We have a two-screen DirectX application that previously ran at a consistent 60 FPS (the monitors' sync rate) using a NVIDIA 8400GS (256MB). However, when we swapped out the card for one with 512 MB of RAM the frame rate struggles to get above 40 FPS. (It only gets this high because we're using triple-buffering.) The two cards are from t...
This isn't a strictly programming related question but I think it pertains to programmers since we don't want to lose our stuff to a thunderstorm. I've had a bit of bad luck lately with my PC (hard drive went bad, memory went bad) and although things have settled down (bought new hard drive, bought new memory) I'm still a little paranoi...
A Sprint cellular modem plugs into a laptop - often the PCMCIA slot. To connect, the user opens a program called the Connection Manager. This program has a menu option to display the serial number and phone number of the modem that's currently inserted. Does that imply that the serial/phone number of the modem could be available to othe...
My project has some money to spend before the end of the fiscal year and we are considering replacing a Sun-Fire-V490 server we've had for a few years. One option we are looking at is the CoolThreads technology. All I know is the Sun marketing, which may not be 100% unbiased. Has anyone actually played with one of these? I suspect it...
EMC is marketing Solid State Flash Drives and my project is thinking about moving that direction in the future. Does anyone have any experience with replacing traditional disk storage with flash drives? Besides price, have you experienced any downsides to the technology? ...
I am about to buy a notebook and I am between the MB or the MBPro any recomendation? Other Stuff is Presentations and Word Processing ...
To make things easier when switching between machines (my workstation at the office and my personal laptop) I have thought about trying an external hard drive to store my working directory on. Specifically I am looking at Firewire 800 drives (most are 5400 rpm 8mb cache). What I am wondering is if anyone has experience with doing this ...
I loved this post by ScottGu which made me think a bit about Hard drive speeds and how it is linked to Visual Studio performance. Since it is a bit older post, I would like to hear from you (serious programmers) if you bought any laptop recently with the same ideas. Is it worth using Solid State drives? Should I go for 64-bit? I am a ...
We're planning to set up a XEN virtualization server using Ubuntu. I'm looking for any recommendations with regard to what to watch out for when buying hardware for the system. Some information about our planned usage of the system: The server is going to host 4 or 5 instances of a Linux/Apache/MySQL/J2EE stack. Each of those instances...
Coming from a Mac background, I've never really spent much time tinkering with / assembling / tweaking my own computer beyond occasional RAM upgrades and swapping out hard disks. I feel like I have a good grasp on how a computer works at a conceptual level, CPU, bus, memory etc, but I haven't really got much practical experience in putti...
What is the proper way to dispose an old hard disk which contains my source code and other intellectual property? I was about to throw it away in the recycle box but thought better to check it with SO users first. ...
I want to mount a USB drive, two of them and I need two different mount points. Unfortunately, the Linux kernel underwent a name change and I can't figure out which /dev location is the right one. Is there a way to look through dmesg or /proc or somewhere else to find out which device node is a USB drive. (I'm using ArchLinux if that he...
We have a small embedded system without any video or serial ports (i.e. we can't output text via printf). We would like to track the progress of our code through the initialization sequence. Is there some simple things we can do to help with this. It is not running any OS, and the hardware platform is somewhat customizable. ...
My primary development machine at work is a laptop. I currently run with two monitors, which the machine natively supports (an external monitor connected via the laptop's VGA or DVI port, plus the laptop's own attached screen). I'd like to add a third monitor to my setup. What are some good hardware solutions for adding a third monito...
How do I tell my boss, that I need endless cpu power to automate my daily job? By the way, what's your setup, now in sep, 2008. How fast disks? How much memory? How many cores? How big screen? (Ok, what the hell are you doing, you may ask. I'm working in multiple environments, vmware. Have couple of build-systems running, for comp...
I'm looking for an off-the-shelf 8-bit processor module or even an entire hardware platform you used in a design. You used this product and essentially put your software on it. If you could mention the processor type and vendor it would be great. A small summary of the platform characteristics would also be great (e.g. 2 serial port, 1 1...
I'm looking for a website that can help me find the best new hardware options to build a new computer. I'm looking for reviews and features. Edit: Thanks for all the good advice. I went with ars technica for most of the hardware advice, it lead me to NewEgg products. I'm looking for a good idea for a fairly cheap custom case for the ...
I have a system where I have multiple keyboards and really need to know which keyboard the key stroke is coming from. To explain the set up: I have a normal PC and USB keyboard I have an external VGA screen with some hard-keys The hard keys are mapped as a standard USB keyboard, sending a limited number of key-codes (F1, F2, Return, +...
We have at the moment quite a few spare 19" flat panel monitors at the office. My little desktop currently only has a single video output from an on-board video card. What would be a good card to buy so I can connect 3 19" 1280x1024 monitors to my PC? (This is for programming work only, I don't need any 3D gaming support.) It seems th...
As part of our product we use 3rd party hardware and drivers. Unfortunately, these drivers aren't signed so up pops the "Found new hardware wizard" when installing or upgrading our product. Our product is web based and allows the users access to everything they need remotely, apart from this one case. Is there a registry hack or other...