h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The parts for my "Hackintosh" arrived about half an hour ago. The only two things I'm missing are the video card (it's lying around my living room somewhere - an nVidia 7100) and the SATA cables, as the half-price motherboard had no cable pack with it. I have a set somewhere, but I can't remember where at the moment.

As soon as I finish eating lunch I'll put together what I have.

Are computer planet any good, they answered my question knocking loads off the price, which is what I thought anyway.


Dear Customer,

Thank you for your question on saved quote number 14590.

Our reply:

Only way to make this faster would be to lower the VGA card to 512 MB model which would have higher clock speed but less video memory but for what you are doing you wouldn't take advantage of 1 GB video memory so you would better going for a faster card with 512 MB video memory.

We’ll keep your quote saved until 11-08-2008

Remember, you can log in at any time and review your quote, change any item, ask more questions and place an order. We sent your login details in a separate email.

In the meantime, if you need any more information, get in touch by email [email protected] or telephone (0161 660 9150, Monday to Friday 10am–6:30pm).

Dont forget during this month we are offering FREE delivery with every PC sold.

Kind Regards,

I don't know them, I'm afraid.

Just nipping out to the computer shop round the corner... I discovered I can get an nVidia 8400GS which is double the speed of my 7100 for £23. I'll also blow £4 on SATA cables to save myself days of searching.

My nearest computer (non rip-off) shop is 23 miles away. Have you done it yet.

Dell do a nice 2.8Ghz 2GB 800hz thing with operating system and wide screen and speakers for £440. I don't believe it.

It's half-built. I had to nip out and scrounge a couple of Molex-to-SATA power adapters.

Must be done by now, exactly how do you make a Hackingtosh.

You build a PC, making sure all the parts are on the "Hackintosh compatability list", then you install a hacked copy of "OSX Leopard".

http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.5.2

It's built and seems to be working fine. I'll post a photo when the glue dries. (I had to make a couple of cosmetic changes - the big blue power light HAD TO GO. )

Well, I can find how to partition a hard drive that already has XP on it, but cannot find partitioning for new ones.

Download this:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gparted/gparted-live-0.3.7-7.iso?modtime=1215010676&big_mirror=0

Burn it as an image to CD, then boot from that CD. Good luck.

Got it saved and ready.

My pc went pip pip pip, this morning

I downloaded what I thought was a free Flash video maker, 36MB downloaded in 3mins, good job because it was crap. MPlayer and its bits could do no more than windows own stuff, and couldn't save anything let alone .swf.

Do you know of any free animation applications that will save as .swf.

I got a sound plugin, WMP and Quicktime are great, but not on most peoples pc's. Their universal playlists are not recognised by my pc or server and as such only good for one song. Besides you have to somehow detect their presence to load the correct object.

I found a way by trickery to get the right one up according to browser which worked in M$ and Fx but non others, this method could not pass validation however.

So I have a flash plugin, like I said flash is great.

"Do you know of any free animation applications that will save as .swf."

Not off the top of my head, but when I was "doing" Flash this site was a Godsend: http://www.flashkit.com

Have a look around there and see what links you can find. If a product is any good, someone will have reviewed it.

Bizzarely, the second I posted that I got an email advertising this:

http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?area=products&product=max_mini

I have an old version of "Swish" that I occasionally use to create wibbly text etc. in Flash - it works well.

This new version has a free trial so you can find out if it does all the stuff you need, and is only about £35 to buy a full license as long as you get it in the next few days. ("Limited time offer", but they don't say for how long. I assume the time starts today, though, as that's when they sent the email...)

It's a bit cheaper than Flash, I might try do do what I want in javascript, it is only a matter of hiding divs, and setting up a stream or input object on a timer.

I better watch the bandwidth now I put some music on my site, 200MB has been downloaded in one day.

I never expected that or spam through form mail. How do they do that.

I can't see anything about an input/output object in javascript.

What I want to do:

Download some images say n of them using the Image object;

Check speed of download;

Check for EOF;This is the end of Files.

Set a marker using addListener; for next download;

When downloaded start animation when previous animation ends;

When marker reached check speed of download,

Check for EOF;

ect ect

Sorry, not my area of expertise. Lets hope others are still following this thread...

I'm not bothered about that at the moment; my modem is reporting 3584Kbps downloads and 1.5GB downloaded while I was in the bath and browsers closed.

Am I going crazy, it's only a 2.8Mbps modem, and 1.5GB seems a lot when traffic reported in security only amounted to 80KB.

What's your Operating System? Could it have been downloading updates in "idle time"?

That's a lot of updates, and it's still doing it, well at 10p per excess Mb I should be owing about ting ting cash register £1500 this month.