Volatus

... Who on earth said anything about that god forsaken classic start menu? I'm not sure if that comment was directed at me, but perhaps you should re-read the thread...

... You'd rather click and open up - and then have to close - an entire new window, instead of just clicking the submenus to make them appear (like most people do with menus anyway)? Hell, I never wait for the menus to come up under the cursor. I click once to make them appear, double click to open a new window when necessary. I'd say that over 90% of the time, I get to what I want much quicker using the menus than having to open a new window and double-click my way through navigation... GL: Couldn't've said it better. kickass94: Menus don't have to be a full-screen flood. But the All Programs menu in Vista is like looking through a keyhole instead of seeing everything at a glance. There's a neat little program I ran across called "Vista Start Menu" which incorporates a lot of changes to the Start Menu that MS should really take a clue from... like, making the All Programs menu blow up to the full screen height (what a concept!), and assigning a shortcut to be the default action for clicking a folder in the list. Y'know, most people I know hated that "scrolling programs menu". So MS decided to make it even harder than _that_ to navigate? Access Denied: Using Search for everything is hardly a solution. If the Search box were to be so useful, it should search just the programs list, instead of wasting time pouring all over my goddamn hard drive looking for files I'm not even close to looking for. Hell, the box in the Vista start menu isn't even close to a replacement for Win+R... it doesn't autocomplete paths! If they want to make it useful, it should be more customizable, and have path autocomplete. Simple as that. Besides, I'm not going to be using the search box to start a program I already know the location of anyway...

Okay, yet another Windows version, yet another opportunity for MS to refine some botched default options... In Windows 9x/2K, everything was a fly-out menu, and it was easy to get to things. With WinXP, this was still possible and even faster, actually. You just have to re-enable the ridiculously disabled "Show as menu" options. It greatly improves navigation speed and productivity, and yet... Vista(ids) came out and the default options were unchanged - not only that, but MS introduced a bug in the way fly-out menus were handled. You could no longer jump from one menu to a different submenu (like Documents to Control Panel or Computer) and have it appear. Yet another unfixed bug, still unfixed in Win7 as well (just tested it). With bugs like these, will Win7 ever get the default options that users deserve? To show extensions on files may be a "long shot"; my IT instructor enlightened me as to why that's not gonna happen: people just don't understand them. But putting submenus back on the Start menu? I can't think of any downsides. Is the whole world just so used to the botched XP start menu defaults that they don't even want to use submenus? Or is there another good reason? Not even touching on the botched implementation of the Vista-style "All Programs" list... *facepalm*

Okay, okay, guys, chill out, both of you... I get the odd feeling that ol' banhammer's gonna slip out of Coffee's hands any second now Topic's about a graphics card. Memory, yes, could be useful, but seriously: SDR on a Pentium 4? I didn't even think it was possible (Pentium 4's are native QDR... which brainiac at Intel thought to put SDR capabilities in a chipset?!). But just getting graphics duties offloaded from the main RAM to a video card would boost performance. If you're web browsing or emailing on this system, a modern ATI Rage XL PCI video card would work very well. They're still manufactured due to demand in servers and low-intensity use, and they're more than suitable for everyday browsing and Youtubing. They have about the power of your integrated graphics, but free up the northbridge and system RAM for other things. If you're doing anything more, an FX5200 PCI is the old standard. Cool, reliable, and very capable of many decent games (you can even play Portal on it... if your RAM can handle it). Oh, and by the way... AGP has been around since the Pentium II's 443 chipset... they just decided not to put AGP slots on this board to save money. It's not "just old". edit: botched link

Come on, I'd expect more out of a mod than just pushing Vistaids on some poor guy. If you like Vistaids, then fine, that's your "problem", but if someone wants to be enlightened with XP, at least let people help... Yes, of course you can run XP on that machine. There is no such thing as a computer that "won't support" XP. You'll have a hard time finding drivers and such, but it can always be done. And it'll take more tech skills than you may already have... not many people will be patient enough to deal with someone that doesn't understand what a SATA driver is, or doesn't understand what a device's VID/PID is... You did post in the wrong forum, though... it doesn't exactly belong in the nLite forum although you'll probably need to use nLite to accomplish your goal. But having said this, do you still think you have "what it takes" to undertake such a considerably large feat?

Yeah, I checked there, and all that's there is: regsvr32 /s /n /i:U shell32 rundll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSectionEx nLite.inf,C,,4,N I searched the whole registry for nlite.cmd, and couldn't find anything! I also can't find nlite.cmd in nLite.inf either, which rules that one out (I think?). nLite.inf is ridiculously huge though... I can't even begin to imagine why it needs 9/10ths of the stuff in that file, but "OK"... Don't know if I can ask Nuhi either... seems to have moved on to "newer projects" like vLite... =\

I've got a frustrating problem. I use nlite.cmd to install programs that can't be installed during Windows Setup (like .NET, Java, a few others), and perform a cleanup. I assumed this file would be deleted and never be seen again on the computer. Well, I created another user account and it hung while popping up a dialog box of "can't find file", for one of the installers that nlite.cmd runs. Duh - they were deleted and it shouldn't be running! I could just delete nlite.cmd but I need to figure out why Windows is calling it to begin with. What triggers it to run on every new user?

Adding my thanks here too! Ran out of space on my XP all-in-one CD (containing a _ton_ of integrations and all sane driverpacks.net drivers), and I really really, really, really, REALLY wanted to get rid of those useless old printer drivers! Thanks to this, now I can!

I use AVG as well. The tech shop I work at installs and recommends AVG to everyone coming through the door (we do our drive scans with it as well), but in all the changes I've made since starting my employment there, I have yet to find a better AV recommendation. AVG lets some things slip by, and has its fair share of false positives (more falses then positives in my experience). Is there anything better that we should be recommending? Something that's unintrusive, automatically updates, good detection, light on resources, and freeware? Kinda a lot to ask, but AVG seems to do quite a good job

People going out of their way to attempt to make me (or others in this thread) look stupid, but only proving their own idiocy. Today has been a particularly bad day for me, full of this kind of BS...PM'd the rest of the reply... carry on meaningless circle-running, everyone...

Yet another completely irrelevant reply, and yet more fuel for my entire library of reasons why anyone claiming that Vista is even an acceptable OS has absolutely zero credibility. P.S. NICE WORK WITH THE CAPS

That's a pretty pathetic reply... you post that just to make an irrelevant point? That was the entire basis of this topic. Nobody wants to download a 1gb file from M$ just to grab a single ~200kb driver. Nobody in their right mind will, either. Sanely, if given the choice between downloading - and INSTALLING ON YOUR COMPUTER - a massive 1gb download from Micro$oft, and just ditching Vistaids altogether, a sane individual would choose the option of ditching Vista. A third option is most reasonable, which is to download an older version of vLite (1.1x), installing the filter driver, and upgrading to 1.2. It can be found relatively easily by Googling for vlite 1.1.6. Just install that, install the driver, close it, then install 1.2. If you really want to stick it to Microsoft, set up a server to continuously download WAIK. Maybe they'll get the idea that a) Vista is crap, and B) WIM is the most important piece of that download and needs to be packaged separately. But then again, how much an act of God did it take to get Microsoft to realize that Vista is a total market failure and a worse mistake than ME, and fix up their screwups in Win7? I'm looking forward to 7's release, and after the miserable failure of Vista, that's hard to be able to say...

Above all, what I'd like to see right now in nLite is the ability to set the name of a preset before it actually saves a preset called "Last Session". I reference a previous preset in all my builds and more often than not, I have to manually pick through the INI files (in nLite\Presets) of previous builds in order to find the one I'm thinking of. If it would just pop up a box (or maybe a page of the wizard)... or something similar to ImgBurn's "You forgot to give this compilation a title!" dialog box... then I'd have a much more organized system. Perhaps a box with "Last Session" prefilled in it, or something. Also, if Nuhi is still developing nLite, the "burn directly to disc" has a bug in it regarding burning to DVD+RW discs... they don't boot, they don't work at all! I have to build and burn the disc with ImgBurn in order for DVD+RW's to work properly. I highly prefer DVD+RW's because they have bad-sector detection (and they almost _never_ go bad after hundreds of burns and tons of scratches) and they don't require an erase prior to burning. It's probably just a simple bug like improper session closing or something! But it could use fixing Just my $0.02

I just wanted to bring up a very severe issue with this "custom installer" maker that I encountered tonight... In the setup batch file, the (mis)use of "XCOPY" to completely overwrite the Program Files folder with the Nero contents of the Program Files folder completely cripples a system that uses a mounted drive as its Program Files folder, due to what appears to be a bug in Xcopy (which I haven't used in years!). That means, that the system ends up with a dislocated Program Files folder (no longer a mounted drive) that only has the Nero contents in it. If the computer reboots under this condition without knowing the problem was there, it'll be one long hair pulling session to get the drive located back in its proper place! This seriously needs to be addressed. Fortunately I caught the problem, deleted the files from the Program Files folder, then re-mounted the drive before anything serious happened. Why doesn't the "custom installer" simply extract (with WinRAR) to the system root, which will allow WinRAR to handle the overwriting of files, then let the batch file work with the in-place files?

I'm sorry, did you say take the PC away? Also, bumping this to report my first case of trying to use the product key update tool on a Pro VLK system (that's passed through my "shop" before, started with a phony Pro VLK license), and tried to put the Home OEM key on it with the update tool. No luck. I get "The product key entered is not valid for this system. Please check it for typing errors and try again." So, no such luck. I really wish it did work though. It theoretically should work, and it would be in MS's best interests to actually make it work properly, but it seems that's not the case.