CoffeeFiend

Well, they just rebranded Ghost from Powerquest. Powerquest is actually the one that invented that great tool as well as PartitionMagic. They just bought them out. Seems to be the trend now adays within companies. Yes, anything decent they've had to offer in the last few years (like ghost) have been bought out - just like Veritas recently (it's really a long list). But I'm sure they'll manage to drive Veritas apps into the ground too, overbloat 'em and make 'em suck badly - just like they've done for the latest versions of ghost (or almost anything else they make). v8.2 was the last version worth using, the new versions are trying to be acronis trueimage or something, and they just suck. But it's getting to be irrelevant now, Vista comes with new imaging and deployment tools that will replace it, and v8.2 will always work just fine for older versions of windows.

Oh, so you're keeping the useless (and annoying/ugly) bits and ditching: the new kernel (better threading, deadlock detection, transactions for file/registry ops, I/O scheduling and prioritization, improved memory manager, improved processes scheduler, new heap manager, etc), new network stack (IPv6, has profiles, etc), new audio stack, the finally somewhat locked down IE7, the new windows installer, the improved system restore, the new task manager, the new shell, the new search, the new apps (like the photo gallery) and all the overhauled ones, the new media center app, the new web/app server (IIS7), DirectX 10, the new firewall (supports IPv6 for new network stack), BitLocker, Windows Defender, the parental controls, the new disk imaging/deployment tools, speech recognition and synthesis in 8 languages, totally redone printing subsystem, the user-mode drivers (to avoid BSODs caused by countless crappy drivers), superfetch, readyboost, new MMC, better group policies, improved task scheduler, new command line tools, improved scripting (e.g. WMI), WPF/WCF/WWF/WCS (.NET 3.0 stuff), Aero Glass, Flip 3D, new fonts and font support, RAW image support, new dialogs, the service hardening and countless other security measures, the faster installation and better installer, the sidebar, new games, the mobility center and sideshow for laptops, previous versions, UAC, file and registry virtualization, ASLA (and finally decent NX bit support, good heap & stack overlow detection, etc), SMB 2.0, and countless other improvements and all the latest great stuff? That's exactly like putting the XP wallpapers on a Win9x OS - talk about lipstick on a pig! (and ugly lipstick at that) Funnily, the annoying and useless sounds is the very first thing I remove from any windows installation, only followed by wallpapers. But I'll definitely be using what you referred to as "the rest" B) Edit: Erm, looks like someone's post disappeared...

I couldn't care less about a boot screen really. I don't use a OS for the purpose of showing pretty logos as it boots. As long as it does what it has do and does it well. Personally, I'd rather they bring back the old NT style blue screen with dots as it loads (a text mode screen saying what's loading).

If you have Vista, you already have .net 2 & 3 installed, so it's irrelevant. If you don't use apps making use of WPF (or WCF or WWF or WCS) yet, then sure, you can wait 'till it happens. It's really just a matter of time.

"Vista components" is not "stuff for Vista only". What they mean is what's needed for you to run WPF (a.k.a. Avalon) apps on your XP box and such e.g. the new NY Times reader (very nice). All you need is the old 1.1 for the older .NET apps, and now 3.0 (which already includes 2.0).

Actually, it's common knowledge that the task manager isn't exactly a great way to measure memory usage. Some of the columns are actually mislabeled/quite misleading (like private bytes is labeled "VM size", "mem usage" is really the working set, etc). There are resources out there (by experts in the subject matter) that explain all this in great depth. Process explorer is by FAR a better tool (shows all you could ever want to know, and labeled properly!) Or windows' own performance counters even (they're labeled properly, not matching with task explorer's) Your method is perhaps less accurate than the task manager - close to 100% wrong. You're accounting for the exe "image size" (a very small portion of the equation), but then go and totally ignore any kind of memory allocation (making this method laughable at best), and then counting DLLs it loads towards memory used - even though they're NOT loaded twice (if any app is already using them, they're NOT loaded a 2nd time, Windows is smarter than that). And telling yourself your math is right because the number (a number too small to really verify anything) "seems" to match what's really the working set. You sir, after nitpicking at a fairly decent article, have managed to produce the most laughable attempt at calculating memory usage I've EVER seen. By your perfect method, a 10kb program that would malloc a terabyte of RAM would use like a megabyte or so (mostly because of dependancies/DLLs which are already loaded, which really require no memory). Edit: And here, before you call me a liar: a quick 3min25s sample video (by sysinternal experts Mark Russinovich & David Solomon) that will tell you it's true the columns in task manager are misleading. Or an excerpt from a MSDN blog (right out of the horses' mouth, in case you think the sysinternal folks are n00bs, even though they work for MS now): This is explained on hundreds of pages, in various programming books, newsgroups, etc. And not by random nobodies either. When using the proper columns, the task manager can give an approximation/general idea of how much memory an app uses, but it's not exactly a "accurate to the byte" meter.

ZoomPlayer also has play lists (dialogs > play list editor). Media Player Classic also has the feature (under file > open there's the "add to playlist without opening" option). VLC has play lists too (view > playlist) As for winamp it's pretty obvious... WMP has playlists too. I'm sure there are several others players out there that can do this. It might actually harder to find one that doesn't.

Ditto! (Well, and Orcas, and LH Server, and the upcoming Expression products, etc). The .NET Framework 3 is out at least (but then again, where's Orcas...)

I disagree. One should spend enough on a motherboard to get something of good quality, with a decent set of features, and hopefully as future proof as possible - but only as long as the cost stays reasonable. I've bought lots of motherboards that wouldn't ever had a chance to be updated, no matter how much I spent on a nicer model. Like Socket A boards. Even if I spent twice as much on 'em, there never were significantly faster CPUs made for it than the one I bought at the same time. And if you bought early, you'd be due for a newer board down the road anyways, as it wouldn't support the new FSBs. Or Like if someone bought a s754 board (that didn't last long). Even the 939's were pretty short lived IMO (AM2 replacing it). My old socket 775 board? It couldn't have supported the Core 2 Duo chip no matter which one I bought back then (limited FSB support too). Anyways, my point is, 95% of the time I've upgraded CPU, I had to change motherboard too, and nothing could have avoided that (usually had to change RAM too). It just doesn't last long enough nowadays to warrant spending ridiculous amounts on them. The Gigabyte DS3 is good quality, OCs very well, is well featured, cost is reasonable, and it's about as future proof as it gets (supports Kentsfield using latest bios, the new rev 2.0 supports it out of the box too). A 300$ motherboard will hardly be more future-proof, won't necessarily last (or be used for) much longer. If anything, by picking the 150$ one, I have 150$ left to buy the motherboard for my next upgrade. Personally, I'd rather spend the extra money you'd consider spending on a board for more RAM or more storage (there is no such thing as "enough storage"), or even a nice case that can fit a gazillion HDs (gotta put 'em somewhere). It's a matter of priorities I guess. Personally, I'd go for the DS3 / E6400 combo (just like Zxian & nitroshift)

Vista is a fine OS. Nobody's forcing you to use it. I certainly will. There's nothing wrong with it.

You're more than welcome. Thanks for the screenshot gallery Looks wicked, really can't wait. Haven't had much time to play with the betas unfortunately. Oh, more new stuff: .NET Framework 3.0 (~51MB, x86) just went final! That was kind of to be expected with Vista going RTM very soon though. Now if only Orcas and LH Server wouldn't be so far off... I kinda wonder when the Expression products are going to be released too. Looks like we'll have a lot of updatating to do. IE7, WMP11, .NET 3.0, Office 2007 and Vista soon...

Gee. Thanks Yzöwl... At least on newsgroups, there isn't one single person with god-like powers that can nuke your entire post if they feel like it over a slight difference of personal opinion about one sentence in it. They don't usually side with the trolls either. No point in posting your section seemingly. Won't be making the error of wasting time on that anymore. I've edited all my posts in the section to reflect that.

.

In related news, Microsoft released Office 2007 to manufacturing TODAY! It'll be available to businesses in late Nov, and Jan for consumers. I can't wait! http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/Articl...4139/94139.html

.

Yep, word came out yesterday. You can get thoroughly "pwn3d" via the XMLHTTP v4 ActiveX object (used in for AJAX namely), so IE users are at risk (including v7), and other apps based on the same rendering engine. So much for IE7 being sooooo much more secure BTW, your link is broken. Here's a link to the secunia advisory

1. There are ways, like the old (retired) mod_aspdotnet (requires the .NET framework, and windows only AFAIK), or mod_mono along with XSP or XSP2 depending. For classic ASP (not that I'd use classic ASP for anything) there's the old Apache::ASP (actually a CPAN module, so needs mod_perl). If you're really into ASP.NET, nothing's better than IIS. And none of these ways are 100% compatible with ASP.NET (.NET 2.0 [the good stuff] support is partial), and don't expect existing ASP.NET apps to run on it without any modifications and such. BTW, ASP.NET is not a language, C# would be a .NET language. ASP.NET is a stack of technologies. 2. Not sure what you want. To version what exactly? Either ways, there's several ways to create versionning systems, like relying on CVS/SVN and using a front end for it, or storing the old version of whatever in a database's "archive" table (copy current field to that before updating it), but I wouldn't store big files in a database either. When "versionning" binary files you can make sequential copies of it in a backup directory and keep track of those using a database. It really depends of what you're doing. You can look at MediaWiki's code too. I'm not sure of why you want to use apache to start with, especially if it's for running MS server-side technologies on a MS Operating System.

Hah! I got you beat 3.6 planets. I find the quiz a bit weird though, and perhaps setup so pretty much everybody would need several planets. I got a 3.6 planets even though I picked "0km" in both motorbike and car, and walking often. Then, there are nice questions like "do you have electricity in your home" (which is kinda funny - "no, but I'm on the internet answering surveys?"). Houses without electricity aren't exactly common (electricity usage varies a great deal from one to another though). And they classify eating meat once a day - which is what most "eating guides" recommend (apart from substitutes) - as "very often"! Oh, and dairy products count, too. So if you have that glass of milk a day (or perhaps just milk in your coffee?) then you're automatically in the "almost always", even if you never eat any meat. It's pretty easy to score over 4 when the real problem might be more along of "over population" (in certain areas) than ridiculous way over the top consumption. Yes, we definitely over-consume, but by more than 600%? Didn't know "I'm ecological footprint" though

That's more or less my point too. I write a lot of server middleware running on IIS6 and such things (often requiring various server components which aren't available on XP, or that interface to [test instances of] apps like Exchange which require a server OS). I'd much rather develop on the same platform than develop and find out it won't run on the other platform. And again, on the list of apps that require server OS'es, there are developer-specific software such as VSTS. Also, win2003 has a different licensing WRT virtualization. It lets you use up to 4 copies of itself in VMs without requiring more licenses (so esentially 5 copies of the OS simultaneously), which is very handy too. You can test your new stuff on another (virtual) server or test stuff that requires several servers at once.

Working "at 100Mbps" (as in not at 10) doesn't mean performing as good as it could. UTP is twisted for a reason, non-twisted parts should be avoided as much as possible (connectors and such included). Splices really does affect the electrical performance of a cable, you can easily see them with a TDM. NO professional installer would splice UTP - especially nowadays where we often lay 5e or better and with Gbit ethernet gaining a lot in popularity (the switches are coming down a lot in price). I've never tried to do some ghetto UTP splice on a gigabit connection to see how bad it performs, but I'm sure I wouldn't want that on my network. Splicing UTP is the absolute last resort, it screws up the cable's electrical properties. And even if it came down to splicing, I still wouldn't use a pigtail splice like that, that's meant for electricians, in junction boxes - NOT telecoms! Same goes for Marettes and such - not on telecoms cables!

Not really... DK never did as good of a defragmenting job. Simple enough. okie It should be trivial to manage to schedule some defragmenting job for anyone that reasonably computer literate (unless they have a very hectic work and sleep schedule, which is extremely uncommon) And BTW, I do a LOT of video editing, and it doesn't fragment the HD quite as much as you claim. And that's a unusual scenario either ways (you picked the 0.001% of the population that might benefit from your no-schedule way, hardly representative of anything) And you claim that your background defragging is magical and consumes no resources. That's very funny stuff to read over and over again. And that it uses some perfect algorithm for knowing when there are enough resources to do defragmenting. Somehow, defragmenting (which uses a fair amount of memory, and certainly uses a lot of the available I/O) doesn't affect performance AT ALL, WHATSOEVER as you claim. Aerial Pork, I say. And none of the things I mention are a problem, even on a "average fragmented" machine, but add if some background defragmenting kicks in at the same time, it's bound to happen (and again, there is NO such thing as a "perfect detection of idle resources" - especially when it comes to I/O). Sounds like you've never done those things before... Anyone who've ever tried that could tell you background processes, especially those that are I/O intensive like defragging WILL certainly do that. Especially things like DVB capturing. It uses not much CPU, and not that much I/O either, but just "sneeze by the PC" and your recording is all corrupted. Do I trust a defragmenter not to fire at that time? I've never seen it take "several seconds" as you claim. Most of the time is taken by loading the proper filters and such things. Not by reading the headers (which is very very little of the avi file - check with filemon if you don't believe the obvious) I've never seen defragmentation make any difference in how long it takes for mpeg4 files to open ever, no matter which defragmenter was used. 3GB further into the disk, to quote Microsoft. It makes an instant 5-10% performance improvement (again, their claim), which is not negligible (and it never "goes away" unlike making files defragmented). See their "NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP" white paper if you don't believe me. This has been known for ages (that's why ppl use cvtarea when formatting), yet DK is the only major defragmenter (AFAIK) that doesn't bother to move it where it belongs. Your next post doesn't make much sense. I'll try. That it defragmented everything it should have (e.g. skipping hibernate files and such things like DK does is NOT thorough) Having all files as close to possible in one chunk is the main goal indeed, but it shouldn't skip all kinds of stuff either (talking about DK here again). And I believe placement (not talking about the MFT) does matter, placing specific files in the faster-loading part of the HD to speed up windows does matter, and is part of the defragmenting job IMO. As for the MFT placement, there is no excuse not to do it. It's simple enough to do, and gives a significant performance increase. That being said. I let people try/test/decide what's best for them. You're more than entitled to prefer DK for any number of reasons (or anything else). And to quote yourself: "I've discussed this literally to death to the point where I just can't be bothered anymore." We could throw this back and forth 150 mores times and it would change absolutely nothing. And my point still is, this really belongs in that 13 page long thread, no point in duplicating it. All that stuff was already argued about, and going over all this again is an absolute waste of time.

That's new, you couldn't do that with SQL Server 2000. It was just an example of apps that require server software. Even without SQL Server 2005, the list is pretty long. You remember wrong. Installing IIS5 on win2k or IIS 5.1 on XP is a couple clicks away. But IIS6 does not, and will not run on anything else than win2003. It's impossible. And the version of IIS coming with XP is not only older/different, but it's also crippled (max connections namely), making it useless for load testing. And just lik the previous example, IIS was only one example, there are dozens more server components which aren't available on XP. I see a reason, but I would be tempted to say it's slower/has more overhead too (if you're actually using some of the server stuff it's meant for).

Same here. I see no performance advantage whatsoever. None. But some people have a genuine need for sever components (IIS6 namely), or use need apps that will only install on server versions of windows (like SQL Server [non dev ed nor express ed] and such things). XP has better compatibility with "desktop" apps though.

jcarle: agreed on all points. Someone using that C method for network stuff would be fired on the spot.

No hosts file will always work for everything. Even my hosts file over 1mb was FAR from blocking it all. It's NOWHERE near infallible, I'd say you're quite lucky if you get 50% blocking with that alone (unless your hosts file is several megs). A proxy or ad blocker made specifically for that purpose can use lists which can be dynamically updated, and use patterns and regular expressions (blocks based on IP/host name are useless for the most part, the ads VERY often come from the same domain/IP as the content and can't be blocked), thus also requiring less entries for the same job. Personally I have privoxy which can block things, but adblock is more than enough (hardly any ads ever making it thru even once). Also, using a hosts file has side effects in many cases. Most of them use 127.0.0.1, but using that will result in hitting your own web server (and getting countless 404s - not just in your browser but also your server logs) pointlessly, and using something like 0.0.0.0 instead (another kludge that causes problems with various proxies, etc). And since it doesn't remove the tags from the html either, you get the missing image placeholders everywhere, unless you use something like eDexter (another kludge and process running for no reason just to make it bearable to solve a problem in a wrong way). No option to whitelist pages, quickly disable/re-enable in a couple mouse clicks or such things using hosts file either. It's still a kludge regardless. And as for disabling the DNS client, yeah, you're likely saving a whole MB of RAM (like it really makes a difference, and once you start using things like eDexter and such, you're likely using more), but then again you're forcing many roud-trips to a DNS server, and that really does take more time (many thousands more queries taking far more time - it adds up). That's like removing your car's turbo because it's just dead weight. Sure, your car might be a tiny bit lighter, but you're lacking the boost too. It's not there for no reason, just using up memory.