Off Topic Forum

I have noticed that unzipping is faster than zipping... is it just me or that really is so and why? Is it because the zipped archive has instructions on how to uncompress/unarchive and when it creates the archive it does not have these instructions so it must create them?

Is this also true for other archiving/compressing standards?

Can you recommend an alternative to Winamp, that's both portable and not as bloated as Winamp?

Explain the BitTorrent network? I'm a bit confused

I'm looking to reinstall XP on my computer, as it's gotten super slow.
Anyone know how to do this?

I have three text boxes in which data has to be inserted and then via ADO.NET stored in SQL database,the three text boxes are Customer First Name,Customer Last Name and Contact Number,thus using ASCII code one has to restrict data that only alphabets are accepted in the first two text boxes and numbers in the third text box,there should also be a restriction so as to see that the maximum number of digits in the third text box is limited to 12 or 11,actually this was the work of my team member but he has run off leaving me in a fix,I am not too comfortable with this and it's become a huge pr

I own a Dell Inspiron Laptop designed for Windows ME (yeah its that old) but the harddrive is broken. I tried to run SLAX operating system by taking out the harddrive and inserting the flash drive and then turning on the computer... then i get the dreaded message:

Operating System Not Found

Its the same message i got when i first found out my harddrive broke. Does anyone have any idea how to make my laptop work, please... That, besides my windows 95 desktop which serves no purpose except to play solitare and hearts and pinball, is my only computer.

Are AutoIt exe smaller than Autohotkey exe?

It will have been 1234567890 seconds since the Unix epoch in just over a week.
$ date -d '1970-01-01 UTC 1234567890 seconds' to get the time for your time zone (for GNU/Linux).

I got an adapter for my external 2TB RAID array so I could use Firewire (it uses a 6-pin cable, laptop uses 4-pin port). I had it on a USB port previously, but now that I'm not using it, I decided to remove the USB cable from the enclosure. Well, I pulled the power cord by mistake instead.

I'm looking for a media device with the following features.

• at least mp3, vorbis, aac, and wma
• for videos vorbis, mp4, wmv (wmv doesn't matter as much)
• not too big, but it should have a reasonable screen for videos
• good podcasting support
• linux support
• hackability (eg. write apps or games for it)
• it would be nice if it suppoted WiFi

Does anyone know of a device like this?