Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2010 November 25

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November 25

LAN and WAN configurations

Where can i get the detail and slide shows regarding LAN and WAN configurations and if possible ,give link there to. --RAIJOHN (talk) 06:07, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't know where to get slideshows, but you may wish to read our articles on LAN and WAN. Hope this helps. Rocketshiporion♫ 06:30, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

What DirectX is for?

Resolved

I know that DX is an API for creating games for Windows and the 360. But is that all? Is it capable of creating GUI for Windows programs? And can a program developed in DirectX 11 run on Windows XP, or on Windows 7 w/o DirectX 11 supporting GPU? -- Livy the pixie (talk) 06:33, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

See our extensive article, DirectX. Comet Tuttle (talk) 08:00, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

My vocabulary is quite bad for reading complex IT articles to be honest. I am specialized in gaming ones, since gaming is my hobby. Translating such an article will take me a whole day for sure. Forgive me my laziness, but can you give me a quick answer? I want to re-design the GUI of the software to make it more attractive, but don't know if there's another way other than using the boring wxWidgets API. -- Livy the pixie (talk) 09:20, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

DirectX can put arbitrary pixels on the screen, so it can be used to make a GUI. Many games have homebrew DirectX GUIs. But you would either need to write everything from scratch or use a DirectX widget toolkit, and I don't know if such a thing exists. Speaking as a user, I would prefer that you use the "boring" standard widgets, because the main benefit of a GUI in the first place is not attractiveness but usability and accessibility. -- BenRG (talk) 11:05, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Using directX to make a UI wouldn't be a novice task. DirectX is a set of API's that allow access to the framebuffer, and other graphic/hardware components. DirectX is used largely for game rendering such as in shading, ray casting, sprites, and overlays (as well as sounds). See the Microsoft devolper site for more info.Smallman12q (talk) 12:56, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Currently, our software is created by wxWidgets, a cross-platform widgets toolkit, but looking at it reminds me of Windows 95. I want to make it more attractive. I tried to edit the paint function of each control but it is very difficult to me 'cause I can hardly understand what they have coded before. And at last I can see very little difference after editing. From what I see in games, I always thought DirectX is a easy-to-use tool that can make up amazing GUI in a short time. Anyway, does GUI made by DirectX looks nicer than GUI made by standard widgets API? Or it depends on the programmer? -- Livy the pixie (talk) 13:24, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I think you're confusing DirectX with a different API (probably, you want to use the Windows Presentation Foundation). DirectX is intended to provide "direct" access to hardware acceleration - typically, things like video cards and audio cards. In case it is not clear, it is possible to use DirectX to manually draw any type of graphical object that appears on the screen, but that is not the intended purpose of DirectX - so it's going to be difficult to do it well. If you want to draw graphical widgets (that is, menus and buttons and so forth), then you should use a widget toolkit for Windows. The most common options are Microsoft Foundation Class Library or the modern version, Windows Presentation Foundation. (Select the appropriate toolkit based on your needs). These are the standard tools to make windows, icons, menus, and so on. DirectX will not provide functions to build a menu - for example, you will have to draw and manage the individual pixels of a menu, and manage the individual mouse and keyboard inputs to decide if they are affecting your menu. So, DirectX does give you a lot more flexibility for designing a user-interface, but you lose a lot of the operational conveniences, and all of the standardization. If all you want is to tune the appearance slightly, you should use a Windows Presentation Foundation design and apply a custom theme to change the way stuff looks. Nimur (talk) 14:57, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

So, use the current widgets drawing API is still the best way. -- Livy the pixie (talk) 02:12, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Kindel reader

Are the Anne McCaffry books avalable to download on my Kindle reader.

Deifen. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Deifen (talk • contribs) 10:09, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

This page on Amazon certainly suggests that at least some are Darigan (talk) 10:39, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Calendar sharing with MS Outlook 2007/Exchange 2010/Server 2008

I have a problem with sharing calendars.

A can view the calendars of B, T and K

B can view the calendars of A,T and K

K can view and edit the calendars of A,B and T

T can view and edit the calendar of B but although T can view the calendar of A, T's Outlook crashes if she tries to edit A's calendar.

Anyone familiar with this sort of problem?

note: K is an admin on exchange, the others are regular users. All have roaming profiles, but T always uses the same PC. I have run a repair on the Outlook installation on T's PC.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks

Trugster | Talk 12:45, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

PC freezing

I know it is a fairly general question I am using WinXP home editon on a PC that has suddenly started to freeze, I can't open Task Manager when this happens and the only way to get the PC working again is to hold in the power button and re boot. Any ideas were I could start looking for a cause/solution to this problem thanks Mo ainm~Talk 14:12, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Also it is not a RAM issue in the sense that it is using all available ram as I have 4 gigs in it and it is only a 32 bit system, and I know that a 32 bit cant use all 4gigs Mo ainm~Talk 14:15, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

What did you do before the computer froze? Any recent hardware or software changes? 118.96.155.155 (talk) 16:20, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

No absolutly no new additions either hardware or software. The only recent event was when it becam infected with a fake anti virus software called System Defragmenter which I removed. Mo ainm~Talk 16:33, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Any suspicious errors and warnings around the time of the freezes in the "Application" and "System" sections of the Windows Event Viewer? Also, were you using any applications around the time of the freezes? 118.96.155.155 (talk) 16:50, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Never thought of looking there yes it is giving an Error that doesn't sound good saying the source is the disk, checking further into it I am being told "The device has a bad block of memory, which Windows attempted to read. The data might be missing or corrupted." Mo ainm~Talk 16:58, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Either the disk in question is bad, the cable connecting it to the motherboard is bad or loose, or the motherboard's disk connector or controller is bad. Better check the cable first (either reseat it or replace it with a known-good cable). 118.96.155.155 (talk) 17:08, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, step 1 is to immediately make a backup of anything important on the disk, because it could fail completely at any time. (It could also keep working at the current level indefinitely, but you shouldn't take the risk of expecting that.) Looie496 (talk) 17:41, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Would it be worth my while making a clone of my disk and then buying a new HD, or just back up important documents? If so what is a good free cloning software and thanks for the advice so far. Mo ainm~Talk 18:28, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

That's really up to you, the main thing is that you back up whatever you don't want to lose if the disk suddenly fails. If you're uncomfortable with the thought of reinstalling the entire operating system/all your applications then cloning to another hard drive would be the easiest option (but you would need another hard drive of an equivalent or greater size), but if you just want to backup specific files and you're not bothered if you lose everything else you could just copy those files to a USB drive and/or burn them to DVD or just copy to another hard drive. I can't personally advise of a particular cloning software to use, but I'd recommend looking at our articles List of disk cloning software and Comparison of disk cloning software as they can probably help.  ZX81  ^talk 19:20, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Video Cards

I'm thinking about buying Settlers VI for my laptop. I've been to Can You Run It?, and I have far better stats than recommended.

	Recommended	What I have
CPU	3.0 GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 3400+	Intel Pentium Dual CPU T3400 @ 2.16GHz
CPU Speed	3GHz	2.16GHz Performance Rated at: 3.24GHz
OS	Windows Vista	Windows Vista
Sound Card	Needed	Intel High Definition Audio HDMI
DVD-ROM	4x or faster DVD-ROM drive	TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-L632H ATA Device

The only problem comes with the video card. The rocommended is 256 MB DirectX 9.0c-compliant, Shader 2.0-enabled video card (NVIDIA GeForce FX+ / ATI Radeon 9500+), when I have Mobile Intel(R) 965 Express Chipset Family. I don't understand any of that. The site says that my video card doesn't meet this requirement. But when I look at the subsections of the video card check I see that the recommended figures are

	Recommended	What I have
Video RAM	256GB	358GB
3D	Needed	I have
Hardware T&L	Needed	I have
Pixel Shader	2.0	3.0
Vertex Shader	2.0	3.0
DirectX	9	10

What's the problem with my video card? It passes all of the sub-tests. Do you think that this game will run, and why is the site saying I can't run it? Thanks in advance. — Fly by Night (talk) 17:02, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Most likely you would be able to run it but might get jerky and erratic graphics because of the limited computational power of your graphics setup. You might be in a position of having to choose poor graphics quality in order to get acceptable rendering speed. Looie496 (talk) 17:37, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I don't understand, why is that? I have 102MB video RAM than required. — Fly by Night (talk) 17:46, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I'd recommend trying the demo http://www.ubi.com/UK/Downloads/Info.aspx?dlId=2331 (intel graphics chips are not usually very powerful, I'm not familiar with the 965 - but I'd guess it's only good enough for low settings)83.100.211.26 (talk) 18:23, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

I've struggled to find comparisons but it looks like the 965 intel is of around the same power as the recommended type, so it could work. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?cpu=Mobile+Intel+965+Express (but in general a bit lower)83.100.211.26 (talk) 18:37, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

You don't actually have any RAM on your video card - the Intel GMA series use the memory of the computer itself, so that 358Mb (which is a rather strange number...) is being taken out of your 2Gb of system RAM and there's a performance penalty because it has to share the RAM. But having sufficient memory and/or pixel/vertex/etc functionality isn't enough, if the card itself isn't powerful enough then you end up with slow jerky graphics as mentioned by Looie496 above. Put simply, the graphics card is just another processor and like the processor in your computer, they come in various speeds. Hope this helps to explain!  ZX81  ^talk 18:30, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Right, that "video memory" is system memory that's allocated to graphics. It is faster than if it were system memory accessed by the GPU over PCI (because the chipset does have a relatively high bandwidth interface for it) but it doesn't compare well with a real GPU. That Intel GMA bus runs at 12.2Gbit/sec; the dedicated memory bus for a high-end GPU like GeForce 500 Series runs 10 times as fast, or more. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 18:42, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

You're all very helpful. Thanks a lot. Besides buying a new computer, what can I do to improve the video processing? I've got an Inspiron 1525. Can I upgrade it? — Fly by Night (talk) 18:56, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, but no. Very few laptops are designed to be able to upgrade the graphics card (after it's left the original factory) and the Inspiron 1525 is no exception. Your graphics "card" is literally soldered to the laptop's motherboard and can't be swapped to something else.  ZX81  ^talk 19:11, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Some laptops have upgradable graphics adapters, but the service manual for the Inspiron 1525 says it doesn't. Even if it did, doing so is very rarely a cost-effective idea. But try the demo 83.100.211.26 linked to; you might be okay. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 19:15, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Afaik, all Intel graphics cards (except for possibly the really, really new ones) are integrated chips and like ZX81 said above, their chips are completely integrated into the motherboard. Just a word of advice from my own experience: if you want to play games on a laptop, don't get anything other than ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards and make sure they have at least 1GB of dedicated video memory (it should say how much it has on the page for whatever card you're getting). Also, I highly recommend looking up the card on http://www.notebookcheck.net and look at the benchmarks on it before you buy the laptop. If you don't know what the numbers by the tests called "3D Mark 06" or similar mean, just look at the results for individual games. (for example, if a card can run Crysis on high settings at greater than 25 frames per second, you will almost definitely be able to play most games out there now). Also, and this is just a personal preference, but I normally get my laptops from Dell because to some extent they let you customize what chips are installed. My laptop's model is the Studio XPS 1640 w/ an Intel dual core processor @ 2.93GHz with 4GB RAM and an ATI Radeon 4670 graphics card with 1GB dedicated video memory and I can play pretty much all newer games with no problem (I can do Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 at around 40-45 frames per second on standard settings). A caevet to this though is that you will probably have to spend at least $1400-$1700 to get a laptop that is capable of this so you will have to decide whether you think it is a worthwhile investment. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Thingg (talk • contribs) 21:08, 25 November 2010

Thanks a lot for your comments. I was amazed to read the prices at the end. I looked on the Dell UK website. They have a Dell XPS 15 Laptop, with Intel® Core™ i3-370M (2.4Ghz, 4Threads, 3M cache), up to 8GB dual channel DDR3 memory, and a 1GB NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 420M Graphics Card; all for £580, which is about $915. I guess they must be cheaper in the UK? — Fly by Night (talk) 20:21, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Dell's website quotes prices before VAT; UK VAT is 17.5% (shortly to be 20%). And they don't quote shipping either. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Finlay McWalter (talk • contribs) 20:55, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Even after 20% VAT it's about $1100. I doubt they'd charge $300 for delivery. Maybe they work out cheaper because of the exchange rate or something. I don't know. — Fly by Night (talk) 22:22, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

In my personal experience, the Intel(R) 965 is even (if I don't want to say "far more") weaker than the ancient GeForce2 MX 400 with 32 MB of video RAM, simply because all Intel graphic chips are integrated. You should first check out the GPU article. But in short, integrated GPU is just a solution to cut out producting cost for non-gaming PC. They "steal" memory from your system RAM, which is much slower, and even steal some processing power from the CPU. I'm not sure 'bout this but 4 years ago, when I played Audition Online with the integrated GPU, it ran jerkily with 100% CPU Usage. But after I pluged in a GeForce2 MX 400, it run smoothly with 80% CPU load. Among all Intel integrated GPUs, only the Intel HD which is included in Core i3, i5, and i7 desktop version is quite powerful to be compared with GeForce 7 (the mobile version is weaker, about 60% speed. I can say that because I have both). In general, you should get a discrette video card for gaming. But do note that not all GeForce and ATI GPU are dedicated. The ATI Raedon HD 3200, Raedon 4200... are examples of ATI integrated solutions, even though their speed is quite good compared to Intel ones'. -- Livy the pixie (talk) 06:46, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Printing or screencapping Google News Archives scans, easily...

Is there any way to capture a ginormous news article on Google News Archive? I find it annoying to screencap three times, and stitch together the pieces, I'd love it if there was a plug-in or something. (And by ginormous, I just mean that there's more than one screen's worth.) -- Zanimum (talk) 21:17, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

This Firefox addon is what I use for that sort of thing :) ╟─TreasuryTag►First Secretary of State─╢ 21:25, 25 November 2010 (UTC)