CoffeeFiend

That's pretty much what I do myself when the BIOS doesn't have a flasher built-in. I add the flasher & BIOS image to a very basic MS-DOS bootable floppy image then burn it with Nero with floppy emulation. Quick and easy to do, never had a problem. It's a waste of a disc though so if I did it more often I'd setup something on a USB key.

Yes. It'll save you about 10 minutes compared to installing from a flash drive or such. But then, all the updates, all the optional updates, all the drivers for everything, all your software, all the patches and updates for all your software, etc. Printer preferences, pinning apps, browser extensions, codecs, licenses and activations, etc. That's a whole day gone by.Then you start setting all your preferences and general settings in all apps and so on. Now, if you're a power user or programmer, this is *so* much worse (being both is even worse). Several IDEs and compilers (Visual Studio, SQL Server, service packs for both, Windows SDK, sample DBs for SQL Server, AVR Studio 5 -- oops gotta reinstall VS2010 SP1 again now, Eclipse, CodeWarrior, Imagecraft, Keil, eabi toolchain + CMSIS, etc). Now configure VS and others to your needs. Reinstall Resharper/VisualAssistX/CodeRush or whatever you use, SVN/Hg/Git/whatever tools (cmd line/shell GUIs/multiple IDE integration) and their "ignore" files and various settings, various VS extensions via NuGet, VMWare Workstation and several virtual machine images for testing (also, the vSphere 5 client), several JTAG/BDM-related tools and drivers for embedded folks, IDA Pro, etc. There goes yet another day. God forbid you also use other kinds of software! Now my color profiles and prefs, my custom photoshop workspaces (and tons of other settings/presets), bridge settings, my custom pre-flight settings in acrobat, font sets in suitcase fusion, brush settings in Painter, outlook signatures, your company's templates for various CAD apps, and countless other things in numerous other apps (e.g. telling wireshark not to go crazy because of TCP checksums, extra folders in CCleaner, internal codec settings in MPC-HC, Intuos tablet settings, fixing errors in WMP's library, etc). That's assuming that nothing goes wrong on anything, not that it's uncommon for a Windows security update to fail or something along those lines. Some people would even add some games to this list. I think you now understand why I never want to reinstall unless absolutely necessary. I just don't have that kind of time to waste. Installing Windows itself isn't the issue, it's everything else you have to do after that is. It's so much work that I used to make images of it with TrueImage but by the time I end up needing to restore them almost everything included is out of date so that is typically no help (I'd just have to uninstall everything and reinstall the new versions) But yeah. I can now save myself a whole 10 minutes in this 3 day long ordeal! I feel so relieved.

I agree wholeheartedly, but that would make Win8 more of a service pack than a new OS i.e. just a couple minor new features that most won't use, and I don't seemingly have any use for most of them. Hyper-V seems like a desperate push for their virtualization tech that nearly nobody seems to be adopting, reset is mostly sending the wrong message (our OS needs reinstalls so often that we built that in!) while not being really helpful, Internet Explorer version++ which I won't touch with a 10 foot pole, and that's about it for the main changes. Unless you want to talk about the Windows on ARM whose main feature seems to be incompatibility, which is paired with the kludgy interface of Win8 that nobody likes and MS' poor online services (sounds like a winner, no?) The one and only thing I like from it is the task manager. And I'm not paying $100+ for that, especially when the rest of the OS is ruined. Instead of making us pay $100 for a handful of extra features (remote desktop host, MUI and very little more) in Ultimate over Home Premium, just charge us the extra $100 for the non-Metro interface or something.

Then you won't get any meaningful performance boosts ever. End of story. And it's very much self-inflicted. You know, people with those needs could rewrite software in modern ways to make use of modern architectures. If they won't then they'll have to live with the consequences. Everybody else can seemingly adapt just fine. It's far too easy to blame CPU designers here when there's lots of options available to make faster software. Pretending it's 1980 and using single-threaded MS-DOS apps won't get you the performance of modern software and modern architectures.

Unfortunately no decent start menu yet, yeah. Meanwhile, yet another good read: That Windows 8 experience? Confusing. Confusing as hell

There's your problem. There are limits that push modern CPU design in a different direction which modern software makes use of, along with many other options. Such "scientific" obviously software exists, and there's TONS of things to improve performance: -newer instruction sets and optimizations that a MS-DOS wouldn't use (SIMD instructions for starters) -running on HPC clusters, or having a "distributed" architecture -GPGPU computing -specialized hardware (based on FPGAs or ASICs) If you insist on using ancient software there's nothing they can (nor will) do for you. And no, they won't base their CPUs designs based on the specific needs of one person in a million (there's much more money to make keeping the other 999999 happy). Especially when their problem is merely that they just won't use modern software, and that modern software happily makes use of modern CPU designs. TL;DR: you only have yourself to blame.

Yep, but all these differences are abstracted away by drivers and such. Same basic instruction set, calling the same libraries. That's one of ARM's biggest strengths. There's so many companies making chips to address every specific need, with wildly varying specs, different peripherals, at every price point. We buy ARM chips from Freescale and NXP here (and a whole lot more non-ARM stuff) As far as I'm concerned, zero editions of Win8 for ARM would be enough.

It's a game that's over a decade old. Try with the latest updates and compatibility mode. There are people out there who have it working. It might take 5 minutes of Google-fu and a couple settings to get it running. It's mainly Halo's fault for not getting the necessary updates. You'll find that running 11 year old games under *any* OS (like a game from 1990 on XP) without dosbox or such tricks doesn't always work great. That just means you haven't installed some codecs on Win7, which is why WMP11 played stuff that WMP12 doesn't play now. VLC plays exactly the same stuff regardless of OS. So if you only install the codecs for some esoteric formats only on one of the two OS'es, of course the other won't play it. Between a few codecs, MPC HC and VLC as a last resort (WMP is horrible for video), I've never encountered a single video I couldn't play on Win7. And I've played so much different stuff (MPEG4 ASP, H.264, MPEG2 and H.264 transportstreams, all kinds of avi/mkv/mp4 files, some old rm junk, etc). Find some video files that don't work, see what codecs they use, and install the necessary codecs to play that on Win7. If anything, WinXP has a far worse track record for playing video files (some awful codec packs, no built-in MPEG2 or H.264 decoder, etc). Or perhaps you *did* install one of those awful codec packs meant for XP, which will nicely screw up a perfectly fine Win7 install. I don't see how any of it is Win7's fault.

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I didn't see them talk about 4 ARM versions but then again I just quickly glanced. Just like everyone, they looked at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Component Based Servicing\PackageIndex\Product. That does actually list 9 unique versions: Microsoft-Windows-EnterpriseEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-EnterpriseEvalEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-HomeBasicEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-HomePremiumEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-PrereleaseARMEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-PrereleaseEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-ProfessionalEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-ProfessionalPlusEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-StarterEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 Microsoft-Windows-UltimateEdition~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.2.8250.0 where only number 5 refers to an ARM version. As far as ARM goes, there are several different architectures and tons of different chips from different manufacturers (it's really not that standardized outside of CMSIS) but that shouldn't change anything to the editions, very much like when we build a BSP for Win CE with Platform Builder (just use whatever works with your board). Anyway. One ARM version on the list, a prerelease, an eval vers of enterprise... That leaves us with the usual Starter, Home Basic/Premium, Pro and Ultimate -- and also a new Pro Plus version. Either ways I don't want any of it. I've happily ran MS-DOS (3.x to 6.x), Win3.1, Win3.11, Win95, Win95 OSR2, Win98, Win98SE, NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51, NT 4 client and server, Win2k C&S, WinXP, Win2003, Win2003 R2, Vista (32&64 bit), Win 2008, Win 2008 R2, Win7 x64, a couple different versions of SBS in there, WinCE 5 & 6, etc. And I loved all of it. The only 2 I will have skipped will be WinME (mainly because I had moved on the NT line) and Win8. I think that's saying something. It'll be MS' biggest flop, ever. WOA even more so -- just see how well starting from scratch on other architectures worked before (e.g. Itanic) -- but here it also has none of the strengths of Windows nor any of the software for that matter (great!) Hopefully they'll learn from it. It just sucks having to wait another 4 years or so for Win9. Edit: one funny comment from slashdot (out of numerous sites where pretty much everybody hates Win8):

Yes, I'm aware of that. But again, it just takes the one user without it, and your network shares will be chuck full of the said garbage files. Too much hassle Then again, it's not the biggest issue on my list. Not by a long shot. And that list isn't remotely complete either. I'm just saying that there is so much stuff that really needs to be solved and work out of the box, some of it which has been an issue for over a decade, and instead they give us this Metro crap we don't want of. Instead of making what they had (desktop) shine, they turned the desktop in a big mess (screwing up everything they had) to hopefully gain traction in the mobile space which won't happen anyway: they've never done well, their marketing sucks, their online services suck, they have a tendency to just kill their own products (Zune? PlaysForSure? Windows Mobile? Kin? etc), and here they offer absolutely *nothing* over Android or iOS devices which are both mature, well entrenched, and have tons of nice apps. The only way to win is not to play.

The end result is similar but I wouldn't say "reactivated" per se. It might make Win8 bearable i.e. a Win7 lookalike with almost zero new features. I'd still rather run win7 (no need to buy it for starters) Overall, the comments I see on the web so far (multiple sources) are overwhelmingly negative, mainly about Metro. Win9 can't come out soon enough.

PowerShell runs as any other program, under crappy old cme.exe, but yes, there's the PowerShell ISE as well. Still, cmd.exe kinda sucks. On a network with both OS'es mixed you still see plenty of it... If you delete them enough times they actually go away. But yes, totally an unnecessary pain. I'm not aware of such a feature unfortunately.

Yes. With a sane user interface, not this Metro garbage. Oh, and here's another idea: have some actual improvements too. That would be a great idea IMO. Every version of Windows before that had some, so why not this one too? I mean, yes, they there are new features but: -Metro? That's totally a huge step backwards. I'd rather use crappy old XP's shell over that, or GNOME 2, or KDE, or OS X, or... just about anything else. -IE10: Yes, Chrome/Firefox downloader version 10 is a must have -Hyper-V which almost nobody uses, is no match to VMWare's offerings, and that requires SLAT support on your CPU which means you basically need a new computer, and it just might be only available in the enterprise/ultimate editions -Reset: you still have to backup everything, and a solid OS shouldn't really need this often anyway. Besides, you really can't trust it if your machine is infected with malware (virus infected the reinstaller). And then you still need to reinstall everything and apply all the updates and reconfigure everything. Not much gained over just using a clean system restore point either. -Windows To Go: seemingly only in the enterprise edition, and it's not so much a "feature" but just a way to boot -WOA: This will be a complete disaster, pure and simple. I dunno. How about some actual improvements instead? -Canceling print jobs that actually works! Even if it requires new driver model. And how about it supporting things like ink levels natively or better color management? -Reading from damaged CDs & DVDs without the system freezing -- and while you're at it, give us a decent burning app for once -Windows Media Player/Center supporting subtitles, lossless audio formats (like native FLAC support with seeking), or not having to edit the registry to get media center to see MKV files? -Something better than notepad. See notepad++, notepad2, ultraedit, editplus and many, many others. -Something better than paint. Seriously. I don't expect Photoshop here. -A better explorer. How about dual panes? Being able to pause/resume large file job/move jobs? Generating lists of files as text, csv or html? File hashing? -How about adding version management to the OS? Like a built-in TortoiseSVN of sorts, or like Apple's "versions"? -A duplicate file finder (or as an addon to explorer). A comparison tool would be nice too. -A better photo management/viewer app, like Adobe Bridge, Aperture, Acdsee, iPhoto and many others -A better system cleaner (see CCleaner, nCleaner, fCleaner, etc) and why not a secure ease function? -A better shell than cmd.exe -Something less ghetto than the built-in zip file thing for archives. See 7zip, WinRAR, etc. -Something along the lines of Apple's mission control/exposé/spaces, virtual desktops and all that, done right -Better speech synthesis voices. Seriously, Anna sucks. As a developer you need to rely very heavily on SSML to make it say things. -Have remote desktop be usable for at least one remote user when someone's logged in, or having the "host" in home premium? Even Apple lets you do this for free -Some sort of unified updater for all your software (like the current Update thing in Win7, but where ISVs could add updates to their own apps too) -Supporting more filesystems, including something not as crappy as FAT32 but which *all* devices can use i.e. not exFAT -getting rid of thumbs.db and desktop.ini files all over the place -How about some nice extras like the "Plus!" pack had back then, like nice screen savers and themes, new fun games and what not -Centralize and restructure everything management and administration related (Control Panel + MMC + various other dialogs and places) -A system-wide spellchecker everywhere you type -Improve the modern but extremely awful windows dialog for scanning documents (I'll take TWAIN again over this any day) -Something to synchronize files, a basic but decent FTP client, and a good download manager too -Make Windows media player actually find relevant results when it searches for an album by artist & album name online etc. There could be *so* much more stuff on this list really. There's tons of stuff that needs improving rather badly and almost all of it goes ignored (the *only* thing they seem to have addressed is mounting ISO images). Meanwhile, we get a phone touch-based interface that simply doesn't work crammed down our throats, and we'd have to pay $100+ for the privilege too! Work on issues like those on this list, then possibly add some sort of *optional* touch interface and it would easily be the best Windows ever, and by far.

Hmmm does it support the achievements? Well, VS11 needs new archievements like Compiles code that doesn't run on XP. Seriously, I don't know how they think they can get away with it. But yeah, it's quite a let down as well.

This is great! Edit: not sure why but you can't quote attached pictures and have them work I guess.

There's never been an OS I disliked as much as Win8 so far -It makes multitasking a nightmare -The dual metro/desktop thing is as a lot of people put it "disjointed" at best -Metro apps are surprisingly quite slow to load (the weather app often fails to load the default city altogether as well) -Using metro apps with a mouse is an exercise in frustration (just drag this thing across the entire screen!) which only the keyboard can only somewhat tame -Most of the included apps seem to be little more than using a "MS Live" web page but launched via Metro, but without any advantages -Why do I need to signup for Live for everything? Mail? No thanks, I'll just go to gmail. -Calendar? I have to sign in on Live for this? Well, we've got Outlook already for that at work, and at home I'd sooner use Google's -Maps seems to be just Bing maps and Google's are far superior (and yet again work on any OS by opening a tab in your browser), etc -The video player seems pretty much worthless -The search results on the Metro screen sucks quite a bit compared to Win7's start menu search results (nevermind the UI is beyond awful) -Everything seems to take more clicks to get at in general, it just gets in your way of getting work done -Everything feels a bit clunky (scroll up and down to side scroll the Metro start thing? Seriously?) -Even on a touch device, using corners for start/charms just sucks -Metro is little more than something that gets in the way of the desktop ... This is the very first Microsoft OS which not only offers no actual improvements whatsoever but is also a big step back in so many ways. I definitely won't be using it either at home or work.

Yeah, I totally hear you. Even well-known softies like Scott Hanselman don't seem to care much for it. There's a few things I wanted from VS 11 myself: -Some cool C# features, but they barely have anything worth mentioning really (it might as well be nothing) -I wanted them to make it easier to use built-in OS stuff like TaskDialogs and such things (without the crappy API code pack) but instead of that they're pushing for Metro everything -Significantly improved refactoring/code inspection/better intelllisense ala resharper, and things like a much improved mstest (I'll use nunit over it anyway) -- here they deliver NOTHING -Great C++11 support, yet it's still lagging far behind GCC despite costing DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR% more than GCC ... They give you no actual improvements, but they give you a depressing theme that makes it hard to find stuff, a hefty price tag and as a bonus they drop support for half of your customer's PCs! Wow, where do I sign up? I'm *so* totally there. Right now my first reaction is "so long Windows". Ballmer and Sonofski managed to kill something that was truly great. Today, MS lost me as a power user, a developer, an enthusiast for 20 years (since MS-DOS 3.3), and a guy who fixes other people's PCs once in a while (fixed a vista laptop that was missing usbstor.inf again today). Goodbye Windows. Goodbye C# and Visual Studio. Goodbye SQL Server. It's now time to develop cross-platform non-Metro apps. Our next PCs will be Macs, and our next mp3 player/tablet/phones will be Apple or Android devices. By year 2020 we should be mostly Microsoft-free, running legacy stuff in VMWare Workstation or vSphere. There's always the possibility that Win9 won't be such an abomination but I've mostly lost hope.

No need to worry. Nobody's going to upgrade to Visual Studio 11 anytime soon as C++ apps don't run on WinXP anymore, and most likely .NET 4.5 apps won't run on XP either (the beta doesn't run on on anything older than Win7 for that matter). Yes, we're just going to start writing apps that don't work on half the computers that run Windows

When it comes to hard drives, the OS (and WMI and such), the identification comes from whatever the hard drive answers to the ATA IDENTIFY command (0xEC, sent via IOCTL_ATA_PASS_THROUGH and IOCTL_ATA_PASS_THROUGH_DIRECT). That's what tells you the drive serial number, the firmware version, model number and so on. You'd have to modify the firmware for your drive and reflash it. And it would still be detectable in many ways (stickers on the drive, build/design of the drive and controller, unique drive geometry, etc) TL;DR: Buy a WD drive. It will look like a WD drive.

And yet ~millions of people have those same type of problems without even installing service packs or anything. Correlation is not causation.

You're the very first person I hear about which has any issues with Win7 SP1. None of that sounds like a typical scenario, it just sounds like something's wrong with your system (and in no way some sort of widespread issue), so I'll second Magicandre1981's suggestion to troubleshoot it. I don't see a shred of evidence that suggests why you should even blame your issues on SP1 specifically, much less how it would be a nightmare for everyone because you had issues on the one lone PC which just might be caused by malware on your system or any other problem. Also, service packs are usually fine (they're mainly a collection of patches -- a faster way to apply them basically), but sometimes they still affect a small percentage of PCs, just like XP SP3 which had made some machines unbootable recently.

Yes, that sounds like a technology we should adopt! I hear it has a bright future

Fantastic post Precisely. Instead of making a mobile product that sells based on its own merit (something they're incapable of IMO), they decided to make the desktop painful to use, giving it an awful interface that makes no sense -- because then we'll want "that thing that makes the desktop suck and that angers you" on our mobile devices too? I see that as yet another reason NOT to buy one. You summed up my thoughts better than I could have. They won't make their mobile devices attractive to me -- even as a long-time MS fanboy. They're just killing the desktop instead (the only market segment they had) by alienating all of its users and developers. That's what's extremely worrying. Lots of us long-timers, fanboys, programmers and enthusiasts that have been with MS for over 20 years are now perfectly willing to ditch Windows altogether. That's what's actually happening -- not that we're all lusting for their mobile devices that don't sell, never sold and most likely never will. All of a sudden, the lifeblood of Windows are thinking "how about I run these Windows apps in vSphere or in a terminal server, and find replacements or ports of other apps to other platforms?" MS or Windows certainly won't die overnight, but they're forcing us to start a migration away from their platform and making us consider their competitor's offerings. If Windows is going in that direction, now what computer am I going to use for Photoshop or AutoCAD or to sync my iPhone? Yes: a Mac. MS just sold a Mac. And if I'm now a Mac user, what platform am I going to develop for? And thus by killing its Visual Studio sales, they'll also kill their SQL Server sales. MS is going to hand over its market to Apple, on a proverbial silver platter. Same here. We had it *so* good. Win7 and VS2010 are a truly fantastic combo. And just like that, they take it all away. Win8 is an abomination, and even VS11 is doing some questionable changes that have its users rather upset (everything is now grey). Yes, they're working on making the interface suck (thankfully 3rd party themes should fix most of it) instead of trying to compete with C++11 support, useful C# features besides async, improving refactoring or anything else that might actually be useful. Right now it doesn't look like it's worth upgrading to regardless of the price. 3 more days until we see if the sky is really falling. Oh, I'm working on a fairly large C# project, but thankfully the only hardware it uses is a USB communication device. So worst case scenario (yes, there's always Mono too), we'll still be able to use Win7 in a VM, passing through the USB device to the VM 10+ years down the road. It's sad that Win8 is forcing us to consider what we'd do without Windows before it's even released. Edit: well, there's also a Cyclone Pro programmer but that's also a USB device (or used stand-alone, or via TCP/IP or via RS-232 so no worries at all here)

I've seen plenty of pics of suck "easter eggs" or whatever you want to call them in ICs on the web but I've never seen one first-hand never having worked at a chip fab, but I see it all the time on PCBs, it's *extremely* common in the software world (hidden features or games inside apps, especially related around their about screens), I've seen various lab hardware that had such things as well (like an oscilloscope that played tetris), sometimes in executables you can find some funny strings with a hex editor (like Adobe's transient witticisms), some web apps like to include funny lines in the HTTP headers (namely X-Powered-By), lots of movie DVDs have easter eggs in the menus (nevermind Pixar who likes to re-use and hide characters from other movies in places where you might notice if you pay attention), hidden tracks on audio CDs, cheat codes in games, features that are disabled in the firmware of many devices but that can be "tweaked", hidden menus in all kinds of stuff that appear with the right keypresses, etc. And nevermind that this thing on your disc is just an anti-counterfeiting mark, something there is LOADS of on every single banknote of pretty much any country. This stuff is all over the place, and that's not going away anytime soon, whether you like it or not. This is a hidden comment!!!

Indeed. Just look at this previous post and see for yourself. The only real difference in both was that you have to use an enumerator in JScript vs the for each in VBScript. Other than that, JScript has proper error handling i.e. try/catch blocks, vs VBScript's ghetto "on error" abomination (by far the worst I've seen in any programming language ever). It's mainly a matter of using the DownloadString method of the WebClient class to get the page contents, then piping that to match with a regular expressions like <a.*"(.*?/View/.*?-\d*)"> to have the child pages' URLs. Then You do much of the same: you use WebClient.DownloadString to get the child pages' content, and the regex from my previous post to get the PDFs' URLs, and once more, you use WebClient to download the PDFs, but using the DownloadFile method instead (using the subgroups from the regex matches as URL and file name). I just don't have enough interest in the problem (simply renaming files...) or time to waste to write it again in other languages, sorry.