[deXter]

He would not be able to do that since its a multi-part archive. If it was a single archive, it could be possible, but since its a multi-part archive, he'd need to make archive that's exactly identical to the original archive. The chances of re-creating the original archive is very less, since he'd have to get back the original CRC values. To further complicate the things, he'd have to figure out what compression level, method, dictionary, etc was used for the other archives to be able to reproduce it exactly.

Simply put: you can't do it. RAR archives are verified with CRC32 checksums. If you try to externally modify a file in the RAR (say, using a hex editor), then the CRC value will differ and WinRAR will think the file is corrupt. Usually, you could use the "Repair archive" command which forces WinRAR recalculate a new CRC32 and allow you to extract the files, but since this is a multi-part archive, the RAR needs to have a matching set of CRC values to allow it to extract the whole set. Thus, WinRAR would still not be able to indentify the RAR with the rest of the set. You will still get a prompt you to locate the missing rar. To make the rar exactly identical to the original rar would involve rebuilding the header in such a way that the CRC would match the original file's CRC. This would require not only the complete header details of the of the original archive, but also a full knowledge and understanding of CRC and the multi-part RAR storage structure, plus plenty of experience in hex editing. Needless to say, it's not worth the time and effort to go into such intricate feilds, and no one would give you a readymade solution either. Your only option, thus, would be to resource the original archive.

WMP by default won't play DVDs. You need to have a decoder software installed, like PowerDVD or WinDVD. However, there are free MPEG-2 codecs available which you can install to play DVDs in WMP or any DirectShow app. http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Stinky_MPEG_2_Codec.htm If DVDs don't play back even after you install the codec, open regedit and head over to: - [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Player\Settings] - Create the string value EnableDVDUI with the value Yes Reboot. --- My personal advise: Forget WMP. Get VLC or GOM Player. Both of them play almost all video formats, they're really small, portable and easy to use. Don't mess your system by installing seperate codecs or codec packs.

Simply put, yes, you can. There is a caveat though: You won't be able to remove the attributes (R/H/A) of a system file (+S). For such files, you'd need to do a -S first. ATTRIB -S -R -H -A will work if you want to remove all attributes. Further caveats- - It won't work for OS protected files like "System Volume Information" - It won't work for files that you don't have write access to. (use cacls.exe for such files)

I use the two most powerful Anti-Malware tools available in the market today.. Knowledge and Common Sense!

Next time, please search before posting! http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?act=ST...=80&t=17835

Its old news. Its no big deal. Its Microsoft. Nobody cares "What DO people consider as news? Britney Spears shaving her head? Anna Nicole Smith? I think the worlds biggest software company being caught red-handed using pirated software and gaining billions of dollars in the process is very important." Yes. Britney Spears shaving her head is news, since she and no celeb had ever done anything like that before. Anna Nicole Smith is news because you just can't duplicate her case, its so complicated- its never happened before either. Microsoft- leaks, lawsuits, controversies, lawyers. Yawn. We're too used to it now.

I don't use an antivirus but for novices I recommend either Kaspersky or NOD32.

"but the windows cursor problem is not a problem with firefox, its because of a flaw in windows." Yes, but the browser shouldn't allow the flaw to be executed in the first place. Example: If you viewed that infected site in Opera, your PC wouldn't be affected, but if you viewed it in Firefox or IE, your system would have been affected.

Firefox isn't as good as it earlier was. The memory leaks have become a favourite topic of discussion. Also, it isn't AS secure as we were led believe- the recent Animated Cursor flaw in Windows highlights that. If you're looking for Security and Stability/Speed, Opera is your browser. If you're looking for Features and Extendibility/Customizability, Firefox is your browser. If you're looking for malware/trojans etc, then Internet Explorer is your browser -- The reason though why Fx became so popular is because as a user, you could get many extensions to do things more easily. As a developer, you could practically implement features that you want without perstering and begging the dev team (as Opera fans have to do so regularly ) -- It's good because it offers a choice- infact, a wide variety of choices that no other browser in the market currently has. Many people have become addicted to some extensions that they cannot live without. These people won't ever let go of Firefox because of that. In the end, its what does your job the best. I find myself using all the three browsers for various reasons, and I'm not even talking about web-development.

Sure. We do get to know if anything goes wrong. The GUI isn't the only way for a program to output errors, you know. There is something called as logs. Just check the log file and you'll know what exactly went wrong --- I don't know about the other silent-install makers here, but I always make my scripts log to a file so I'll know what happened. For some setups, (especially the ones that take a long time to complete) I usually add a hotkey which when pressed temporarily unhides the program. Releasing the button will hide the program again. In another setup of mine, I added a tooltip (that follows the mouse) which shows all the statusbar or progressbar text. (extracted live from the hidden installer.)

Prince of Persia 1 and 2 One Must Fall 2097 BioMenace 1,2,3 Wolfenstein 3D Dave Cat

Just put your XP+SP1 CD in and type sfc /scannow in Run.

They didn't "do this" yet. It's just what ONE author thinks. It's just his opinion/guess. Just last week Microsoft updated their roadmap page indicating that SP3 will come out in 1H 2008. If they really have no plans to release SP3, they would have removed it from the page. Unless its official, there's no point trying to speculate on what will happen.

It's not confirmed. It's just what one author feels, it isn't confirmed news. Windows XP still has many years to go. The product support is officially on till 2014. So whether or not Microsoft releases SP3 isn't of much concern, as long as product updates and hotfixes continue. For those of you worrying about the long list of updates that have to be installed post-sp2, consider using integrating the latest RyanVM pack. Personally, I'm pretty sure SP3 will be out, if not, there will atleast be a security rollup that'll include all the post-sp2 critical fixes.

Actually, you can use Getright 6 Pro with WUD. You need to enable the Getright proxy and enter that into WUD's proxy settings. Getright will handle the downloads and you'll be able to pause/resume etc.

Just a little doubt: Doesn't Vista Transformation Pack already do all this and more? If it does, why reinvent the wheel? Or have I misunderstood what exactly you're doing here?

boooggy, can you please edit your main (first) post of the thread to add the new version number and changelog? It becomes easier to know if a new version is out, instead of having to sift through all the pages.

Sever's still down. Could be because of this high traffic generated due to the downloads? Why not host the files on one of the many free filehosting sites? I personally recommend http://rapidmirror.com/, as a single upload hosts your file to the top 10 filehosting services.

There's no such thing as Service Pack 3, and what you're talking about is illegal so please don't mention any such stuff in this forum again. Also, Microsoft *highly* discourages people from downloading such readymade packs calling themselves "service pack 3", for obvious reasons. You don't need MS telling you that- its common sense. As for that particular XP, I highly discourage people from downloading such copies, not only because of its legality, but practically speaking they aren't any good. When you have such wonderful and easy to use software like nLite, there's no reason why someone would download a customised disk. If you thought that XP was fast, then you obviously didn't try nLite now, did you? I could list a 100 reasons why you shouldn't or wouldn't want to use that XP, but it'll take this thread seriously off topic.

There is already a patch for running Vista @ 256 MB

That's not entirely accurate. On PCs having 1GB RAM installed, vista sets the max pf size around 3GB. You don't *need* to set it to 3Gb. Vista's memory management logic has changed. For pagefiles, when set to system managed, vista changes it between a min of installed_RAM+300MB to a max of installed_RAM*3. So for a 1gig system, you'd find the pagefile varying between 1.3 <-> 3 gigs. (the pagefile would never exceed 4 GB for a 32 bit system, and 16TB for 64 bit) Take a look at this article on why vista uses so much RAM and why its good for you. Also, let me remind you that you cannot use the same pagefile/memory thumb-of-rule logics that you used with 98/xp for vista! For example, while earlier it was always recommended to set the min and max size of the pagefile to a constant size, its no longer recommended to do it. Also, the myth of a constant pagefile size multiplier with the physical ram has been debunked (many people used to follow the convention of pagefile size = 1.3*physical memory). These so called "tweaks" no longer hold good today, even for an XP system. There's no exact way to calculate your pagefile size, because of the variable nature of SuperFetch, the search indices, etc (they're all virtual memory objects). Therefore, let Vista manage the pagefile size and don't mess around with the setting unless you have a through knowledge of the internal workings of vista, your system and your usage patterns!

@pmshah, by using a memory management software you aren't really decreasing the usage-all that these programs do is swap your physical memory contents to the disk, so it only looks like its freeing the ram. Sooner or later those apps whose ram have been swapped will want it back, and when that happens, you can definately find your system slowing down. @gokulagiridaran, there were a lot of improvements in all versions of windows. I've written an article about this topic elsewhere, so I'm copy pasting the same here: ----------------------------------------------------------- These are the major areas where people are disappointed about Vista: 1) High System Requirements 2) Software/Hardware Incompatiblilty 3) Bugs Lets tackle these points by taking a leaf out of the history book. A couple of decades ago, in 1990, MS-DOS 5.0 made a huge splash in the market. It was the first version of MS-DOS to feature an advanced editor, undelete, unformat, task swapping, and QBASIC 1.0. It introduced so many new features that soon, most programs had their requirements changed to "Minimum MS-DOS 5.0". It had a modest requirements of 6 MHz CPU, 512 KB RAM, 3 MB disk space, 5¼-inch floppy drive. Then in 1996, when Windows 95 OSR2 was out, the system requirements were 33 MHz CPU, 8 MB RAM, VGA card (256 KB), 40 MB disk space, 3½-inch floppy drive. 6 years later (2001), Windows XP was out. The system requirements were 300 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, Super VGA card (4 MB), 1.5 GB disk space, CD-ROM drive. 6 years since then (2007), Windows Vista released. The system requirements are 1.0 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, DX9 card (128 MB), 15 GB disk space, DVD-ROM drive See a pattern here? Every 6 years, the system requirements for MS's flagship OSes increased significantly. Lets have a look at the how the RAM requirements increased: MS-DOS 5.0 -> Windows 95 = 16 times Windows 95 -> Windows XP = 16 times Windows XP -> Windows Vista = 8 times. Suprising right? Going by the timeline, you'd say Vista has actually lower system requirements than expected! Of course, some of you might argue that Vista runs much smoother with 2 GB RAM - In that case we could also argue that XP ran much smoother with 256 MB RAM, 95 ran much smoother with 16 MB RAM and MSDOS 5 ran much smoother with 1 MB RAM! ----------------------- Now lets tackle the incompatibility part using the same example. When MSDOS 5 was out, it introduced a full fledged memory management, EMM386.exe. It allowed loading programs into the higher memory. Naturally, this caused a number of software incompatibilities. Most software had to be re-written/updated. When Windows 95 released, it introduced a whole new user interface, along with cool features such as long file names (breaking away from the 8.3 convention). Wanna bet a whole new generation of programs had to be made? The old DOS programs could still be run however, when rebooted into MSDOS mode. With Windows XP, again a complete revamp of the user interface took place, with new features that we all were familiar with. Not all Win95 programs ran smoothly under XP, and some of them even refused to run in the compatibility mode. Finally, with Windows Vista, its the same old story again. ---------------------- Bugs: Win95 was very buggy, didn't have all the "promised" features and only delivered as a real OS with the release of OSR2 (OEM Service Release 2). By which time of course, most programs were re-written to take advantage of the new features. Win98 was buggy too, and offererd no real reasons to upgrade from 95-OSR2. However, Win98 SE fixed all the issues of 98, so much so that its still regarded one of the most stable releases of windows! It had nice features like improved USB support, IE5, internet connection sharing, and native support for DVD-ROM drives. WinME introduced a lot of features - too many features actually, which ended up making ME as one of the most buggiest Windows releases ever. Features included: no more "real" MS-DOS, System Restore, UPnP, Automatic Updates, Movie Maker, Compressed Folders, Image Preview, MS Internet Games, high color icons, etc. Phew! WinXP was of course a refreshing change from the buggy ME, bringing the advantages of an NT based system to home users. The main issues with XP was that it was more "protective". Things like User Accounts, Access Rights, File Ownership, NTFS, often meant more of an inconvenience than anything. Also, direct access to physical devices was no longer allowed (for eg COM ports), which again meant that a lot of software had to be updated. Only with SP1, XP became somewhat more stable, and important features like USB 2.0 , >137 GB access, and native SATA support were added. Again, what we're seeing with Vista is the exact, same thing. ------------- If you're still not convinced, its probably because MS never took this long to come out with an OS. We had a new OS every 3 years, but Vista took 6 years. Vista does add significant improvements, its just that this 6 year gap makes vista looks like a bloat. I mean when you compare DOS 5 -> Windows 95, all that GUI stuff, isn't that a bloat? When you compare win 95 to win xp, the huge start menu, the "visual styles", the alpha-blended icons, the new services like the indexing service, the animated search, ... isn't that a bloat? Well thats what I felt too, when these OSes were released. Thats what I felt when Vista was released, but if you look at it, its been going on for years, and eventually, all of us who upgraded to the "bloated" XP would upgrade to the "bloated" Vista sooner or later. The significant improvements of vista, the most important one, is that of increased security. The whole user rights system has been upgraded and has brought windows more closer to the unix-style of security than ever before. The fact that it doesn't make the default user the admin in itself is a significant development. Secondly, it runs the buggy IE in a low privlidge mode, thus making IE (and the system) more secure against malware. Other than these obvious changes, there are MANY internal security changes, for which I recommend you to read new security features in vista article on Wikipedia. Security aside, there are a lot of performance enhancing features like SuperFetch, which helps keep the computer consistently responsive to your programs by making better use of the computer's RAM. It prioritizes the programs you're currently using over background tasks and adapts to the way you work by tracking the programs you use most often and preloading these into memory. Vista also introduces the concept of low-priority I/O, which enables background processes to run with lower-priority access to the hard disk drive than other programs. That means better performance while running multiple apps. If you've tried the latest Diskeeper and found that it doesn't decrease the system performance at all- well thats how apps in vista run, the OS has a built in IO-Smart / InvisiTasking kinda feature. Speaking of defrag, the new defrag program in vista works a lot along these principles. Its also fully automatic and works similarly to Diskeeper. If I didn't know better, the Diskeeper guys might have licenced their technology to MS again like they did so in the past There are also performance features in Vista like ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive. I'll directly quote Microsoft on this one: "Windows ReadyBoost introduces a new concept in add-on system memory. You can use nonvolatile flash memory devices, such as universal serial bus (USB) flash drives, to improve performance without having to add memory "under the hood." The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache—that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard disk drive." "Windows ReadyDrive is a new feature in Windows Vista that enables PCs equipped with a hybrid hard disk—a new kind of hard disk that adds flash memory to a standard mobile PC hard disk drive—to enjoy better performance, greater reliability, and longer battery life." Finally, Wikipedia's page on the new features in Windows Vista is actually more informative and better presented than on Microsoft's pages itself! (No surprises there eh? ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista What is surprising though, is that there are plenty of features in here that I haven't seen being mentioned on the MS site, or for that matter, most articles I've read on Vista!

First lets get some things sorted out. The "PF Usage" shown in the Windows Task Manager IS NOT the real PF usage- its actually the Commit Charge. Taken from Windows' Performance Monitor: "Committed memory is the physical memory in use for which space has been reserved in the paging file should it need to be written to disk. The commit limit is determined by the size of the paging file. If the paging file is enlarged, the commit limit increases, and the ratio is reduced)" "Available MBytes is the amount of physical memory available to processes running on the computer, in Megabytes. It is calculated by adding the amount of space on the Zeroed, Free, and Stand by memory lists. Free memory is ready for use; Zeroed memory are pages of memory filled with zeros to prevent later processes from seeing data used by a previous process; Standby memory is memory removed from a process' working set (its physical memory) on route to disk, but is still available to be recalled." So basically, Available MBytes should provide an accurate info how much physical memory is free, and this is the same value that's shown under Task Managers' Available Physical Memory. If it shows 102400K, that means you have 100MB free memory in your RAM ready for use, never mind if it includes the reserved and the cached portions of existing processes. What this means is that if you're about to load a program that would use upto 100MB, you're good to go without much swapping taking place. However some amount of swapping would take place to reserve physical memory for other processes. Therefore, to prevent significant swapping while running time-critical apps like games, make sure your free memory is a good amount more than what the game/app uses. But this brings us to the question on how to accurately know how much non-shared (private) memory is actually being used by a process. You can find it out by looking at the VM Size coloumn in task manager (View -> Select Coloumns -> Virtual Memory Size). This is also called as private bytes, as show in Sysinternals' Process Explorer. And as you can see in the picture, what task manager normally reports as mem usage is really the working set (physical memory in use). And now the answer that everyones been waiting for: How to know the actual (total) memory usage: The solution lies in Performance Monitor (Start -> Run -> perfmon). Add the Paging File object. You'll see the %usage of your pf. So to get the actual memory used by your PC: (Total - Available MB) + (%usage * pf size / 100). In the screenshot below, I have 138 MB free RAM and 37% used PF. I have a total of 512 MB RAM and 512 MB PF. Therefore my actual usage would be (512 - 138) + (37 * 512 / 100) = 563.44 MB.

You cannot download the iso since it would be illegal. However, you can build one on your own. Follow the instructions at : http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/