Reflux

I really really would recommend spiceworks. The interface is very nice and I had a much easier time setting it up compared to Zenoss. If you really don't want ads then you can pay $20 a month ($220 a year) to get rid of em (the ads aren't very intrusive though), since its for work I'm sure you can find $220 somewhere.

I current have 3 1TB hard drives in a raid 5 configuration. I am wondering if it is possible to expand my raid volume with another 1TB hard drive without having the recreate my volume. I have the Intel ICH10R controller and Intel does say that Capacity expansion is not supported by it but I saw a forum post that said this can be done (they didn't say how). Any ideas? Gonna be a paid to find a place to backup almost 2TB of data.

Does anyone know a good book to get me started with coding USB HID drivers for Windows. Mainly what I want to eventually do is to create drivers for the ps3 controller for 64bit vista.

Why not just get a cardbus adaptor and use a cheap cardbus wifi card. Also the Alfa Network one Vako recomended isn't that expensive its around 50bucks.

If you are already in your 3rd or 4th year don't bother switching out, it will just be a waste of time and money. Also you say mechanical engineering isn't really hands on, well I'm not sure how many years you've been in college but if you just started it could be just your core classes, you won't get deep into anything the first year of college. Also I don't think IT is what you are looking for, that really isn't taking apart things and building stuff either (at least that is what i think, correct me if I'm wrong). You might be looking more into Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering, probably Electrical Engineering that's more focused on creating electrical circuits and stuff like that. Computer Engineering is more chip design and they also create software and firmware for chips so you need to like programing.

What im trying to say is just get any old thermal paste. Arctic Silver 3 will be fine though I don't think they sell them anymore.

Honestly the ceramic based thermal paste that comes with the cpu cooler will be fine. Unless you plan on overclocking the stock fan and thermal paste that comes with intel cpus will be fine. And if you do plan on overclocking the stock thermal paste that comes with aftermarket coolers will be fine also. It is more effective if you keep the air around your computer cool. Also cpu are built very resilient and all now have safety measures to prevent overheating. But if you insist on getting thermal paste why not bling out your pc with some IC Diamond 7 carat :P. No seriously carbon has very good thermal conductivity.

Actually looking into it wmp can't play video from capture cards. I'm sure ATI has software though, I know they have Catalyst Media Center for their TV tuners, not sure if it works with your card but give it a shot. Also maybe you can try Sapphire technical support. Its called ATI Multimedia Center now i guess, this link is for window XP, not sure what OS you have but you can find it under the driver section for x1900 on amd's website. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/mmc9-16.aspx

I don't see the point of using matroska, I mean i guess it would be nice since it is "open source" but its just another file they have to host and there is very limited support for matroska outside of computers. And theres really no advantage of choosing mkv over mp4. mp4 also supports multiple audio/video streams and subtitles. Plus you can stream mp4 files.

If you have vista or XP media center edititon, windows media center should be able to see it. Not sure mabye Windows Media Player too.

If orb sees it as a device it should work. But dunno Orb doesn't officially support cards without hardware mpeg-2 decoders. You might want to post this question on the Orb forums.

Its probably a VIVO card. It should appear as a capture source on w/e software you use. ATI should have software for it, I know they have Catalyst Media Center for their TV tuners.

I'm pretty sure the psp can be a host device so all you need to do is code some drivers for a flash drive.

The main issue is not really how to shut the computers down but is how to deploy it. Like I said i've been using Altiris Deployment Solution to deploy the shutdown.exe command to all the computers at night. The problem i've been having with that is that everytime when WOL doesn't work the next time a user turns on the computer the shutdown.exe script will run and they don't have the privileges to stop it. I guess ill probably just schedule it as a task on each computer.

Yea but even the local user support specialist doesn't have a DA account. Our Domain Controllers are managed by remotely by IT systems specialists.