Thomas

Generally if something has a driver for XP, it will work in w2k. It's the same basic kernal, with a few minor changes, and most drivers don't care. The major differances in the two come at the bundled app, and shell layers.

SCSI is pricey, but it's advantages over IDE have gotten smaller and smaller. And with RAID, you can get something equal in stability, with less cost.

A well set up raid is worth the cost and then some.

Heck, if you think we have broadband everywhere you should check out S. Korea... With XP Home, I'm not sure the stability trade off is worth it. But YMMV.

*grins* If you need/want server grade HDD's use RAID. Being able to hot swap a new disk in to replace a failed drive and watching the RAID card rebuild the drive is pure joy. Plus having 1TB of storage is just cool.

So the system is using an auto-format? I apologise, I haven't had a chance to play with a high-end dvr.

We use XP PRO here for machines we send out. XP Home should pretty much be avoided at all costs for all users. It's not worth the money you save. For those who wonder what the differance is, XP Home had a number of networking and higher end features removed from it. And this can cause all kinds of minor annoyances. Just out of curiousity, which codecs did you have a problem with w2k? And with our app, we just freeze live video and that generally steps down CPU usage enough.

It does matter if the drive is formated or not. If you take a raw, unformated drive and put it in there, at best it won't recognize it. Software has to be able to recognize/read/write to the file system. Usually this is done with drivers. It may happen that certain systems can read/write to raw, but that would be the exception rather then the rule.

Do you mean Transmeta? They make x86 compatable chips, but they aim for the low power, low heat market.

I personally perfer W2k for building systems when I know there will be heavy CPU load. Window's XP has a lot of graphic's cruft that take up a few percent of CPU usage. For most users it's not a big deal, but it can be a problem when you're running 90% usage. YMMV.

The fast way is to open the box and look on the board itself. If anything has VIA on it then it's a VIA chipset.

We had a client who needed to keep one of our systems somewhat more physicalically secure then Windows normally allows. Some things to keep in mind. If someone has physical access to the box, you can't keep them out. You can slow them down, you can annoy them, but you can't keep them out. Removing the inputs isn't a bad idea, but rember that wireless inputs are interchangable. Most companies bluetooth keyboards will work with any reciver. Same with mice. And any person can walk in with a Knopnix CD, put it in and have it boot up, they now have access to your computer. Now for remote access, may I suggest VNC rather then the remote desktop. It offers a better degree of encryption support, uses a much smaller memory footprint, causes less windows flakyness, and is open source.

They work on the main page, but on the products page only switcher and tools work. Now I'm guessing that the other links there should be making a menu expand off of them to chose the links to their subpages?

The SATA raptors are pretty nice, but might overkill for the speed. You're not going to notice much in the way of performance gain by using the 10k rpm drives. You can get these: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-151&depa=0 For about half the price, one and a half times the storage space. The drives should scream either way.

If you use the policy editor, you may want to remeber to lock the users out of the registry editor. And if you do that, make sure you keep a copy of the file to undo it.

The links on the side use Javascript to open the link. I'm guessing you're trying to make it open a window, rather then open a new page?

I'm not sure if they just aren't up yet, but the JS links on the http://www.altechvision.com/pages/products.asp page don't seem to work in Firefox.

What you want to do is go to start -> run then type "control userpasswords2". There should be a little check box there that says "users must enter user name and password". Uncheck that box and you should be good to go. However, this does not work if you're on a domain. GUI based programs don't work as a service. From what I've read, you can't make a GUI program into a service, but I've never actully tried.

http://www.bsicomputer.com/portable/pcatxr9/pcatxr9_intro.htm Not really cheaper, but in the same general range. The downside is that it's milspec. It's all lowest bidder hardware inside there and I've heard horror stories about them just not getting along with even low power PCI cards. The higher end ones also have heat problems. It's a small case with poor to alright airflow. But if you add a card you're going to make it worse. Now as far as using mineral oil for shock resistance, it works, but diesal fuel is the recomended liquid. Tom Techincal Support Video Insight

I don't know of any cases just for DVRs that are shock proof, but there is a company called BSI that makes fairly shock proof PCs. The down side is that they tend to be really flaky with any really powerful PCI cards. Tom Techincal Support Video Insight