Glenn9999

In my Windows 8.1 install, I have a program that seems to be running improperly off of a file association. When I click on the some of the files it belongs to, I get a "File not found" error message. Others work, so I guess the file parm needs quotes (") around it. I tried looking in the UI and didn't find any screen to fiddle with this manually like I'm used to seeing and got the "which program to use" screen instead. I even tried searching the registry and didn't see anything particularly odd looking. Could anyone fill me in on where this stuff is stored, how to access it, and more importantly fix this problem? Thanks.

Since I haven't seen it mentioned...Weird Al is back. Posted 8 music videos to Youtube from his latest CD. Here's one: The interesting note for computer-related news is that he proved that a music artist can promote online (and give away 75% of the CD on Youtube) and still sell CDs, shooting down a lot of the music industry's "online piracy" propaganda (if people can download it, they won't buy it).

I don't know if anyone is still using this program or not, but I thought I'd point out what I noticed in using this on Windows 8.1. It functions for me just as it did in Windows XP, except the "Offline Mode" will fail. All you will need to do is "Run as Administrator" and this part will work. I put a manifest into the file I have here to do UAC elevation no matter what, but I figured it wasn't a big enough change to warrant releasing since the "Run as Administrator" option is there. Hope that helps. EDIT: I put the program on the first post so it should be easier to locate and download. Like I said, I don't know anything about win7 administration to know if you could do anything with those CAB files like what is in the first link. The best I could do is enable those to be shown in the list so it'll be downloaded. After that, I really can't say. See Batch Patcher. I enabled 2.0 to handle patching systems with CAB files.

Version 2.00 is released and can be found on the first post. The main change is that it supports CAB files via pkgmgr and dism and MSU via wusa. I tested it against Windows 8.1 and Windows XP. Given I used the same code base for handling EXE, there shouldn't be any reason why it shouldn't support Windows ME as well.

Sorting algorithms are where you want to look, especially sorting networks. The problem you'll run into is that most sorts are based on exchanges more than reorders, due to the nature of computer memory. Which means in a lot of cases, like you described, you'll be exchanging a lot of numbers. Now if you construct the data as a linked list, you can perform a replacement like you described, but can be a little tricky to code a sort against. If you can do it (and I'll have to look at my source, I kind of remember doing something like this, but not sure), you'll need to do your normal sort algorithm, saving the data from it (i.e. a sequence of instructions like "exchange position 5 with 1"), then parsing that data and constructing an optimal path for sorting the data which requires the fewest moves. I'll look and see if I can find something like that in my stuff.

okay I got it figured out. Thanks.

I was getting a weird error in posting this so I tried it a few times. I see they all posted. Please delete the others, thanks.

I'm running into a problem (more generic one than a 8.1 one, though, but it's happening there), that I'm not seeing a solution to - perhaps just not putting the right things into the search engine...anyhow, how do you do a successful shortcut to an EXE that's greater than 64 characters (I found this limit out through testing)? What I get right now when the EXE path is > 64 characters is that it just does nothing... Any help on what to do to solve this?

But I believe that some versions of DISM can be installed on Vista, and I think even on XP. I think so too from what I see (especially since CAB files can be downloaded on Windows XP - I get the feeling CAB is what Windows Update itself uses)...so that's why I just decided to search for the files in (WinSysDir). Anyhow I got the update done and the whole thing seems to work well. Of course, I have a different idea. I'm half-tempted to try for an end-to-end (offline) solution driven by Windows Update that you can put on a flash drive or CD/DVD, so you basically will always be up to date and don't need manually created update lists. I already got two different programs posted that will do it, so it wouldn't be technically impossible. Just whether it would be worth doing or not would be the question.

Good to know. Anyway, I think I got it all resolved. Found references that say you can just blow out the sandbox directory after you run pkgmgr and all will be well. Thanks for everyone's help!

Actually no. All expand.exe will do is get you the files, it does nothing to actually INSTALL the files, since they're "diff" files and not the actual files themselves. I refrained from responding to that thread simply because the OP was wanting "the actual files installed by the update" and I found about three ways to get to the files within. Evidently the OP did not want that, given the response. Expand.exe is easy enough, the problem is actually doing something useful with those files after you got them. Anyhow, I think I got the problem in hand as long as I can determine whether pkgmgr and DISM is present on the system or not. The only real outstanding issue seems to be how to handle the sandboxing issue that seems present with pkgmgr.

Okay, so DISM.EXE starts in Windows 7 and can be downloaded in the WAIK for Vista or below...documentation suggests pkgmgr for CABS in vista... This is the command-line I'm finding... Pkgmgr.exe /ip /m:c:\temp\Windows6.0-KB929761-x86.cab /quiet /norestart Is this reasonable? Edit: Nevermind, I see it here on my system, can test it :-) Thanks.

Okay thanks. Like I said, I figured out how to do online installs with both and tested both under 8.1 to work, but need to be reasonably sure they will be there for other OSes if the program is presented with .MSU or .CAB. I figured out WUSA is probably in Vista and above (your first link confirms), but wasn't sure about DISM. Thanks for the links.

And that's consistent on all things Vista and higher version wise?

I'm working on a new version of my old patching program since the requirements changed enough for Windows 8.1 (of course now that I have it) and was wondering something. I figured out that you can use DISM.EXE against .CAB files and WUSA.EXE against .MSU files on Windows 8.1 okay. But I'm not sure of the availability of these things on Vista and 7 (and the other Windows Server type products). Could anyone fill me in on whether they're there, and more importantly where to find them on the system? Thanks.

Unless there's a good static redirector link (I don't think there is in this case), you'd have to download the HTML from that main page, scrape it for URLs that match the front part of the file name, and THEN call WGET on those URLs. If there's a way to do it with Script, the folks over here are sure to know.

Yeah, or another one of my questions with the program - I found out pretty quickly as in #1 that there are very few *strict* 4x3, 16x9, 16x10 files, so I had to make it sort in a more "fuzzy" way (i.e. 4x3 plus or minus a certain value). The "certain value" is a difficult one, too, as it's hard to tell how many pixels off you can get before the picture begins to distort. Of course, I think I found the right value that sorts most of the files into those bins but punts the oddball aspect ratios to another place to be manually reviewed, as I tested some of the outer cases. Things that require visual judgments get hard. There are, but I find it easier to just take off and do it than search sometimes, especially if I have most of the code already lined out from other projects. Of course, there's harder tasks that I don't get the time to, where I eventually just stumble across a program (last being id3v1 to id3v2 copy on MP3 files, or actual image duplicate checking). Sorting by resolution is easy in Explorer, so I probably won't bother with this program, but it wouldn't be too hard outside of working out what the "bins" should be in that case. Sorting by subject matter will be much easier, too, with smaller groups of "like" images.

A custom one (unreleased) I wrote for the job (more or less, because I don't know scripting too well, but there you go). As I wrote in the first post: Basically, load up JPG into graphics object to find out dimensions, do calc to find aspect ratio, then copy/move file to appropriate output folder. Of course, it's not very polished. This thread is asking about taxonomy (can pick a value and call it HQ, but not really *sure*), mainly what rules it should use, because I'm not too sure of what is universal. Of course, I can make it cut off a "quality line" at whatever I want, but I'm looking for an opinion as to what "high-quality" image resolution is these days. The main reason why it exists is mainly trying to cut out a good amount of the grunt work in Explorer of going through these 1800 files and sorting them like I want.

I've already visually verified all of them as I've collected them. Basically the issue is more organization than anything else. I got the before mentioned program functional enough that it does the job if I pump the constants in such as directories and the like and fudge things enough to handle pixel size differences. Mainly the issue seems to be more taxonomy of size - I got the program to successfully identify 16x9 suitable pictures versus 4x3 (and even group off the oddball sizes for further review). There wasn't very many oddball sized pics, so #2 seems solved. Mainly the question left is taxonomy regarding size: 640x480 is obviously crap if it can't be tiled, so probably should delete those? What's the low water mark for most people when it comes to desktop images? I guess whatever the common monitor size is right now? What point becomes hi-res/hi-quality? Anything 1080p (1920x1080) or greater?

I'm not sure if this would be a good topic for here or another place such as Desktop Screenshots, but I wanted to get some discussion on something. I have a number of graphics files intended to be desktop backgrounds (1800 right now to be precise) that I'm trying to sort out based on quality and other factors and burn to disk. Now I figure one can apply certain standards to those as to figure out what is crap and what isn't and what is best used for each kind of thing. My first thought in having that many is to create a program to sort these files based on certain criteria. I can get some numerical tests out of the file resolutions, but the main issue is knowing what is best. 1. In sorting by resolution, I've found there really isn't anything consistent = in one case, I had sorted files of 1600x about 20 other widths. So the question in having so many file resolutions (I ended up with about 100) becomes how do you generically group up files? I can assume higher resolutions are better than lower in files that aren't meant to be textured. Where would you set the lines (i.e. less than xxxx is low-res, etc)? What resolution is too low to keep around (i.e. crap), and how is this determined? What becomes high resolution, or otherwise? Basically, I'm asking if there's a good way to group these up. 2. Then, there's the issue of aspect ratio. I can divide width by height and get an aspect ratio value, representative of whether it's more a full screen image, wide screen image, or the like. But again, I get a multitude of these and nothing uniform. I know 1.33333333333 is strict full-screen and 1.6 or so is strict wide-screen, but is there a good variance that's acceptable without too much stretching or the like? Can one block out wide-screen images on a full-screen monitor and make them okay? Or a fullscreen onto a widescreen? Is there anything different for other devices? I know I've got a few double-width files, I presume are for double-monitor situations? Then some weird half-width ones. Are those for mobile devices? I guess where I'm at is that I'm not really sure what's the best way to handle this and am looking for some advice on how to sort images so as to identify the device they'd best fit on and identify what is good to keep and what is crap. Or am I just overthinking it? So, any ideas?

Actually, I had this issue too in doing the install I referenced before, and the patch mentioned in this thread didn't help. What did help however was as you did, going ahead and installing the patch files I had on hand. When I did that, autoupdate took off upon reboot of the OS and installed the rest. What's going on is the infamous svchost.exe is using 99% cpu all the time problem. Several of the sources I found indicate that providing the system a patched MSI.DLL is what fixed the problem (though I can't say which of my patches on hand did that).

I'm finding this patch is a complete mess, and in researching the problems I'm having with installing it, I found 2 or 3 different scenarios where it fails to install. I'm not seeing where Microsoft made a solid fix for this either.

I just tested that, that covers the rest of it. As for the 2nd part of the quote, that's the whole story. DBAN bomb already set off, virgin copy of XP installed and patched up to current, but not activated. Only problem is that there are certain forced "personalizations" when installed that need to be changable if the end-user wants done (I doubt "Your Name" is going to fly as a profile). Anyway, I think there shouldn't be any more problems that will present themselves in selling this old machine.