Idontwantspam

Right now I've got XP Pro SP3 and Ubuntu 8.04. I had vista too for a while but needed the space it was taking up.

Boot off of your Windows XP CD, and when you get to the first options screen, press R to open the recovery console. Log on to your Windows XP installation in the recovery console. Then type the following commands: fixboot This will fix the boot loader cd C: <--or whatever your systemdrive is for XP attrib NTLDR -S attrib NTLDR -R attrib NTDETECT.COM -S attrib NTDETECT.COM -R This removes the system and read-only attributes from NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM copy D:\i386\NTLDR C:\NTLDR copy D:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:\NTDETECT.COM Replace D: with whatever the CD drive is. Make sure not to copy NTLDR from windows 2000. You can run dir D: to list the contents of D:, and if it looks like the CD structure then you're good to go. attrib NTLDR +S attrib NTLDR +R attrib NTDETECT.COM +S attrib NTDETECT.COM +R This will restore the system and read-only attributes. As a final step... fixmbr Which will fix the master boot record for you as well. Then type exit, remove the cd and XP should load succesfully. Oh and I'm not sure what these remote connection details are that you speak of, but this process shouldn't modify any other system settings or saved information whatsoever.

>_> Also read this...

I read bugs and was thinking that you had a lot of, you know, software bugs. Wow... that surprised me. Ummmm you might be able to use a vacuum or something... I'm not really sure. Make sure to eliminate any crumbs, etc. that they might be attracted to. DVD's can be washed with soap and water as long as you let them dry completely before using them again.

iirc, it's in explorer.exe, shell32.dll and possibly iexplore.exe as well. It's actually a series of bitmaps that are played in rapid succession to imitate an animation. You can use Windows group policies or TweakUI to change it without having to change the source files.

Good question. I was wondering the same thing... I think he might be asking if anyone has a powerpoint explaining networks. Maybe?

"Just like cars, most bad computer crashes are caused by bad drivers." Check and see if there is an updated driver available.

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/74/

There are free tools on the web that will tell you your product key for things such as this; I believe System Info for Windows does, and someone here at MSFN made a tool that does as well. As for media, depending on how long ago you bought it and what agreement you have with Adobe, they *might* ship you new media, otherwise you'll just have to find it.

I always save away my disks and make copies of them. So people always look at me funny when I'm using a CD-R that has "Windows 2000 Professional - (xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxx)" scribbled on it. "Is that LEGAL??!" So basically, make copies of your disks for backup or use the backup and save the original. Alternatively, make an iso of the disk and save it somewhere safe so you can make another copy if you ever need to. Just don't let other people get it. As for your issue at hand... if you work in IT or with people in IT, they can probably find you one - most techs will have an old win2k disk sitting around somewhere that they can make you a copy of.

Well... keep in mind that WEP is far less secure than WPA. It would be a much better choice to just get yourself a WPA-capable card.

No, since sometimes userprofiles aren't even all stored in the same directory, for example when roaming profiles are in use. There is a %userprofile%, which will return the current user's profile path, e.g. C:\documents and settings\bob. There is also a %allusersprofile% which goes to the all users profile, generally C:\documents and settings\all users.

If it's not an internal card, I'd highly recommend that you get yourself one that supports WPA - although you might be able to get it to work using hacks, when you're dealing with something like encryption security, it's probably a better idea just to get a card that works right. I'm not even sure that you can just use a different driver either - I think encryption is somewhat hardware handled as well.

Have you looked around at all? I'm 100% certain this has been covered before... more than once.

Basically, in the windows command line, the > character sends the output of whatever you're running to whatever is to the right of the > character. So, if you were to do echo test > text.txt Then test.txt would say "test" inside. Nul happens to be special in that Nul is Nul - that is, it's not there. It's sort of like sending it to nowhere. So by sending the output to nowhere, there is no output. Be warned that using > repalces the existing file if there is already one, so in the above example, if test.txt had content already, it would've been erased. >> appends the output to an existing file or creates a new one if none exists, and may be more suitable for some situations.

Most modern BIOSes have an option somewhere under power management or something of the like to turn on the PC automatically at a specified time. Quite handy sometimes.

Yay! I got it working! Yeah there's some registry settings. I'll see if I can find the .reg file somewhere...

Really? Hmm... I'll have to try that again, since so far it doesn't seem to have worked.

So, after upgrading to SP3, it appears that the old multiple remote desktop sessions trick doesn't work any more. Does any know if there is a modified termsrv.dll for SP3 yet, or if not, how I could go about making one? I like being able to have multiple sessions a lot so that if I need to make some quick changes to a different computer, I don't have to boot them off, etc. Any ideas? Google hasn't shown any promising results so far.

The cake? It's a lie Happy Birthday! (haha... nice, sneaking in the paypal link)

I need to generate a random, 8-digit combination of numbers and lowercase letters, for the purposes of creating the firefox profile folder, which is named xxxxxxxx.default. I tried using %random% but it seems to be a different length every time I use it, and it doesn't use letters. Is there any other command-line tool I can use to get 8 random letters/numbers? Here's my code right now: set profile=%random%.default mkdir "%appdata%\Mozilla\firefox\Profiles\%profile%\" xcopy "%systemdrive%\install\fxprofile\*" "%appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles\%profile%\" /Q /Y echo F | xcopy "%systmedrive%\install\profiles.ini" "%appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles.ini" /Q /Y echo Path=Profiles/%profile% >> "%appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles.ini" This is on Windows 2000 Professional. Thanks - any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh goly, what a dirty way to pause a batch file! Just use the sleep.exe that can be found in the Windows Server 2003 resource kit. It works just like the sleep command on linux: sleep n where n is a number of seconds, and it then waits for n seconds before continuing. Much cleaner.

But... why wouldn't you apply the service packs, other than just to be stubborn? It seems like a bad idea - MS stopped offering security updates to SP1 users about a year ago, I do't even know how long it's been since SP0 was supported...

Well, any user can create new users that have the same account level or lower than the account creating it. In other words, a user account that is a member of the administrators group can make an account that is a member of any group including but not limited to the administrators group. A Power User can create Power Users, regular Users and Guests, but cannot create Administrator accounts. Likewise, Users can create Users and Guests, but not Power Users or Administrators. There is no way for a user account to create an account with a higher status than itself, or else the user of said account could escalate themselves to higher levels, which of course would be a vulnerability. So, yes a normal account can create other normal accounts, if that is what you want to do. One note; the default windows xp user accounts control panel won't let non-admins create new user accounts, however, it can be done through lusrmgr.msc (Local Users and Groups snapin) or using the net user command. Hope that helps.

Ok... here goes. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, and I don't use vista as my primary OS. I have used it on my laptop before, although I inevitably end up going back to XP because my laptop, despite being "Vista Capable", does not run it well. Those arguing that Vista is a good OS have a point in that some of the same things were said about Windows XP and even Windows 2000 back in the day. I wasn't actually all that much into computers "back in the day", being relatively young, but looking back into the depths of the interwebs, I'd say that's true. You are also right that Vista doesn't run well on hardware that isn't up to spec. Giving Vista anything less than 2 GB of RAM is not a great idea. XP requires a minimum of 64 MB, recommended 128 MB and starts to work well at 512 MB or RAM, from what I have observed, although it can run well on as little as 256. So, you win the RAM argument. However, the user who started the thread is right as well: the world is saying "no" to vista. The simple fact is that Vista does not run well without decent hardware. A computer that just barely can run aero - like my laptop, with a 1.6 GHz Core Duo, 1 GB RAM and an integrated Intel GMA 945 graphics chipset, does not like vista. It's slow and laggy. On the other hand, this computer speeds along quite well with Windows XP. Although it can't play the latest games well, it can perform most day-to-day tasks with ease, even while seriously multi-tasking. So imagine then what a truly vista capable machine can do with XP. In my opinion, you would get more out of your hardware using XP than Vista, turning a "good enough" computer into a "damn good" computer. Also, never has there been such a public outcry against an OS. Vista is different in this way: the general public, joe sixpack, people who are noobs not nerds, are commenting on vista and how bad it is for them. Not everyone can build their own computer with the best parts, so they get what they can from HP or Dell, and it comes loaded with crapware (although dell is starting to lay off on the crapware, especially if you buy through the right parts of the site). The crapware slows down their computer (granted, not vista's fault) and vista slows it down more. My peers who know next to nothing about computers talk about how annoying that new vista is and darn it why can't they give back XP. Was there ever a petition to save windows 98/ME/2000? No. When Windows XP came out, it was new and strange, much like vista is now, but it was an immense improvement over windows 98, which is what most home users were using, and even better improvement over windows ME which all the unfortunate people were using. It brought the NT kernel to the masses, with improved security, stability, etc. Vista offers no advantage over XP for most users. True, there are a myriad of advantages, but there are no large, major changes that will really make people go "wow", despite the whole "Ow is now" program. In fact, I would venture to say that there are quite a few new "features" that are disadvantages. UAC is a failure in the eyes of joe user - most people end up turning it off and it never does any good, and those who leave it on are often irritated by it. Although those who are more tech savvy can afford to turn it off and be careful, those who don't know what they're doing are those who need it the most. Then there's the whole issue of DRM, which is getting worse with every release. Also, a few days ago it was announced that MS is handing out free for the taking a backdoor exploitation kit to law enforcement agencies. Do you really want any cop to be able to walk in and get right into your computer, supposedly even being able to bypass vista's highly touted bitlocker encryption? I didn't think so... Anyhow, most of this is either opinions I've developed from my limited experience with vista, or a summary of what average people I know are saying about vista. And I'm tired so I'm going to leave it at that. Oh - I must mention, that file sharing is very easy in vista, and is one of the few improvements. Can't argue there. The A+ exam does have a software segment, but xp has only just made its way on there, and vista is not in any of the questions. And as it has been mentioned, the A+ is an entry-level exam, not a declaration of expertise.