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Everything posted by j7n
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If the CPU fits in the same motherboard, then it is roughly the same generation of CPU and directly compatible. The motherboard contains all the components that need drivers configured. With Windows you can have a single CPU kernel exe installed if you upgraded from a single core CPU, which would then only use one core but continue working.
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Was Device Manager ever part of the control panel directly? I think it was always called up from "System", properties of "My Computer" or Administrative Tools, which can be added as a directory to the control panel.
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Can Windows XP Setup recognize an external HDD from USB?
j7n replied to TheLeftOldComputer's topic in Windows XP
Do you want to install winXP onto an external drive? There is a set of instructions on how to boot WinXP from a USB disk. I have followed them personally to hide software at work. They were made when SP1 was current, and may still work with later SP, but I haven't tried. They involve changing the order at which USB drivers load. You need to install Windows on the disk while it is directly connected to the motherboard. When the Archive Org come back, you can read it here: http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176 In the meantime, you can read my copy: http://j7n.sytes.net/misc/xp_usb_msd/ -
I download videos to the disk using the YT-DLP application instead of using the source filter. An exe file is easier to swap when it stops working. And I don't like upgrading the player because it changes many things that I prefer to keep as they are. Video plays on the Nvidia GPU. That is as good performance as it gets. On a fast computer, the seeking issue is also less noticeable. The ffmpeg in the background is the same in all players. When I occasionally get a "VP" codec and the resolution is HD, that is unwatchable on the CPU. On the YouTube site I can't effectively seek around the timeline for multiple reasons. They really want to ram the advertisements down your throat. 1) If I seek, it will usually pop up an ad immediately, 2) The laggy performance, 3) The imprecise scrollbar with the big round knob. I've not updated Yt-DLP for many months, and it still works.
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You can play the separate streams in recent media players such as Media Player Classic Homecinema. Seeking is slow because that format doens't have a complete index or something like that. But I can avoid having ffmpeg. I avoid that monstrosity. Usually I watch videos straight through once and only skip over sponsorships. Sometimes YT gives me a VP and Ogg Opus as the best formats. The extension given to the audio is "webm," and the player doesn't recognize it as an audio stream until it is renamed (should be mka or something). I couldn't do bug report about this because I don't use the official build.
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My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
Yes. I don't know because I would have to build up the Pale Moon installation over a very long time to get 19 thousand files or thereabouts. Maybe it is an issue with the OS, as BSODs are. Usually programs with many files are compartmentalized into their own archives. The worst game I've had was 8K files, and at some point I might have had 10K favicons in Opera. Those are badly behaved programs in my book. I seem to recall that the cache of Firefox used to be split into subfolders. I also used this temp drive to extract many files for another project, which were deleted, but probably left some fragmentation behind as the other person guessed. I see how nice it is to have a temp drive separate and easy to clean out. It is 10G and holds all kinds of caches. -
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
It was like when you kill csrss. Important process terminated something. I think the whole memory got corrupted and that important process crashed. The PC still works today. I could read it but nothing rang a bell, except that I had seen it before. When I load YouTube, there is always a long worrying pause as it loads everything. The video playback is prioritised, and it goes on happily playing advertisements, which makes the loading of the rest even slower because the CPU is used up. I set video to not autoplay in the settings of New Moon. -
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
YouTube is not quite "crap" as long as they allow to download normal h.264 videos that I can watch in peace. I got a weird issue. A blue screen of death happened about a terminated system process while I was browsing YouTube. I restarted the computer and got it again on that page where I wanted to comment. I know what you're thinking. Throw the old computer out. An application cannot cause a blue screen of death. Windows 2008 is old shite. What I observed was that the disk was heavily thrashed while I was on that page. Then the system froze. I tried to call up the task manager, but got a cryptic error about system files required for the Ctrl-Alt-Del screen being corrupted. And then the blue screen. The OS is on another disk, which is silent. The system works again after I wiped the temp drive where the browser files were. No errors were reported during formatting. At the time, the cache directory contained over 19,000 files all in the same directory, which is crazy. I wonder if some limit was reached. I have had this blue screen once before, and couldn't pinpoint a reason. -
Why did firms remove their names from CD drives?
j7n replied to j7n's topic in Hard Drive and Removable Media
I don't recall seeing any Philips drives. I'm sure they existed in other parts of the world. Philips no longer exists. Various other companies have been licensed to use the name. Last original item they sold was the razors. "The Death of Europe's Last Electronics Giant" To make a simple item like this, which doesn't take any cutting edge technologies anymore, they didn't really need to make a joint venture. NEC became Optiarc around that time, and the drives still looked the same. This was the go to brand as I recall. https://cdburnerxp.se/testeddrives?page=testeddrives&pnum=13&sort_by=vendor&direction=asc&search= "CDWRITER" "DVDRW" "GENERIC" -
Why did firms remove their names from CD drives?
j7n replied to j7n's topic in Hard Drive and Removable Media
Lite-On models were branded "ATAPI" like "iHAS124" (I know it is the connection standard). -
Initially most CD drives were branded with recognizable names: Samsung, Teac, Sony, NEC and so on. Then when their price had dropped to a disposable commodity level, the names all disappeared. First Samsung became "TSSTCorp". Then others followed with cryptic names such as "HL-DT-ST", "ATAPI", "Slimtype". Why did manufactuers seemingly tried to distance themselves from these products?
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My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
There is a new (to me) server of forums called "Fora". It kinda looks like Quora. For some reason most random motorcycle-related related boards are on it. On a not-so-fast computer in New Moon those sites hang until the dialog about hung script shows, and display giant vector icons filling most of the screen and a cookie law and Google login prompt that cannot be dismissed because the scripts had to be stopped. It's a bit annoying to land on this site from Google without being able to tell that it is on Fora. The forum is apparently called "XenForo," which worked alright in the previous iteration with less flat design, like on SteveHoffman.tv. https://www.k1600forum.com/threads/tell-me-about-cottonwood-pass.198855/ -
What are the costs of such a website? They say that the server will be kept up, so those running costs are not the main expense. Is it the purchase of items they review?
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That is the software. I don't know the last version because I keep using what I got already: 2.2.1.1 works and 3.8.6 works with a bunch of dependencies. It takes files from a Windows CD or ISO and will copy them to the system drive, which normally happens during the blue text-mode setup. When the computer is rebooted, these new files will run and continue setup. At that time it is a parallel installation of Windows. Yes, nLite for customizing Windows installation. If needed, you can integrate disk controller drivers. One option it offers is another folder where Windows will be put. I mention this because if the new OS doesn't work, you can still keep your old one (in \windows) and try another way. There are other ways to specify the directory, and you can use those instead. WinNTSetup also offers an option to set the directory (windir @ ... ). It might work ok, but I don't remember if I've used it. If you have already wiped the HDD and have no OS, then you can't use this method. It would not result in a perfectly clean installation because the old Windows would remain to be deleted later. I have used WinNTSetup to install one laptop, and a couple other times.
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You can install Windows from HDD using WinNTSetup from within a functional copy of Windows (including booted mini-XP from CD). But you need to find an older version of it because the developer has abandoned old versions of Windows. It basically replaces the first part of setup and sets up boot .ini to boot into the newly copied files. If you have no partitions, there will be a bit of a challenge. Put the new Windows into a different directory like \winnt with nLite. Then you can still revert to the existing Windows from the boot .ini menu (set a few seconds timeout). If that goes wrong, your system becomes bricked without a means of booting from an emergency CD. If you partition and format the disk, you have no Windows anymore at that point.
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You could try writing data at random locations in WinHex and see where it appears, and not incur extra writing cycles. Reading/searching is probably faster. If you buy these fake products, you're giving business to scammers. There are other testers who do it too. There is no brand to harm with negative publicity. They can pop up with another name to sell more.
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My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
So how much faster can Firefox clones now be on YouTube? I don't think that the bottleneck on an old PC was the video, but the layout around it. If I open too many tabs, because I forget which ones have served their purpose, they shrink so much that I can't read any text on them without the tooltip and I need to open even more tabs. I tend to always open links in a new tab to not lose the already displayed content. -
My RoyTam1's browsers don't have this, and my Opium 93 is too old to have this. If these are switches that enable and disable stuff, why hide them under a secret menu, and then say that nobody uses them?
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I suspect that the data might wrap around some smaller block of real flash. Let's say you write something at 258 GB, and it could show up at 2 GB or so. There are other Chinese companies like XRayDisk that sell flash disks at reasonable prices. If these disks were real, those sellers would be out of business. The fake disks can't be considered reliable, and maybe it is little loss to break them open.
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My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
Nothing wrong with restarting the browser to get a clean slate. I've heard multiple times of people keeping numerous tabs open and relying on them for organization (instead of bookmarks), but I've never practiced that even back on Windows XP (with 512 MB of RAM). With dynamic content that been standard for more than a decade, an open webpage more or less reloads completely when a link is followed, and I might as well load it when needed from a bookmark. -
My Browser Builds (Part 5)
j7n replied to roytam1's topic in Browsers working on Older NT-Family OSes
Software expands like an ideal gas in a container to fill all available memory. What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away. -
What work on their part does "supporting" a version of Python involve? Is it a matter of avoiding certain functions in code?
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The BS behavior looks like this if I try to grab the scrollbar "brick". Frozen and doesn't scroll. I have to close and reopen the application for it to work normally. I suspect one of the web browsers that has h/w acceleration in the background might trigger it. If I click on the free space to move one page, it keeps scrolling as if I held down the LMB. The problem doesn't happen on Win2003 on the same computer. I don't have the Vista Aero theme because I don't want the Desktop Experience Pack "bloat" on the computer. I suspect the issue might go away with it. This guy thought that the Windows controls even with Aero (apparently) are crippled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay-gqx18UTM
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YouTube under Windows XP - Downloaders, players and browser support
j7n replied to AstroSkipper's topic in Windows XP
If you don't want to see or write comments, what is the use of the stripped down web interface? You might be able to watch 720p downloaded to disk, with more precise and responsive seeking. Search from Alphabet using site:youtube.com gives better results. The internal YT search tries to guess too much what you really meant and suggest synonyms. -
If a person already owns this graphics card, he can try to do the best to make it useful. Not everyone can buy new parts.