Jeremy

Why do people always assume it's me who breaks sometime? *slap!* Nope, just installed it, rebooted, clicked OK to everything and tried to go to Google. Wouldn't work. *shrugs* Anyway, in regards to the Windows Firewall, I wouldn't use it even if I was behind 5 hardware firewalls. Reason is because it's half a decade old, a lot of malware targets it, and I try to use as much 3rd party software as opposed to Windows-based functions as I can.

What kind of video are you trying to playback?

I'd say it's the graphics driver, rather than the codecs. Are you using the latest drivers, or some futuristic beta/alpha?

Try Media Player Classic.

At this point, I'm finished posting in this topic because defragmenters have been beaten around as much as IE has when people have debated whether to use that or Firefox. I don't think anyone really knows whatdefrag program is truly the best. Until someone finds a way to properly test each one while working around the countless factors that would interfere, I'm not saying another word here.

The author of nLite stresses that one should only use the tool if they are sure of what they are doing. users beware! Double check! Read descriptions! Try in VMware first! Make an image of your harddrive, reformat, install, test, if it fails, restore with image file.

PuntoMX doesn't realize that just because hardware based tasks come easy to him, that not everyone else will find them that easy as well. If I were in the same situation, I would get a new motherboard.

I tried the new Outpost Firewall 4 and was disappointed. It wouldn't even let me browse the web. I think I'll give Kerio a try.

It's not my program, it's one of several good defragmenter applications. Diskeeper is written by the same people who wrote the defrag API for Windows and it defrags automatically on-the-fly in the background while impacting system performance at a minimal rate. So in other words, it doesn't suck at what it does. There, I didn't use "by no means". Feel better? Ok, for some reason, you seem to have interpreted what I said as a major insult to your intelligence or pride or whatever, and in return, feel it necessary to attack me with claims that I'm delussional.When you said: it seemed to me like you were dismissing it's lack of ability to perform a boot-time defrag to reinforce the reason to use the application. From experience of defragging many harddrives on many machines, boot-time defrag helps. If the defragger can't do a boot-time defrag, then I personally wouldn't use it. If you feel boot-time defragging is pointless, then so be it. Ohh! You got me! I don't really know much about it, other than that it seems to fragment a lot frequently. You don't have to understand the pH level of citric acid in order to know that eating an orange is healthy for you. But since you seem to be the expert on all this, I suggest you share your share your prowess. Proceed, master.

Hey, Dig, you know what happens after Boris says that, right? Gettin' a lil' chilly in here, eh?

I'm pretty sure Opera has always been known through the course of it's development to be the browser with the least number of unpatched security holes. www.secunia.com has all the information regarding security vulnerabilities in countless programs. Just do a search for Opera, you will find much info. However, that's all technical and statistical. Let's look at things realistically. There are certain functions within an application that pose as a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution. However, a user may not necessarily use a given function, and thus doesn't have to worry about it. Also, a lot of vulnerabilities require a malicious user to actually lure an unsuspecting user into a trap, so the malicious user can actually succeed in compromising the system. Are you that gullable? It's the same as those ads on webpages that say "You have # new messages, click here to check them!" or "Your system has been infected, click here to become safe again!" C'mon... you'd have to be born today to fall for that crap. I'll use myself as an example for this next one. I use Acronis True Image. Regardless of what happened to my active partition (what Windows is installed on), I can always restore to a 100% working copy with my backup image stored on my second partition. But on a day-to-day basis, I'm protected by a router, have a slimmed down (nLited) version of Windows, so a lot of components/files that are known to be exploited in some way or another, are removed from my system. I use Opera and I usually run it Sandboxed, so even if I were to get a truckload of spyware/viruses/trojans/worms/hijackers/etc, the Sandbox empties automatically after I'm done surfing and ALL of that is deleted. And IIRC, I haven't gone out of my way to p*** off some m4st3r_haxz0rz, enticing him/her to hack the crap out of me. If I did notice my mouse cursor moving on it's own, I immediately reach to my left and pull my ethernet cable out of my router. Long story short, you do something like that, you're pretty safe.

354 MBs for your original XP source?

You'd be better off taking a copy of XP Home or Pro, slipstreaming SP2 and the latest Windows Updates. Then backup your drivers and integrate them with nLite or wait until after Windows is finished installing. You could use Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost to create a new image of your drive and store it on DVD, an external harddrive, or a second partition.

I actually had the opposite thing happen for a friend's laptop I was working on a few days ago. I enabled a password but the user logon never prompted for a password. I tried 3 nLite ISOs before I somewhat fixed the issue. It asked for a password at first login, but afterwards it didn't. Then I fixed that by going here and doing this:

I don't know what gets defragmented? Did you even read the post? The program tells you what gets defragmented. (system files, page file, metadata, MFT, hibernation file) I use Diskeeper, and it by no means, sucks. I take you can't stand to even be suggested by someone else what to do. I don't care if you never run a boot-time defrag. I use my PC everyday and the more programs you install, uninstall, the more you copy, modify, delete files, extract, compress, encrypt, decrypt, etc... metadata fragments especially. Metadata can only be defragmented during what PerfectDisk calls an Offline Defrag, and what Diskeeper calls Boot-Time Defrag. For that reason alone, ocassionally means either once a week, once every 2 weeks, once a month, all depending on how often you do the above-mentioned operations on your computer.

DivX is essentially AVI, though. I don't know if any applications that accept the actual .divx file extension. AVI is pretty much universal. Direct Steam Copy will maintain both data rates of the audio and video streams.

Capacitors are designed to puff out at the top to indicate that they are going bad. You have two options: 1. Find someone who can solder new capacitors on your motherboard, pretty much as expensive as getting a new mobo, anyway. 2. Get a replacement mobo, it is under warranty? When I used to help out at a tech shop, I had a PC with a mobo which had bad caps, and it literally caught on fire. I'm not saying yours will, but it could happen. You should get it checked out immediately.

.... regardless of where you're putting the update files, you still have to download them. I have portable Ad-Aware SE and Spybot on my flash drive and I update within the program. Same thing.

VirtualDub is your best bet, then. .divx is essentially an AVI I believe. If you open it in VDub and go select Direct Stream Copy for both audio and video, and trim the frames and Save, it will save it at the same quality as the source file is.

Well, the warning in unnecessary, since installing Windows Media Lite is essentially just reinstalling and re-registering the DLL/AX files that make up the Windows Media codecs.

How do you mean "edit"? You mean put in effects or just trim (remove frames)?

Should not be installed on Windows versions that include WMP? 99.9% of all Windows installations in the world have WMP on them. If you take a look at this topic, you'll notice how a forum member was having codec issues with WMP and the WML I linked him to actually resolved his issue.

I don't think nLite disables the ability to create shortcuts, and unless you selected 'Disabled" for more than you should have in Tweaks, that's the only thing that would cause you not to have any desktop icons.

Freeware. Basterdized? It's called an nLited Windows installation. And the Windows Media Lite isn't just made for those who reduce their Windows source, it's also for people who like to view the latest Windows Media content without needing to install newer versions of WMP.