dencorso

Either the northbridge or the southbridge have (at least in part) burnt out, IMO. Remove the heatsinks from over them and clean the past or tape from over them, to give them a good look. Some times the damage is visible. Some times it's not. But if I'm right, the mobo is toast. Sorry.

Give every cap a gentle tug. Sometimes they blow downwards, not up. If nothing appears wrong, do inspect the backside again, for black spots, melting or any other more subtle signs of a short.

No. Sorry! Win 8 already required NX, PAE and SSE2. See this and this. The newest Windows without those requirements is 7.

Janis Joplin (with Big Brother and the Holding Co.) - Ball and Chain That was at the Monterey Pop Festival (1967), FTW.

The sad thing is that Dogbert would probably be a better CEO than Nadella is... Hands down!

Is there any need of further proof that Windows 10 is actual malware?

Try to do an explicit type recast, from the type it says it cannot convert to the one the function requires. What the compiler is saying is that it refuses to convert those types implicitly.

Dogbert is bound to become MS's CEO soon, you'll all see...

jaclaz gave you links to the homepages for GNAURAL and SBAGEN, already. we all expect you to go there and read their fabulous manuals before posting back.

Well... IMO, where one reads "senescence", one ought to read "sentence", in case it may be of help...

I'm moving this thread to the office forum: let's see whether it gets more responses there... err... here. In any case I've left a link to this thread in the websites and boards forum, too, so that on can get here from there, too. I'm sorry I can't be of help myself, but I went from pine on aix or irix to non-MS webmailers, so I've never even used outlook express...

If I got it right, it's more or less like this: 1.) You fumble around until you find an obscure option "Check the status of my reservation", then you click on it. 2.) You then get a window where you can click on a button marked "Cancel my reservation!", then you click on it. 3.) You then get a window saying "Are you sure?", then you click on "Yes". 4.) You then get a window saying "Really?", then you click on "Yes". 5.) You then get a window saying "Please state in full you want to cancel your resevation, using alternate case:", so you type: "SuRe, I hErEbY dEcLaRe I fIrMlY wAnT tO cAnCeL mY rEsErVaTiOn Of WiNdOwS 10". 6.) You then get a window saying "You spoilsport you! Your reservation is cancelled", but, even then, there is a button in the lower part of this window that says: "Click here to fully cancel your cancellation.", followed by a much smaller one that says "Done!". Seems to be easy like this...

With all due respect, do create a ddrescue or similar raw disk image *NOW*, before anything!!! After that you may indulge into philosophizing about the slowly turning universe (or maybe the faster turning disk platters) without risking loosing more data than you already have.

Well, in any case, it seems to me our friend void* isn't much interested in participating in any of the multiple threads he opens when he decides to pay us a visit. We do go off-topic very often, as you know... I did return to the 9x point because I do feel for most uses 95c or 98SE should be at the perfect balance between functionality and size. And because 95c+ is much more stable and reliable than 3.x... As always, just my 2¢, so, in a way, I'm too venturing off-topic, isn't it?

Just my 2¢, so feel free to ignore it, but I'd stick to the original purpose of the application and make it exclusively a way to opt-out of 10, after being conned by MS into accepting it. Such an application is clearly needed, especially by the less tech-savvy users.

If the idea is to run 16-bit Windows and DOS applications, a VM running Win 98SE should better than 2k for doing just that. And lightier, too.

It should allow for choice, of course. And in any case, those telemetry updates are obviously unwanted, too.

Something that presents a menu of installed updates and allows you to select the one you want to uninstall. In case you mean the updates in the menu ought to be limited to those listed in the thread about avoiding Win 10, I do fully agree.

Its not alowed to redistribute unredistributables. You ought to have read the Rules, already...

Yes. It's easy to spoof. File versions require a lot more work to spoof. On things like this I agree with the X-files: "Trust no one!" And, just to start gathering some data, here's the only relevant datum I can provide: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 (EN-US) SMSS.EXE is v. 6.1.7601.18798, having a PE Timestamp of 0x5507A49D or Tue Mar 17, 2015 03:50:53 GMT, 112,640 bytes of size and SHA-1: D34ED774F9FDCBA938A7807BD8FB1B398C51BC81 It's possible that the numbers listed here for 7 and later may hold... but better sure than sorry.

@rn10950: Great! Thanks! @all: We need to ascertain the version numbers of SMSS.EXE across Windows Versions... those I've not found anywhere... @jaclaz:I sure do. Thanks! And here is something you might enjoy, too (it was fist published in 1891, mind you!)...

Well... I, for one, found that story interesting... but, yes, nothing changed. For the record, here is a pointer to Geoff Chappell's detailed version history for the NTOSKRNL, and a similar one for NTDLL is available on the same site make sure to scroll down... these pages are rather long, but quite worth it). Some more info on NTOSKRNL on this page.

I do think SMSS.EXE may be the best file to target if using just a single system file to ascertain windows version, because it is rarely, if ever, replaced by hotfixes or security patches (and, BTW, here's some interesting info on Win 10's SMSS.EXE). But using more than one file should be more reliable, albeit a little more complicated.

Obviously it'll have to do some heuristics when unexpected versions are found, but it should be reliable enough. Incidentally, a similar method, but based solely (AFAIK) on the version of kernel32.dll, has been the way Kan Yabumoto settled on for xxcopy to know which windows it's running on, for quite a long time already... The loss of a sane versioning mechanism is another great accomplishment of the more recent versions of windows, so MS must be quite proud of it!

Reading the file versions of NTOSKRNL.EXE, NTDLL.DLL and SMSS.EXE should be the most reliable way for determining the true windows version, and ought to be reliable, isn't it so?