Glenn9999

D:\ is where the uninstall information for the service pack is pointing. Where is your Windows install? D as well or is it on C? How is the space on drive C? Have you tried running disk check against all your hard drives? Do that by running "chkdsk c: /f" (no quotes) on a command line. C: is the drive you want to run it on, so you can reissue the command for D: and however many drives you have. Then try to claim more space. Remember two things: 1) Files are measured by byte size, but are stored in sectors on drives. That means you can have a 1 byte file that in reality takes up 4,096 bytes (or whatever the allocation is per sector). As a result, you can have a ton of very small files on the drive taking up the whole thing and have reported a lot of space remaining. 2) There can be other things going on, too (the chkdsk thing, ADS, system restore taking up a lot of space - try disabling that).

(never mind, I got this program tested to my general satisfaction)

I read the Windows XP SP3 board and there is an occasional request from people for both IE7 and WMP 11. Now I know my thoughts on the matter (no to including both), but I was wondering the general opinions of those here. Would you want Microsoft to include a full upgrade (meaning if you have IE6 you'll end up with IE7) of both IE and WMP (of course we all know how well Microsoft listens to its customers )?

I find most people into computers usually have some typing skill. Actually, it's almost essential to productivity when it comes to programming. In one class, it paid off, because I finished a 2 hr final project in the computer lab (one header in a print report off) that the instructor designed to not be finished in that time period. Of course, copying code helps, but also helps to get it entered in the first place quickly. Probably shocked the guy. Oh: 104wpm, 1 mistake.

(edit: You posted a link to NTFS for Windows98 I see now. But it seems to perform what you're looking for)

As a tip, Microsoft is operating a Windows XP Service Pack 3 message board, which you can find here: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowFo...0&SiteID=17 If you already have a hotmail address you can log straight in (pretty much).

I don't know the decisions or the whys of why bootable CDs (El Torito) were done this way. But anyhow, when you make a bootable CD, you have to make a floppy image and then burn the rest of the data. When the CD boots, it uses the floppy image, and then as part of the floppy image you have to provide CD-ROM drivers. My guess is to be compatible with most systems, since most systems only know how to boot from floppy disks or hard drives.

If you can deal with running beta software (i.e. you can deal not having your computer work completely right), Microsoft did release Service Pack 3 RC1, build 3264 publicly. It has a few CPU scheduling issues, I've noticed, which I hope they fix come time for full release. As far as Microsoft goes, I would rather them take their time with this and fix as many of the bugs as possible, given that they are pushing the Vista garbage they have. This will likely be the last service pack.

(Nevermind...)

This is incredibly strange to me. Is there a bug in the emulator that only reads files in 32K chunks? That's what it's sounding like. A simple error to correct too. In the meantime, will this help?

Microsoft Update Catalog

If this is for your school work (a paper I assume?), you would do well to start researching answers to these things so you can provide reputable reference sources (this means magazines, books, etc) as opposed to asking people in a web forum. Of course, we can give you some good hints on directions to start looking. In most cases, you'll find good case studies and documentations to answer these questions. As geek points out, the licensing model used will play a great part, but you will need to take the background of what those say and compare it to some models you find out in the real-world. For your question "Can a company based on open source software make money?", look for answers to the question in terms of companies. Try to find a general sample of companies that post their revenues publicly (you'll be lucky to answer this question for private firms/individuals). No doubt, you'll find companies both making money and losing money that are trying the open source thing. Seek then where their revenues lie and see if the company is gaining most of its revenue from open-sourced projects or if their closed-source business is subsidizing it (as truthfully many firms doing OSS are), or if their revenues come from providing services, etc. The key is to start finding company case studies, articles on companies, etc. Computerworld or Business Week is a couple of good starts for searching. Good luck!

I tried VirtualBox, but had a couple of big problems: 1) It wouldn't work with the first boot disk I fed it to load the OS - it locked up. 2) It seems to not handle direct hardware accesses too well, maybe it shouldn't being a VM, but I had problems on a couple of things I fired up (Norton Disk Doctor being one of them) when I did get a boot disk to work. My guess is they probably still have some stability and other issues to work out.

I had another thought about this: since it seems to be a common enough problem that I keep running into (and expensive to solve if you follow most municipal electrical codes to the letter, I read), I wonder how practical, safe, etc it is to construct a box with an outlet. Then, rig a 2 prong cord for power and a separate ground wire to run out the window, etc, to the ground. Of course, it's not much a concern I'm finding out since people are pretty much dumb to what not grounding an outlet does to a computer, or any electronic equipment plugged into it (not to mention rendering the surge protector plugged into it useless). So there's not much of a market or concern for such matters.

http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/

It seems like it, if I had to guess. The files are always locked because the ADSes are probably in current use on the system. It's not exactly sophisticated, as I'm sure you've seen. ADS is a feature of all NTFS based drives, and you've seen how easy it is to both insert and read these data streams. As you will see, it's not a very much used feature (IE will use it to put icon files into the link files, and Windows will use it for a couple of other inane things). Just because it isn't used doesn't mean it's not useful to someone. And human nature always is this: If something can be used for a beneficial purpose, it can also be used for a nefarious one. Of course this isn't as messed up as the day of the Word VBScript viruses (and Microsoft's vehement denials that it could ever be used for that purpose), but it's still bad. Obscurity of this knowledge is what the virus/malware writers are counting on, but it will be a matter of time before all the scanners are looking for this kind of data and people know about the feature, making it useless to them. Yes. The ADS is associated with the file in question. The major problem, though, is that you wouldn't know any different through regular programs such as Windows Explorer, etc. You could have a 1K text file with a 10MB zip file in ADS, and you wouldn't be any the wiser (Explorer would show 1K text file). Hide sensitive files with ADSes explains all the how-tos regarding the issue. Use ADSSpy to scan your drive for ADSes and kill them.

It depends on what's available to you and what you're willing to pay. For a personal situation, I'm not sure I would purchase Ghost (too much money for as little as it would get used), but if I had enough occasion to use it, I probably would. It might be worth looking into the Nero option just to play around with it, but for most applications I can think of, I'd rather have the spare partition. Of course, my main problem with most backup solutions is trying to image the drive while the OS is running.

Actually a backup/restore program in Nero that goes to CDs. Nero BackItUp would be what it is called. NRESTORE.EXE would be a DOS restore option in case you would back up your entire drive, and then hose the drive for some reason. But from what I read in the docs, the first CD it turns out when you use that option should be bootable and have the program on it, so there shouldn't be too much to worry about with it (unless you want to make a disk yourself or the CD isn't bootable for some reason).

It's because those two OSes do not run true DOS, but they run a subset. In essence, anything resembling DOS (if it will even run, a lot of my DOS stuff won't even run on XP) is emulated. Therefore great pains were made to try and keep the DOS apps from detecting the underlying system. What are those pains? Look at COMSPEC. Usually for Win32 Command-line apps, NT based operating systems will use cmd.exe, but it will use a version of command.com. So to your DOS app (if it even runs), it thinks it's running on MS-DOS 5.00, and consequently will not have the same environment settings as the main command-line session. My thought to see if you're running in an XP system. Look for cmd.exe (it's real command-line interpreter) in c:\Windows\system32 (if it lets you). That would be a start anyway, at least until I can think of something better to suggest.

Try running the WD Data Lifeguard diagnostic program (available from Western Digital's website) and see what it says. In the absence of a problem indicated by the WD program, and the other stuff you've mentioned would make me think a possible BIOS problem relating to recognition of the drive, though. What kind of computer/mainboard is this? Are the settings okay for the drive (primary master I presume) in the BIOS? Has there been a noted problem with this drive as master relating to this particular system?

Nevermind the above post...got it figured out. I got the compiler thing figured out to my satisfaction. Actually I missed something in Notepad++. There's a plugin called NPPEXEC which allows batch scripting, and has an output console. So you can get it so it literally works like an IDE. Hit F6 and you'll get a console where you can type commands and things. For the compiler I was trying to run earlier, the following works: npp_save "c:\program files\borland\delphi 3\bin\dcc32" "$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)" The second-line is as before (runs the compiler, full_current_path is the currently loaded file). npp_save is a nppexec script command which saves the current file to disk. Save this to a script name, then when you pull up Notepad++, you can hit F6 and then select the script name, and then hit ENTER. Subsequent compiles only require F6 then ENTER. Of course, you can have multiple scripts if you have multiple compilers. The scripts are saved in plugins\config. Can't get much better than this

Holy crap, you can do that!? This would have saved me so much time during my last semester... (Description of an attempt to run the compiler deleted. Below is much better.)

Notepad++ Ask if you need any help on configuring it (the language pre-sets are okay, but setting up the compiler to run from it is not so obvious). In your code you'll need to check for that. Something like "try to read these registry entries, if they do not exist then create them." Or a non-existent key path if you did not create that first. In either event, there should be an exception condition triggered which you should be able to test for.

Most of the files offered on Microsoft Update can be retrieved as offline installers by using the address http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/. You can see if you can find what you want there.

The key is more to find out a cheaper/easier way to do it. For this project, I'd hate to get into something too involved. Which is why I thought I would ask. I figured from the start running ground wires would have to be a pre-requisite, but I wasn't sure if there would be a more straight-forward way. I have a surge suppressor with a LED that indicates a proper ground or not, and it indicates an improper or non-existent ground with these outlets. But I know what you're talking about, and have seen them before (may have to invest in one if I start to make a habit of doing projects like this). That's what is being done with these outlets now. They are in metal boxes with regular wires (no metal tubing like you describe), so I would think it would be easy to run single insulated wire (outdoor wire) from each outlet to a ground source. In fact with this situation, since they are so close to the ground anyway, I'm considering making 0.5-1.0 meter metal stakes and just doing straight runs to the ground. I know basically what needs to be done in theory (I found a few "how-to wire electrical outlet" pages). I guess the reason I'm asking is that I want to see how practical this is before I commit myself to doing it.