Veazer

We would like to run MSOffice so that has the toolbar is in English but that recognises Thai script so we can compose documents and emails in Thai.

Does anyone know how to do this? We can get full (toolbar and text) in English or full in Thai but not mixed.

If you're running an english version of Office and you have thai text services installed, don't the toolbars remain in english when you change input language to Thai? I was not aware that the menu's and toolbars changed, I thought that was dependant on which language version of office was installed. Or maybe i misunderstand what you're saying...

You might check out the supplemental CD for Office called "Office 2003 Proofing Tools". This allows me to run spellcheck and properly format thai script, etc. on an english version of Office2k3.

Dave

...Sony's really the only power player in the market at that size. However, expect to pay through the nose for it. Fujistsu also makes one or two, and Acer might interest you...

Thats not true Fujitsu also have a range of powerful small laptops worth exploring

Same situation my way, considering the Dell XPS M1210, anyone any input on this model?

I've heard very good things about them but I haven't had hands on experience. For the size they are extremely capable - up to 2.33 Core 2Duo & 4GB ram. I've seen some very good deals at the Dell Outlet for them as well.

I can verify that TRUE cable does use PPPOE. That is what I am using. Same ZyXel Prestige modem, etc..

Do these modems have any kind of web admin page that is accessible by the end user? Mine seems to ignore http requests.

1. Many network adapters will have a property of 'Locally Administered MAC Address' or something to that effect on the advanced properties tab of the driver. It doesn't physically change the MAC in firmware or anything like that, but for that particular device installation it will be seen as the MAC address specified.

2. You should not use identical MACs on the same network as MACs are used for the traffic routing, as i understand it. Someone with a better understanding of network layers could explain this far better then I. This page HERE seems to give enough reason to avoid it: "... the majority of routers that are posed with an identical MAC address to the router will usually crash and become inaccessible, thus killing all traffic."

Sorry, I still have no clue as to what you're attempting to do here.

While it is true that you should not have two identical MAC addresses on the same network, the link you referred me to is a page on how to (take the extra steps to) BREAK a network by duplicating a MAC address, causing the router to crash. Since the chances of two devices having identical MAC addresses is astronomical, nobody setting up a network should ever need to do what you're recommending here.

What I was attempting to do is make sure there are not two identical MACs on the network. As the author pointed out, changing a PCs MAC to be identical as the router's MAC will cause the router to crash. I assumed that the reverse would be true, that is having the router clone one of the other machines MAC addresses would cause the same failure. I see now what you're saying - the router continues to use it's true MAC address internally after cloning. That would make more sense. I've always assumed that MAC cloning was much less 'intelligent' and functioned in the same way that a network adapter's MAC can be changed. I think I've been taking extra precautions that were not necessary when setting up networks...

... You'll need to then change the MAC address on the original PC via device manager so that you don't have identical MAC addresses on the same network. Make sense?

Sorry, but that last part makes no sense as it is written.

1. As far as I know, you cannot change the MAC (physical) address of a network device.

2. He will still only have two unique (PC) MAC addresses on his network. The cloned MAC address you refer to is only visible OUTSIDE the router.

Maybe I misunderstood. Can you please clarify?

1. Many network adapters will have a property of 'Locally Administered MAC Address' or something to that effect on the advanced properties tab of the driver. It doesn't physically change the MAC in firmware or anything like that, but for that particular device installation it will be seen as the MAC address specified.

2. You should not use identical MACs on the same network as MACs are used for the traffic routing, as i understand it. Someone with a better understanding of network layers could explain this far better then I. This page HERE seems to give enough reason to avoid it: "... the majority of routers that are posed with an identical MAC address to the router will usually crash and become inaccessible, thus killing all traffic."

You may need to clone your PCs MAC address in the router. My connection was setup to only allow 1 PC in the house to use the connection.

Without it, your true connection may not work because the router's default MAC address will be different from the PC they setup your connection for. After cloning the MAC address, True will see the router as the original PC instead. You'll need to then change the MAC address on the original PC via device manager so that you don't have identical MAC addresses on the same network. Make sense?

Let me know if you need more info.

One other issue might be that some Thai ISPs block bit torrent ports during the day. It's not happening with me, but I know a CSLOXINFO subscriber who has bit torrent ports blocked from 8 - 5pm, Monday through Friday.

Strangely my 1024/512 true connection seems to work the opposite. Browsing is mediocre, 1 thread downloads are hideous (5-10 KBps) but torrents are relatively fast. I can't even use skype or 64kbps radio stations on my connection anymore but torrents are fine, averaging 50-60 Kbps and some going over 100. Nice bandwidth management True! Conversely my maxnet connection was fine for most things but bittorrent was never usable.

... they asked my to give them my password for accessing my email...

OK, I just checked the site. What they are asking for is the username and password for their site, not your email, just as h20dunc suggested. After registering, your email address is used as your login for their site. Obviously, don't use the same password you use for your email.

I have received and invitation to join this website www.tubley.com. Curious, as I am, I checked this website and they asked my to give them my password for accessing my email.

Now I find this rather strange, even suspicious, because what for do they need that? I gave them a wrong one and clicked on "continue". But immediately an error message flashed "wrong password".

Is this some sort of a scheme? Does someone have any information on that web-site?

Scam. They have no legitimate reason to need a password for your account.

Are you having the same problems as Farma, and do you think there may be a correlation with how many people are online at the time, as he has suggested? Do you use it at their peak times when there are 8-9 million people online or when there are 5-6 million like when I do, ...

Skype calls are peer-to-peer, they're not routed through the skype servers. IIRC the servers are only used to maintain a db of who's online, profiles, etc. The number of concurrent Skype users shouldn't affect quality.

Maybe I'll head south to Lamphun and take advantage of that uncongested internet.

Any correlation do you think between trying out their beta and having problems? I've been burned on trying betas on other programs and will never do that again. I've been using skype since my dial-up days and it's always been pretty good, although it has gotten quite a bit bloated since version 2...

No correlation, the problem occurred before trying the beta. The beta was installed just to see if it might fix the problem, it didn't. It behaves as if skype traffic has been intentionally given low priority, very annoying. I wonder if there's any testing software that mimicks skype for troubleshooting purposes. I've got plenty of VoIP testing stuff but it's all for SIP.

I have not been having any problems and I have adsl 256/128 from Maxnet. I talked to my mother on her computer the day before yesterday and she still has dial up, and I talked to my sister's mobile phone in the US yesterday, but only for a couple of minutes. Do you have the latest version 3.2.0.163, and/or do you have the skype video activated? I do not and have never used video.

I've got 3.2.0.163 but I don't have video activated. I've tried the 3.5 beta as well.

Maybe I should go back to maxnet, True is noticeably worse anyway.

Skype has suddenly become unusable on my connection. Mostly, there is a massive delay of 10-15 seconds that was never there before but there are also some weird issues with the persons voice changing tempo.

Skype used to be able to maintain reasonable quality even when the connection was less than ideal, but now the opposite is occuring. Even when speeds are good skype suffers.

A few preliminary tests with tracert don't show anything too unusual. Anyone else having any problems?

Hi, nothing to do with id3conv. It already did a good job of converting this rubbish to unicode so that it would display correctly in Mac iTunes.

Seeing the garbaged text in the columns for Artist etc in File Explorer in XP. Not seeing anything garbled in the filename. That's all 7bit chars.

I'm sure sometimes Thai install of Windows will work as they will have everything setup for Thai but the normal western version with asian fonts doesn't work. These would have originated on a machine that was setup for a Thai. ie. the id3tags would have been populated on a machine setup for Thai.

It may well be a version of ID3 tags that windows doens't play well with. Try using MP3tag to save a different version of ID3v2 tags to your file (2.2, 2.3, 2.4) and see if there are any that windows likes.

Well after reading the glowing comments about FireFox

I want to give it a try, and I would like to use some Add Ons,

Both for viewing and security, can some one please recommend

Which Add Ons you think are a ‘’ Must Have ‘’ along with your personal favourite

One’s…

Thanks Mumbo

I have a pre-built configuration of FireFox Portable for people who are interested such as yourself. It's about 15 MB compressed, if you're interested I'll upload it for you. I've added some handy extensions and prettied it up with a custom skin. It's stable, portable and looks great.

They might limit speed to individual users at 512kbps while their main feed is 2048kbps (probably the max they can get). Even then if only 4 people in the building are using p2p, with lots of high seeded downloads, all the speed will be gone with all other users stuck with lower then dial up speed when trying to watch a website or check there e-mails!

You are incorrect in that someone currently using the bandwidth to a high extent will block out others that are comming online, as email-grabbing and surfing is done in spikes, and only giving them very slow speeds. Infact, every client will be alloted a proportional piece of the bandwidth and if it's slow for one, it's slow for everyone - and that would indicate that the total current available bandwidth is too small.

I've encountered many scenarios in agreement with what Monty is saying. An improperly managed connection simply allots bandwidth proportionally per connection rather than per user. If someone has 80+ P2P connections your web surfing and email will suffer because they will control far more of the bandwidth.

The bandwidth should be managed as you noted, but often isn't.

FYI I'm seeing garbled text. Not Squares. That's what I'd see on my ipod for these tracks but these tracks aren't for my ipod. I'll try changing the desktop font later. I'm guessing that's what Explorer in XP uses.

Don't bother changing the font, if you're seeing garbled letters than the font is probably not the issue. BTW, exactly where are you seeing garbled letters - in the filename or the actual ID3 tag or both? Remember that ID3conv converts tags to unicode, not filenames.

Try this test..

• Download and run 'XTIS620.exe' from HERE.
  
• Copy some of the garbled text and paste it into that app.
  
• Press '--> Unicode'
  
• Highlight and copy the result* and paste it into MS Word, etc. If you see proper thai text then the original garbled text is still TIS-620 format.
  

*For reasons I will never understand, the author of this app seems to have chosen Arial as the working font for this app and thus it can't display thai characters...

Another way to test would be to change the font used to display the tags or filenames to a TIS620 font such as THIS. Likewise, if they display properly with that font then the text is still TIS620 and not unicode.

It could also be the 'wrong' ID3 tag version. Not all ID3v2 tag versions are supported in some apps.

So I've installed the language support for Thai via regional options in XP but when I look at some thai mp3's they thai script still displays as garbage.

Now I know that these are encoded using the Windows Thai charset because i've used id3conv to convert them to unicode so they show up correctly in iTunes.

Why can't Windows Explorer display them correctly if I've setup thai fonts correctly in XP. You only have to click the checkbox for Thai right to install the language/font support? I would then expect XP to be able to display these correctly.

Are you seeing squares instead of characters or garbled text? If squares, it's likely that the font used to show titles in your media player doesn't have thai characters. Many apps use whatever font has been selected as the desktop icon font. Try changing to Tahoma, Microsoft Sans Serif (not MS Sans Serif) or another font with thai script. Arial & Verdana do not have thai characters.

You can check if a font has unicode thai characters by loading 'charmap.exe' and changing the character set to "Windows: Thai" under "Advanced View". If you don't see thai characters on this setting, the font doesn't have unicode support for them. If you see thai characters before specifying thai characters but not after then you have an older TIS-620 font.

There is no reason, in terms of OS capabilities, for Microsoft to make this software Vista-only. What a typical MS maneuver. I'm tired of MS trying force new operating systems on users with this tactic of making windows add-ons incompatible with older OS versions. They usually wait longer before they start crippling their software this way, but now it seems they already making the switch. It just makes them look desperate and pathetic.

Last night I reached a new low in Max net speed.

Download..............16kbps

Transfer rate............2kbps

I pay 4,500 a month for this.

This morning was ok again 854/106, but the whole weekend was around the 60/7 mark. Is there anyway I can complain about this service, or am I dreaming again like when I complained to I.P. star?

My neighborhood as a whole had maxnet speeds this low. Complaining individually nothing happened but one neighbor went house to house looking for maxnet customers and found that everyone was having the same issue. We sent a group email signed by all, including phone numbers and this actually got them moving. I sent you a PM for the contact at maxnet we eventually got ahold of. He seems to be able to get issues solved much faster than the standard support calls.

FYI, I made the switch to True thinking that my speeds might improve but they are far worse than maxnet. Support people respond quicker and are friendlier, but they don't get anything done. My chiang mai to bkk speed is often under 500 kbps (1024/512 connection), so even domestic internet is severely overloaded with True imho.

EDIT: @fft100, i have sent a pm to you as well.

My guess is that windows is using the pagefile aggressively due to low memory. Download filemon and run it run for 10-20 seconds or so to find the culprit.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...kutilities.mspx

Good post, but a couple of minor corrections. Technically, the MPEG specifications are video codecs, not containers. Well, technically MPEG-TS and MP4 are containers, but that's not being discussed here. A container format can contain various encoded data that it identifies and mixes together. That's how VCDs/DVDs can have subtitles, etc. since the MPEG doesn't address that except for closed caption in NTSC. You can use all sorts of container codecs and keep the MPEG encoder. AVI, OGG, VOB, etc. are all popular formats that can use MPEG.

good points. I was basing the container statement on this wiki as I wasn't sure myself. I guess technically .mpg files would be considered a stream, yeah? I didn't know VCDs could have subtitles other then those encoded into the video itself though, interesting. As for TS files, so far my experience with them has been a royal pain, lots of sync issues.

You also touched on re-encoding the clips, I understood you but want to emphasise that encoding one lossy compression to another is usually not a good idea. Also if his player supports divx, that's what quite a few of the mp4 files are encoded in, it is a better idea to keep those. MP4 is not dvd, but the next stage of compression.

As soon as h.264 gets accelerated to the point that it's usable to encode at, i.e. 1/2 or less of real time, that's what everyone should move to. Getting files that are 1/2 the size of mpeg-2 with the same quality if fabulous.

I agree about lossy to lossy conversion, but sometimes it's unavoidable unless you've got a player that really works well with mpeg-4 video, especially at non standard resolutions. I assumed his didn't since that would be rather simple to burn the videos to a cd.

I haven't done any h.264 encoding but i've got a few HD mkv files that look fantastic. fun stuff

VCD movies are usually in AVI format. SVCD movies are usually in MPEG 1 format, and are better quality videos Because of that, MPEG 1 vidoes are much larger than the AVI files. MPEG 2 was created to be even higher quality that MPEG 1, but with additional compression to make them as small as possible. Even with the additional compression the extra quality meant the creation of the DVD disks which can hold much more data than the CD disk.

MP3 video didn't really take off, but the audio component created an MP3 revolution.

VCDs use a file structure similar to mpg containers but with the extension .dat and some extra stream info and error correction data. They are never avi files by extension or structure.

SVCD movies use MPEG2, not MPEG1, a more efficient codec which allows them increase horizontal resolution a little and double the vertical resolution to native resolution (576 PAL / 480 NTSC)

You can find a quick comparison of the most common video disc formats here.

For the sake of clarity (I know you didn't state it explicitly) - MP3 is not MPEG-3 but rather MPEG1 layer 3, the compression scheme largely responsible for making music downloads and uploads manageable as you noted. Mpeg-3 video didn't take off because it never really left the lab..

Finally DIVX or MPEG 4 is compressed even more than MPEG 2. Often you can convert an MPEG 2 movie from a DVD and fit it on a CD in MPEG 4 format. It's a matter of opinion if you can do that and not notice the difference.

Compressed to a single CD, the difference will be noticeable but less so on a conventional TV. But, yes, it looks pretty d*mn good considering how much less space it takes up.

@farangsay, i think you'll get better results if you don't join video clips into a single file but instead use a video disc format with some type of menu system so they'll be more accessible. The quality will likely be better since they won't all be force to become the same framerate, etc. If I were you, I would see if you can play SVCDs on your player and if so then use that. It's a nice compromise of size vs quality and doesn't require a DVD writer You can find more info about SVCD authoring here. doom9.net is also a fantastic source of info for video encoding discussions and software.

Nero CD/DVD burning software with the mpeg2 plugin is an easy solution for SVCD creation. Just drop your videos in, create a menu & burn. You don't have lots of control over the menu appearance but it works fine.

I would use YPOPs! to make your yahoo webmail appear as a normal pop3 mail server to email clients and then use Mozilla Thunderbird portable version as the email client which runs well from a usb drive. If i remember right, YPOPs runs fine as a portable app and the YPOPS folder can be copied from c:\Program Files to your usb drive.

Good luck.