CoffeeFiend

I used to use 4NT... Been a while though. Most of my "console" time nowadays is spent in PowerShell, and most the other stuff gets scripted too (vbscript/jscript), and half the time it's running inside VSCmdShell too. Never tried REXX (on any platform) Semware... I'm more of an ultraedit person I guess but there's lots of other good ones for sure (notepad++, EditPlus, etc) -- that selection very comes down to preferences. I use more than one too. Never heard of FC/2 and FC/W. Google isn't too helpful finding anything there even. Unless you're just referring to fc.exe from windows (/b is VERY handy with that) which I just willingly omitted (no place to write down ALL of them!) ShellExec -- nice tool for sure! Added to the list. I've used apps like Windows Commander before... Some were nice, but I just don't really bother I guess. Snagit? I'm already a big fan of it, I just left it off the list because it doesn't really accomplish an admin task per se (i.e. doesn't make changes on a computer). If I included such apps, my list would be 10x as long. BurnAtOnce, well, I've used disc burning command line utils now and then, but if I'm gonna use a GUI then I'll just use good ol' Nero I guess (or ImgBurn). Also, same comments as Snagit to some extent (I didn't put Nero on my list either) DskImage, BFI and Extract2? It's been YEARS since I've used a floppy... As in, more than 5 (WinImage was a handy util for those though)

I got one in %SystemRoot%\system32 too, and one copy somewhere in the WinSxS store as well. As for the other in software distribtion\download, I'd be looking at it more closely (might be a patch or something, not sure).

Looks like this is gonna be a very short list as I expected Where's the Vista bashers and their constant FUD now?

I'd make sure I have the latest BIOS flashed on there first. There's even updates to the SATA BIOS in there (likely for bugs). Sounds like a ACPI problem...

First, for the love of god, PLEASE stop using BOLD on your entire posts. It's not much better than all caps. No need for all the line returns and "padding" things with anywhere from 24 to 33 spaces like you did. Nope. First time I see it mentioned anywhere even. I'd suggest updating your video drivers to the latest WHQL version, or the latest beta, if the latest WHQL doesn't fix it. This isn't Microsoft PSS. There's NOTHING we could do about this, even if it's a bug with Flip 3D (and it's not), nor can we really customize it...

Care to back up that claim? Like I said, I have plenty of reasons NOT to... I'm already well aware of those things, but it's not practical/possible to run it on my system for various reasons. Besides, RAM disks wouldn't help very much for encoding AV, the total disk I/O speed is quite low: under 1MB/sec for xvid (which already flies, about 150fps), and MUCH lower for x264. It's really a CPU bound process -- that's by FAR the biggest bottleneck (both cores pegged at 100%). The one thing that would speed it up a lot, is a faster/quad core processor. vmware's already plenty fast, no worries there. Security stuff... non-issue. It's been years since the last virus or spyware, on any of our boxes. Lack of 64 bit drivers, lack of crucial apps for that platform (that wouldn't run or run well under WOW64) and such is however a big show stopper.

That's not what I hear at all. Seemingly Windows on a MBP is sooooooooo much faster than OS X... ... and what DOESN'T work out of the box with windows? Yes, you might want to do some tweaks to how it looks and such, but everything DOES work regardless. Vista comes with a web browser (that I loathe admittedly), a mail client, a calendar app, a media player, a very nice photo gallery app, movie maker and dvd maker, an IM app, a bunch of small games, a backup app, can burn discs, ... That covers basic usage alright I'd say (no need to buy iLife or such) Because running setup.exe, or using the autoplay menu of most CDs is too challenging? If they can't do this, they're probably the type that just learned to double click. I don't see how copy/pasting is any better/more intuitive myself. Windows already comes with a firewall and windows defender. You don't have to buy anything. Actually, I run without either, and it's been years since I've been infected (so much for not clicking on everything blindly, and not opening freepr0n.jpg.exe I guess!) Update your AV every 30 mins? Crazy firewall rules? Triple backup your files? That's TOTALLY uncalled for... I do NOTHING of this, nor do I know anyone who actually does! Mac is the LAST platform I'd recommend to anyone: The licensing style and closed-source-ness of Windows (who cares if it's BSD based, where's the source code again?) The OS is no cheaper than Windows -- 100$ for every 0.1 update, whereas a copy of Windows be had for 100$ (5 updates in the last 6 or 7 years, only 1 new copy of windows in that time frame) Absolute worst lock-in EVER: a single hardwave vendor! THEY choose what you can buy. With any other OS, YOU pick what you need. The said hardware vendor doesn't offer any GOOD hardware configs (either a mini POS, a beyond overkill $5000 mac pro, or such -- they don't sell a normal Core 2 Duo tower!), unless you want a laptop And their hardware is overpriced And in the end, when they buy quicken, or this year's tax report app, or their kids buys a game, or try to use basically any app that didn't come with the mac pre-installed, IT WON'T RUN! Because ~99% of apps are windows-only nowadays. Why lock yourself into a single hardware vendor, who has no good hardware configs, with an OS that's no cheaper or anything, and that won't run most apps, and on top of that, pay a hefty premium for their hardware? It costs more than a windows box (hardware and OS), the license is no better, and like Linux, it doesn't work with Windows apps -- worst of both worlds! At least Linux would have SOME benefits vs windows: free for good, open source, etc. And no, it's not THAT hard to install. I think someone's been watching too many Apple ads...

ExCtrlst is part of the resource kit tools which I listed. msicuu sure looks like a handy tool. Thanks! I'm not a big fan of TweakUI myself (I already got tweaks & scripts to do all them things anyways), but whatever gets the job done I guess. nirsoft seems to have some tools that might come in handy now and then (pwd recovery ones mainly, don't have much of a use for the others) grc.com... doesn't really have anything I'd use I guess (best thing seems to be ID Serve, but I already got plenty of utils that can do this and more)

What tools do you other admin types use day to day? I'm NOT talking about making unattended installs here (i.e. not nLite, BDD, WAIK or such) nor de-spyware'ìng but rather admin tasks (in an enterprise setup) A quick list of some of my fav tools, in no particular order: SysInternals Suite (process explorer, process monitor, several command line utils...) WinDbg and related tools (like DebugDiag and the User Mode Process Dumper), and KernRate viewer Visual Studio with some addons, and SVN/Hg MMC & snapins, SSMS for 2005 & old client tools for 2000, SMS, MOM various editors (ultraedit, primalscript, etc) for scripting and such PowerShell v2 (currently CTP2) + WinRM, and some extras (even got a portable version...) mstsc and vnc CopSSH, Putty, WinSCP, Tunnellier, FileZilla (SSH, SCP, SFTP, FTP) Windows/IIS/MOM resource kit and Windows admin tools WireShark, nmap, WinPCap, MS network monitor IIS/SQL Server (2005 express & 2000 developer's ed) as a back-end to various in-house admin web apps and web services (also used by some scripts) many of windows' built-in cmd line utils (net, netsh, wmic, reg, sc, tasklist, taskkill, icacls, takeown, diskpart, netstat, fsutil, mklink, powercfg, etc) many command line utils (not windows') like wget, sed/gawk/grep, wsname, devcon, 7z, makecert, etc Windows Performance Tools Kit (replacing BootVis) tons of scripts I've written (vbscript/jscript/powershell mainly) and a few homemade apps some reg tweaks -- many "uncommon" ones (set symbol path, pre-accept EULA on SysInternals Suite, etc) some MSI installer tweaking, packaging, and repackaging tools the usual disk image deployment tools... ghost/trueimage/imagex, sysprep, etc various references like BOL and some handy cheat sheets Lots of things I'm forgetting... vmware comes in seriously handy for a LOT of things. Now and then I'll use Hyena too (I'm not a big fan of it though). MS Office for a lot of things too (e.g. excel pulling live data from MSSQL, then doing fancy graphs from it or such). Wiki on a stick to keep some notes too. There is a bit of overlap between my admin and programming tools admittedly (e.g. when you already have VS 2008 installed, why not also use it to debug scripts?) Additions to the list: msicuu -- thanks to GrofLuigi nirsoft apps -- thanks to GrofLuigi ShellExec -- thanks to os2fan2 What am I forgetting? Any gems to add to that list?

I could go on about all this for quite a while... But here's the short answer: download the latest BOL for SQL Server 2000. There should be a section called "Backing Up and Restoring Databases in SQL Server". You can also peek at this technet article. Loads of ways to do it. BTW, you can use a simple BACKUP DATABASE T-SQL statement (then schedule it to run), just look it up. Any specific questions, just ask.

PowerShell isn't included in XP SP3 (it's not in Vista SP1 either). You have to install it manually. I recommend v2 anyways. I've been using the current CTP for some time without any issues. Don't forget to install WinRM/WS-Management if you want to be able to use PowerShell remoting. I know it's listed on there, but I just looked on a vanilla XP Pro SP3 en-US install (I don't use nlite or anything like that -- SP3 integrated by hand), and it's definitely not installed. There's no trace of the PowerShell executables, directories, or its registry entries or anything anywhere in sight. Or maybe it only installs if you have an old RC installed already or such (updates it). No idea...

Try looking at the CD with something like isobuster, see if it has any issues (multisession discs sometimes cause problems). Maybe it's a CD burning app that screwed something up. Or perhaps it's burned in a format that isn't supported without addons (e.g. UDF 2.5). Hard to guess. Never had the problem.

Hmm, 1280x800 will already get cleartype enabled (16:10 AR i.e. 1.6, bigger than 1.34). The line you added tests for 1280x1024. If you want to enable cleartype of those too, then sure, those changes you made will work. Or you could do: If (intHorRes / intVerRes > 1.34) Or (intHorRes=1280 And intVerRes=1024) Then objShell.run "regedit /s cleartype.reg" End If And for those who are into them hardcore batch files still, I can manage to retrieve the resolution parsing WMIC's output: FOR /F "skip=2 tokens=2-3 delims=," %%A IN ('"WMIC Path Win32_VideoController Get CurrentHorizontalResolution, CurrentVerticalResolution /Format:csv"') DO ( set echo Resolution is: %%Ax%%B ) But when it comes to doing math with them... I don't think that's possible (set can do math, but no floating point divisions). Unless you add some kind of command line calculator, then pass on those numbers to it, thru another FOR /F statement to parse its output, then perhaps pass on that result to a number comparison app, thru another FOR /F of course, to get the output from it, to see if it's widescreen or not (I personally don't really use batch files for anything anymore)

Dunno, might be true. I haven't printed a PDF in ages... Maybe sumatrapdf is better with regards to that, no idea.

Why use a button? You're gonna be typing an URL anyways, just do CTRL-T. Some people use gestures for that too.

There's a Win32_DesktopMonitor WMI class that has a DisplayType property, which you'd hope would work, but there's no values for LCDs. And it returns a null value with this LCD... And I don't think testing for a null type is a reliable detection method either You could peek at the monitor EDID (DDC) infos, but there's nothing about the monitor being LCD or CRT in there (besides perhaps the lack of more than 1 resolutions supported? Didn't investigate much, not like I'm gonna write a parser for that). I also peeked in the monitor's properties in device manager, and in the registry, and I didn't notice any information giving away if it's a LCD or CRT unfortunately. So we're stuck checking resolutions I guess. That leaves us with the Win32_VideoController WMI class pretty much (Win32_DisplayConfiguration is deemed obsolete) If all your LCD monitors are widescreen, then this script will work: strComputer = "." Set objShell = WScript.CreateObject ("WSCript.shell") Set objWMI = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colItems = objWMI.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_VideoController") For each objItem in colItems intHorRes = objItem.CurrentHorizontalResolution intVerRes = objItem.CurrentVerticalResolution Next If intHorRes / intVerRes > 1.34 Then objShell.run "regedit /s cleartype.reg" End If if you wanna check for 1280x1024 specifically, change the if to: If intHorRes=1280 And intVerRes=1024 Then JScript version (with minimal error handling): try { strComputer = "."; objWScript = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell" ); SWBemlocator = new ActiveXObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator"); objWMIService = SWBemlocator.ConnectServer(strComputer,"root/CIMV2"); colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_VideoController"); propEnum = new Enumerator(colItems); for (;!propEnum.atEnd();propEnum.moveNext()) { objItem = propEnum.item(); intHorRes = objItem.CurrentHorizontalResolution; intVerRes = objItem.CurrentVerticalResolution; } if (intHorRes / intVerRes > 1.34) { objWScript.Run('regedit /s cleartype.reg'); } } catch(e) { WScript.Echo("exception " + e.number + ": " + e.description); } PowerShell version: $strComputer = "." $colItems = Get-WmiObject -Class "Win32_VideoController" -Namespace "root\CIMV2" -ComputerName $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) { $intHorRes = $objItem.CurrentHorizontalResolution $intVerRes = $objItem.CurrentVerticalResolution } if (($intHorRes / $intVerRes) -gt 1.34){ $objStartInfo = New-Object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo $objStartInfo.FileName = "regedit.exe" $objStartInfo.windowStyle ="Normal" $objStartInfo.arguments = "/s cleartype.reg" [System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($objStartInfo) } anything else really, just ask.

When you add the parts to your cart, it lets you in on a promo: "With every $70000 computer, receive a free set of ear defenders for FREE!"

I can only agree. Best money can buy, as in no object? And at a total disregard for power usage seemingly? I'm not totally sure what's the point of the thread (no offense)... The absolute best computer money can buy so you can lust over it, for you'd need to be Bill Gates-like rich to buy/build one? CPU: Why only one CPU then? I'd say a quad Xeon X7350 would be nice (hey, I could have said 8!) It would totally slaughter this box on x264 encoding speeds, run anything in vmware, etc Motherboard + case: how about this? RAM: Might as well fill all the slots on that motherboard with some of these FB-DIMM's? HDD's: 8x 15K rpm SAS drives like these in RAID0, or SSD's, along with a Fibre Channel SAN of course! Needs a BluRay writer or 2 for sure as well. Oh ya, and a LTO-4 tape library for backups too. This one looks nice. And a pair of 30" 3007WFP Ultrasharp LCDs at least. Not that anyone could ever afford it, but at this point, 10G's or 50G's... Edit: actually, it's more like 70G's

Error 0x80070005 is "Access denied". As you explained, your version of Vista doesn't have that feature, so it won't register (not licensed). Either ways, there are TONS of other mpeg2 codecs out there. The Vista one is only required for MCE (it won't use anyone else's mpeg2 codec AFAIK), for everything else, any 3rd party mpeg2 codec will do. The quality of Vista's decoder is OK, there is better and worse. PowerDVD ships with one (even old versions bundled with DVD drives), WinDVD too (don't particularly care for it though), the bundled ATI DVD player comes with one, etc. Loads of companies sell just a mpeg2 codec by itself if you want: nvidia PureVideo, MainConcept, Elecard, etc. There's even some free codecs that will handle it (ffdshow which indeed has no acceleration at all, dscaler and the GPL one on sourceforge namely). And also, most codec packs include one or more I'm a k-lite user myself (custom install, and extras added after, namely CoreAVC). Lots of ppl like CCCP as well.

No. Hard drives aren't "read" every 30 seconds, they manage to stay spinned down most of the time actually. I've never seen (or heard of) having multiple hard disk slow down windows (any version) before. Actually, quite the opposite (OS is on 2x Seagate 7200.11 RAID0). Dunno why you bring my vid card into this, but it's actually quite seriously overkill for anything else than gaming. And no, I'm not patient at all when it comes to waiting after slow computers. As for the x64 versions -- no idea. I don't run XP x64 or Vista x64. I have devices I can't live without that don't have 64 bit drivers, and for which there are no real replacements. Besides, I'm not in a big rush to switch to x64 just yet. Yes, I'd see about 512MB of RAM extra, but then again x64 apps need ~15% more RAM in the first place (due to double sized pointers, double sized structues and such -- even your CPU cache is affected), negating all of your gains unless you have more than 4GB (and what "normal" everyday task, or what kind of desktop usage needs MORE than 4GB right now?) Yes, the extra CPU registers do speed up some things a bit, but then I'd have a performance penalty running pretty much all of my apps under WOW64 (it's known that apps like excel 2007 uses TWICE as much CPU to do the same math under WOW64 -- I'd call that serious overhead, and no, there's no x64 version of even that!), so no real gain there either. So no real significant benefits yet, just the drivers/codecs/security app compatibility issues and such, even though it's slowly getting better. No real advantages yet (on the desktop), no compelling reasons to switch, so I'll wait some more -- Likely until I decide I have a need for 8GB of RAM o a desktop, and have ~250$ to spare for it (not anytime soon). I don't really think it's that... Besides, I've never seen anyone mention that this box was even remotely slow or anything (actually, if I turn Aero Glass on, it feels FASTER than XP does) Actually, I have 38 processes running currently, including firefox, indexing, the sidebar, 2 for the intel RAID, the realtek mixer, so 32 if you don't count remove these. Besides, total number of processes have very little to do with raw system speed. It very much depends what processes they are, and how much resources they each consume. Lots of these processes aren't really doing anything, and they're even paged to disk. Anyhow. I see no real difference between this box booting Vista or XP, or any of my other boxes running XP. Everything is instantaneous on all of them... Anything faster, and it would happen before I clicked basically. Encoding speeds, file copy speeds and virtually everything else I do, the speeds are basically identical.

Can we get a quick screenshot to know what "Shop for music online" you guys are referring to? I've never seen that anywhere (on stock Vista Ultimate), even in folders with only mp3's.

I never used vlite, so no idea there. But there are LOTS of easy changes that makes the RAM usage go down a lot (without resorting to vlite) Things like indexing (I've seen that take over 200MB sometimes, but normally around 60MB idle), desktop composing (plenty of times over 150MB...), sidebar (about 80MB or so), media center (hundreds of MBs!) and such can use up a LOT of memory, so disable what you don't like/want. There's LOADS of unnecessary services you can disable too. My non-vlite'd Vista boots on 365MB of RAM (and that includes several unnecessary "extras" and things like IIS7 running -- you could make it boot on less). Not that I'd really stress out over RAM usage with 4GB. I just disabled the stuff I don't care for myself -- mainly desktop composing and the awful MCE crap. Also, I only have 38 processes open right now (including indexing, the sidebar, firefox, 2 processes for the intel RAID, and the realtek mixer, so only 32 if you don't count those) As for boot speed, check this sticky.

Again, there is no such thing as "pro reader"! It's either: acrobat reader OR acrobat pro/standard/pro extended. There is NO pro reader. Yes, the $450 app can make pdf files, but there's tons of other (and MUCH cheaper -- some are even completely free) solutions that can do that too.

Well, I personally am comparing the free foxit reader to acrobat reader, not acrobat pro. I mean, who's surprised a $450 app that's a full CD would have a few extra features than a 5MB freeware reader?

It offers all the services, except the slideshow PDF and form PDF services, which is enough for probably 99% of users.