I have no idea what is a good card anymore but I will say that not all onboard stuff is good. My 5 old desktop has a Creative X Fi Xtreme Audio that I purchased for it and sounds fantastic with my 2.1 speakers or my Sony headphones. My 1 year old Laptop with the onboard audio sounds dreadful with the same Sony headphones and there is nothing I can do to make it sounds good. I have spent hours with Win Amp trying to make it sounds reasonable even and it is impossible. My Nexus One sounds 100 times better than my laptop through the same headphones! Not all sound cards are equal!
Audioengine D1 USB DAC/AMP for 2.0 http://www.amazon.com/Audioengine-D1-Premium-24-Bit-DAC/dp/B006IPH5H2/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1336054306&sr=8-7 My keyboard has built in audio! My Keyboard! What next? Mice?
I actually never had any issues with setting up my old audigy 2 and x-fi platinum in windows 7. I've heard the stories though. Never had an issue myself though. and I could never live with myself it I used onboard sound. my alienware laptop sounds horrible
get a usb soundcard, those work well. Not many are even 5.1 though, but they'll handle stereo and won't give you any trouble. They're mobile too so you can use them on any computer.
Do you have a technet account? You could just download the desired version of Vista and use your key.
No I am going to fight Acer on this, they put a COA on the bottom that doesn't work with a Windows disk and then want £50+ to send you a restore disk. Its a complete con.. I tried skipping the product key at install and told it to install Home Premium, went to change product key and it still comes back as invalid. Called M$ who confirmed that it is a Home Premium key so couldn't understand why it isn't working.
Good luck with that. If it doesn't work out, I can give you temporary access to my technet account so you can download the appropriate version and burn it to disk.
Dude windows vista has a phone activation hack. Unplug the network cable and try to put in the key. It will fail and give you a phone code. Call into the automated system with the code. It will fail and try to transfer to a real person. If you hangup between the call transfer it registers the serial and activates.
If I pack a load of video files into a .zip folder for later use will the quality be the same when I unpack them or will the quality suffer?
the quality will be the same, dudebro. zip just puts the files into one file. quality of the video depends on the compression method when the video conversion was done.
Yeah I feel really bad now because I'm not enough of a nerd to know such things so I posted in a thread called noobish questions. What kind of questions did you expect to find here? What happened to you Chi? You used to be funny.
wait.. so you want to get an hd-pvr to record video gaming sessions yet it's nerdy to know the basic concept of the zip file format that's been around for as long as some forum members have been alive?
Actually Zip does compress. But it's lossless, it doesn't compress as much as rearange so things fit better. It's like my sock drawer vs. my Dad's. his is nice and neat mine looks like a bomb went off. Either way the same amount of stuff fits in there so it's all good.