OT - Excellent video file (avi mpeg etc) conversion utility

I went to a computer fair the other day and was amazed at the low prices being asked for "old" desktop machines: 2Ghz for about £20. Similar vintage laptops were around £100.

I also use SUPERc - have done for years. It isn't perfect - but it is great value for money!

IME, spyware is never that subtle. They will *promise* to install a marvellous piece of software but do no such thing. Fully fledged bits of software are just that; some company somewhere is trying to get its paid-for products out there and will use freebies to do so.

And, @Dave, as per various other messages; a desktop with a good enough spec to run modern codecs and modern software easily, costs peanuts. It doesn't even have to be particularly new; there haven't really been any great technological leaps forward in the hardware in the last 5 years. A decent lump of RAM (1GB up) is two/thirds of the battle. And running XP instead of Vista or Seven.

So, Seven no good then? I was thinking Seven to replace XP but maybe I won't bother. What's the issue?

Roy

N issue as far as I am concerned. Fedora 15 covers my needs.

7 can be a PITA on pre-Vista hardware as the hardware driver requirements are different from XP and they may not have been rewritten. 7 is fine if it does work. I had to search out audio drivers for the same chipset on later model PCs and experiment until one worked.

Those cheap second hand desktops may be value-engineered office machines which don't expand or update well. Be sure they have the type of slots you need to override the inadequate mobo video controller. That's why I mentioned the two low-end Radeon cards. Neither adds much to the drain on a possibly marginal non-standard power supply.

An example:

jsw

An OS is there to sit and watch out for keypresses and mouse movement and to draw stuff onto the screen, all for the benefit of the programs the user is running. Windows has ever more become caught up in a mixture of its own self importance, massive bloat and feature churn (ie changing stuff for the sake of it.) I loathed XP when it first came out for buggering about with the standard layout and endless pointless animation but then got to like it when I realsed it could all be turned off and look like 2000/98/95(!).

Seven is quite tiresome to use after earlier versions (I'm even getting vaguely nostalgic about Vista and that's truly awful) in that there is so much change just for the sake of it. Also stupid changes that mean that, if you turn off the poncy UI, you end up with a daft colour scheme of white on off-white for the task bar buttons and things. Then there's an odd feature of bunging new windows to the back of the stack for no good reason making you think it didn't notice a double-click.

Basically, unless you have a need for Seven or really want the latest and most spangly shiny thing, don't go there!

I can't really argue with that. My newest old PC came with 7 including Media Center, which despite its numerous egregious and confounding faults is still better than Hauppauge's execrable TV capture software. It works well with the Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner, though not (yet) with a Pinnacle 80e.

For those who cling stubbornly to Win2000 Pro, Petri has a hack to allow it to open zip-compressed folders, nearly the only real improvement in XP.

jsw