Pain_Man

Thanks, Lightning. I have a really killer program called Babylon. It's basically a UI/search engine for locally installed or 'Net glossaries and data bases (e.g. "9300 Computer Terms"). I've got several dozen installed. It can usually 75% of the time or so, come up with the answer. They've added wikipedia but, in my experience, wikipedia info has to be treated with extreme caution unless you already know it to be accurate or can confirm it. There's definitely people with an agenda over there and one is harassed if one goes up against this clique. I've not had the honor of being invited to join the Beta team. To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure have the skillset/level of knowledge to qualify. But since I don't know what those are...maybe I do. I was a pretty heavy contributor on the old board (apologies for violating any tabu here). I believe I had over 400 posts. Made it to "Senior Member" or something.

Thanks for replying personally. I'm sure lotsa people bombard you with silly bullshit. This issue is so weird I figured I'd bring it to you attention. It doesn't quite pass the smell test, does it? I don't know much about this hardware, but it seems odd that only DLs would be affected. Why not all DVD media? Also, if its such a BIG issue, why's there no warning on their website? On anybody's website? Or the box? Why have I never heard about this before? And I have a Pioneer 110D I bought a few weeks back that'll burn DLs at 8x. So it doesn't seem to be a controller, cable or MoBo issue (I'm guessing here). The only DL media I've ever used in the 760A are Verbatim +R DLs. I do have one Write Speed Graph (I'm assuming you mean the .IBG file generated by ImgBurn/DVDInfoPro?) Unfortunately, on the two others I used IB to burn, I forgot to generate the damned files. As I said, I had a 716A that burned DLs without issue. The other issue with the 760A is that it's supposed to burn DLs at 10x. It won't even list the 8x speed the 716A did! When I called TS about that, I got the usual blahblah about "the next firmware" update. The next one? that's not what the box says. At least the -/+Rs show 18x as the max speed. And it burns the 6x RWs at 6.0. The problem seems to be only the DLs. I'm not sure I know how to upload a file. Lemme look around... I don't have my own website and I don't see a way to upload the file. I'll see if I can get it to you directly. One really weird thing is that on every disk the first "burp" occurs after the 50 minute mark. On Star Trek: The Time Travel Fan Collective, the first one occured a few minutes into the second episode (which would, I'm taking a guess, be about the same place as the 50 min mark in a feature length video). Thus, it seems to me the "burps" are occuring on the first layer. I'm not sure what to do. I waited weeks to get my hands on this drive and now its got a super-weird issue. The TS twerp was repeating his mantra so many times it just increased the smell. "This is not a Plextor issue..."* I don't yet know if Plextor will take it back? I have to call their sales dept Monday to find out what the policy is. If they stick to their policy that its an Intel issue, then they'll probably want to charge me a restock fee + shipping which would come to probably 25% of the cost--making it not really worth doing. We'll see how flexible they are. If its just a problem with this drive then a replacement would be without the problem. If its endemic to the design.... My hope is that its screwed up firmware. I probably should have waited a couple of releases instead of installing 1.1 right off the bat. *It reminded me of when I was doing TS for Dell. If the customer had a home network, that was the problem, period. The customer had to hang up, disconnect the home network, uninstall all the networking software from the Dell and then call back. Who's gonna do that? Of course, we were told to advise them to reinstall Windows if they didn't want to go to the trouble...

Indeed, happy belated birthday. 59. Wouldn't have figured that. Was thinking you were in your forties. My old man's 62 and he still can't program the friggin' VCR. I gave him a DVD as a present and he couldn't figure out how to turn off the Spanish subtitles (which he must've turned on!). And he started working on cars when Eisenhower was Prez. A fact I like to remind him of. For some reason, he doesn't find it that funny. Decades from now, I imagine, I'll have grandchildren kidding me for being in high school when Reagan was president.

Wasn't that Horace Greely? I think the remark was apocryphal. Man, my whole childhood image of the Village People is blown--and not in the way I expected. To think as a six year old, listening to their albums on 8-track through my mother's gigantic stereo I was supporting this man...just breaks my heart. Oh well. At least it wasn't the Construction Worker. Speaking of America's Most Wanted. Anyone who saw Prison Break last week (is it shown in the UK?) saw John Walsh "profiling" the rapist, child molesting freak psycho killer character affectionately known as "Tea Bag." This broad, er, woman that he's bamboozling--just co-inka-dinkally she has two young kids, is standing in her kitchen and sees Walsh doing his thing about the character. For once a TV character did the obvious thing--she called the Fuzz. And when he threatened, "One day I'm gonna get out of here and I'm going to remember where your front steps are..." and she spits on the visitor's partition...my kind of woman. Now, if she's got a brain in her head, she's goes and buys a .357 and gets a concealed carry permit. So if he does make good on his threat, his brains will make a very small mess when she splatters them on the floor.

I have a controller with this description Intel 82801EB USB2 Enhanced Host Controller - 24DD in my Device Manager. Exactly what you write. I can't find an entry for "Standard Enhanced PCI To USB Host Controller" in DM. Minter and I tossed this back and forth and decided that since I bought this machine in AUG 2003, it has the "SuperUSB" capability. This only recently came to my attention. I don't have an external hdd and I'm not in the market for one. I noticed SuperUSB when I was shopping for a new burner. My jumpdrive is really quite fast. I figured it would take a lot longer to transfer data on and off it, put even for 100MB files, it rips. The only other device I have running off of a USB port is my external Creative Live! Sound Card and there's narry a problem outputting sound. Getting Quake 4 and Doom 3 to recognize it has Enhanced HD sound, now that's a different story.

'Scuse the ignorance, but what is the "MMC" spec? I'm guessing it's this: Multimedia Command, a set of instructions for CD/DVD devices?

Billions, Minty, they'd owe you billions from the replay fees from Animal House alone. But the money would get really sweet as soon as we patent a method of creating semi-musical "entertainment" using spoken iambic pentameter, peppered with profuse profanity, misogyny and glorifying senseless violence. In some circles, I believe this is called "hip hop." How 'bout we patent that. Then Snoop Dog, Puff Daddy and Dr. Dre can start paying us. Be nice to have the three record companies in the world by the nuts. Oh yeah, and we can patent a method for choosing who gets new record contracts? They have to be between 16 and 28. There'll be a panel of three judges, one rotund, name-dropping producer, one lip-synching former dancer and one rude, effeminate English git. The "contestants" will then have to sing songs way out of their ranges and styles and people would call in votes for who they'd like. American Idol and Fox, get ready to start writing BIG checks...just as soon as Minter and I have the patent approved... Well, it is "methodology." (OK, I'll take two weeks in Bermuda with Katharine in lieu of half my settlement...I know, but hey I'm married. Married guys: don't we have to watch all kinds of shit we'd never watch if were still batching it? We'd be sitting around in our underwear watching our B5 DVDs. That and BSG & Deadwood eps.)

Unless you're using the same lawyers as the RIAA, I won't lose sleep. If you do have the same lawyers, will you take my kid for a settlement? Plus my dignity and all the equity in my house? Talk about choadswallowers...how could any lawyer, with good conscience, sue a 12 yr old girl? Who should be put on phone and internet restriction for a month. Her parents shouldn't have to pay for it. Especially since so many kids are much more Net savvy than their parents. (Not anyone on this board, of course ; our kids'll never get anything over on us.) I'm so glad that lady in N. Cali is standing up the the RIAA-Gestapo? Y'all have heard of the case? The RIAA wants five grand from a woman who's trying to raise a daughter on disability (I get disability payments and lemme tell you, if my wife didn't make nice money, we'd be living in my mother's spare bedroom!) because, they claim, she "illegally" downloaded 1200+ songs. The woman didn't even have a computer. Her older son had been living there and set up an unsecured wireless network--yeah, I know, bone-head maneuver. She offered to let the RIAA examine her computer and they refused for months and months until they suddenly decided they wanted to (doubtless with the idea of making sure the "evidence" would be found). Thankfully, the Federal judge ordered the computer to be examined by a company chosen by the woman and, I love this part, THE RIAA HAS TO PAY THE COMPANY SHE CHOOSES!

Grazi

Just because I've made a couple of small donations, I don't want to presume and bother Lightning directly. But I'd appreciate it if someone who is on closer terms with him would run this Hyperthreading issue by him? Or if one of the other sophisticates (meaning people who know more about such arcana than I do , which is most of the members here ) could throw in what they think... And Newbie? I had something like 400 posts on another incarnation of this forum!

"That's his replacement, a fucking actor?" --Chris, Team America Thanks, GrainMan. It finally thawing out in GWN? I find the HT thing a little odd, but these are PCs. Anything's possible, I suppose. I have a new Pioneer 110D that burns the DLs w/o "burps" or any other issues.

Bingo. Came out in 1985. Methinkso thou art north of 30 to remember that one. Great album. Lots of blurred memories of, ah, extended braincell desctruction sessions.

And you can forget about the kiss, let alone the v******e and the r****a****d. "This won't hurt a bit..."

Our bloody patent system! Hey, rest of the world, do yourselves a favor: do NOT copy our legal system! In fact, we're trying to sell it to China. This is exactly what's wrong with the damned patent system in the first place! How can you patent mailing rental DVDs to people? I suppose if you stole the software Netflix was using and set it up, then that might be a logical case. But the idea that just the concept of renting DVDs this way in patentable is ridiculous. Does this mean NO ONE can compete with Netflix? Better be careful. Wal-Mart will patent supermarkets and Albertson's and the rest'll be out of business. Can Microsoft patent the concept of the OS and the sue Apple, Silicon Graphics, Sun, et al? Patenting a "methodology"? What is this crap? Does this mean that I can open up a station, install pumps that deliver gasoline (petrol) into automobile's tanks and then patent it? So now Exxon-Mobile, BP, Shell, et al, will have to pay ME for patenting the idea? It's ridiculous. Doctors have been doing this for years in this country. They don't even invent new technology. They just invent a way to use existing technology and then slap a patent around it. And the Patent Office grants them the patent. So a new procedure that could potentially help lots of people is locked up by a greedy few (or even one) persons who jack up the price outrageously. So high the insurance companies won't pay so it becomes an all cash buisness--with a nice little sideline of financing loans to get the procedure (LASIK, anyone?), loans with a 24% interest rate. I love my country but sometimes it drives my NUTS. This is NOT what the Founders intended when they created the patent system. Read our Constitution. Here's exactly what the Constitution says on patents, from Article I, Section 8: To Promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Where is the phrase "business methologies" in there? No where! I've said it before, especially to my British cousins: DO NOT LET THE JUDGES OFF PARLIAMENT'S LEASH. You'll be far sorries than you can possibly imagine. Like all "modern" countries, we are slaves to out of control national bureaucracies. In the US we've added another layer of tyranny: the judidiciary (as y'all across the Pond have done with the EU; come on the French and the Germans thought this up; the same countries that tried to conquer the world for 300 years, from Louis XIV to Hitler!).

Hello all, it's been a good, long while since most of you have heard from me. I've intended to post here but got lazy and didn't get around to it until now. Now I've got a bizarre issue that's come up. (One that's cost me four +R DLs!) My Plextor 716SA died last month. Only fifteen months old, it up and decided it was tired of burning media. Any kind of media. It wanted to be a ROM drive. Skipping the extraneous, I decided to buy the new 760A, 18x -/+R burning, 10x DL burning, et al. Well, I got it and installed it. Without mentioning any names, I burned several DVD-Videos on Verbatim +R DLs--Plextor's recommended brand. All four of the discs I've burned so far (well five, but it was defective and wouldn't play at all) have "burps" or video/audio stutters. Just brief little instances where the sound fades out and the video briefly freezes. Then it goes back to normal. To make it weirder, the more times you scan backwards to the point before the "burp" occurs the shorter the stutters or disruptions become until, finally, they are much, much shorter. Now he's where it gets REALLY weird. I called Plextor TS (I only got the drive last Wed!) to explain the problem to them, hoping they'd ship me a new drive and I could return the old one. Nope. According to the twerp on the phone, the problem is NOT the drive it's Hyperthreading!. And only when burning video or audio. Yes, chips with hyperthreading, or, that is EVERY chip Intel makes, is the issue. And, according to the twerp, it's not just Plextor drives, most every manufacturer's drives have this problem with DLs. And it appears to be ONLY with DLs. I used a 6x -RW to burn the same video and, having noted the times at which the "burps" had occured, waited to see what would happen. NO BURPS on the -RW. Smooth as whipped cream. (Reminds me of a line from an old Cure song, show your age and tell me which song and album! "And smear this man across the walls/Like strawberries and cream/It's the only way...to be...." If I decided to buy another brand, the twerp recommended I contact that manufacturer and ask them if they have a known issue with hyperthreading and "burps." And finally, the "fix" recommended by the twerp is to go into the BIOS and disable Hyperthreading, burn the video, and then re-enable Hyperthreading. That's not time consuming or a pain in the tuchus. So I'm not sure what to do. I'm going to contact their sales department (I bought it directly from Plextor) and see if there's any kind of money-back guarantee. (However, I have a feeling since the twerp claims it's "not a Plextor problem" there's probably going to be a restock fee.) I could get another 716A, I suppose. It was a great burner until it decided it only wanted to be a ROM. I did TS for Dell and TS for a (now defunct) dot bomb scam* So the question for the IB Panel: 1.) Have you ever heard of this particular issue? Well, I just got the Borg DVD-Set from UPS so I'm going to go immerse myself in Star Trek and not stress about the drive. Oh yeah, and wait for your posts... *(yes one of those companies run by people who knew ZIP about computers or IT, let alone the Net, yet managed to attract $200M in capital on the stock market, mostly by lies and bullshit; I was in the middle of a $200M scam and lemme tell ya, it was something to see. People were practically fighting each other to give these clowns money. But that's a different story. The good news? Nearly the entire management teams faces Federal criminal charges and a dozen lawsuits. Sadly, I was unable to benefit financially. )