amigafan

Well, I clearly have XP and Win7. Is it so hard to work out why I didn't try Vista? I don't really like Vista's explorer, but it does have the classic startmenu.

I've tempted to upgrade from XP to Windows 7, but I want to have as much of the classic look and feel as possible. I particularly want the classic start menu, and the old explorer layout would be nice. I tried to run explorer from XP, but it wouldn't launch. Would the Vista explorer work?

A few months ago I was having some strange problems with my PC at work. The Windows installation has been in use for about 4 years, by several users. After running CCleaner, I did see an increase in speed. Explorer in particular was much more responsive. This may be due to removing references to shell extensions that are no longer installed, filetypes that are no longer registered etc.

That is incorrect. Google for Wii softmods.

Don't forget to allow space for the pagefile, which is 1.5 x RAM.

I wasn't talking about LiveCDs or VMs either. Back in 1999 my PC had one FAT32 partition (Win95), onto which I installed QNX, BeOS and Mandrake. These 3 operating systems each created a file of around 500MB, which was a HD image. The bootloader/kernel and/or some other essential parts were launched from inside Win95, which was then shut down and the alternative OS booted. Your Google skills must be poor, I found this info about BeOS on the second page of results. For details about QNX, the first page of results throws up the necessary info. Well, that's proved me right, I won't bother finding something that proves Mandrake used the same technology.

Which operating system do you use?

QNX, Mandrake Linux and BeOS all had an ""entire "volume" inside a VHD, that is bootable from another OS natively without a Virtual machine". I know what I'm talking about.

I'd hardly call this an amazing concept, since Linux, BeOS and QNX were doing this a decade ago.

Could somebody please point me to the registry key that controls the Extended pane for Service in mmc.exe. I'm certain I got it from MSFN, but days of searching have failed to produce the information. TIA.

SSDs also use less power and generate less heat. Lower power consumption may or may not be of of interest to you, depending on the price of electricity in your region. Here in the UK, energy prices go up when the price of oil goes up, go up when the price of oil goes down, go up when the Queen of Sheba farts, go up when there's a vowel in the month etc. Lower heat generation will help maintain reliable system temperatures.

I tested 2 microSD cards in my MSI GX700 laptop, but was unable to boot from them. I can boot from them when I use a USB adaptor, but I wanted to have them stored safely in the SD slot. Oh well...

SD stands for Secure Digital, it's a type of flash memory used in cameras, phones and other devices. OP: I know that CF cards can be booted when install on the IDE bus with an adaptor, but I don't know about SD. I'm looking into it for use on my new laptop, so I'll post any info I find.

Have you thought of using a RAM disk to store temporary internet files? This thread by Gosh explains how to integrate one into an unattended CD. Some system profiles such as LOCAL SERVICE and NETWORK SERVICE will still leave temporary files on the harddrive, but it will be a lot less to clean up. Alternatively, you could use Opera and turn off the disk cache.

I use RVMIntegrator to update the source, nLite to shrink and customise, and the $OEM$ folders for applications. This means that updating apps doesn't affect the XP source, and vice versa. See the MSFN Unattended guide for more info. As long as you use a sensible folder structure, maintenance is fairly easy. This is mine: