Personally I'd eBay it and spend no more than 20 quid, as no webcam is amazing quality (Or they weren't last time I checked)
P2 should be up to the job.
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Webcams come in cheap and dead cheap. The dead cheap ones are rubbish, and the cheap ones are ok. Look for a brand name you know (logitech/intel/Creative etc).
Beware you may have problems with the combination of ME & USB if your machine is running on a VIA chipset.
Webcam quality is all about bandwidth. The more you have the better the quality. At 2mbs yours is fine, but what about the other end?
Also quality is also about lighting. your chosen "webcam area" needs to have good overhead and or facial lighting. Back lighting kills the image again,
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>>The dead cheap ones are rubbish>>
Not necessarily. I have a D-Link NetEasy 350 Pro which has the same specifications and ability as a Creative VideoBlaster Webcam I had previously and which cost me £46.
Price of the D-Link? Well Scan of Bolton sells them at just over £15 and recently had an offer of three for about £34...:-)
tinyurl.com/eyz2d
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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We have a 2Mb BT broadband connection.
2Mb is almost certainly the download bandwidth. For your webcam, what matters is the upload bandwidth, which is probably 512Kb/sec
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I'd suggest the Logitech Quickcam Messenger Pro, link is for a twin pack
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0001XIZY4/qid=1...9
and the Philips Toucam II USB -
www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000E5SDM/qid=1...9
Both are pretty good, we use a lot of them at work and they're fine.
2Mb is plenty for decent connection using this kit and MSN Messenger will give you the easy connectivity you require. Post back if you have any problems, it's a bit of a pet subject of mine.
Cheers,
-- Lee Having a Fabialous time.
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Oh, and a PII running Me might work fine, depends how well you've got it set up. If it were me, I'd be binning it for something better, £300 would get you a decent PC these days
Dell (£299): www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails...s
eBuyer (no monitor £252) :
www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action...5
pcworld.co.uk (15" TFT £299) :
snipurl.com/ejgn
It's not worth bothering with the old kit or trying to upgrade it at these prices...
Lee.
-- Lee Having a Fabialous time.
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.. not worth bothering with the old kit or trying to upgrade it at these prices...
>>
wow - a pc including 15" tft for under 300 quid including xp, 40gig hd, 256 meg ram !
you could ditto that advice to mapmaker in reply to his earlier questions regarding getting more ram and a new hdd ;-)
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frightening when you think I spent over £100 last night on a Zalman cpu cooler and a few other items of PC exotica in the name of (near) silent cooling.
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ND - This is a major factor in why I run Dell kit myself - they're an integrated design rather than bits off a shelf. Mine runs silently. I even got rid of a post-fit graphics card with a fan on it as this fan was louder than the PC.
OK, you pay a few £ more but you can't beat good kit.
-- Lee Having a Fabialous time.
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I always run away when I see the term 'integrated graphics' like in the rather nice recent Dell Dimension 3000 which my friend has - no AGP slot, or even PCI IIRC. Onboard sound, don't care, but fixed graphics sharing memory - not for me.
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Fair enough, if you're playing games you'd need something with a bit of horsepower GPU-wise but for most folk integrated graphics work fine. Mine does have AGP for which I paid extra but that's because I'm a nerd.
You'd easily cope with VGA webcam graphics with most modern integrated boards.
-- Lee Having a Fabialous time.
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frightening when you think I spent over £100 last night on a Zalman cpu cooler and a few other items of PC exotica in the name of (near) silent cooling.
even more frightening when you find out its not. (near silent cooling that is) you should have thrown the money on the fire, at least you would get some value from it that way.
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>>you could ditto that advice to mapmaker in...
Well I thought that a fraction over £15 for 256 MB of brand new RAM wasquite good value. Very excited about its impending arrival.
Can I, BTW, take out one of the CD drives & replace with a DVD drive, just by unlinking the ribbon cable & the multiplug? DVD drives seem to go for a fiver or so on eBay - and more & more sellers are putting their dodgy software onto DVDs rather than CDs.
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Err, I clicked on that Dell link, Dalglish. It seems to have gone up to £393. Deduct £60 if you don't want your hand holding with service for the next 3 years. But then add £23 for a floppy; that TFT is another £105; and by the time you've been tempted by some choice extra 'essentials', that computer looks a lot more pricey!
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Err, I clicked on that Dell link, Dalglish
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mapmaker, i hope your maps are more accurate than your navigation when clicking.
to help, i will quote lee-citroen's post:
pcworld.co.uk (15" TFT £299) :
snipurl.com/ejgn
( trust that works OK as copy & paste from previous links removes http prefix )
and do read up the telegraph bootcamp archive articles.
e.g. bootcamp-316,
www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/conn...l
and bootcamp-323
www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/conn...l
incidentally, this week's bootcamp covers the nigerian & tsunami scams posted recently by hj in ihaq-vol-73 on 27 april.
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and i just clicked on the dell link - my result shows;
" Dimension 2400 From £299 Price inc. VAT & Del "
so lee's post is correct to date.
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"Can I, BTW, take out one of the CD drives & replace with a DVD drive, just by unlinking the ribbon cable & the multiplug? DVD drives seem to go for a fiver or so on eBay - and more & more sellers are putting their dodgy software onto DVDs rather than CDs"
Yup you can do just that thing no problem. However do not think about watching DVDs on this machine unless you like them very choppy, and missing bits. your machine does not have the guts to run DVD films.
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>>watching
Watching? I've got one sitting on my table here that I've been watching for some time, but it hasn't done anything. It has some (dodgy eBay) software on it that I should rather like to get hold of, but putting it into the CD drive doesn't do me any good... Idiot seller described it as a CD, but it wasn't!
Seems like I followed the wrong link there, Dalglish - sorry!
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You used to be able to get hardware video accelerator cards to relieve the CPU of the intensive processing required by movies. I had one in a very old system and could watch a DVD fine. The brand had Magic in it's name somewhere - not sure if these would still be available though.
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...or you could take £49 quid to argos and get a portable DVD player with a 4.5" screen - tiny I know, but it's getting silly what you can get for your money these days - not sure how the manufacturers are making any money on these things...
Thanks for re-doing the link, I'd forgotten about tinyurl :-)
-- Lee Having a Fabialous time.
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Thanks for re-doing the link, I'd forgotten about tinyurl :-)
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the snipurl one? - i didn't do it, i thought it was yours to start with.
but it's getting silly what you can get for your money these >> days - not sure how the manufacturers are making any money on these things...
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soon the cost of the case, switches, and software will outweigh the cost of the electronis, if it does not already do so.
btw, i had assumed mapmaker wanted to run some pc-software on a dvd-rom and not to watch movies.
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soon the cost of the case, switches, and software will outweigh the cost of the electronis, if it does not already do so.
The software will come free with the computer. It's already more or less true of operating systems (OEMs pay pennies per box for Windows), Apple bundles loads of stuff, such as the iLife suite and for a while Quicken, with Macs, and Linux (plus the several thousand apps that come with it) is of course free. The money is gong to be in services I think.
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(OEMs pay pennies per box for Windows),
Oh really? This varies from very nearly what punters have to pay for retail windows (79 dollars is the cheapest OEM deal) to a minimum of about 35 dollars depending on how much "marketing support" or "favoured partnership" MS allows you. That means "how much do I kow tow and follow the MS holly grail" not how many boxes do I sell.
When Dell started to ship boxes available with Linux they suddenly found windows cost them 70 dollars a box, that was ALL the profit on the box gone.
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rf - i am glad you responded, because i prefer to avoid debates of this sort. especially when i remeber that chris has posted here in the past about the "extortionate" charges mase by microsoft for xp. ( and reference to the cost of software arose from my earlier comment that the 299 quid price included a copy of xp ).
if chris thinks microsoft software is now only pennies per box, well that is good news as it will help kill the awfully complex linux - which by definition will now only save you a few pennies. :: ;-) ::
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OEM's don't pay the retail price of Windows as RF rightly said, which is why the price rises for them when they try to sell boxes with something else installed. That's how monopolists keep their monopolies, by bullying suppliers. Windows is WAY cheaper for Dell per box than it is for you and me if we buy it on its own from PC World or wherever. Try buying a box from Dell without Windows and see how much they want to charge you--if they'll even let you--if there's any difference in price at all it will be pennies.
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>>You used to be able to get hardware video accelerator cards to relieve the CPU of the intensive processing required by movies. I had one in a very old system and could watch a DVD fine
Oh right, I'd got confused by all the talk of movies, but I see it was for software. Ho hum!!
Lee.
-- Lee Having a Fabialous time.
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the snipurl one? - i didn't do it, i thought it was yours to start with.
Twas I that amended it. DD.
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