Hmmm, how much muckin about would a usb soundcard take? also how much to buy?

this is probably going to be just a temporary mneasure as I'll probably look into getting a new laptop later, but stil I'd rather this one worked in the mean while.

That is if Windows doesn't automatically shift your output, it did that when I was using USB headphones until the headphones bust.

Very easy fix in any case.

Sorry to hear about the bad headphone socket, but I'm glad to hear people have suggested some inexpensive workarounds.  If I could get my teleporter to work I'd zap on over and fix your laptop myself.  Just kidding about the teleporter .

Nope, the changelog was sent to the audeasy list, and as usual with bgt updates I'd prefer to post the hole of it in the news so people know what's going on, but ah well, I'm sure philip will post anything important on this forum as he usually does.

Aprone, given the crazy devices and things you've developed, a teleporter would hardly surprise me too much ;D.

I'll certainly be looking into some sort of usb option, but this has also brought home to me the fact my laptop is! five years old, has traveled around most of england pluss to Egypt and Itally, and something else is likely to go at some point.

so, I'll probably look at getting another one, ---- especially sinse if I get one now I can stil have windows xp provided I ask, --- and no I do not want windows 7 at all, not with it's annoying interface and lack of backwards compatibility.

I'll probably go with toshiba, sinse their a make I trust, and I know their laptops work well.

any suggestions of a good quality soundcard would however be much appreciated, ---- it's a while sinse I've been computer shopping.

At least this will also get me more drive space on my laptop, having only 32 gb has become a bit of a pain of late.

i'm afraid I've heard of quite a few, especially with games, and even more especially with particularly old games. I would guess a good quarter of the games I have wouldn't work under windows 7.

I know the interface is navicable, but I personally much prefer setting things out in folders as I want them, rather than those context sensative and most recently used stupidities which microsoft stick everywhere, in fact friends of mine with perfectly working vision have complaind about the windows 7 interface.

toshiba however will stil sell windows xp laptops on request (my brother bought one abou six weeks ago), and while this option is stil open i'd prefer to take it.

I'm not sure how possible that would be Aprone, sinse screen readers generally need windows to run, and I doubt microsoft have included such a thing as an accessible installation option.

Once windows is installed, i'd have no problem installing Hal, sinse it's install is self voicing and all i'd need to do is bang in the cd, but installing windows might be a problem (especially sinse I'd be concerned about getting something wrong).

toshiba is the make I'd choose anyway, sinse I've found their laptops to be the best out of the ones I've tried (acer was down right horrible!), so buying from them and getting xp just seems an extra bonus.

Thanks robla I'll have a look.

I'll probably ring toshiba directly sinse obviously i won't need a particularly good graphics card for my laptop at all, pluss I don't particularly mind about size (my deffinition of what is portable is rather different from other people's).

As to windows 7, I've not actually found anything I'd need it for thus far, where as upgrading would as I said, cause me lots of problems, so that's why I'm sticking with xp, ---- it seems though that I'm in no way the only person making this choice, lots of people are too.

I suspect that Windows 7 has gotten such popular feedback largely because of how terrible Vista was--It's hard for a giant developer like Microsoft to take it any further downhill...!

Well often it's not the developer's fault for using vb6 etc, sinse at the time the games were made that was the latest technology, it's just that they haven't been updated sinse.

the only dev I can think of who stil does is Jim kitchin, and he includes the vb6 components with his installer.

I'm more concerned about games like world of legends and fallthru which run in the console window, sinse as far as I know 7 doesn't have one.

This is also no counting a couple of very special graphical games I own such as original pc turrican 2, ---- though I can't play these on a laptop anyway.

I think Cae might be right on this, that 7 is just better than vista, but that's not really hard.

myself, I'll probably only considder upgrading when something I wish to do cannot be done with xp, and thus far I haven't found anything.

in fact, I know quite a few people who have made the same decision, frankly we didn't really need a new version ofwindows, it's just microsoft trying to force their products onto people which has caused this hole business.

I have an MSİ laptop, it's working very good. also, it's provided with windows vista and I'm installed windows xp.

Well, much of the slowdown and crashes can be reduced with a good fix program. In fact after running avg pc tune up my desktop is running as fast as it did when i got it and never crashing at all.

I haven't really got the ram on this laptop to run avg, which is why i haven't bought licesnes, but that would be another improvement of getting a new machine.