be using personally?

Probably more applicable for those using it at home but here are the prices for the various Vista OEM skus Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic DVD OEM (32 or 64 bit) £55 + Vat Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium DVD OEM (32 or 64 bit) £69 + Vat Microsoft Windows Vista Business DVD OEM (32 or 64 bit) £85 + Vat Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate DVD OEM(32 or 64 bit) £115 + Vat I'm slightly disappointed that home basic didn't come in at a cheaper price point with home premium coming in at the xp home price point Although I'm glad to see Ultimate hasn't been too over priced Discuss :!:

Yes I'm afraid its not really worth having the caps replaced. If you want the full low down on how so many mainboards shipped with capacitors with bad electrolyte see here Bad Caps, How old is the board? Must be about 6-7 years I would think, try and convince your friend they need a MB/CPU/Ram upgrade.

Nvidia chipset per chance? (couldnt see that model on ASUS website unless its the M2NPV-VM) There are Dos drivers but they are 2 part which makes things a bit interesting but certainly do-able.

Remember thats retail boxed pricing so its a little more than Windows XP costs today (probably will drop down in time.) i.e Windows XP Home £199inc > Vista Home Basic £179inc Windows XP Pro £245inc > Vista Business £289inc and who buys retail boxed anyway get an oem copy and buy a floppy drive its much cheaper I do agree that Home Premium should be the price that XP home is at the moment and Vista basic should be really cheap say £30.00 (oem) £100 (retail) as the os pricing is now very much a large part of the pc cost.