Acheron

I thought the problem was that you experience some problems installing Service Pack 4 on your system, not me. BTW, I do not recommend upgrading your existing installation to Windows XP SP4 when installing from CD, but install Windows XP to an empty partition of your hard disc, or a different hard disc. If you don't need to save your existing data you can choose to quick format the existing partition during setup. About the link to my site. It should work fine. I have sent you a PM about that.

Gora, I had problems using Universal Extractor 1.9.11. Thanks for fixing extracting Windows XP updates in 1.9.17. The second issue was that I did not get the dialog asking to unpack upx files, instead these were extracted automatically. I will test 1.9.17 to see if these issues are fixed. Thanks for continuing this project

No, I think it is better to not forget about them, or you will repeat making the same mistakes.

submix8c, as this is the Poll Center area and this is a general poll it's probably ok to bump.

Yes, but I think the problem is that the issue here is not the average user cross posting, but advanced spam bots operating in teams to affect Google search results. In order to defend against these I do think we need more strict rules and if there is strong evidence we are dealing with a spam bot or intentional spammer it warrants to take appropriate actions.

So basically it is a problem that some users have bad netiquette by cross posting their questions online. I think we need to educate those online users to have some patience when asking questions online and not expect an answer immediately. Reporting them to a spam service may be hard but it is the only way to get users to actually change their behavior online. Maybe you can send a warning first to their registered email address, that the exact same questions is posted on multiple boards and looks suspicious. Give them a week to respond and then decide what further actions to take. Maybe only giving a ban without reporting them to the spam list is enough, if you don't have complete evidence. In this case I noticed a strange behaviour: I think this is enough evidence. Why would a normal user register on both sites on the exact same day and wait 6 days on each site before asking the exact same question?

My main issue is that when you speak of tandem teams operating I don't think it is enough to only ban the person who provides the answer, but also the person or bot who asks the question. For example in the other thread we see that PaavoNurminen is banned, probably for cross posting answers on mutiple boards. But the person or bot who asks the question on multiple boards does not get banned, in this case CharlesMorris. Note that I'm using this as an example, as asking to get users banned is not up for discussion. It is up to the moderators to decide. I'm not for keeping everything marked as spam on this board. Only to have a few of such topics archived and marked as SPAM for educational purposes, instead of deleting everything. @Jumper, what's next is that spam bots will evolve to get around these limits. The problem is that it will make it much harder for regular users to start posting questions and getting answers on this and other message boards over time.

Yes, but I think if we have no problems here at MSFN allowing people to cross posting their questions, I see no reason why people should be banned for cross posting answers, even if they reference the use of commercial tools. My only suggestion is to add a tag SPAM to these topics if it is almost clear the user is not looking for answers, but only to promote specific commercial software.

I also noticed PaavoNurminen got banned, but I do not understand exactly why, as the information he provides maybe useful. He did post an answer here to the corrupt excel file thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/175029-corrupt-excel-xls-file-ole-header-corruption/#entry1116743 It looks more useful then the information I posted in that thread, what could be seen as spam bot reply according to the rules set up by Jaclaz how to determine spam, except my post count is too high.

Thanks for your link. So it is not exactly a new problem. I also noticed this topic has some tags attached to it. I think also tagging it as SPAM should be good idea.

I have replaced svcpack.in_ with an uncompressed svcpack.inf for easier version control. If you replace the svcpack.in_ with the uncompressed one you need to delete svcpack.in_ from the SOURCE folder. I don't know how much room you will have left over. Instead of integrating all the DriverPacks you could also add a folder with for example the latest NVIDIA drivers for your card or the standard Realtek Sound Driver installer, or the sound driver installer for your sound card. I chose to remove as much as possible to speed up the installation phase of Windows XP. It is too much of a hassle to generally support all graphics and sound cards. You can always download them later. I also recommended removing MSN Explorer, MSN Messenger and Netmeeting.

Yes, this kind of spam is still very easy to battle against today. But the problem is that as computer technologies advance, better AI etc., spam bots will also become more sophisticated. To defend against such spam bots, board administrators will more likely to ban posts from new users. The average computer user asking for help with their problem can then become very easily mistaken as to be seen for a spam bot. I think it is best to keep some examples of this spam method online. On most boards this kind of spam get promptly deleted when found, but the problem with deleting it is that only the board administrator and the active users will know about it; most users will not be aware of it and will spend some time on it answering irrelevant questions in the future.

I'm considering this kind of posts to be a form of spam bot evolution. Soon we will no longer be able to differentiate between normal users and spam bots. We will be helping spam bots solve their problems instead of normal users. I have contacted the board administrators of TPF and the AnswerBank. Hopefully they reply. I like to know how often they experience this problem on their board and how they generally deal with it.

Using a Google search I found the question is already asked on another site, but apparently the user got banned. http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/members/silasspencer/ Interestingly SilasSpencer registered on both MSFN and the AnswerBank February 9th and posted the first question on each site 6 days later. I would like to see some explanation what happened on the other site, because cross posting questions on multiple boards is usually frowned on by the board administrators.

JodyT, I have at the moment over 260 updates and hotfixes for Windows XP SP3 in my HFSLIP folder, excluding .NET and superseded updates. So yes Harkaz has done a tremendous amount of work to build the Windows XP SP4. It is not just an update but a big project.

Yes, thanks for your answer Harkaz. My main focus right now is getting the PosReady updates thread organized and updating the .NET framework updates list.

I actual did a google search for the name, and filed a bug as "is france a boy or girl name" results in google showing "French baby names" as results.

Hi FranceBB, I'm also interested in building a localized Service Pack like Harkaz has done. Harkaz has been very helpful to the Windows XP community by building the Service Pack himself for English versions and even MUI versions. He also published some instructions and even a video about signing the patched files, the 'Microsoft' way. However I would also like to see the Windows XP Service Pack project to become fully open source, so we are no longer dependent on one developer maintaining the project. Harkaz has also mentioned something about this in the KernelEx thread here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/175138-kernelex-001-for-windows-xp-currently-in-development/#entry1117596 I have sent him a PM about my ideas about a week ago, but he has not replied yet.

I agree as well that the update thread should get split. The EMET / MBAE security discussion should be moved a new topic.

We had the same complains when Microsoft released SP1, SP2 and SP3 originally. If you don't want to upgrade then please don't install the SP. Noone is forcing you to upgrade (except Microsoft pushing Windows 10 to Windows 7 users).

Another possibility is that Internet Explorer 6 is not affected, or that an update for Internet Explorer 6 will be made available later.

I think some Abandonware could be distributed by another party under the terms of fair use, for example when you need to convert old documents to newer formats and the original company providing the software ceased to exist.

Cross posting issues on multiple boards is generally frowned on and should get discouraged. In this case the original poster did not reply, because he already got an answer on some other site. I personally think he has not solved his issue and we will probably not get an answer on this board. I think prochazka has some interest to promote WinRar. This is also a new user answering without any post history. Tripredacus, Yzöwl and dencorso all mentioning this new method to circumvent the general spam filter on forums.

I think you should be fine using these latest packs. If you use these you don't need to add DriverPacks CPU, as these are now part of DriverPack Chipset. Ignore the warning about the missing Driver Pack when using DriverPack Base. I think you should look at your current modem connection. In almost any case the dialup modems in newer laptops are using the default Windows XP dialup modem driver. In very rare cases the manufacturer would probably have included a cd with modem drivers. These would probably be much newer than the ones from 2001. When removing the Modem drivers using nLite it will keep the default driver for compatibility. The only issue I ran into was about part of the Nokia Modem connection not working correctly without mdmcpq.inf. You only need to add this file to the nLite exclusion list and you should be fine removing all the modem drivers. They take up a lot of space and slow down Windows XP setup. You asked about removing the default printer drivers. These take up a lot of space. If you want to keep PDF printer support you have to add the files to the nLite exception list when removing the Printer Drivers. You should run nLite multiple times, as removing components and integrating addons in the same run is asking for trouble. The Ricktendo and YumeYao common printer driver pack contain the latest printer drivers. Probably your new printer also requires these files. Most of the files included in this pack update the same files as on the exception list. It will only increase the size of your I386 slightly, but it is still a lot smaller than when you keep all legacy printer drivers. About ISDN. I would still check if any of the ISPs on Malta have implemented ISDN connections. You probably don't need it. Here is some information from a Maltese ISP mentioning ISDN: http://www.ozone.com.mt/services/telephony/post-paid.aspx It mentions "SIP trunking" to replace "legacy" ISDN connections. So I don't think ISP's will offer new ISDN connections to customers, as this technology will be fully replaced by VDSL within 1-2 years at most. About Windows Upgrade support. You can safely remove these folders. It only disables upgrading from Windows 98 or Windows 2000. You should still be able to run a upgrade install from an older version of Windows XP to your version, but you should generally avoid this at all costs, as a fresh install is the better solution. It has no effect on Windows Update support. Do not confuse this manual directory delete process with the Manual Install and Upgrade option offered by nLite. Using the Nlite option will remove winnt32.exe and additional setup files as well, not only removing upgrade support but also the ability to install the recovery console. If you don't want to install the recovery console ever you can select this option to save some space, but I do not recommend it. Instead I recommend removing the legacy modem drivers, legacy isdn support and drivers, legacy printer drivers and replacing them with the latest common printer drivers without any general reduce in functionality. About installing recovery console during setup I have the following lines in my SVCPACK.INF file [SetupHotfixesToRun]"..\winnt32.exe /cmdcons /dudisable /unattend"HFSLIP has an option to install the recovery console through the ANSWERFILE options.

I have not installed SP4 myself as it currently does not support localized versions of Windows XP yet, but I still don't see why any copies of dosnet.inf should exist on a installed system. Looking further into the issue it seems that Roffen is trying to transform his original Windows XP OEM CD into a standard XP CD, by undoing the modifications made by the computer manufacturer.