firestarter's Profile

Member since April 17, 2007

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    firestarter

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  1. Review - Recuva

    1.02.095 Beta (Jul 26, 2007)

    fast, reliable, portable, freeware, small, and from the makers of crap cleaner.

    honestly, the only bad thing about recuva is that its in beta.

  2. Review - Microsoft Windows Live OneCare

    2.0.2284.28 (Jul 26, 2007)

    hmm lets see...

    1)an AV with a detection rate barely in the 70% range.
    2) based on your computer settings, onecare will have a green shield (all systems go), yellow shield (hey, pay attention and fix something) and red (HOLY S**T, you dont have WGA installed?!)...isnt this the same thing as xp/vista's security center?
    3) bad RAM usage, and a pitiful attempt by microsoft at an in-house antivirus.

    STAY AWAY from onecare

  3. Review - Monkey's Audio

    4.01 Beta 2 (Jul 26, 2007)

    monkeys audio encoder compresses at about a 5% better rate than FLAC. unfortunately .ape files dont include support for replaygain or multichannel audio. there are also a significant number of reports that monkeys audio files become corrpted at a much faster rate than any other mainstream audio format.

  4. Review - FFDShow MPEG-4 Video Decoder

    20070710 rev1349 (Jul 25, 2007)

    ive never seen so much rabid fanboyism for such an unnecessary program. most of the people who review this use that god awful k-lite codec pack anyway.

    ffdshow started out as an open-source alternative to the official divx pack which at the time came bundled with gator spyware. the spyware was eventually removed, and ffdshow morphed into an AIO decoding bundle.

    the program itself does technically work (unless you install external codecs which can override it as the default decoder), but with all the better alternatives out there, its kind of unnecessary. vlc and kmplayer already come with necessary codecs, gom player can automatically download ones you need, mplayer's ftp site has a codec download package that lets it play just about everything...hell even media player classic (which isnt even developed anymore) comes pre-bundled with many codecs.

    it comes down to this: anyone running windows that wants the best audio quality uses foobar2000, and having audio pass through ffdshow first is at the very least redundant...if anything it degrades sound quality. as far as video is concerned, people encode videos using so many different settings and compression levels that its next to impossible to tweak ffdshow's video settings and get a definitively better video quality.

    save your time (and RAM) and skip this one.

  5. Review - Miro for Windows

    0.9.8.1 Public Preview 1 (Jul 24, 2007)

    wow, glad to hear that someone found that adware hidden in this OPEN SOURCE media player...maybe next time people make up lies like this they should first understand that the source code is there to prove them wrong. and "monopolizing your desktop" is a really strange way to say "puts one icon on my desktop". seriously, where do these people come from?

    all that aside, miro really is a great find. i dont use it as my dedicated media player. but considering it can download just about any type of streaming media, it definitely gets used. my previous review gave this a 4, but i decided to raise it to a 5 to offset the spammers who are giving this a 1 for no reason.

  6. Comment - AOL Heads in New Direction with 'Helix'

    0.9.8.1 Public Preview 1 (Jul 26, 2007 - 4:46 PM)

    it looks like betanews is in bed with AOL...theyve deleted bad reviews of helix for the 3rd straight time in less than 24 hours.

    flood the helix download with bad reviews!

  7. Comment - Apple Posts Record Mac Shipments, Quarterly Profit

    0.9.8.1 Public Preview 1 (Jul 26, 2007 - 4:28 PM)

    a breakdown of apple:

    -computers sold with an in-house OS and in-house hardware. because of this apple could conceivably sell their computers for hundreds and hundreds of dollars less. instead, they mark them up more than any other computer manufacturer.

    -they copied the iphone technology from the prada phone. google it. the helio ocean and the nokia E70 also beat it to the punch in terms of features.

    -the ipod is a hard drive with software that can play mp3's. every laptop and smart phone ever created is also an ipod. more and more people must be realizing that the ipod isnt so revolutionary, since its been steadily losing market share to superior music players for the past several months.

  8. Comment - Target to Push Blu-ray Over HD DVD

    0.9.8.1 Public Preview 1 (Jul 26, 2007 - 4:16 PM)

    ok first the PS2 story today, and now this? is betanews TRYING to start a fanboy war?!

  9. Comment - AMD Downplays Performance Factor During Tech Analyst Day

    0.9.8.1 Public Preview 1 (Jul 26, 2007 - 4:13 PM)

    *sigh*...and AMD was once at the pinnacle of the processor world. i love them to death but theyre slowly floundering. its even harder to side with AMD when intel is making such leaps and bounds, and not doing anything wrong in the process.

  10. Comment - Intel Speed Breakthrough Points to a Post-Motherboard Era

    0.9.8.1 Public Preview 1 (Jul 25, 2007 - 6:19 PM)

    bah, everyone knows IBM did the same thing a few hours earlier...they just havent gotten around to giving a press release about it. right?

    ...right???