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  1. I noticed a slowdown in my computer on Sunday. On my main drive when I went into Device Manager it was in PIO mode and when I unistalled and rebooted the computer sped up again and things seemed to getting back closer to what I am used to. One thing that seems to be happening is that I encode video from Mpeg2 to .divx with Tmpgenc Express 4.0 and somewhere along the way my hard drive goes from Ultra DMA 6 to PIO mode.

    I record video to my capture drive which is Drive D. I edit it using Womble Mpeg Video and send it to the main drive into to a folder in My Documents. I then take this video and encode it using Tempgenc Xpress 4.0 and encode it to a folder in My Docments. I have about 600gb free on that drive, but it is quite fragmented. I have Diskeeper Free Edition but it won't defrag the drive because the hard drive is too large. My capture drive which is 1.5 TB is full except for 130gb.

    I am noticing in PIO mode that things slow down quite abit and the audio on stuff I play from the C and D drives are full of crackle and seem to be overly loud.

    This computer I have is a custom built computer and the guy that built it divided my main drive at the time into three partitions one for "C: Drive", one for "My Documents" and one for the "Page File. It is a dual core computer and I remember someone wrote on here that the technician who built it had it Quad Pumped. Well back earlier in the year my computer had a meltdown and a new power supply had to be put in and the computer would no longer boot from the original drive. Part of it I think had to do with heat issues, my hard drives would run very hot, now according to speedfan they are running at 28, 31 and 31 as there are three drives. The guy that worked on the computer when it broke down installed a 1 TB drive for me and put the Windows XP Home on it for me. I had one drive disposed of it was a 500 gb one because I just didn't trust it, because I barely got my data off it before my computer collapsed. Well anyway the capture drive seemed to be fine so it went back in and original C drive was put back in and it is still in three partitions. I plan on erasing everything off of that drive, and having it departitioned and put into a hard drive enclosure and have it as a portable usb drive. The only thing stopping me is I have to figure out how to find mail messages from Outlook Express that are on that old drive and importing them into the Outlook Express that is part of my main drive now. The "Page File" is on that old drive as well and I don't know if the computer is trying to access it or not. The perplexing thing when I play video from the old drive it plays smoothly and the no sound distortions or crackles, everything is just perfect.

    When the old drive is taken out I have plans for atleast a 1 TB hard drive to go in to give me some more breathing room and perhaps make it my new capture drive and try to deal with what I have already captured. Another thing I have noticed is when I am editing video and if I send it to the old drive that it takes about a third of the time to finish the task.

    The new tech I am using gave me some advice that I should run "chk disk R" from the command prompt and that might fix any bad sectors on the new boot drive, but if the bad sector is in a critical spot where windows is then there could be problems. If it is a hard drive cable problem he has cables he can put in for me. On top of all this someone told me that the drive I have in which is a Seagate 1 TB drive is most likely a SATA drive and that they prefer the PIO mode, the model number is ST310000528AS. I also had a Windows Update that stalled this morning and the drive was in PIO mode, and after it finally finished I restarted the computer and got a black screen saying "Disk Read Error press CTRL, ALT, DELETE. and it eventually started back up but that drive is still in PIO mode.

    I will dig around and dig up links to my other recent computer problems as they might be of use in trying to figure this out. Thanks in advance for any help I get here from the other members of videohelp.
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  2. The command is "CHKDSK /R C:" Replace C: with the drive letter you want to check. CHKDSK can't check your boot drive while Windows is running -- it will ask if you want to run it the next time the computer boots.
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  3. I didn't communicate what he told me to write down correctly. Here it is:

    chkdsk C: /R

    press yes for reboot

    jagabo: Thank you for any advice you give me in this matter.


    Other threads connected to this issue:

    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/255243-Tom-Saurus-Potentially-New-Computer

    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/333875-Computer-Meltdown-Speedfan-Readings

    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/319979-Windows-XP-won-t-load
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  4. I think I am going to give the ckdsk a try I am kind of scared, as I haven't backed up what I should probably back up.
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  5. "disk read error" indicates a serious problem. Get a new cable, and run chkdsk, and if under warranty, replace it.

    If you get the read error again, after running chkdsk, replace the drive.
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  6. Chkdsk /r reads every sector of the drive. If it has trouble reading a sector and it has data in it, it attempts recover the data, move it to another sector, then marks that sector permanently bad. If there is no data in the sector it just marks it as bad. There's not much down side to running it except that it may take a few hours.

    Also run the drive manufacturer's SMART utility. It may give you more information about the problems the drive is encountering.

    A warning: once a drive starts developing bad sectors the odds are high that it will develop more shortly. Back up all your important data as soon as possible. I usually replace the drive then use the bad drive for non-critical temporary storage until I decide that it safe to use again.
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  7. Nelson37: I am letting chkdsk do is job right now and hopefully I will be able to get all my important files backed up to a portable drive, that is if I haven't screwed things up with this chkdsk proceedure. I will definetly get a new cable, and contact the other technician at a different shop where I bought that hard drive from as I just got it installed about 3 months ago, so it should be covered for a year on the warranty. I am thinking maybe if I can access the drive after chkdsk I should send the files over to that old partitioned hard drive temporarily and I think I better just get some money saved for a new desktop, maybe cheap quad core that Future Shop has reduced and have that computer for encoding and editing. I really need the money for more important things though, so I hope I can put that off. Thanks for your advice.

    jagabo: I will definetly get this drived replaced. The chkdsk is taking quite awhile, right now it is at 24 percent. I don't know if it would of been any faster if I would of switched the drive back to Ultra DMA 6 or not; I just had maybe I shouldn't keep doing that and since this is a SATA drive, maybe I shouldn't anyway. Thanks for your advice.
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  8. I doubt Seagate drives prefer PIO mode, that would be silly. I believe your drive is a Barracude 7200.12; there's a firmware update for it, check here for all the details and use DriveDetect to find out exactly what drive you have.

    You should replace all your drive's cable with one that has a locking tab. Are those temps you cite from when the drives are idle or churning away? I don't know if you have any kind of drive cooling in there, but when the drives are working hard they'll get hotter. Some form of cooling is always better; it could be just a fan taped in front of the drive tray. A little nicer is a cooler like this one, if you have the space. A better one, good for 3 drives, but you need 2 spare 5 1/4" slots.

    Instead of running ChkDsk you should run Seatools to test your drive's condition, besides you have to do that to get an RMA from Seagate. As an added bonus when you run the deep scan function, any bad sectors will be relocated along with all readable data. You might also want to give CrystalDiskInfo a try, it's a nice HDD monitoring tool.

    As for your defragging problem, try SmartDefrag. Also, you can use Defraggler to defrag individual files instead of doing for the whole drive.

    If you're using Outlook Express get KLS Mail Backup (works with other mail clients too) to copy and transfer your mail. You can try PicoBackup as an alternative.

    If you're using Outlook (from Office) get Easy2Sync or Safe PST Backup.
    Last edited by nic2k4; 29th Jun 2011 at 11:27.
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  9. nick2k4: Thanks for all this information. At the moment chkdsk is at 37 percent, but hopefully I will be able to back up my files when it is done. I have talked to the new technician and he seems to have quite an extensive knowledge. The other guy at a different shop where I bought the computer didn't know what PIO mode as told me that intermittent problems would result in the manufacture doing a test and sending it back. So to avoid that hassle I am not going to pursue it. If the new technician can find any use of me keeping the drive then I will have it put in a case and turned into a USB drive. I am going to have the guy take a look at the fans inside to make sure that things are cool enough and that existing fans are still performing well. The hard drive that was going to be a USB backup drive will be my new boot drive. My Speedfan specs are in a link above in one of previous posts, they are several snapshots of the results under differing conditions. Here is a link:

    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/333875-Computer-Meltdown-Speedfan-Readings

    The problem with Outlook Express is buried on that old drive in the Outlook Express program files, is some correspondance I want to save and then bring back into my current Outlook Express. I still have windows program files on the old partition drive and the only reason why haven't deleted the whole things is the hope I can extract those emails and archive and then bring them back if need be. No programs run off of that old drive anymore and I think that this old correspondence might be in the Outlook Express program folder somewhere.

    This chkdsk thing might drag on for days at the rate it is going. I probably should be patient and let it do its job. I wonder if the PIO mode is slowing it down. As long as I can save my data at the end I don't care how long it takes. I am glad I bought that PVR, I can let it take up the slack while my computer is down. I really think this new technician knows his stuff and will be able to get to the root of my computer problems. I thankful for everyone's advice thus far, and I am grateful for additional advice if it comes along as well.
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  10. Obviously, it's a hassle if you have to remove the drive from your PC to send it away and wait for a replacement to come back. Seagate doesn't say what the firmware update fixes for the 7200.12 drives, but judging from the talks on different forums it might have to do with the drives falling to PIO mode without reason. They had a major problem with the 7200.11, after streaming media the drives would disappear from the BIOS.

    Updating the firmware on those is pretty trivial, first run Seatools to make sure everything is Ok with the drive. While you're there, write down the model and serial number and the firmware rev. level or just run DriveDetect, then download and run the correct firmware.

    As an Outlook Express user you definitely should get an email backup program, OE's dbx files get corrupted easily and then you can't access your account. You should be able to point any backup program to a dbx and load it or you can try Smart Email Recovery. Undbx is also pretty good, but treats deleted messages a little harshly.

    Just curious, what's the name of that computer place you like?
    Last edited by nic2k4; 29th Jun 2011 at 19:44.
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  11. If your post times are accurate and you got 13 % in 3 hours, hang it up, the drive is crap. Get a warranty replacement and do not waste any time trying to use the drive.

    It hasn't been mentioned but it is possible for chkdsk to FUBAR the drive, mainly it will split unreadable files into lots, and lots, and lots of little chunks. Sometimes, these files can be read and copied with only fairly minor data errors, that is BEFORE they are split into lots of little pieces.

    Western Digital Caviar Blacks. If I'm buying for me, or for a customer who wants the best, these are the only drives I purchase.

    Did you replace the cable? Very cheap and very fast, and just maybe could eliminate the problem.
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  12. nic2k4: Thank you very much for the additional information. It is very kind of you to go to all this effort and I appreciate it.

    Nelson37: I am currently at 45 percent. I think I get a percent every 20 or 30 minutes. I will look into the caviar black hard drives. I think I started around 10:00am eastern time this morning with the scan. I am willing to wait until tomorrow afternoon and if it isn't done by then I will give up. I don't think I will bother trying to get my money back, and take the loss. If it is truly screwed up, I will just give it to the new tech to dispose of, as in Ontario, Canada they charged fees for the disposal of electronic waste, once or twice a year they give you a day to throw it away without the fee at a certain drop off spot, but that is months away; I imagine the tech keeps various electronic junk to dispose of all at once. I am hoping I can get my files all backed up, and, I trust that I will get Womble Mpeg Video Wizard, Tmpgenc Xpress 4.0, my internet and the Hauppauge 150 working again after I get the new hard drive. Thank you for your additional advice.
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  13. No problem. Don't worry about the eco fees, they charge you a fee when you buy not when you dispose. You can just take your old electronics to Staples.
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  14. Originally Posted by Tom Saurus View Post
    This chkdsk thing might drag on for days at the rate it is going. I probably should be patient and let it do its job. I wonder if the PIO mode is slowing it down.
    Yes, PIO mode is very slow and consumes a lot of CPU time (but it doesn't show up in Task Manager). On some computers PIO runs as slow as 3 MB/s. The best I've seen is something like 15 MB/s Compare that to 30 to 120 MB/s for a normal SATA drive. Switch to UDMA and start over unless you're nearly done.
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  15. aBigMeanie aedipuss's Avatar
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    windows switches to pio when the error count reaches a certain level for an ide controller. if you search the net you will find directions to hack the registry to help stop it from slowing to a crawl. since it's a reg hack i won't put it here and the usual warnings apply.

    PIO mode is enabled by default in the following situations:
    ...
    For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.
    In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.
    Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).
    ...
    --
    "a lot of people are better dead" - prisoner KSC2-303
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  16. nik2k4: Thanks for the additional advice.

    jagabo: The scan complete and it took somewhere between 22 and 23 hours. When I came in after checking it several times this morning at a later time, the desktop screen was up. I went through the procedure to switch the drive to Ultra DMA 6 mode and then launched defraggler, as I thought it would be a good idea to defrag the drive. Then I launched FireFox while it was defragging, intending to post to this thread, and I noticed I hadn't launched speedfan. I then went out to the kitchen was gone for about 5 to 10 minutes and when I came back my desktop was minus defraggler running, FireFox and the speedfan number was gone was gone from the tray near the clock. I think the computer restarted itself for some reason and the drive had reverted back to PIO mode. One day a few months back I was doing something on my computer and it just shut itself down and restarted and it kind of aggravated me because I was capturing some video at the time; I didn't think much of it and it hasn't happened again until today. I think I should backup everything and take it up town Monday to have the technician work on it. I definitely want to get new cables in, a fan to cool the motherboard a bit more.

    I also have to figure out why my computer doesn't like more than one usb device plugged in at once. I find when I plug in a USB hard drive, and the hard drives, have their own power cables and lets say another USB hard drive or a thumb drive, that the drives just won't work properly until their is just one plugged in. It is kind of perplexing because at my friend's place he has a computer and just a few weeks ago his 500gb USB drive was nearly full and I helped copy everything over to a 1.5 TB hard drive, so that he had it backed up and he can add more files to the 1.5 TB drive because the capacity is there to do so. It took awhile as they are USB 2.0 but there was no conflict like that with his computer and USB drives. I don't know if that has any connection to the main issue with my computer though. My work around is to transfer files from the USB drive to a hard drive in my computer and then shut down the USB drive and plug in another USB drive and then transfer the files from the hard drive to the USB drive I put in. The technician has a grasp on what the problem might be, so that is on my list of things to have done. I notice that when I transfer files to a USB drive my computer gets really slow if I am doing something else while the transfer is taking place, maybe that is normal, I don't know, or maybe it is vice versa the file transfer slows down while the computer is busy with another task.

    aedipuss: I found this when doing a google search that is from Microsoft Windows unless it a site pretending to be Microsoft Windows:

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817472

    So I think my best bet is to start transferring files off this drive to prepare for a new drive or for this one to be wiped and the OS installed again. I definitely want to have new cables put in, I don't know if the technician has the locking ones or not. I hate to start all over again, but sometimes it is necessary. I just thought of some hard drive space I have available, my old computer has 2 drives that are nearly empty, I could use that as temporary space to store files on.

    Thanks everyone for your additional advice. I will be back shortly with a screenshot of the my hard drive that shows all my hard drives seem to Seagates. Maybe they are all SATA drives, maybe that is where the problem lies. I tried inserting the image from the Insert Image button above but in FireFox that doesn't work for me but it works for me in Internet Explorer. I was able to upload the picture with the tool below though.
    Image Attached Thumbnails Click image for larger version

Name:	Hard Drives.jpg
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  17. If you want to get files off of that drive, Stop using it! It is defective. Avoid anything like Defrag, It can easily move good files onto a bad part of a dying drive and cause their loss. Avoid using any utilities on it including Chkdsk, You run that one the drive you have cloned the bad drive to.

    Get the Suggested Western Digital in at least the same size. Use another computer, download the WD cloning software and clone it form a boot CD.

    I see major problems that can not always be corrected after a customer tried to fix the computer themselves.
    If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.
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  18. TBoneit: I am making progress backing files up and will take the computer up next week to have it worked on. I don't know if the technician has a WD Caviar Black in stock, so I may have to wait until he does or go with a different type of drive.


    Last night I had the computer encode from mpeg2 video files to .divx files with Tmpgenc Xpress 4.0 and the mpeg2 files were on the C: Drive which is failing and I sent them to my old hard drive and when I woke up this morning and checked the files had shrunk fine, they played fine when test and the C: Drive had stayed in Ultra DMA 6 mode. But this is tempered by the fact the drive switched to PIO mode atleast twice yesterday. A good thing about this is I have 77.5 GB of video files that need to be shrunk and using TMpgenc Express 4.0 I should be able to get that down to one fifth the size maybe around 18 GB which should take up alot less room on the drive I am backing things up to. Maybe there is hope to wait on the technician to get in the WD Caviar drive, because it is a stable drive and very good quality and even if they are ten or 20 bucks more in price it will be worth it in the long run.
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  19. Originally Posted by Tom Saurus View Post
    I also have to figure out why my computer doesn't like more than one usb device plugged in at once. I find when I plug in a USB hard drive, and the hard drives, have their own power cables and lets say another USB hard drive or a thumb drive, that the drives just won't work properly until their is just one plugged in.
    Are you plugging the USB drives in the front connectors or the rear ones? The front ones have wires going to the motherboard and the connectors can have bad solder joints. Try using only the back USB ports and see if the problem goes away.
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  20. nic2k4: I will test out your suggestion. I tend to use the USB connections on the front because it is so convenient to do so. Each one works when I plug a usb device in, but if both slots are used that is when the problem arises. Thank you for your advice.


    I have been using Tmpgenc Xpress 4.0 to shrink stuff to save some room, but I better skip ahead to get stuff off the drive and replacing it quickly. I set it last night to shrink a bunch of files and it stopped shortly into the third file. The computer is freezing up or shutting programs down at certain times. I will talk to the technician this morning and find out what kind of hard drive that he has in stock. I might not have the time to wait on the WD Caviar Black hard drive.
    Last edited by Tom Saurus; 4th Jul 2011 at 10:00.
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  21. The computer seems to be getting buggier and buggier. I was just watching a YouTube video and ended up with a flash of a blue screen wtih a bunch of writing on it and then a fast restart of the computer.
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  22. Have you been paying attention to what everyone has been saying? Stop using that drive. You are digging your hole deeper and deeper. The first thing you should have done is copy everything you need onto another drive.
    Last edited by jagabo; 4th Jul 2011 at 11:29.
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  23. jagabo: I finally got everything worth saving off the drive. It was quite a process because the hard drive kept getting worse. I would get blue screens saying Kernal Install Page Error and other blue screens that read something about driver, software/hardware error and that it was dumping physical memory. I have a friend who is taking me up town and I will be dropping it off at the technician's shop. I will have to make due with whatever hard drive he has in stock.
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  24. The best solution was given by TBoneit in post 17 -- stop using the drive and clone it from a boot CD. That way you would have a new drive with a copy of the OS and all your applications that you could just use as your boot drive. If for some reason that new drive wouldn't boot (ie the original drive was already too corrupt), at least you have a copy of everything on the original drive. Of course, you need the new drive before you can do that.
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  25. A friend took me up today and we dropped the computer off for the technician to work on. I cleared everything off the boot drive that I wanted to save. If my Tmpgenc DVD Author 3 and Tmpgenc Xpress 4.0 install back on alright along with the Hauppauge 150 and Womble Video Editor alright then it just a matter of getting Outlook Express set up again with my ISP then I haven't much to complain about. I think the drive is corrupt and it may be best to start all over. The technician wasn't there today which was disappointing, I was told he would be back tomorrow. I put my Windows XP Home disc and the Intel driver discs in the box with the computer and a note of what I want checked out. I told him in the note that my capture drive is working fine and to make sure nothing gets erased off of that. My old boot drive is split into 3 partitions and I want that combined back into one; it is my oldest drive and seems to be fairly stable and it is only 250mb in size so I just want it for storage. The drive that is failing is my new boot drive, and I suppose I will accept whatever drive he has to put in there; I can't wait around for the real good quality drive the WD Caviar Black. The technician was going to test the ram for me to find out if there are any problems. I will feel better about the process once the technician is back; I am putting my faith in this guy to fix the computer and from my conversations with him he seem to know what he is doing.

    I want him to fix the Hauppauge timestamp issue, as even with detailed instructions I couldn't manage that.
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  26. If the failing drive was reasonably new it was probably still under warranty. If it was a retail drive most drive manufacturers will ship a replacement drive in advance if you provide a credit card number (in case you don't send the bad drive back). That would have allowed you to clone the bad drive onto the new one before it got so bad it wouldn't boot anymore. OEM drives have to go through the OEM who may have different policies. Something to consider next time.

    What's the Hauppauge timestamp issue?
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  27. jagabo: Thank you for your advice. Here is a link to the a topic I launched about the Hauppauge timestamp issue:

    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/322030-Hauppauge-150-Odd-Problem-With-Capturing
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  28. The technician is diagnosing the computer. It may be a BIOS, motherboard or chip issue. One thing the technician discovered in that the SATA drives were in the wrong order. He seems to know what he is doing and it looks like I may have to get a new computer if the cost is too much for fixing this one. I want to stick with this one and get a new one maybe next year if possible. I will get back to this thread when I know more.
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  29. Originally Posted by Tom Saurus View Post
    jagabo: Thank you for your advice. Here is a link to the a topic I launched about the Hauppauge timestamp issue:

    https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/322030-Hauppauge-150-Odd-Problem-With-Capturing
    I packed SHS's four reg scripts into a zip file (attached). I think you need to run TimeStampIssue1=0 and TempStampIssue2=1. But all four are there in case you need them.
    Image Attached Files
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  30. jagabo: Thank for the timestamp fix; it was kind of you to provide that file. I will be happy to apply the fix.

    I sure hope there is life in my old computer yet. It is about 5 years old now as it was built in 2006. I know I have to get a brand new one at some point, but I hope this computer will work for years to come, I guess I will find out the answer to that sometime tomorrow. I am so used to video capturing stuff, editing and encoding I tend to miss it. I really like the good quality video files that the Hauppauge 150 provides.
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