CoffeeFiend

Check inside soundman.exe

Please don't use such huge fonts... It's worse than all caps. For all bt8x8 cards btwincap is a great 3rd party driver. Much better than any the drivers that comes with the card.

Well, if you don't know the .NET framework, the .NET language of your choice (VB here) decently well (and at least a good grasp of basic OOP concepts), and ADO.NET, you're just going to have to learn a lot of things to get this done... There's no way around learning all this (unless you decide to use something different, like plain old Access forms -- something any untrained monkey can use), and it'll take some time and effort for sure. Knowing basic SQL is perhaps 1% of what you need to know. It's like a guy who wants to be a carpenter or contractor who would say "I can hammer nails". There's just so much more you need to know. Basic SQL (CRUD operations) can be learned in what... 5 minutes?

Citrix is just somewhat better terminal services (for a lot of $). You can try with Terminal Services (even in trial mode, or using plain old Remote Desktop) over your VPN just to see. At least you'll see what to expect (Citrix could be somewhat better, but don't expect anything to be radically better). Personally I wouldn't even bother. Graphics and CAD apps are possibly the worst thing you could try to do over RDP. Even slight lag is unbearable for this, and it requires LOTS of bandwidth too (far more than downloading/uploading a few files would). They're also rather CPU and memory intensive apps as well, making them not very good for Terminal Servers even over high speed LAN links. And even if it worked OK-ish, the price of Terminal Server CALs, Citrix licenses and of beefy hardware for a terminal server means a lot of $$$. If the 40 users need TS CALs, that's already 6k$ in TS CALs, if only a half dozen of them need to be accessing Citrix at once, you're still looking at about 3.5k$ for that (for version 4.5), plus the new pricey/beefy server hardware (and possibly OS) -- that's if you don't need a small cluster/farm... Over 10k$ For something I would rather never have to use. Not to mention how much of a PITA it might be to get AutoCAD working on it in the first place... Why is the VPN a problem? How big are the files anyways?

There's no "scripts to do downloading" or anything like that on the page, just plain, straight direct download links and nothing more. Something is wrong with your PC or security software. First link copy/pasted directly from the page: http://home.midmaine.com/~nlite/nlite/nLit...3.installer.exe Tested and working just fine (in both FF and IE): GET /~nlite/nlite/nLite-1.3.installer.exe HTTP/1.1 Host: home.midmaine.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3 Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.nliteos.com/download.html HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:29:04 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) PHP/4.3.10-16 Last-Modified: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:45:20 GMT Etag: "3000c4-20aff0-45f591b0" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 2142192 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: application/x-msdos-program If it doesn't work, then the problem is definitely on your end. Edit: looks like someone beat me to it. And I forgot to grab the link for the SFX instead...

No such thing as msql. Do you mean MySQL or MSSQL (MS SQL Server)?

Bad idea IMO. Extremely bad choice of OS for the particular task (couldn't really think of anything worse to use really). It's not a server-oriented OS by any means. NAT? You're not going to hack something around ICS (I hope not at least). Firewall? XP built-in? Eeek. DHCP? God knows. How to manage it? How are you going to make a web interface (and SNMP) to manage configure NAT/DHCP/Firewall and all? XP just doesn't have what it takes (like no DHCP server, much less VPN stuff and what not). XP is not configurable enough. XP is not nearly secure enough for the task. A "full-blown" OS like XP is way too resource intensive for such a simple task. XP is too expensive (even XP home at 96$CDN to replace a router, even if hardware was free...) Using a PC as a router (and nothing else) is wasteful - it'll cost more in electricity in a single year than a decent router like the WRT54GL costs. Too much maintenance overall (apply windows updates and all that) Generally speaking so-so uptimes (compared to embedded linux and such) Would be somewhat of a PITA to use/administrate headless. At least, if you chose the "let's spend more on electricity per year than a router costs", use something appropriate/meant for it, like m0n0wall, SmoothWall, ipcop or something along those lines. It's secure, time-tested, reliable, full featured, performs well, is light enough on resources (any old Pentium 1 will do - no need for even a hard drive in many cases), is free and open source, already has all the management interfaces one would expect, has uptimes approaching eternity, is well supported by large user groups and companies and everything else. My 2 cents: just buy a WRT54GL if all you want is a SOHO router, and use your preferred 3rd party firmware on it. Cheap, easy, reliable, secure, doesn't cost anywhere near as much electricity as any PC, etc.

Well, hard to say how much help you need here (not that I use VB nor Access mind you, so don't expect too much). Are you familiar with SQL and ADO.NET at all? Data Binding? Did you check the MSDN2 docs? etc.

Yeah, I'd put rapidshare very much at the bottom. Too much delays (before downloading and between downloads), annoying weird captchas and all. Everything they can to force you to pay! pay! pay! Downloading anything there is a real PITA and takes forever. Just discovered another bad one... live-share.com What a joke. Pulling in 0.4KB/s right now... Over 1h left on a 2MB file. Looks like they're being hosted off 56k dialup. Last time it stopped mid-transfer too. A couple places I've had good experiences with: mihd.net 2GB max, decent speeds, no captchas, no need to pay to download stuff in the same year like rapidshare, download accelerators supported, etc. (the flash upload is buggy though, so you're better off using the plain old http upload, which shows no progress during upload, just be patient) megaupload.com has been OK. 500MB max. But there's people complaining there's no slots for their countries and such all the time (I've never experiences that myself, or had anyone I sent files to tell me so either). Might be worth a try.

Ha! I thought so too. They seemed to be on pretty good terms anyways. There's a lot of such people around nowadays who just love to spread FUD and blame Microsoft for everything - including bad mouthing the Melinda Gates foundation even though they're doing a lot of good. And they accuse anyone saying anything in favor of Microsoft of being shills and all (slashdot anyone?) Anyways. It's nice to see that the technology is still evolving. Just noticed they're going to have WPF apps accelerated locally by the GPU, as well as Aero Glass and ClearType. Good stuff for sure!

TS/Remote Desktop (RDP) was based on ICA indeed. I've heard about that lawsuit many times, but never found evidence of it being true. I can't find anything about it, it sounds like one of those urban legends. I'm not saying that there wasn't some disagreement though, but I have a hard time to believe it was blatant "theft". After all, Citrix doesn't seem to dislike MS that much - they've renewed that licensing agreement a couple times. Citrix gave to MS what they needed to have multiple user sessions at once (for NT4), and MS gave Citrix a license to the Windows source code. How so? It's really not that bad. Citrix has a slight advantage over TS (advanced configuration and features -- things like load management, more advanced printing, slighly better compression, etc) and they support other OS'es than windows, but it's quite expensive. It's like 350$ per concurrent user -- that's on top of the TS CALs (~150$ for each user that will need to connect - not concurrent users) and normal app licenses! Really nice, if you can afford it that is. I mean, decent thin clients with TS CALs already costs as much as a basic Dell. Now add Citrix, and it's starting to get rather expensive. Just for a dozen users, only half of which would connect simultaneously, you're looking at around 4000$ worth of TS & Citrix CALs.

As bj-kaiser said, perhaps you need to be a bit more specific. Just a ticket management solution? If that's the case, then it's very hard to say. I've tried countless such apps a while ago, including several commercial ones. More or less, they all sucked. Some were plain ghetto. Others had the very worst GUI I had ever seen (when a whole IT team sees it as the worst WTF ever, you have a problem -- a half dozen frames in a web page, each with 2 scroll bars...) Some were very buggy. Others were missing basic features. Others were just backwards or counter-intuitive. Some were a nightmare to customize the least bit. Some had licensing we didn't care for. Some had weird system requirements. You could have nightmares looking at the code of a few (just plain bad stuff, buggy, insecure and all). Some web-based ones weren't anywhere near cross-browser (IE + ActiveX only anyone?) You name it, I've seen it. You'll need to make a little analysis of what you need. Does it have to run on a specific platform? Are there any type of things it must do? Do it have to be ITIL compliant? Tons of questions to ask yourself. And Must it absolutely be free? I mean, if you're going to have a help desk, you need to provide them with office space (that ain't free), hire some people (not free either last I heard), get some office furniture, phone lines, etc. It's a pretty expensive thing overall, I don't see the price of most commercial ticket management apps making much of a difference when you look at the big picture. Especially if it makes them more efficient or such - it could end up being effectively cheaper than free if it's a really good fit. If it must be free, then do like I did a few months ago and hit sourceforge. Download dozens and dozens of apps. Waste time trying to install them, configuring them, getting them to work (expect lots of glitches and little problems), lots of system requirements to take care of (different databases to setup and what not). Only to find out that 99% of them are really bad. Costs nothing in licensing, but it'll sure cost you a LOT in wasted hours. We ended up replacing our old app (classic ASP from back in the NT4 days or so) with a new home made ASP.NET (C#, .NET 2.0) app which was really great. Did everything we needed and more. We were quite happy with it. Until the day some manager heard about ITIL and "drank the kool-aid". How ITIL was best practice, so it would make everything so much better and also cure cancer. So eventually we were forced to move to a totally wretched system instead: Remedy. Service has anything but improved... Heavy bureaucracy moved in, support calls can now take far longer, everyone hates the system in general - all of it (and the asset management part is so sub-standard it's practically useless). Personally, if I was going to make a choice, I'd go for Web Help Desk. That's the best I've seen so far. The only thing I don't really like is the price, but then again, setting up a help desk is already a big expense. Not pocket change, but not so much when you look at the big picture. There's a few other decent commercial ones, but as for free apps, I have yet to see one that doesn't suck (haven't tried them all though, and your needs might be different). The other option is to make one yourself, if you have the time and expertize - and pray no manager ends up forcing you to replace it with remedy!

Yeah, me too. I'm hoping it's baloney. Yes and no. You can install SP2 on top of IE7. It'll work just fine. If you hit windows update with a Win2003 SP1 box, it'll let you update to IE7 and then apply SP2 on top no problem either. The problem is a potential issue. Someone installs IE7, then SP2, and then for some reason uninstalls IE7. It'll roll back files to SP1 (pre-IE7 install versions). It's the old out of order uninstalls problem.

You need a license per user. You got 100 users connecting to that TS and using office? That's 100 licenses to buy, just like installing it on their 100 PCs. They've got many documents about licensing for terminal servers (like this one). But the point of terminal servers isn't to "dodge" licensing fees - it doesn't help at all. It's mainly convenience: -you can use cheap, maintenance-free thin clients (like the Wyse products) instead of full fledged workstations (which require maintenance, upgrades and all) - albeit at the cost of buying a very expensive monster server -legacy apps that require an different OS or different environment than what's on the workstations -applications which are just too much of a PITA to deploy and update (only 1 server to install onto and to keep updated) -apps can be accessed from basically anywhere (including from laptops on the road or home PCs), no local installation required -sometimes I've seen some very badly written apps that would be beyond painfully slow if used on certain network connections but that would run OK if the network connection between the terminal server and database/middleware servers was fast enough (hundreds of DB queries over high latency links makes for a excruciatingly slow app) etc... OpenOffice is OK, but it's not quite MS Office. The main thing going for it is the price really. Anyways. Short form answer to the first post: if you don't know what citrix is, then you don't need it.

Bottom line: it's a terminal server - to use apps remotely for various reasons. No more than running office on a terminal server. Same license, same license cost, so exact same price overall.

In keyboards? Well, not daily, but it happens. When you have young kids around, spilled drinks are VERY common too. Never spilled one inside a computer yet, but I'm not taking any chances (towers are away under the desks, so unlikely to happen this way). But I've seen it before (back when motherboards couldn't be had for like 50$). That was a very expensive repair (it was actually coke, what a sticky mess it made)...

It depends on the case. I've added some to a few cases with poor ventilation, which were runnning quite hot (lots of HDs don't help). But most cases have half decent airflow nowadays. You got 120mm fans on there, so likely it's good enough. If airflow/temp is a problem, first thing I do is take out the "mesh" thing that's in front of the fans (usually it's just a bunch of tiny holes in the case) as it restricts airflow quite a bit, and put some grills on there (dust filtering too if required). If that's not enough (with the optional fans installed too), then I consider the blow hole. The main problem I have with them is fear of coffee spills thru it (kids being a risk here too). That wouldn't be pretty.

News have already been out for over a day, and several threads like this one already highlight the news. There's even a thread about slipstreaming it here. In the first thread I linked to, cluberti made a list of the new stuff. And I've mentioned in there too that I've tested it on 2 servers already (and also in VMWare Server). I've also slipstreamed it no problem - installs fine too. There's no point in being worried about it either. Service Packs are mostly the same patches people already have applied (and working fine), just in one big "rollout" / archive. And they're tested before they're released as final as well (I had been running the RC for a while with no problems).

You want a free AV, then use a free one! (May I recommend going over the forum rules? Rule #1 particularly) Besides, of out all the AV software out there, why pick Norton Isavirus -- the very worst bloated and buggy POS one could ever choose? Try avast or something like that instead. Free and FAR better.

Yes, but just go ahead and try downloading it, you'll get a 404. The ISO works fine though (75% done...) Edit: finished downloading. No mentions of it being a RC anywhere in the release notes, titles, EULA or anywhere else. Looks like it's the real thing. Installing... Yep! The real thing 2 installs with no problems, time to slipstream! BTW, the main difference in size is mainly because they've included symbols too.

You can always give the ISO version a try, but it's bigger (523 vs 372). The download speeds aren't very good though. I often max out my 10mbit off MS' servers, but I can only get 150KB/s right now. About 50% complete, will be trying it soon.

Well, I thought I had covered pretty much everything... If you want to know more about something, perhaps try asking specific questions. In short, whatever HD signal you send to it gets downconverted to DVD resolution. It basically isn't even a HDTV, just a large plasma, and nothing more. You want the extra detail of a high definition signal? Buy something else, this just doesn't have the pixels. There's nothing more to it.

You think that's clean? Here's my current desktop (just finished the every-other-year reinstall which was severely overdue): It could hardly get cleaner than that (Taskbar on auto-hide as always, useless recycle bin nuked) The sad thing is it won't stay like that for long... I like it, but I doubt it'll win too many contests around here

If you're using the legacy-type of drivers (non-WDDM) or some sucky installer that forces it on you for no reason (like to load those tray icons and such junk after rebooting) or something, maybe. But when upgrading a WDDM driver the OS itself does not require a reboot. It can reset the GPU while it's running and all. Yes, for now. But as soon as pretty much all the hardware has the right drivers and all, nobody's going to want to go back to the old stuff. Just like the old VxD -> WDM transition. It sucked somewhat at first when nothing was available (the drivers for Creative's junk was a TOTAL joke!) Inconvenient, but still a good thing.

They changed the driver model for many reasons... A video crash doesn't take down the system anymore (drivers not running in kernel mode/ring0 anymore) i.e. stabilty, performance reasons, complexity, not using GDI for everything anymore (DirectX based instead - accelerated by video card i.e. CPU load offloaded to the GPU)... Plus adding various features like GPU multitasking/scheduling/memory management, video playback enhancements, etc. Not having to reboot after video driver upgrades. It's likely useful for protected video path too. Video stuff has changed a fair bit in Vista - Aero, DX10, WPF (part of .NET 3) and all. They pretty much had to. Sometimes changes are necessary, and a good thing, even if it's inconvenient or plainly a PITA during the transition period.