Posted 09/26/08 at 11:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

Second Opinion is where readers respond to the Doctor, share their wisdom, correct him if he's wrong, and generally show the world what smart, beautiful people you are.

I can’t agree more with the Doctor regarding his advice to Michael Collins (June 2008) on a TiVo as the best option to extend your DVRing capabilities, especially for transferring recorded programs to a computer. The TiVoToGo feature is great. However, the Doctor’s advice regarding the FireWire ports of most cable DVRs is, as Dwight Schrute would say, “False!”

More after the jump.

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dvr, cable, fcc, tivo, ask the doctor, firewire, second opinion

Posted 09/25/08 at 05:00:00 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

In your June 2008 issue, Frank Buttell mentioned a problem with a disappearing hard drive. I have also had that problem with Vista Ultimate, except my disappearing drive was my DVD +/- RW with LightScribe. I am dual-booting with XP Pro x64 edition and Vista Ultimate (32 bit). The drive is fine in XP, but in Vista, it will randomly disappear. A restart or sometimes a disconnect and reconnect of the SATA cable will solve the problem. So something must be up. What’s going on?

Don't disappear; hope remains after the jump.

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dvd, Windows Vista Ultimate, ask the doctor, disappearing drive, dvd drive

Posted 09/25/08 at 02:00:00 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

My question regards backing up games using tools like ImgBurn and Daemon Tools. I use ImgBurn to create the ISO from a disk and Daemon Tools to mount the ISO. But for some reason, with half of my games I get the message “Please insert the original disk” when I try to run the game from the ISO. My method works with older games but not newer ones. I understand that some of these games might have some kind of protection on them preventing me from running them off an ISO, but I paid for these games and I should be able to create backups of them. Do you know how I can back up my games so they actually work?

Gotta go forward to go back, Christopher - hit the jump for the answer.

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games, backup, copy protection, ask the doctor, iso, daemon tools, imgburn

Posted 09/25/08 at 11:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

I downloaded BioShock through Steam a couple weeks ago and have had trouble getting it to run. Sometimes it will randomly crash and send me back to the desktop with a message that tells me the display driver stopped working and has recovered successfully. I have to restart the program through Task Manager to get it to run again, but I can only play 5 to 10 minutes at a time. I have an Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT in a MacBook Pro running Vista 32-bit.

Steaming-hot solutions, after the jump!

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nvidia, Valve, Bioshock, Steam, ask the doctor, paged pool memory

Posted 09/15/08 at 06:35:51 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I’m trying to upgrade my boot disc drive, which uses XP as the OS. I’d failed twice and hen turned to Norton Ghost 12 to copy my C drive to my new disc. During the clone, everything seemed to be working until about 70 percent of the way through the procedure. At that point, a message appeared stating that my computer was trying to communicate with Microsoft. After about two minutes another message appeared stating that the attempt to communicate failed. Then the computer crashed.

I had some difficulty rebooting and then found that XP failed to recognize the new disc drive. It took me some time to figure out that this drive had to be reformatted. I’ve upgraded discs before but never encountered difficulties like this. I called Microsoft and they suggested I buy a copy of Vista and rebuild from scratch. I don’t want to do this. Am I missing something?

Begun, the Clone Wars have. Answers after the jump.

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windows, XP, ask the doctor, Norton Ghost, boot, bootable cd-rom, clone, reformatting, cloning wars

Posted 09/10/08 at 09:00:00 AM by The Maximum PC Staff

I am currently running Windows XP Pro. Every time I start my computer, the first thing that appears on my desktop is a pop-up error screen. It’s a rectangular box with “system.exe -Application Error” at the top. On the bottom of the window is a red circle with a white X through it and this message: “The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000022). Click OK to terminate the application.” I don’t know what this means.

Evan's answer, after the jump!

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windows, malware, ask the doctor, pop-ups, xp pro, application error, system.exe, clamwin

Posted 09/09/08 at 04:47:48 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I have a brand-new rig that sports two WD Raptors in a mirrored array. I wanted the speed of the Raptors and the convenience of a mirrored array. But I wonder if a mirrored or striped array (1+0, 0+1, or some other RAID number) using four 7,200rpm drives would be faster than the above array. And how would the price compare?

Delicious, speedy answers for David after the jump. 

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raptor, Western Digital, RAID, hard drives, ask the doctor, velociraptor

Posted 09/08/08 at 01:36:43 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

Some time ago I purchased a Dell E1705 laptop with almost all the options. I was very happy with the laptop and its GeForce 7900 GS. It allowed me to play just about any game on the market. Everything was great until I upgraded my machine to Vista, but I can’t find any Vista drivers for my 7900 GS.

I’ve been waiting for more than a year now, and there’s still nothing from nVidia or Dell. So I was wondering: Do you know how I can get my card to work right? I would even take homemade drivers at this point if I knew where to find some! 

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vista, dell, nvidia, geforce, Drivers, ask the doctor, 7900, e1705