Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Everything posted by j7n
-
I think the CAT file includes all the stuff, so nothing can be taken out to de-bloat the driver without Windows throwing a fit. On Nvidia and such you can skip the supplemental applications and frameworks like Experience and PhysX and the ATI Control Center or whatever it is called now. In the past I would always take out all the languages. These days even an INF may be 2 MB because everything is translated into Unicode in there. I put this driver into my collection. Maybe it will come useful for something. BTW, does anyone know a small and simple GPU benchmark tool that is compatible with old systems. The new stuff is very flashy for gamers. Something like AIDA64 where you run it for a few seconds and it tells your memory bandwidth and processor speed. I'm curious where Intel HD Graphics sit compared to entry level GPUs.
-
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
I gave an example of TechSupportForum dot Com. There are also giant vector icons visible under every message. I can't dismiss the prompt because the button is handled by the stopped script. On a fast processor like Ivy Bridge the CPU finishes the work and the site can be browsed. But on a slow CPU it hangs. Turns out it's an offspring of Fora.com too, as is AvsForum, which I can't tell by the domain. https://fora.com/communities/ https://xenforo.com/community/threads/a-quick-peek-at-fora-com-s-modified-xenforo-community-software.224690/ Ross-Tech.com appears to be older, as is Paradox-Plaza.com (now flat design), or SteveHoffman.TV. Look how easy it is on the eyes in comparison. -
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
The new XenForo software is spreading. Now it's not just motorcycle boards. It causes 100% CPU for me in New Moon until the script is stopped and the cookie prompt stays obstructing some of the view. My Windows 2008 partition is only 24 GB with great room to spare. https://www.techsupportforum.com/threads/solved-extremely-bloated-c-drive.610414/ -
That's not for me. It is for Skylake and Kaby Lake. What are the certificates in the Reg file with boxes as the filename? That looks a bit sus and should be clearly labelled.. Also 700 MB for a display driver. Lol.
-
I found how to make file associations unrestricted and normal. 1. On later builds probably remove the UCPD.sys driver and reboot (not needed for me) HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UCPD ! Start := 4 2. Remove OEMDefaultAssociations.dll Remove OEMDefaultAssociations.xml 3. Remove DENY permission for Administrator, and have all subkeys inherit HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts 4. Delete all contents of this key to clear Open With choices. There is a list of protected extensions in shell32.dll but it seems to not be important. I'm surprised that the DLL wasn't essential. .3g2 .3gp .3gp2 .3gpp .aac .adt .adts .avi .bmp .dib .flac .gif .htm .html .jfif .jpe .jpeg .jpg .m2t .m2ts .m3u .m4a .m4v .mkv .mod .mov .MP2 .mp3 .mp4 .mp4v .mpa .MPE .mpeg .mpg .mpv2 .mts .pdf .png .tif .tiff .TS .TTS .txt .url .wav .website .wm .wma .wmv .WPL http https microsoft-edge microsoft-edge-holographic ms-xbl-3d8b930f https://i.imgur.com/fjH0orY.png
-
In the end, the component has to boil down to files and registry that are either taken from INFs during setup or DllRegisterServer. I'm surprised that the program error box depends on something external. My reasoning for removal was that I don't ever want errors reported to someone. On Windows 2022 a group policy setting was needed to display the dialog. Customizing the computer has taken me several days. It's never 3 to 5 hours. I encountered a crashing program only later.
-
I removed the Error Reporting service and some other things from Windows 2003. Now, when a program crashes with a protection fault, I get no message. It just closes. I have checkmarked "But notify me when critical errors occur". I tried to put ersvc.dll and registry entries back in, but the service has some other dependencies and won't start. I just want to see an error message. Maybe it is caused by another removal. Can I restore it?
-
Control your HDD's AAM/APM through registry
j7n replied to GrofLuigi's topic in Windows Tips 'n' Tweaks
I tried to insert these settings into every possible key: Parameters Parameters\Port0 Parameters\Port1 Parameters\Port2 Parameters\Port3 Parameters\Device And they would not stick. I rebooted the computer, looked with Crystal Disk Info, and the previous value was retained. (iastor 11.2.0.1006) I have disks on ports 0,1,2, and 1 and 2 support APM. For me hdparm for Windows [1] is the best choice. The MSI file had to be extracted manually. I set hdparm to run on bootup as a scheduled task from the SYSTEM user. This way the console window doesn't show. The program doesn't stay resident. I have a lappy disk from HGST, which apparently has 491 thousand of load/unload cycles, rated as 49% of its life! For Seagate drives there is a proper solution. New models: A win64 application called PowerControl from SeaChest. [2,3] Old models: Editing the Device Configuration Overlay with HDAT2, which makes a disabled APM setting stick. [4] 1. http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com/ 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/truenas/comments/p1ebnf/seagate_exos_load_cyclingidling_info_solution/ 3. https://github.com/Seagate/openSeaChest 4. https://msfn.org/board/topic/168799-seagate-nas-hdd-vn-do-they-chirp/ -
I found that the setting from TweakUI on WinXP still works, and mitigates the issue in applications like WinRAR and similar. The horizontal scrollbar was particularly lazy. This should be in Performance -> Visual Effects. REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "SmoothScroll"=dword:00000000
-
Don't fix what isn't broken. Try it on a spare PC. Or plug in a spare HDD and disconnect the good one. I wouldn't even risk dual/tripple booting it, which in the end is probably a good idea to ease the transition. It's always good to have another OS to fix problems without a boot CD. Treat a new Windows like a virus. What's going to happen in 2025? I can't delete the Microsoft Reserved Partition from inside Windows either, and must use BootIce or Gdisk to set up a disk before installing Windows. When Windows 8 came out, it was the worst crap ever, and now people look fondly upon it in comparison. Lol. How so? You can compare any business application that came out at the time with what we can get new today and it will be smaller and faster. Back with Win98 we had to install our choice of applications to handle graphics and media, and Windows only did the core. Now they bundle everything but the kitchen sink into Windows, and those programs are rarely optimal.
-
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
In what situations would hardware accleration make a significant difference? Most normal, even rather complex webpages are rendered once and stay like that as they are scrolled. You'd have to have some elements overlayed onto one another with transparency and moving, or being constantly refreshed as if they were moving, or a video. There probably are such. But what are any concrete examples where h/w acceleration makes the CPU usage noticeably go down? -
Are there any motherboards that can accept 128 GB of RAM and work satisfactory under Win NT 5?
-
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
I can drag the mouse, but it is not enjoyable. One core of Conroe is pegged at full. Of course a faster CPU solves many problems as with other growing applications. The screen is also upsampled from 800*600 and jaggy with no obvious way of setting the picture to 100%. I'm not complaining that a DosBox is be slow. But just like with playing videos, there is additional overhead from the browser. I don't see what is gained in this case by putting it inside the web browser. Every time I go to the website, it downloads the 45 MB package. They could give it to me directly, set it up with a batch command to run DosBox with the intended settings and it would be faster, save network traffic and independent of the server being up. It has many preinstalled applications and games, fit within that size. Nice perspective of software bloat that has occurred since. DRM in Palemoon is about as useful as a fifth wheel. I would put up with sluggish websites if they are free. But paying to watch protected films inside the browser makes no sense. -
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
I found a website that runs Windows 3.11 inside the web browser. It seems to be a DosBox in JavaScript and not a remote desktop. Jesus. On my computer it is unusable in New Moon. pieter.com -
The backround on my screen is almost black 18,18,18 in Opera (Opium). I think reduction of contrast on webpages is the result of people using new monitors set up to compete with the daytime sun. They won't turn them down at night. So webpages or browsers do it for them. The button that says "member" is white (247,250,249). Such stray elements make everything around hard to see and the dark mode a non-starter for me. The "member won the day" frame is almost unreadable. I can appreciate the limited viewing angle of a flat screen for cases like this. I tilt my head and can read it again, lol. I've adjusted my monitor all the way down, for the other monitor the backlight can't be modulated so it must be kept bright.
-
I think the limit is 64 GB which is more than everyone will ever need, lol. Windows 2003 works flawlessly with it, especially considering how web browsers today are broken up into multiple processes. Each process can use about 1.7 GB. That is not enough for giant, bloated games. With the /3GB switch they can use more, but that can cause instability when the system portion (1GB) is too small. A problem arises with direct memory access to the PCI bus, which have to be in the low memory. I recall that WinXP had one or two built-in drivers that were not safe.
-
I have 8 GB of RAM in my main computer. I've reached the limit only on a few occasions when I did something stupid like simultaneously opening a big game (3.5G), and a web browser (1.5G) with a long uptime, plus everything else. One of the programs just says that it is out of memory like in days before swap files, and you can correct the situation (close the web browser) and continue as normal. On WinXP/2003 you get an exclamation mark in the systray when memory is almost full. My other computer has 20 GB of RAM and I couldn't even figure out how to fill it up to fully test it. I paid for it maybe 25 or 30, so I decided how cool would it be just give win2003 so much. In the end I launched many copies of IrfanView. If there is something that Microsoft has added, it maybe is present in Windows 10 or 11 only. Usually people bring up debug information for a BSOD to justify the existence of a paging file. But most people can't read that or have anybody to ask to read it for them. They say that the paging file wouldn't be used if enough RAM was available, but it cleary is used.
-
I think I installed it via the device manager (add new hardware) where it can also be uninstalled. With the parameter UsePAE, a disk of 5 gigs was automatically created (/MAXMEM=3072 out of 8G), disregarding the value DiskSizeM. The rdutil.exe didn't work right. That is supposed to create a compressed disk image and restore it on boot, but my disk was always corrupted when I tried that. I was able to add swap file to this disk later without "building" it into the image. If your sofware relies on a directory T:\TEMP being there, you can create it somehow. The builder and the CMD file that adds it is some additional service that is not strictly needed. It was absent from the package I got.
-
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
More like when you throw a fast processor at the problem. On a slow computer many websites go into an infinite loop until the prompt to stop the script comes up. -
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
More like when you throw a fast processor at the problem. On a slow computer many websites go into an infinite loop until the prompt to stop the script comes up. -
You need a swap file if your memory gets close to being full, which with modern bloated applications it probably will. I'd say with 8 GB you might not. But it depends on what you do with the PC. I belong to the school of thought that the paging file belongs in the past when memory was scarce. I would never put a paging file on an SSD to save it from wear. There is a Gavotte RamDisk that can be put in high PAE RAM. I had some experience trying to use it. The option to load a formatted partition from the registry would become corrupted after shutdown. I could only use it in the default mode where it automaticaly fills with a FAT32 file system. It seems that Windows likes to use the swap file a lot when minimizing big applications. There was a pause and mechanical squeal. File copy speed to the ram disk was not as fast as expected. There seemed to be a considerable overhead. I would try to install Server 2003 with normal PAE memory. There are only a few older drivers that don't work, most notably from Creative Labs and likely some older multimedia cards. If you have bad drivers, you can revert to the crippled behaviour of WinXP with the /MAXMEM switch in boot-ini.
-
What are good software products for editing keyboard layouts? I am currently looking for one that can make them for Windows 64-bit. Microsoft in its infinite wisdom has made keyboard layout in NT a DLL, which has some implications. An old layout for x86 does not work anymore. It can actually include program code, which can do anything, or refuse to load if it checks a license. Programs are usually limited in what formats they can load and output. They may have a native project format that is neither KBD nor DLL. I have the following candidates: "Tastatūras Pianists" part of localization packages "Tildes Birojs" or "WinLogs". Works under Windows 98 and Windows 2000/XP. Produces layouts only for the active system (either in KBD or DLL format). Can import layouts from a file to set up a new system. Can visually edit a dead key layer and, with some trickery, separate layers for Shift and Caps Lock simply by dragging symbols onto keys. The interface language can be set to English when the application is installed. Does not need to be kept running. Does not work under x64. "KbdEdit" requires an expensive license. Works under Windows NT x86 and x64. Has a steeper learning curve. The dead key layer is apparently only editable in a list format. Opens more advanced options. Without a license, produces a bloated, crippled DLL, which requires the service to be kept running and displays a nag screen. The layout does not work under the System login on the welcome screen. EDIT: I have found "Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator" This program is free. It can take an existing DLL from NT x86 or x64 as a base and generate new DLLs for three architectures at the same time: x86, x64 and ia64 (Itanium). This can be used to strip down KbdEdit created DLLs and make them freely usable, or transfer them between architectures. The dead key editor is still in a list format. Symbols can be typed or pasted from an external character map, which this program doesn't include. The installation can be done with the following registry entries: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\b0020426] "Layout File"="kbdx1062.dll" "Layout Text"="Normal" "Layout Id"="00e0" Where 0426 is the language, b002 is a unique ID within the language, and 00e0 is a unique ID within all available layouts. (around 0xcd on Windows 2022, and around 0xaf on Windows 2008 R2). Windows 2022 requires a reboot to show new layouts. I've read reports about them being unusable for others.
-
List of Microsoft Agent-powered programs
j7n replied to WadmodderShalton's topic in Software Hangout
"Speaking Clock". It featured two assistants called Checkers and Max. It also included a speaking calculator. If you dragged the assistants they said, "I kinda liked it. Please do it again."