ares35

so, tom's swings-and-misses... again?

i personally bought them. no i don't have money. didn't then either. they were about $200 each, just prior to when vista started shipping (they were on sale). ram was upgraded from scrap, so was one of the video cards and one of the cpu (they were both originally windsors)--the other was bought new for ~$50 in late 2008 or so.

i have a couple dual core athlons (windsor and brisbane athlon 64 x2) at the office from that era. they are still used, even. have 8gb ddr2, dvdrw, and dx10-capable geforce cards.

and this is why i refused to give you my social back when i lived in your service area and had a land line installed.

just put a big pillow 'on' the external hard drive.

i think they're limited to apple, fire or roku devices for the siriusxm support (which is still a relatively new feature of that service).

i hadn't considered a splitter or extractor yet because they're very much hit-or-miss on quality and whether they actually work as described.

does anyone have any suggestions for an audio extractor they know will work with netflix, prime, and siriusxm without any glitches or 'protection' (hdcp) issues and one of those streaming devices? total budget would probably be around $100 max for both items.

the monitor does not have audio pass-through. that is what sent me here to ask for other ideas.

my vizio has been stuck on a tos update acceptance screen since about the time of the recent roku shit. i haven't had the time to deal with it, so it's just been turned off.

apple does 'support' their hw better, it's just that it's a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better--much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they're far more important than users or the planet.

i do edit photos and video on a 15 year old desktop. yea, it's not as fast. it even still only has mechanical hdd. it works. i really don't give a shit how long it takes to encode. it can sw encode hd h264 in 'real time' (sw giving better quality output and at a smaller file size than the faster gpu encoding), that's good enough for me. it does everything the much newer system i've been able to use recently at the office can do--it's just slower at some things.

but I just don't get who was using it.

way more than you realize. i've been supporting home users and small businesses for thirty years. i run into wordpad users frequently.

wordpad has always been gimped to keep it from taking any sales away from word. if microsoft wasn't worried about wordpad, they would have tossed a spellchecker into it back in the 1990s (when wordpad replaced write) and it would, ya know.. still exist (in upcoming versions of windows).