Matt Pollard asks: "Help! I have an Audigy. I have tried it in Windows Millennium with three sets of WDM drivers. I have tried it in Windows XP with three different sets of WDM drivers. I sent the card back to NewEgg and got a new one. I tried it with a new set of drivers in XP. I tried it in my friend's box with the new drivers. I tried it in different PCI slots. every time, a hard freeze. Creative tech support has been...less than useful." Has anyone been able to get the Audigy to work under later versions of the Windows OS? If so, what was the trick?

adpowers writes "Anandtech has a large preview of upcoming motherboards shown at Comdex." P4s dominating Athlons, lots of DDR SDRAM boards. A quite lengthy article. The FIC pages have several interesting looking PCs, I dig the AquaPad, a WinCE Transmeta box.

Keith writes: "Icrontic.com has taken apart, examined, and modified an Xbox. In their latest article, they point out some debugging leads on the Xbox, and a possible USB hack. The Xbox is looking more and more like a PC." A lot of the investigation here is incomplete; watch this space, because it won't be long until Xbox surgery is commonplace.

sphealey asks: "I have an opportunity to purchase a used disk storage array in the terabyte class (which we need) originally manufactured by a leading vendor. The price is reasonable, and the seller is offering to provide installation and a 90-day warranty with the system. The unit appears to be complete and functioning. My question is, what are the pitfalls? And which are likely to occur?

e1en0r writes "My Linux DA PDA finally arrived yesterday. It's a great PDA for under $100. I put up a review of it here. It's very similar to the Palm OS, with a few more interesting features. The most notable being the file manager. You can see where everything is and view all the files in text and hexadecimal mode. It also appears that you can overclock the 16 MHz DragonBall CPU up to 25 MHz. There are some screenshots on their site, which include the CPU Speed application. Unfortunately that application is lacking in documentation." The review is a little thin, but its still cool seeing these in the wild.

Monsta Coty Scott asks: "After reading through countless articles from techies on how to make your own gadgets from available hardware, I find myself getting a little hungry. I've turned my play station into a hand held, I've just finished turning my old computer case into a home built CD-Changer, and I'm getting ready to upgrade the linux MP3 player in my car. But I cannot get a decent suger rush to keep me going, and the cost of surge and mountain dew slurpees are eating into my electronics fund. Has anyone made a junk food machine at home, or out of parts laying around? I'm looking to build myself a Slushee machine that orders new syrup when it's running low, a cotton candy machine that warms up and turns itself on when my alarm goes off at 7am. I don't need this morning coffee, get me a slurpee and some suger and I am ready to go. Has anyone came across plans, or know the workings behind such machines? I think there's alot of unexplored territory we are missing here." I thought this was a fun one for the weekend. Who knows what crazy projects might result from this one. If any do arise, please share!

slugfro writes: "Do faster boot times and RAM that maintains memory after shutdown sound interesting? This article by a Science Magazine author details the study of utilizing the spin of electrons rather than just the charge in electronic devices (hence the name 'Spintronics'). Anyone out there researching this or have more info?" We do a story about MRAM every four months or so, and each time commercial development is a few years in the future. :)

Daniel Rutter writes "Sony's DCR-IP7 Network Handycam IP is digital. It's really small. And it's got a super-tiny one hour cassette, USB, i.LINK and Bluetooth connectivity, a Web browser, an e-mail client, and a quite long list of other features." Pricey, but interesting. The review kinda pans the device, but I still dig the idea.

Dan Guisinger asks: "I'm looking at replacing a laptop that was recently stolen and came across ASUS's new B1000 series laptop. It seams to have everything one could want, dual FireWire ports, DVD, CDRW, 15" screen, upgradable Pentium III cpu using mPGA2 sockets...it even has finger print security. My only problem while looking at the specs is the measly 1024x768 XGA resolution it supports. I am unable to find reviews on this laptop, nor most other ASUS laptops. Can anyone speak of the quality of their laptops overall? How about this particular model, has anyone seen or used the B1000?"

DJ Decepticon asks: "I've recently been given the task to determine the feasibility of tracking several hundred workstations spread out across North America using a handheld device. Requirements include having a barcode and GPS reading and inputing that information into a spreadsheet. Would a handheld device such as Palm or Handspring be able to take on such a task?" Aparently there are PalmPilot's with integrated barcode readers at Symbol.Com, however I don't know about ones that also include GPS. If anyone has used these units before, how difficult would it be to add GPS functionality? Are there other solutions?

iarkin writes "TechReview is running a very interesting article about clockless chips. Clockless, or asynchronous, chips work very much faster and consume less power than their synchronous equivalents (Intel hade some experiments on these chips back in -97, the results showed that the asynchronous chips were three times faster and consumed only half the power)."

Isamu Noguchi writes: "The Samsung Linux-powered Yopy is coming back with a fliptop screen and an odd keyboard. A developer unit is previewed at infosync." After a series of design flip-flops, changing release dates, and nice-looking prototypes, could the Yopy actually be released?

rneches asks: "I've been looking around for a Linux friendly laptop, and I've found a couple of reasonable systems. However, there really aren't any laptops out there that really meet the needs of a Linux user. In particular, most laptops are, more or less, desktop replacements. As such, they are loaded with scads of nifty features, beefy processors, and so forth. This is great, I suppose, if you are running Windows or MacOS and want a desktop replacement. If you're a Linux user, and spend most of your time in emacs windows (er, frames), most of that fancy stuff is more of a liability than an asset. In other words, I'm talking about coders, admins and other Linux hackers more than I'm talking about the 'average user'." In short, rneches is looking to find a way to build his own laptop, and if the platform doesn't exist to be able to do this, he's looking for help in creating one. Interested?

bobstaff asks: "I work for a company producing a highly technical product for export of which a Linux network is a significant part. Usually we build the Linux computers from components using some of the higher end options available (Dual 1Ghz Pentium III, SCSI disk,CD-RW,tape, 512Mb Ram, High End Video card, etc...). Occasionally we have a customer, however, who insists on having a brand name computer (eg. Compaq, HP, etc..) with support in whichever country they are from, regardless of the extra cost and decreased performance. In the past this has always caused problems, from Linux incompatible components to having to fight to get the pre-installed Windows distribution overwritten with Linux. What experiences do Slashdot readers have with buying brand name computers with international support and running Linux on them? Also can anyone recommend companies with international support producing Linux computers?"

whiplash asks: "There are regular stories on Slashdot concerning neat homebrew projects, hardware doing things nobody expects it to. I think the homebrew niche is excellent reading and wonder if there are any sites devoted to just that? Archives of articles, HOWTO's, and related material devoted to those folks that are controlling their garage doors with old serial cards and other neat things."

Spot writes "If you're a hardware junkie, then you may already know ATA133 is on it's way to becoming the new standard for drive controllers. LittleWhiteDog has a very detailed look into the Promise Ultra133 TX2 Controller and Maxtor's D740X-6L ATA133 interface drive. " And I just bought a few 100g drives :) I still find it funny that every couple years I buy new hard drives always for around $200... 120 megs, 800 megs, 2.5G, 12G, 30G, 100G. I love this.

A reader writes "In this article, just posted at LinuxDevices.com, embedded developer Jerry Epplin takes a close-up look at Sharp's new Zaurus SL-5000D Linux/Java PDA developer edition, from both a user and developer point of view. In the article, Epplin says the SL-5000D demonstrates that "Linux has reached maturity as an operating system for handheld devices", and concludes by saying "Overall, the polish and quality of integration of the environment and applications are excellent. Their documentation and support are first rate.""

Robogeek writes: "News.com reports that Fossil will launch its $145 Wrist PDA in early 2002 - "a watch that doubles as a Palm- or Pocket PC-compatible organizer." Apparently, the 190KB device will accept data imported from your PDA via infrared. But isn't this kind of redundant if you're already carrying your PDA with you? (And can't enter data directly into the watch?) Besides, what I really want is a combo phone/mp3 player/PDA watch, dammit!"

Jobe_br asks: "I've spent the past few days scouring the web, trying to put together a custom 1U system that I don't want to cost a lot (starting out), but that should be quite expandable. The 1U system I've looked at and would most like to emulate is the 1U dual processor AMD system from Einux. I've looked around and can't seem to even get close to what they're able to pack into this 1U system. My price point goal is $700 for the base system (1 Athlon MP 1GHz or more, 128MB DDR SDRAM, 1 10/100 NIC, 1 3.5" IDE drive 10G or more) and I'd like the system to be able to handle another Athlon MP, at least 1GB DDR SDRAM, up to 4 10/100 network ports, and at least 2 3.5" IDE drives. As more hardware becomes necessary, price won't be an issue, but initially, I need to stay within $700! Does the custom building Slashdot crowd have any advice?"

mkarpinski writes "ExtremeTech has posted a nice overview of the next generation of peripheral buses and interconnects including PCI-X, InfiniBand, 3GIO, and HyperTransport. From the article, "All these future interconnects and buses have a few things in common. They use packet-based, point-to-point connections; in fact, InfiniBand implements a full switch fabric. They provide bandwidth in multiples of that offered by PCI. They decrease latency significantly, with HyperTransport and RapidIO showing the most dramatic decreases, crucial for their target communications and embedded markets. And all four strive to reduce pin counts in order to conserve power and system real estate." Open the floodgates!"