spacejay

yep

okay so the situation is this. i am tearing my hair out. no actually this : the short story is i have 2 pc's - a standalone music pc (windows 7) and an htpc (xp). both have identical libraries (well they should have but i am not going into that now) and i ended up buying a 124 gb usb drive when my hard drive back up went kaput. initially the usb drive was exfat32 but i couldnt't copy much of my music library onto it so i refomatted it into ntfs. now it seems that when i take the usb drive out of my music pc , having copied all my music onto it, and try to use it on either machine i get a message telling me that it is corrupted and unusable. i can fix it but then it seems like the data is there but it is unusable by any player i have ie foobar or even kmplayer.. i have no idea how to fix it. anyone know what is going on? is it a problem reformatting usb drives from exfat to ntfs? i have thought about splashing out on an external hard drive but don't really want to at the moment in case the same thing happens and i would just be wasting my money

@ jason schiit i agree with your direct selling model however this only seems applicable if you are in the u.s. i was very interested in buying one of your dac's but buying from one of your reps in the u.k. was much more expensive then if i could have bought direct from you (even accounting for import taxes). i have just bought a chinese bit of kit (not a dac) which was a speedy transaction and, yes, maybe a somewhat risky transaction but the manufacturer has a good reputation in terms of quality of work and business dealings. in the end price is king (or emperor). bit off topic so apologies.

elf, you are probably right but some good old style laws remain. don't know how many of cbutchs' list are apocraphal but number 6 is def illegal in the house of commons (unless the speakers wig is used).

cbutch - there are many laws that remain on the statute books that have never been rescinded. why waste time and money to do so?

when was the last time anyone in the uk ever bothered about it being illegal?

i had a problem with linux and couldn't get to grips with some of the concepts (i wouldn't class myself as a thicko)and no-one would help me out. so i logged on as a woman and people were so very helpful. i agree with everyone here that it is better to find stuff out for yourself though and if you can't understand something state clearly that despite your research you still can't understand.

so a year down the line what is the the best mini itx motherboard for use with a xonar essence then?

i have, until now, been very content with old style hifi - vinyl, although i have got quite a few cd's i sold my cdp about a year ago. my new project and one which i have thought about for a while, is building a decent computer based audio system, which i would plug into my power amps. okay so this is what i have come up with and bear in mind that size constraints play a factor here as i want to fit the pc on a rack. xonar essence soundcard (maybe modded) in a mini itx shuttle system. my questions are : i want to build this thing as cheaply as poss and want the minimum spec but i don't know what that is. the pc only has one job - play music, it will do absolutely nothing else. will getting lots of ram help or is that a waste? the hard drive will be a ssd and i want to have as quiet a psu as poss so i was considering taking the psu that comes with the case out and having a quiet psu outside the pc powering it (via cable extensions). good idea? stupid? opinions welcomed.