Can video editing use the dedicated video memory for anything?

I know Final Cut Studio won't even install unless you have at least 128MB of VRAM, and certain types of rendering require 512MB of VRAM.

[link]

It's between "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics" and "NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 256MB"

I don't aspire to video editing, just copious playback.

I know Final Cut Studio won't even install unless you have at least 128MB of VRAM, and certain types of rendering require 512MB of VRAM.

And they require ATI and NVIDIA chipsets too, I guess they must stuff things into that high bandwidth memory. I stand corrected, but I still don't think it'll matter for casual video editing. FCS sounds more like professional stuff.

You're not going to get any extra features going from 9400 to 9600 GT, you're going to get far better 3D performance. You'll use some system memory for video, but in most cases it's not going to be much. You don't need a lot for framebuffering a display, the most common usage is storing textures for 3D where it has to blast textures real-time from that high bandwidth memory.

All my imagery is stills, and most of that is still done on my PC. I think I'll go for the 2.53GHz processor with the lesser video. I got no 3D going on.

Thanks for the input.

Is there a way to import messages from Outlook to Outlook Express? I am trying to save e-mails from work that are not entirely business-related in my personal e-mail at home. But I don't know if OE will recognize the files. I would be using Outlook at home, but when I tried to import my old OE files into Outlook, it changed all the "received" dates to the date of import (maybe it just did that for the sent mail, but it was still annoying).

PC, there's a program that will import from just about any email program and export into any email program. It's what saved me when I changed from Windows Mail to Outlook. It's intended as an archive program, but I used itfor the import/export. I'm pretty sure it was MailStore, which is here: [link]

From The Consumerist: Best Buy Optimization Is A Big Stupid Annoying Waste Of Money

Over the past year, a number of you have been telling us that, due to "pre-optimization" of computers, it's difficult -- sometimes impossible -- to walk into a Best Buy and leave with the advertised deal (in effect, you would be paying a $39.99 surcharge over the computer's advertised price). We decided to look into your complaints. We sent the Consumer Reports secret shoppers to 18 different Best Buys in 11 states, and one of our shoppers was denied the price advertised for a specific model because only pre-optimized computers were available. When the Consumer Reports engineers compared three "optimized" computers to ones with default factory settings, there was no performance improvement. In one case, an optimized laptop actually performed 32% worse than the factory model.

Thanks, Deena! I'll look into that. Unfortunately, as I suspected, I can't install it on my work computer, so the export remains a bit of a problem, especially since the ability to create new archives or add to existing archives has been disabled.

What's a good program for running multiple IM accounts on a PC?

I use Pidgin: [link]

one of our shoppers was denied the price advertised for a specific model because only pre-optimized computers were available

Bingo! Happened to us with every model we decided we wanted. Bastards.