yeah, willem said it, but i'll chime in as well. nothing is more annoying than listening to someone one a mic without earphones. you not only get an echoing effect sometimes, but you hear everything all the sounds from their game as well. 

nothing like a group of def people taking on a zombie army

i was thinking more fear and loathing in Las Vegas negke, the scene when he wakes up from an all night trip and he has the tape recorder strapped to his chest and the mike taped to his chin with a collender helmet 

Logitech USB desk mic is good. Not super cheap but not all that expensive either, and should be widely available.

I always use headphones anyway, but I'd still say get a separate mic as it gives you the flexibility to use it with any speakers or headphones. I don't like headsets.

While I kind of agree with these guys regarding using speakers + mic in games, it's not *that* bad for everyone else (at least hearing the game noises isn't so bad, the feedback does suck if it's there). 

What about a lapel mike?? Could that work?? I haven't got �500+ of speakers (admittedly accumulated over the years for �300-) for nothing ;). Having said that I've got a nice pair of headphones that might work, hmmm. 

As for echoes and noise, the main problem is that, if you don't set the voice chat to only work with a key bind, it will automatically switch on the mic whenever it detects a sound. Obviously, using speakers will make it also catch ingame character voices as well as loud ingame sounds. I've seen that a couple of times - it's when players have that voice bubble icon practically all the time (though it doesn't always have recognizable effects - fortunate if such people have the mic boost option disabled). 

Let me get this right:

If I had a mic and used my speakers as normal AND bound the mic to a key, then it would only pick up the sounds (my posh British voice + potentially annoying game noise echoes) when I pressed that key??

But if I was using headphones I could keep the mic permanently on and it would only pick up my voice (plus assorted belches etc etc)?? 

Yep. The mic has to obey the laws of physics so if you're wearing headphones, it won't be able to pick up sound waves from the game. :) 

I went and bought a cheap mic from PC World :S, to use alongside my headphones. First impressions are that it's shit, almost completely quiet unless my mouth is 0.01mm from it, and that's with everything maxxed. Bleh. 

depending on your audio card, you may be able to boost the gain on your mic. i remember a creative card had a +20db boost setting buried in the control panel somewhere. 

Just buy a headset? They're cheap and work.

Just make sure to buy it online. 

U know it to be true :PPP 

Didn't want to buy a headset as I already have a good set of headphones.

Anyway it's kinda sorted as with negke's moral support / mocking disbelief, I hacked apart the stand from the desk mic and cut a notch so it can clip onto those headphones, hey presto DIY headset. Apparently it works although the quality is quite poor. 

It remains to be seen if you're ready to face Biff in an Ellis competition. Maybe some of the things mentioned in the FAQ can help improve the sound quality to an acceptable degree.

At the very least, you can do classic 11khz Shambler roars now. 

Worked in game last night but apparently Biff was usurped by his nephew so didn't get to do an Ellis-off... 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DPQW0e9ufM 

if you have a set of identical hdds, but one of them already has data from a non-raid setup, is it possible to create the raid 1 set without loosing the data without having a third hdd to temporarily store the data on? 

You will lose all data when you create the raid array. 

i couldn't find any information about what happened since most raid info pretty much assumed you were using brand new disks. 

Be aware that RAID1 is only protecting you from harddrive failure. It is not a backup at all. You do not want RAID1 unless you are running a highly important service. 

Playing with my 80gb Intel X2-M G2:

http://jago.pp.fi/temp/SSD-LOL.jpg 

80gb Intel X25-M: http://jago.pp.fi/temp/SSD-LOL.jpg
1,5tb Seagate Barracuda: http://jago.pp.fi/temp/HDD-LOL.jpg

Note that the Barracuda isn't really a "slow" disk at all, its actually one of the better traditional mechanical disks, it's just that NAND media wipes the floor with everything. 

Then I looked at the numbers, hehe.

Past 16MB the HDD has the lead in write speeds, is that because of a larger cache? Does it matter? Rendered irrelevant through the huge difference in latency? 

SSDs traditionally lose in raw sequential write throughput, but dominate in read speed and minimal latency (we're talking a difference of 7-8ms to 0.1ms). There are SSDs that have excellent writes as well, for example the Intel X-25E and a few others that push above 190mb/s writes, but these are enterprise grade drives where a 80gb disk will cost you over 650-800 euro. 

The numbers you were looking at are not MBs, they are KBs. The test reads and writes 256mb files in blocks of 0.5, 0.1, 2, 4, 16, etc. 

If you put your OS and favorite games on the SSD, then you would mostly be reading that data, not writing it.