Glenn9999

All of which is wholly irrelevant to the point I was trying to make. Most all of what is suggested in here (disabling the WU service, changing settings, host files, etc) is very non-permanent and is on the par of someone setting read-only attributes to files thinking that it will stop them from being deleted, which is the point I was trying to make. In fact, with a significant portion of the technically inclined Windows 10 user base actively arguing that forced updates, telemetry, etc gains them trust from Microsoft (the whole virus inoculation argument basically), and would claim that the suggestions here are from people actively trying to erode the security of Windows, I wouldn't be surprised that Microsoft would force the issue at the behest of this "satisfied" portion of their user base and remove any options of these things altogether. Simply put, it depends on what you definition of "secure" is. Ultimately with all the "ink" spilled here, it's been an amusing read, but I'm surprised that so much trouble is being put out for things that are ultimately moot in the end if Microsoft so chooses. There's always Linux. If you can get it to work.

Ironically when I was writing that (main reason for it being never having the ULZ problem of certain other software and not having to fight Update Catalog by entering in KB numbers ad infinitum to get the updates), the question of the service itself being disabled (2nd page of the post, "Minimum Requirements" note #3 in the CHM). I debated disabling and enabling the service while the program was getting the update list, but ultimately decided against doing it for doing the same things that Microsoft is doing now with Windows 10 (fun huh?). Besides for those that are swearing by that, how do you know Microsoft's own stuff isn't doing that behind your back now? Of course the problem is going to come on whether Microsoft allows the service to be disabled into the future (this function is very much controlled by the service itself), or honors the "Never check for updates" setting into the future, especially if we start putting out things that will expose both on Windows 10. Ironically though, I was surprised BatchPatcher Downloader worked so well on Windows 8.1 when I ended up with it (conversely the rote offline patcher is what I really had to work on so I could use it in Windows 8.1 without issues). That said, the "Control Panel applet" thing was an idea to (more or less) put some of these suggestions into automated form for those that might not want to keep checking it constantly, and maybe put some of the settings back like they were.

It appears this tool simply uses the WU API interface, and works similarly to mine , which was more designed to simply download updates to be used offline from WU. That said I wonder how well mine works in Windows 10, especially since I haven't upgraded. If it all works fine, I wonder how fruitful it would be to throw together a simple control panel style applet to expose these settings? Also since I haven't seen it mentioned: Microsoft wages war on 'crapware' with new Windows 10 tool Pretty hillarious that they'd cook up some functionality that would have been mildly useful long ago.

ISO isn't really a very useful file format outside of optical disks. Maybe "preserve the files on the CDs in such a way that they can usefully accessed as boot devices under any and all circumstances" would be better. As for specific OSes, I'm well aware of the assorted requirements and limitations surrounding them. The main problem is getting these three specific disks to be useful outside of the presence of a DVD drive.

I've run into a question that I can't really find any good answers on. It kind of runs across different topics 1. I'm looking for things on how to make a USB drive bootable for things like DOS/98/Me/XP, but I'm finding a lot more about rigging up install disks for Windows 7, 8.1, and nothing much more than automated "format" programs. One thing I need to pick up...but however... 2. I already have some custom boot discs in storage I made from when I transitioned things from floppy to CD that I'd like to pull out and preserve... then 3. There's this whole disk image format that I see in some of the VMs... So, how do I proceed on this in order to back up my boot CDs and then be able to use them in such a way that I can install things onto a VM or straight boot from them off of USB drive? Also, is there anything else that I haven't thought of?

Has whoever done Pale Moon completely redone their code? It was rather horrible the last time I tried it, had to go back to Firefox.

Okay, now that I know what you're talking about . . . this is indeed quite doable from code. Programs that work from the notification area do it habitually. The problem is, you take away the end-user's means to control the application when you just indiscriminately remove the taskbar entry, and the user minimizes the application. Once that is done, all you can do is go through task manager, either hope you can get the app back, or simply kill it. Now there are tweaks that will pull any application from the taskbar to the notification area, but the problem with any approach like this is that there always needs to be a "controlling application" of some kind to handle when the window of the application isn't visible. So, a lot of the answer to this is "it depends on what you want to do and how you're wanting to get there".

You may want to clarify what you are talking about when you say "witness". Do you mean the regular taskbar entry for the application? Or something else?

I got the problem knocked down, once I had the time to look at it. After verifying that the recent patches didn't do it, I found out that Mediafire Desktop added a faulty setting. I removed it and the menu works correctly now. For those that need a solution to this: 1. Download ShellExView . 2. Run it and then sort by date ("File Created Time" or "CLSID Modified Time"). The last settings will be the most recently added. Disable starting from newest and work your way up the list until the problem gets removed.

I've noticed with my computer, recently, that the Context Menu of File Explorer will disappear within 1-2 seconds, making it unusable. How do I track down the cause of this (a recent patch, corrupted registry?) and fix it?

It would help if you debugged your batch files properly. The answer is pretty patently obvious here - 1.bat is simply not finding the others, probably because the current directory is different than the one the batch files reside in.

Supposedly, one could pull a lot of this information out of Windows Update itself. As I mentioned above, they did a better job of documenting their patches once upon a time, but now (especially looking at my Windows 8.1 patch list), they do a copy/paste on a lot of it and leave a lot more of it out. More or less they're saying "we don't care and you shouldn't either". Of course, I mentioned the ability to drop a list of installed updates to text file, which reasonably does update itself on superseded updates. Ironically, the capability to get this information was intended in querying the Windows Update database, but I never pulled back any real information in my tests. Then, the biggest problem I found was the inability to query it for other OSes outside of the one you're running, which cripples Windows update for any serious patch management. One could crack open WSUSSCN2.CAB and process (thinking of trying it) for any OS, but the problem there is making sure the data are unchanged (this is very undocumented by Microsoft, on purpose). Even just making API access to Microsoft Update Catalog (OS KB) would make matters like this so much easier, but we're kind of lucky Microsoft even bothered with an API for Windows Update given their obvious stance against user control of their own systems. At least they did reserve the option to pull patch files off of Windows Update and save them to disk, so that makes it a whole lot easier than manually searching and downloading files or hoping someone's external patch file is correct/updated (IMO the predominant weakness/failure of WUD).

You know what? It's only as confusing as Microsoft wants to make it. The problem is that they really don't want people evaluating and making choices about updates. They never did. There's very little to no information out there about any of it (your second statement quoted isn't true). The simple statement of it is that what we are seeing with Windows 10 is how Microsoft always wanted it to be. Auto updates, no control of what updates get applied. They couldn't do it for the anti-trust stuff back in the 90's, or just didn't have the cajones. So they make it as confusing as possible to manage the system by yourself. Document nothing, make anything like manual patching or selection of specific patches a nightmare and especially non-uniform. People will just either give up or stop caring, at least their thought until they started cramming things down people's throat. But such is a monopoly on Desktop OSes like what Microsoft has. Or a mobile monopoly like Google. Or anything of that nature. When there's no alternatives, you pretty much have to take what you get.

(Just a general response and not to any specific person) FWIW, I'm not sure the question at issue anymore. But a number of patch options will serve extra EXE files, which I figure are run as part of the process of actually patching the system. Older patches are EXEs by default, and those EXEs will be served by both WU and MS's public download links. But the newer ones vary depending on whether you get it from WU or download. The variance is whether you get MSU or CAB, which are processed by different patching systems if you have those files (WUSA versus DISM). MSUs are served by Microsoft's public download links (like Microsoft Update Catalog), while CABs are served by WU. A MSU file is actually a renamed CAB file which contains the CAB file served by WU along with an associated data file and any non-file serving EXEs. And if you want to get even more confused, certain KB numbers actually serve a number of patches reflected by still different KB numbers. If you have a concern of which patch files are actually "current", you can drop a list of patches off of WU or the offline scanner file (WSUSSCN2.CAB) along with file links and compare, which is a function I've been playing with (more off and on). It works well if you want to keep a flash drive of patches off of all the systems you encounter if you want to automate it, but the best you can do otherwise is drop a list to text. For instance (a snippet, edited to keep the forum from serving hyperlinks): A lot of where confusion lies is that there's just so many options for those that are technically and nothing particularly uniform.

When you do a program (full disclosure, I actually did one of those "alternatives to WUD") and download a file, you can control how you save a file - basically save it to whatever you want. AFAIR from when I considered doing a "make a UL" function in mine, I think when someone cooks up a UL a "friendly name" get specified along with the URLs. Actually what you posted wasn't *quite* right. Intel actually cooked up a 64-bit processor architecture of their own. The problem with it was that it wasn't very 32-bit backwards compatible so it floundered. So basically like a HD-DVD, Blu-ray thing, you had a format war and an eventual winner (AMD64). I don't know what tipped the balance in the end. Anyhow, you'll see patches with IA64 as well in older Windows as well as more modern things like .NET patches. Most will handle the long file names okay, but if you have something that claims to batch process (NLite or my patcher being two instances), grouping the files into the same folder is almost always best so they can all be picked up at once in a controlled fashion.

Anything directly associated with the Windows Update system, like Microsoft Catalog, will have a checking mechanism, which is the SHA-1 of the file appended to the file name. If you run a SHA-1 of the file, it should match that last part of the named file. You'll also notice this if you obtain the links directly off Windows Update as other alternatives to WUD will do.

Not to steal your thunder in the conversation, but I thought I'd point out that this is a simple macro which calls a function (VerifyVersionInfo) that has existed since Windows 2000. Edit: FWIW, the only real "issue" I've read about over running things on Windows 10 so far is version reporting functions (GetVersionEx, VerifyVersionInfo, etc). These will not return a correct version number as of the newest Windows 8.1s unless the application is explicitly manifested for those versions. This reflects Microsoft's application compatibility change, which leaves it up to the application for versioning instead of the OS.

Actually this has always been a universal. The best comment I got from a coding contest I entered once upon a time was something to that effect. Less functional OS/website, more eye candy in the (required) manual. This really has always been the case, as they explained in any device, product, or artistic endeavor like music or movies (guy related this to his military service at the time in the reports he had to fill out). Flash > Substance/Talent Always.

Wordpress is a mess in about every way these days. Not just in terms of a bloated web design. Most of the tools they've recently reworked are pretty bad, too. For instance, the new editor is neigh unusable if you plan on doing posts that are beyond simple doodles. And yet, they haven't fixed any of the standing issues that have existed in the service for years (fuzzy tracking for instance). Now granted, all the script blockers and things of that sort have pretty much killed that kind of functionality, it's still pretty bad when you have it reporting traffic that you have no clue about in one fashion or another even after you read the report. Granted, I'm not sure Blogspot or anything else is better. Edit, since I don't want to double-post: Most of the web pages have a problem with ads, which an ad blocker most always fixes. The problem usually is that most won't begrudge an occasional ad in moderation that won't screw with bandwidth or user-experience all that much, but when someone comes along and gets plain abusive, the ad and script blockers become absolutely necessary. A great example is a page full of flash, style sheets, etc that takes 2 minutes to load on higher end broadband. latimes.com. The current heavyweight champion in my web browsing world with respect to obesity. They ask for their ads to be blocked by pulling this and they deserve it. This is Ghostify without script blockers and everything else turned off. That isn't even the whole list. This kind of garbage is more the rule than the exception. Edit 2: IIRC, having that many sites broke Ghostery, too as the UI couldn't handle them all.

Feel free to try this out. It uses Windows Update to get its downloads so it'll always be up to date.

>Glenn9999 your batch files don't work it says disknumber is not a valid command Did you read what I wrote? "While I'm sure there's a good VBS solution to this, I thought I'd go ahead and post the program since I attempted it. Looking at attachment: Download count...0.

While I'm sure there's a good VBS solution to this, I thought I'd go ahead and post the program since I attempted it. (past all the UAC elevation stuff I had to put in the BAT) rem ----D:rem grubinst.exe --verbose -t=0 --silent-boot --skip-mbr-test(0) Seems to be catching the general idea. Though my batch skills aren't the best these days. @echo offpushd "%~dp0"echo %~d0disknumber %~d0 > temp.txtset /p _DiskNum=<temp.txtdel temp.txt@echo onrem grubinst.exe --verbose -t=0 --silent-boot --skip-mbr-test(%_DiskNum%) pause But I would say it's certainly a sub-optimal solution, especially if you can get the VBS to go fully. In fact, i'd go ahead and program the call to grubinst.exe within the program or whatever it is I'm wanting to do with the data. (File Pulled)

I can't help much on the VBS side, but I notice since I tried this as a program that it requires admin rights to get the file handle to call DeviceIOControl. So it may require you to elevate the script too to work.

This is not going to be an incredibly easy task. In fact, you may have to go VBS or program for it. Basically for WMI, you would have to hit Win32_LogicalDisk and then link it to Win32_DiskPartition in order to see what you're getting. Or if you have string testing capability, just checking Win32_LogicalDiskToPartition would cut it if you can get the data out. Microsoft provides an example here. As for API, you'd have to call DeviceIoControl using IOCTL_STORAGE_GET_DEVICE_NUMBER But it seems there's no "one shot" answer to this.

I revisited this recently, since I learned enough to make it handle the way I want now. Single click to bring up the drive size display window, which should show a relatively unlimited number of partitions. This window should appear next to the system notification tray, where ever you have the task bar. Single-click to turn it off. As you use the system, the window should stay in the forefront while you use it for other things. Check "Settings" to set the units it uses (bytes, KB, MB, GB), along with the period in milliseconds that it uses to update the stats. (Yes you can copy something to a drive and watch the partition info change on the window. "Load on Startup?" makes it so the system loads the program upon startup. Clicking the option again should remove it. As this was a simple little program to do a single task, hopefully this will be enough and there won't be any problems. But if you try it, let me know. driveinfo.zip