CoffeeFiend

Actually, wsname even has an option to rename according to the asset tag ($ASSETTAG), but honestly, I never bothered. It's only good if all your PCs have an asset tag (most of ours don't). So we've been using other ways (like mac addys, we keep a database of such things)

Eh? wsname is a great util (it's part of many small utils I keep on my USB mem stick). I've renamed thousands of workstations with it before. It does like 95% of the job for you. Just how much simpler do you expect? And no, there are no totally automatic solutions that just guesses the name for you. Don't wanna sound rude, but this is already very fast, simple and straightforward. Trivial. Just get the service tag # using WMI (iirc you want the SerialNumber property of the Win32_SystemEnclosure class or else of the Win32_BIOS class -- sorry, don't have a Dell handy to check), then pass that # as an argument while calling wsname. Can be done with almost any scripting language (vbscript, jscript, powershell, or any "standard" language like C# or whatever you like) Alternately, you can keep a database with mac addy's or service tag #s to workstation names or such, and call that in your script... So many possibilities.

I'm totally guilty of that I *DID* buy a pci-e/agp-less HP tower years ago. And it's a P4 3.06 indeed (519J). But hey, a P4 3GHz CPU was worth like 300$ back then, and the whole tower only cost me like 500$. So 200$ for a case, PSU, ghetto motherboard, 1GB of DDR2, DVD burner and 160GB hard drive, like 5 years ago -- not bad at all! Just had to get some more ram for it. But, yes, they're best avoided. That PC doesn't have a DVI out, and there's just no way I'm spending ~100$ on a ghetto PCI vid card for an old P4. One might as well sell the box for 200$, and build a basic C2D rig for a couple hundred more. Getting a motherboard and pci-e vid card for it is just too much money for a P4. Can't wait to get rid of it, mind you it stills runs XP & Linux great, and the kids still use it everyday without any complaints. As for the P4 having enough power, perhaps for basic stuff, but a P4 3GHz will struggle on even 720p H.264 (unless you have hardware acceleration, like with a radeon 2600 indeed -- too bad they don't make it in PCI). Mine plays it all very choppy using CoreAVC. No worries tho, my e2160 (OC'ed to 3.4) can handle 1080p H.264 with lots of power to spare. Thanks, nice to see you're still around, I did miss reading your posts Well, if it's just for 2D stuff (checking your email on your TV? ), the ATI 2400 will do the trick. But if it's for movies and such, then you'd probably be better off buying a Popcorn Hour A-100 instead.

Considering it's a refurb (from bestbuy), not really Even Dell has similarly priced PCs year-long at similar prices (brand new too), like their Inspiron 530 (E2180 & 2GB as well, just a smaller HD) for 369$. If you look around for some specials, you can find better deals. Hell, you could build a somewhat nicer box from brand new parts for the same price yourself... Using ncix's prices (likely cheaper elsewhere if you shop around, btw ncix price matches!): E2180 $72 2GB DDR2 PC6400 CL4 (lots nicer) $32 500GB SATA HD, e.g. Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 $67 DVD writer... more than a dozen models at ~30$ (pick one) generic mATX motherboard with onboard everything (no worse than the HP's!) e.g. ASUS P5N-MX $60 With a 350$ budget,that leaves you with about 90$ for a generic tower/psu (perhaps a ~40$ coolermaster case, and there's several nice PSUs for ~50$) better than the HP's (especially the PSU) As a bonus, you can opt to pick different parts. Not that I'd buy specifically those parts, but it just goes to show 350$ for a refurb isn't exactly an amazing deal.

That's like asking about the differences between Windows, Linux, BSD and OS X. They're VERY different. Apache is an open source web server. Used primarily for php stuff, but also for others (perl, python, etc). It's what's normally used to host most blogs and forums, as most are written in PHP, and LAMP hosting is dirt cheap. IIS is windows' web/app server. Will handle everything Apache does, plus also ASP.NET and classic ASP stuff (only IIS can serve that basically). But as it requires windows which is not free unlike Linux, hosting costs more. JBoss is one of many java application servers. Zeus? Never even heard of it. Likely has a market share well under 1%...

I would recommend against getting a ATI 2400 myself. I did look at them before and for multimedia playback they have very bad reviews (just check avsforum for one place). It's basically a crippled 2600... I mean, it WOULD work, but don't expect on it to do hardware decoding of H.264 and such, it'll all be in software. Not sure what kind of CPU you got, but decoding H.264 at 1080p is very demanding, and if the PC only has a PCI slot (no PCI-e), then likely it's old enough not to be able to handle it (just guessing here). Long story short, you just might be due for an upgrade instead (or some kind of inexpensive hardware media player if it's for movies). If you tell u what you're trying to do, and your system specs, we'd know for sure. Anyways, if you do end buy getting a ATI 2400, the same place has another one made by Diamond instead, which is essentially the same, but passively cooled (I like my HTPCs quiet), and 14$ cheaper too. Oh, also, you didn't mention which inputs your TV has. Personally I'd go with something that has a HDMI output, if your TV has such an input.

I despise VPC. Yuck! But, VMWare might be taking a bad turn. I tried VMWare Server 2 (beta 2), and seemingly they expect us to use a crappy web interface (VPC-style) for everything Or, you can buy some VI client licenses to manage it perhaps ($$$) -- then one might as well just buy ESXi 3.5 instead. Looks like I'll be staying with 1.0.6! Oh, and BTW, for those who are into PowerShell too (and VMWare), check out the VI Toolkit, it's great!

What's your top 10 favorite things about Vista? No bashing, whining, complaining or other negativity about Vista or such PLEASE! If you don't like it, then you're welcome to hit CTRL-F4, or to click the "X" on the current browser tab (there's plenty of other places to say Vista sucks if that's what you wanna do...) Here's 10, in no particular order: The new file copy dialog The new task manager and perfmon The new audio mixer (no more struggling with apps screwing with wave or master volume!) The new MMC snap ins The new installer (the old XP one dating from the early NT days was REALLY overdue) Windows update not using IE (no need to use IE anymore ever! ) The new explorer (all kinds of little things, like drive space usage bar graphs, F2 to rename doesn't select extension, etc) MUI (better/avail on windows update/works even for speech recognition, etc) New apps like the photo gallery, or the ones that were revamped (e.g. games) IIS7 (no need for expensive windows 2003 or 2008 to have the latest IIS to develop & test web apps)

Your crashes are being caused by snp2uvc.sys (usb2 webcam driver).

I was answering the original question asked -- is Vista putting a dent in Win9x user base. And I think I've answered that pretty well. You're the one trolling. Because even P3's are barely usable? Because the P2's don't run the modern software most people need? It's obvious. Do I have to justify "the sky is blue" too? Things have changed an awful lot in 10 years. Actually, css total size does matter. Given the same (relative) complexity, the larger css takes more time to apply to larger pages' elements as there are more (complex) selectors and such. A page with css will load slower than the same page if you disable css (if size didn't matter like you say, it should make no difference at all). Complexity matters too, but the link you posted doesn't really use any complex stuff either (nothing out of the ordinary). Shows how much you know (hey, you started it again).

You didn't load the page I linked to 10 times, but one that's 1/6 of the size (by comment size). Not exactly heavy pages anymore. And is it too hard to understand that if you're not logged on, and that if the browser doesn't send a user agent it thinks it supported (browser caps of seamonkey are TOTALLY irrelevant here), then you're not getting the same pages AT ALL! You get the static HTML/non-AJAX ones (which are also split in different pages when there are too many comments, so even lighter), which are nowhere as heavy. Being a heavy page being the point of doing this in the first place -- not loading a heavy one totally defeats it. It probably takes 10 of these (non-AJAX, 1/6 of the size and spanned) to be as heavy as single one like the one I linked to... Again: shows you know nothing of IIS6. By default it's REALLY locked down -- it doesn't even do things classic ASP out of the box, you have to go enable everything you need by hand. It could hardly be any tighter. It's obvious you've never even tried IIS6, not even once. That FUD was partially true for IIS4 (that shipped with NT4), but not for IIS6. They don't dictate secunia et al what to rate them. I'm hardly a NT-fanboy. But I'd certainly use pretty much *anything* over Win9x (that includes linux), and since I use a lot of windows-centric apps and I develop for that platform, I'm mostly a user of the newer NT-series products. Can't fathom 10 year old stuff can be useful? It seems more like you can't fathom that even for the basic tasks most people do such old PCs just don't cut it anymore -- not even close. 10 years is pretty much eternity in the computing world.

Yep. IDE. 20MB. That's retro alright!

Looks like a 44 pin IDC but with a 0.1" pitch. Still can't see it be anything else than IDE. SCSI doesn't use 44 pins (rather 50, 68 or 80), and even the older "retro" stuff (ESDI/ST-506) doesn't use 44 pins either. Just how old is this thing anyways?

Sorry, but you're a day late, and also one post late

44 pin IDC? That's a standard 2.5" IDE plug.

Before anyone else replies my XXX GB HD is a really a YYY GB HD A short list of common values, courtesy of excel and 30 seconds of free time (quick and dirty unformatted copy/paste job): GB GiB 20 18.62645149 40 37.25290298 60 55.87935448 80 74.50580597 120 111.758709 160 149.0116119 200 186.2645149 250 232.8306437 320 298.0232239 500 465.6612873 750 698.491931 Short version: You're "losing" roughly 7%. As for space going missing (because of system restore, recycle bin and such) there's also the client side cache to blame (I've seen it enable itself and use up a few GBs before).

I only wish they were all this easy As for quirksmode, you really don't want that. And I see no excuse for not having a proper doctype. Without a doctype your stuff gets rendered in quirksmode, doesn't use standard DOM (like what you're seeing here). Using a doctype, the browsers know how to render it properly (display properly in more browsers consistently), it's actually faster, and it's just more standards compliant in general. Not using one is sloppy at best. I see no reason to use "iso-8859-1" instead of UTF-8 either (UTF-8 is unicode and supports more languages). Their sloppy coding only worked in the first place because the browser is in quirksmode: it tries to make sense out of the junk you feed it... guessing stuff where you don't provide it. Long story short, you're trying to set the position of the image using .top & .left, but they fail at providing a unit! Likely you mean pixels, but there's no real reason to go guessing units for everything... You could use percentages if you wanted to (not so practical in this case, but that's besides the point). Just add +'px' to the 2 lines to tell it you actually mean pixels, and it'll work just fine: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xml:lang="en" lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <script type="text/javascript"> function cursor(event) { document.getElementById('trail').style.visibility="visible" document.getElementById('trail').style.position="absolute" document.getElementById('trail').style.left=event.clientX+10+'px' document.getElementById('trail').style.top=event.clientY+'px' } </script> </head> <body onmousemove="cursor(event)"> <h1>Move the cursor over this page</h1> <img id="trail" style="visibility:hidden" src="w3schools.gif" width="100" height="30"> </body> </html> Quickly tested OK in FF 2 and IE7.

What motherboard? What memory sticks? The more information the better. Also, try testing your sticks with memtest86+. Individually at first (make sure none is bad), then you can try combinations (to see if they don't play nice together). If the amount is says when it posts is right, then it's recognizing it. There's just not enough information to tell.

10 tabs of posts with 96 replies? I bet you're not logged on either. Log on (you don't get quite the same pages at all), and try the ones with like 600 comments and see. Also, it depends what browser you're using. For some (the unsupported ones) it disables the AJAX stuff, so that makes a huge difference too. 10 of the lightest pages logged off or with a unsupported browser is nothing. So what exploits went unpatched for too long in IIS6's entire life (that's already been a few years)? Right: none. Apache didn't do any better there. Also, exploit severity also counts (none were real bad for IIS6). Oh, so based on hear-say from someone else (you don't seem to know too much about it) you call others n00bs? IE is more than a rendering engine. The rendering engine is only part of it. It's everything that comes with it. When we talk about IE, we mean IE (like when we talk about a car, we mean the whole car, not just the engine). The XMLHttpRequest object is NOT a 3rd party component. It was part of IE5 and shipped with it. Hey, I never said IE7 doesn't suck real bad Looks like at least we can agree on one thing after all...

Ah, more trolling: Nevermind apache had more security problems in the lifetime of IIS6? Go educate yourself: check exploits for IIS6, and those for apache during the same time frame. Hardly a lie. Yes. Obviously YOU are not one. Basic margins, borders, styling, etc. Nothing complicated there. Please enlighten us, how is this complicated CSS? It's no more complicated than the stuff I write on a daily basis. So you change your story from "IE doesn't support AJAX *at all*" to "but it uses ActiveX!", and somehow that's funny? Alright. BTW IE7 can do it natively too (and also as ActiveX for legacy purposes). Ask gamers. Lots of people swear by the mouse for FPS games at least. LOTS of gamers disagree with you... ' And BTW, yes you did quote the "burning DVDs" part and such. Look at your own quotes.

Oh, so you get to decide what people need? Neat! Nice to not have needs for anything like basic privacy, not ever needing to setup permissions so others can't (mistakenly or not) delete (or look at) your files, or security using ACLs (just common sense) or anything like that. Like anyone who does even basic video editing (lots of n00b apps for this, for home videos et al -- LOTS of people do this, especially new parents), or copying DVDs (not just video) or downloads stuff off P2P. Hardly advanced. NTFS has that too. Which is useless at home. :lol: Nice of you to include a joke for aprils fools! That's the very best one I've heard so far. Every single computer is only used by a single person! Not that families share PCs, each having their own accounts so they each have their preferences and such. Fast user switching is basically made just for home users. Not the same thing at all. They complement each other, but they're no substitute. Try logging on a 2nd user session using VNC... And VNC over slow links is a dog compared to RDP. (plus RDP is built-in, requires no install of a 3rd party server process, no extra tray icon, etc) I hardly use VNC anymore these days. ...unless you have a LCD, which is more or less what everyone buys these days. Google it? (Bah, don't bother, you'll say "nobody needs that!" -- I'm sure we should remove command.com or cmd.exe too while we're at it. Using a command prompt is too advanced! no one does that!) You've hardly refuted anything at all. You just deemed nobody has a need for stuff lots and lots of people actually have a use for. And anything you don't do automatically becomes "oh-my-god-so-advanced-nobody-ever-does-this!": -people should use consoles to play games! -nobody visits heavy websites, and shouldn't visit anything that uses flash (nor should web designers use it) -nobody has big files (nor needs basic security for 'em) -all systems are single user, or they should use it as one -watching mpeg4 is advanced (who ever goes to youtube?) -burning DVDs is advanced (yeah, nobody does that) -filling mp3 players advanced - who has one of those newfangled mp3 things yet? -all new software that doesn't run on a 10yo system is bloated or poorly written ... I think it's pointless replying any further.

Watching mpeg4 (including videos off youtube and such), burning DVDs, editing photos, watching HD DVDs (or plain old DVDs), filling mp3 players... Advanced? I see countless n00bs and old people do stuff like that everyday. Hardly "advanced". Not by any stretch of the imagination.

2nd half of previous post... Oh yes, it's absolutely unbearable on anything but a Quad Xeon X5355 with 16GB RAM. Not like a 38$ CPU with 50$ worth of RAM or anything older like a plain old P4 or Athlon XP (even 2nd hand) would suffice Really, this "it's bloated" crap is silly. VS6 once was a OK IDE... Like 10 years ago. Even VS2003 is pretty much considered legacy by now. Hardly anybody writes .NET 1.1 code anymore, the documentation (MSDN library) is not being updated anymore, it's not supported on Vista, etc. VS6 is an horrible IDE by today's standards, but also the compilers included suck: they don't support modern instruction sets, 64 bits, don't optimize for modern CPUs, the STL sucks -- you name it, it sucks! I would use pretty much anything over that, including the new and free Visual C++ Express (and GCC, and the Intel C++ compiler and pretty much everything else). Nevermind VS6 doesn't support modern languages (like C#) and all that either... If you call VS2005 bloated, then you don't want to even to try. It's one of the best performing databases out there, and it has a very good feature set, and halfway decent pricing. Way to bash a product you clearly don't even know. Not at all! Unless you're using a 10 year old barebones IDE with nothing else of course... But if we're going to go down that route, I'm sure writing basic on a VIC20 or a PET is just fine too (they're every bit as useful as a P2 to me -- good for nostalgia, or perhaps as a boat anchor/paper weight) LOTS of people disagree with you on that one, even if just because on a PC you have a mouse, and you can buy the graphics card to get the graphics you want. Personally I don't mind consoles, but saying they SHOULD be played on a console is a bit much. It just looks like you're into retro computing. 10 year old CPUs, 10 year old operating systems, 10 year old IDEs and compilers...

NTFS? No ridiculous file size (and partition size) limitations? ACLs? Real multi-user environment? Remote Desktop? ClearType? PowerShell? Hibernate and hot docking (for my laptop)? Fast User Switching? WMP11 and IE7? MMC 3? (oh wait, no MMC at all on win9x!) IIS An OS that can use the .NET framework 3.0 and apps that require it? ACPI that actually works? Or just a stable OS that doesn't BSOD everyday? That list could be very, very long. It's updated, had flash 8, and has recent WHQL certified drivers and all. Yet it plays for about a second, stops for one, plays another second... You'd be fine? Sounds like you haven't actually tried! And no, it's not just memory. BTW, it uses a lot of javascript to expand/contract posts now. Just try it. FF pegs the CPU to 99% for a few seconds when opening one of that in a tab. Just try opening a dozen such tabs and you'll see. There's no complex css there at all (unlike perhaps csszengarden), much less long -- only 7kb of it. It's not a heavy page at all, the tab opened instantly in FF, no CPU load peak at all. Yeah, it's not like sites like google maps or live maps or gmail or digg or slashdot already exist and are being used by a lot of people BTW, IE can handle AJAX stuff just fine. Hell, AJAX came FROM IE! They invented the XMLHttpRequest. Most popular sites nowadays. Again, did you even bother loading a dozen tabs of that /. page yet? Looks like I've got to split my post too...

Looks like I had missed one of your posts (just noticed right before I hit submit on this post). I'll be replying soon (out for groceries first) If I start that, we could be here all day... Just a few everyday things: -doesn't run modern OS'es (which are required for many apps, and I want the features they offer too) at decent speeds if at all -heavy multitasking in general (lots of heavy apps -- see below) -work on lots of large photos (lots of raw stuff) with photoshop cs2, a few raw tools, noise removal apps, sort/tag/catalog it all, etc -did I mention stitching lots of large panos (from 12MB raw files) and some HDR work? -fill our mp3 players (reencodes mp3s as it loads 'em) -- in the same year -watch lots of mpeg4 video xvid and x264 for the most part), with post-processing and scaling too. I have a fair amount of HD rips too (720p) -- soemtimes on the web too (like the stuff that can't even play on my ex-wife's father's P3) -watch live TV off my DVB-S card (even with DXVA a P2 couldn't handle the SDTV stuff), including HDTV channels -burn DVDs at high speeds -compress and decompress archives of several GBs (rar, zip, 7zip) -- before I die of old age -reencode a lot of my recordings to either xvid or x264, including the odd HDTV show -soon I'll be buying a HD DVD drive (requires a dual core CPU and all) -using MS Office 2007 (requires XP BTW) with some addons and OpenOffice (already slow on a P4) -surf the web (that does include lots of heavy pages), using a modern browser (FF and favorite plugins), lots of tabs at once (often 3 rows) -use Thunderbird for mail and newsgroups (already slow-ish on a P4 with a large enough information store) -run database software that's required by apps I use, test and write: SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g Express, DB2 Express-C, PostgreSQL... -run a few instances of different OS'es at once inside VMWare server (and MS Virtual Server) for many purposes -cataloging the said vmware images (means a lot of compressing/decompressing base images) -use several CAD / electronics / embedded development apps -use IIS6 (win2003 only) to run web apps, web services and server middleware. Soon that will have to be IIS7 (LH server - likely inside vmware). Sometimes more than once instance at once. (also needs other server processes/features too) -writing code inside IDEs like Eclipse and Visual Studio 2005, along with all the usual plugins (e.g. Resharper, CodeRush, Refactor, Visual Assist X, AnkhSVN, etc) and countless other apps: dotTrace, SQL Prompt, Reflector, CruiseControl.NET, NUnit, MbUnit, NAnt, NCover (etc), CodeSmith, MyGeneration, LLBLGen, Crystal Reports, Installshield, Visio, Borland Together, XML editors, UML tools, several database tools for different purposes, various apps from many companies (Red Gate/SSXX/Altova/etc), various SCM repositories and clients, etc. -the odd game twice a year ... Again, we could be here all day. P2's are way beyond outdated.