How hard is it to open up a phone and remove the ringer? Voila free 2 mp camera.
The only way I can see this hack not working is if the CCD has a piezo built in.
Good luck with that.

Try booting in safe mode. See if the system is still slow. If it is, chances are you have a hardware config problem. I actually had an S-ata IRQ conflict once. If it runs fast, you probably have some ressource hog hidden somewhere. In the case of the later, open up process explorer or task manager and watch your cpu utilisation. If it stays low and your computer is slow, there's a resource fight in progress. Probably a process latched to where it's not supposed to be. If it is high, you can easily identify the offending software. In procexp or task manager, look at your total i/os per process. You may find the culprit there. Finally if that fails. Look for any anti-virus. They have caused me more headaches than the actual visuses. You may wish to disable it and see if your computer revives.
I applaud your courage on posting a windows question here.

I don't think Lord British is that bad.

You didn't get the memo? After BSG is finished, reality tv will have lost its appeal. The only sustainable tv will be cooking shows and christian action fantasy detective shows.

Barack me Obameus!
I am thrilled to see the renewed interest in politics. I remember on the night he won the election seeing some potentially drunk guys in the street gathered in a horseshoe pattern around a poster on a wall. The poster was that of Barack Obama. The group was of course chanting "Obama" to the poster. I've heard of more extreme celebrations such as the potential of many Obama babies. Bear in mind, I am in Canada and the election garnered such a reaction.

I'm sorry you got a flamebait tag. I understand your post. As an experiment I put my (grand)parents on my rig for an hour every now and then.

The results in general are: linux is very pretty, but I get more work done in XP with office 2003. I will not change for office 2007/vista or ubuntu(ubunto?) and openoffice.

That being said, they both use winxp + firefox + thunderbird + office 2003. My dad even uses openoffice now because office 2007 moved everything around and he wanted an editor that just lets him type up the text.

My mom finds ubuntu prettier than vista. It does have beautiful themes. My dad likes openoffice. I count this as a victory for FOSS.

I find /. has issues if the system is not 100% FOSS in general. We should be glad just to show people it exists and it works. If they still insist on paying the 150$ to ms for vista/xp licenses, it's OK, it's less money than the training necessary to feel 100% comfortable in Linux. I'm not a fan of panicked calls at 2:00 am saying "the etc ate my permissions".

This animal does sound kind of odd. It can rip apart a chicken like a bear, grunt like a pig and smell like a man. I wonder if it's threatened by global warming?

I'm sorry, I poorly expressed myself.
The driver would provide support for 3d as long as the game used the Z buffer. The user could adjust IIRC for such exotic features as FOV, inverted Z and "eye distance".
Basically games did not need to support it since D3d/OGL worked out of the box, you could load whatever game you wanted from how many generations ago you wanted (mechwarrior 2 anyone?) and get 3d results that would jump out of your 17" CRT monitor. (19-22 for later generations)
Hope that clears things up.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any dvi mode that can reach 120Hz. In the article NV was talking about working with some proprietary TI dlp stuff. Is this technology condemned to HDMI/HDCP + Projectors with a lamp life of 1/2 of your typical sandbox game?

Can you wear contact lenses? Dunno, I have 20/20 and am probably an insensitive clod.

Games did not provide support for the glasses. I remember using my Asus TNT2 Ultra http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=964 on final reality and tomb raider 2. I thought this would not work on an LCD monitor though since most of them work only at 60hz. Kudos to greenzilla for playing on the fact that these monitors have a ridiculously high resolution and halving it to maintain the performance while losing sharpness. I don't think this will work for twitch gamers. but for casual gamers, if they can throw in head tracking, this can be a really fun way to play tetris.