CoffeeFiend

Yes, and I'm looking for a super fast dual core CPU under 100$ Seriously, I have yet to see a "nice" printer under 100$, much less a networked one. Usually the network card [jetdirect] alone costs at least that much by itself.

Another vote for DeepFreeze. I don't like the app a whole lot, but for such PCs that people end up screwing up all the time (classrooms, internet cafes, problematic users, etc)., it works quite well. They won't be able to permanently change any config, viruses just can't do a thing, etc. One reboot and problem solved. It's decently priced too.

Like some have said before, Windows doesn't just slow down for no reason. If it's getting heavily fragmented, that you've installed countless junk shareware apps, that you have tons of spyware running and such, then yes it must definitely get slower over time. I got some installs that have been running for quite a while too, and just as fast as day one. If it's not your case, then there's a problem somewhere.

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Floppies? I have no use for those. None at all. Whatsoever. Haven't had one in any of my PCs since ~3 years ago and couldn't be happier (Actually, it's kept in a plastic bin somewhere in the basement, and hasn't ever been dug out of there for anything). Excruciatingly slow, ridiculously low capacity (a bit over a MB), unreliable, very low capacity per physical space occupied (like, as many cubic inches as a 2GB flash disk for 1.44MB worth), unconvenient, old piece of legacy junk. I still have a use for many old-ish things (I use serial and parallel ports almost everyday for example), but floppies? No thanks!

gparted

Believe me, I've tried that. My main issue that made me look into this wasn't that I was upset it didn't produce a totally defragged partition. It was that even if you create an image from a fully defragged partition, once you dump it, it's now fragmented (of course, unless you've made a huge sector for sector image of the entire thing). And like I've said before, perhaps it somewhat works better for FAT16/32 systems, but I wouldn't use those for anything anyways (besides portable flash media). Well, that's what he claims (and like we were saying before, perhaps I should just ghost my video server onto some 2TB RAID array and dump it back, it'll be nice and defragged then? Disk Imaging != Defragging). Nonsense...

Ahhh. Not that misinformation again! I'm a ghost 8 user, but it's FAR from being a replacement for defragging (reimaging for defragging is like rebuilding your house instead of repainting it). In fact, it's funny how my drives are ALWAYS framented right after reimaging them (yeah, free space's always at the end though - like with any disk imaging app)... Decent drive imaging app, but that's all it is... Nothing more. [edit]: Actually, I'm thinking about moving on to something else. Something better. Rebooting to an old dos-based bootdisc to image is getting old and bothersome. But maintaining the said bootdisc with ndis2 drivers for every nic out there is a real PITA. WinPE/BartPE might be a good alternative, even if it boots somewhat slower. And ghost doesn't do incremental/differential backups. And as much as I'm not keen on the idea of creating images from windows (as it's already running), rebooting every time, and having to find that old boot disc sucks, when another app could just have a scheduled incremental backup overnight (no reboot required, no disc to find, no need to even do anything at all - just let it happen! How convenient is that!) And support for USB/Firewire/Network or even CD/DVD drives just couldn't possible be any worse. And everybody keeps talking about True Image, saying how good/better it is, and seeing good reviews about it everywhere all the time, so I'm starting to think there's got to be a reason for that... And there's so much reviews claiming it's faster and has better compression - don't know if it's founded or not as I haven't tried it yet, but I just might find out soon. So I think I'll be trying True Image tonight.

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I agree with Zxian. Just get more RAM. It should be dirt cheap. I've given away over a dozen sticks of PC133 (256MB), and I'll be giving a couple 512MB sticks soon (to my dad - along with a motherboard and CPU too). It should be dirt cheap (you might find someone wanting to get rid of some, even for free), even new it shouldn't cost too much (25$ perhaps?) Not that installing XP on low end systems is my specialty, but I remember installing XP on a few friend's old PCs a few years ago. Anything less than 256MB was already painfully slow back then (and that was pre-SP2). 128MB was quite sluggish (and slowed down to a crawl once you started using apps). 64Mb might work, and I'm sure someone would enjoy that a lot if their hobby's waiting after a slow PC - almost as exciting as watching paint dry. CPU wise it didn't seem to matter too much, one had a P3 633, and it ran XP almost as fast as a ~2GHz PC as it had enough RAM (GUI was just as responsive).

http://www.appliedts.co.uk sells it (if that's the app you're talking about)

Yes, and half the time it's an incorrect one... Tons of people recommending FTP clients instead of FTP servers! FlashFTP? (Perhaps you meant FlashFXP? - not that it's free), but in both cases, that's a CLIENT regardless! FireFTP? That's a CLIENT too! That leaves us so far with: -FilleZilla Server (not bad, free and open source) -Cerberus (which is very good, but only free for home use - NOT for commercial use) -WinEggDrop TinyFTPD (VERY LOW in features/very basic, and it's a console app i.e. command line, which not many people like)

I have to agree with Zartach. IT staff or programmers could easily map their own drives as necessary, that's required basic knowledge for the job, but end users? Very, very bad idea. Asking them to type "cryptic" commands they don't understand at a command line is not gonna fly. They'll be scared to do it, they'll get stressed out and annoyed about it (if not just plain angry). Batch files or scripts is definitely the way to go. Deploying can be a PITA indeed. But you could gradually move their workstations to the new domain (or that's what we did at least)... We did a transition to win2003 not long ago, and everthing went just fine (it was quite well planned I must admit). Nobody had to map their own drives or anything like that.

Speaking of anectodal evidence... And there's SOOOOOOOOO much WD-fanboy bashing of Maxtor out there... I've seen lots of maxtors, and haven't found them to fail more often than others at all. They're also used in a lot of other places than computers - I've seen 'em in xbox'es, various PVRs including echostar receivers and tivos, etc - and we don't hear about these failing in large batches much either, so I dare say it's unfounded for the most part. But if we're starting to make recommendations... Personally, I'll buy just about anything except for WD as I've basically seen them fail in a noticeably larger percentage than pretty much every other brand (and we've got many thousands of HDs in use at work). Currently buying Seagate and Samsung drives for the most part.

The interface itself (PATA or SATA or even SCSI) by itself doesn't affect reliability whatsoever. Some disks are just better built (like high end SCSI drives used in servers), but it also varies from one company to another, from one model/design/series to another, from one batch to another... It's a bit "hit and miss". Besides the obvious bad designs/bad batches/flawed drives we've seen (5 platter "deathstars", the old Fujitsu MPG series which were far worse than the IBMs but that nobody seemingly remembers, etc), most hard drives are pretty reliable. Gotta keep 'em decently cooled though, especially if in RAID. Some people like to bash some companies, but most of the time it's from people who had a single drive fail on them or just bad luck, just anecdotal evidence in 99% of cases (or even fanboys bashing brands they don't like and pretending to have seen tons of bad ones from brand X). So you can hardly rely on anything you'll read on the web. I personally don't buy stuff from companies from which I've personally seen too drives go bad (in some cases I've seen full tri-walls of them).

My usual/preferred servers aren't free, but I've also used FileZilla Server before. It's not bad for a free FTP server. It's hosted on sourceforge. As far as installing, it's pretty simple/straightforward/intuitive, it has documentation, and I'm sure google can answer all your questions (or ask here or whatever). You can even get it bundled with other server "packages" (like XAMPP), which is quite easy to install too. There are tons of other free ftp servers though (I've used a few more, but can't recall for sure how goor or bad they were, and they might have changed a lot since then, so won't comment on them). You can google (or even just search sourceforge) for more. No idea how good/stable/secure they are, what features are there or aren't, etc. Depending on what features you need (things like methods of authentication and such) you may prefer another one.

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Yeah, I know it won't fill data on different worksheets by itself. That's basically what I meant by "Excel's XML support is better than nothing, but it won't do overly complex things." It'll import some simple XML, but that's basically it. As for VBA/VSTO, it seems like the only 2 options if you really need stuff on multiple worksheets. VBA sucks (poor, old and crusty VB-ish scripting language that sucks badly), but it's a bit simpler than VSTO (and VSTO needs Visual Studio - not sure if you have/use it, and they're not exactly free either...)

I can attest to that. I've got several DBs (main one being SQL Server 2005 and others used mainly for testing/porting apps), and it does get heavily fragmented indeed, especially when you run all kinds of tests (with scripts to generate data, test apps, empty database, refill it, etc - stuff we do extensively when developping/testing apps). Add a couple SCMs (vsts/svn/cvs/whatever) to that (where tons of small files are very frequently modified/added/deleted) and you've got a huge mess (not counting other shares, virtual machines or anything else either)

Yeah, it's never been free, but you can get a legit copy of windows for not too much (96$CAD last I checked for XP Home OEM - under 100$USD with tax for sure). Whereas Vista... (of course OEM versions of it will be cheaper, but still) Mind you, their desktop OS isn't extremely overpriced just yet, unlike Windows 2003 in a way: it's cheap for a server, but when you just need it to develop stuff that needs to run on it (e.g. runs on IIS6, or needs a DB or app that'll only install on windows server, or such things). I pretty much require it, but it's not exactly cheap (I wish they had a "Developper Edition" just like they have for SQL server -- which is only 50$!) As for being a success... Well, of course it will. It'll ship on every single new PC (not talking about self-built/whiteboxes), and since every gamer will want DirectX 10 all those people will move to it as well, and soon enough other apps will need it, some people will want Aero (so much people that like pretty looks over everything else - look at the mac fanboys or people that use stardock stuff), etc. There's a few people that won't convert instantly, or that won't install it on their old PCs, but that's expected. Just like a lot of people didn't want to move from 2k to xp (some still haven't), saying it's just a new skin over win2k or such (totally disregarding everything new/improved - facts don't matter here, they won't accept anything and still run their old OS regardless). Long story short, it's only a matter of time before it's on most PCs.

XML's a good format for many things. You're faced with a few options: -excel does support XML (well, 2003 does at least, under file>open, the combobox underneath has "XML file" in it) -perhaps whatever program that saves to XML can also export a excel-friendly format like CSV too -you can use some type of XML editing app to transform it... -you can write a program to parse the XML and write a csv file using the data -you can use VBA inside excel or VSTO to parse the XML and fill cells Excel's XML support is better than nothing, but it won't do overly complex things. Thankfully it's not very hard to program or script a little parser (providing your know the basics about programming and XML), which is likely what you'll have to do.

Usually, people don't use iso images for that. You just put your files on any network share, then boot using a dos (well, win98) floppy that has your network card's drivers (or use winpe/bartpe if you prefer), map the share, and install right from there.

Well, there's likely a problem on your end then... http://snmpboy.msft.net/ GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: snmpboy.msft.net User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6 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 HTTP/1.x 200 OK Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 02:57:32 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322 Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Content-Length: 5645 All requests go thru just fine. And I did try 3 browsers, just in curiosity to see if they were doing something weird, but it loads perfectly fine in all 3... Perhaps you're running some kind of IP blocking app (maybe via a HOSTS file too) which blocks the page (it's an Microsoft address range), either that or spyware issues are the 2 most likely causes. Otherwise, try flushing your DNS, see if the IP resolves, try a debugging proxy (to see HTTP traffic), try hopping thru any proxy (like Tor), so many things to try... Or don't even bother and look at any old graph made with mrtg or rrd, and pretent it says "free HD space" instead or such