CoffeeFiend

Athlon 64 3200 & MSI K8N = ~100$ more the S754 sempron 3100+ setup I suggested, and is quite slower too. Whenever your sempron "4000+" won't cut it anymore, I don't think it'll really matter anymore wheter it's a S754 or 939. There will be newer better/faster chipsets, DDR2, most likely PCI Express, and other features, so you will want to change no matter what (I have yet to change the CPU on a computer - and not the board at the same time), and that 100$ you'll have saved by buying the faster sempron will basically pay for the new board (or most of it). Faster PC for cheaper, works for me Socket 939 now is hardly an advantage, and as for what you'll replace your PC with later, it doesn't really matter either... Unless you want to upgrade that board in a year to something like a Athlon 64 4000 - which performance you'd get *today* for that 100$ cheaper setup - and without having to pay for the new Athlon 64 4000 CPU down the road (so more than 100$ saved)... I just can't see why someone would want the Athlon 64 over the sempron at this point in time (unless money is really no problem and you can fork out the extra $$$ for the Athlon 64 4000 now)

I don't see anything with my wnirar sfx. With WinRAR sfx'es, just set the silent mode option to "hide all".

The admin install & /DisallowSystemRestore (or byte patch) is tested working (with a winrar sfx, but using 7zip shouldn't make any difference)...

Never had the problem. It could be a problem with the site itself...

It does. Read the script more carefully... Look at the command line added to the sfx

The Athlon 64 has hardly any advantages over that sempron 3100+ (which REALLY outperforms it if you OC it-simple OC with stock HSF, just changing a bios setting. It's pretty unreal how easy it was and how much you could push the chip) the main 2 advantages of the Athlon 64: -it's 64 bits. Oh wait, nothing uses it, it's not really an advantage, or not quite a significant one anywas -about an extra 2% speed or so on the memory bus (...) That sempron once OC'ed will definately outperform a Athlon 64 at 4 or 5x the price of it at least. I don't see why one would want to go that way, unless you got some major money to spend. Not like the average guy could afford a Athlon 64 that fast. And the much slower performing Athlon 64 still costs nearly twice as much... Peronsally, I'd much rather spend the difference on something else (more RAM, more storage or a faster vid card)

That's a good idea as well. Common partition for the junk that creates that fragmentation. (temp files, caches and that sort of stuff). Easier to cleanup too I guess. (which reminds me, I'm currently looking for the best app to cleanup those type of things in one click to save me some time...)

It doesn't make a super huge difference, but why buy the old interface with the flat ribbon cables (and for sure no performance gain to PATA) when the price difference is so small now - and that all the boards are moving to SATA? Wheter we like it or not, it's the future, and generally speaking, it's cheaper to maintain the newer stuff down the road (as stuff isn't "mainstream" anymore the prices start to raise again)

Case solved. Using a administrative install point along with /DisallowSystemRestore works: final solution

Odd. It's never glitched for me... No idea what could even possibly go wrong here. As for the WMC, if everything works without using the msi (if the components still get registered, the add/remove infos are there and all) then it's definately a nice way. I had thought about a admin install, but I couldn't remember the switch, and I wasn't sure if it would work, so I tried to modify the msi file instead - which didn't go over well. (I noticed u added /DisallowSystemRestore as in my previous post hehehe) I'll try making a WinRAR sfx that way right now (I'd use 7zip, but sometimes I'm lazy... and the extra couple MB aren't that much of an issue on a DVD) Great work Looks like we finally got a real unattended WMC without enabling the system restore.

It depends a lot on your budget and preferences too... (mind you I'm no gamer) I've been shocked when I say how easily and how much you can OC a Socket 754 Sempron 3100+ to like a equiv rating of over 4000+ (being faster than a Athlon 64 that costs leasily 4 or 5 times as much, and the socket 754 boards are cheaper than the 939 ones). A LOT of bang for the buck. If I was buying a new PC right now (I might very soon too), here's what I'd pick: -ASUS K8N-E DELUXE S754 NFORCE 250GB 175$ CDN (~135 USD) it's got 6 SATA ports, dual RAID, 8 channel audio, firewire, 8 usb 2 ports, gbit ethernet... -S754 Sempron 3100+ 170$ CDN (~140 USD) -2x 512MB DDR400, 100$ CDN Each (~80 USD Each) -2x 200GB SATA 8MB HD (Maxtor, WD, whatever's on the special-du-jour) 135$ CDN each (~107 USD each) - nice and cheap sataraid0 setup -Pioneer DVR-108 (if you need a new fast DL DVD burner) 100$ CDN (~80 USD again) -Radeon 9600XT 256MB 225$ cdn (~180 USD) -A uh, something, ok case with decent PSU, 60$ cdn (~48 USD) For 1200$'ish CDN (~950 USD), you get quite a nice rig. It'll do anything you try, and fast. Lots of CPU (OCs nicely), lots of fast storage, fast DL DVD burning, nice gfx card... I'm most likely going to buy this exact system very soon (other than with a cheaper vid card - most likely 9600 pro - as I don't play games) Try to come up with more value than that [edit] (there's always someone submitting a post as I'm typing mine!) If I wanted to have a separate sound card, I'd definately pick a MAudio over anything made by creative, but I guess it's because I'm coming more from a HTPC background rahter than gaming...

Yes, it's hardcoded in a DLL (no real time to look), and I have not bothered looking, as I find XP's "content type sniffing" very lacking, slow, kludgy, featureless, and there's no real way to configure or improve it, so I just have AutoRun completely disabled instead. (autorun.inf is a bit of an issue for some things, like the interactual crap player, but that's only like 5% of the problem imho) That's the very reason why I wanted to replace it with my own, with custom, highly configurable options depending on media type, content type and everything.

I'm still using my 4.4mb bigger winrar sfx... It works fine and was ridiculously easy and fast to do (just a few mouse clicks, no scripts or such things...) It's never had issues either. I'll perhaps change it the day I need to squeeze out another 4mb of free space out of my DVD [edit] Just in case you want to try it... You need to have WinRAR installed first on your PC (if you haven't tried it before, chances are you'll be addicted to it soon) Once you got that, there's the couple steps: -Right click on mp10setup.exe, and select "Extract to mp10setup\" -go in that newly created folder, press ctrl-a to select all files, right click anywhere on the files, select "Add to archive ..." -Select Best in compression method -Check "Create SFX Archive" -Click on the advanced tab, then "SFX Options..." button -In "Run after extraction", paste the command line (setup_wm.exe /Q /R:N /NoMigrate /DisallowSystemRestore) -Click on "Modes" tab -Check "Unpack to temporary folder", "Silent mode" to "Hide All" and finally "Overwrite mode" to "Overwrite all files" -Click "ok" twice That's it. So basically, extract files, create archive, best compression, sfx, add command line, tell it to extract to temp folder, all silent and to overwrite files. Takes under a minute if you know your way around the (simple) WinRAR gui. It should work no matter what language. Expected file size around 13Mb. I yet have to see the install fail. *knock on wood*

Thanks Yzöwl for that Good to know that it works at cmdlines. I'll be most definately looking into implementing something like that soon

@magicfly PowerDVD cannot possibly sound better than ZoomPlayer if you use it's audio filter with it (you can choose). If you want even better sound, then you can use ac3 filter and/or extra DSPs and such too (in combination with it, and the very nice latest ac3 filter does great things, have a peek at it). Nothing else has the power to let you do that (other than say, graphedit, but that's not exactly a media player) You can choose for every specific sound type (AC3, mpeg, mp3, ...) how it will be decoded. Also, some apps (and I believe cyberlink is still like that, it used to be anyways) aren't even smart enough to use their own filters. They'll just use whatever the merit flags forces it to pick. So in some cases, the better sounding app is in fact using another app's decoders - so you can't necessarily give it the credit all the time... Also, the inherent lack of control over what filters are used, and the fact that you can't configure them as they play is a severe limitation imho. I couldn't even imagine living without it. Same goes for WinDVD. As for pic quality, you should see the very latest NvDVD 4, it really beats them by a good margin - especially with interlaced (480i) stuff, it's even better than DScaler/TomsMoComp. Add that with the amazing, wicked ffdshow post processing power for scaling, sharpening and everything (with VMR9), and you have something that rivals the high end DVD players (those 1000$ toys). WinDVD/PowerDVD cannot possibly match that, not even remotely. (lots of talk about things like that on avsforum's HTPC section...) It especially shines if you're outputting to a HDTV (with nice custom timings in powerstrip). Also, ZP works nicely with any remote control by the use of apps like girder. If you use it a lot to play DVDs and movies, I assume it's plugged to a TV as well, and then having a remote control is nice, just like it's nice having one for your TV or amp (receiver). BSPlayer is just a good DirectShow player. Nothing really amazing imho. It's missing most of those key ZoomPlayer features I just mentionned above, doesn't quite have the advanced config options and such either. It's not bad, but I can't see how someone that tried ZoomPlayer before would prefer BSPlayer over it (unless they actually don't want the extra options/power). They really make a great deal of difference. As far as HD DVDs go (DRM'ed), this is the only app other than WiMP that can play them (and I don't care much for WiMP 9 or 10). Also, even if it has all these options, it's not that hard to configure. In under 10 mouse clicks you can have custom video/audio decoding/processing going...

Your compaq should come with a set of restore discs or a windows install cd. If you don't have them, perhaps compaq could send you a set for your specific model...

I've been thinking about this for quite a while too. I don't think changing the paths in the registry directly would help, or at least not for all of it. I think some of it comes back on it's own too (unsure) I think one of the easiest way to do this would probably be making a vbscript that uses the (local PC's) WinNT:// user object to set the users' Profile Path property to say, D:\Docs\UserName or such. (and maybe some registry tweaking involved too). It shouldn't be hard to do, and hopefully it would work. There might be some 3rd party apps or information on the web about this too. Haven't had the time to look much (and I got many other issues to fix on my disc first). Also, that script would probably be best run early, so the subfolders created in MyDocs (my music, my ebooks, my whatevers) are properly created inside it. Also, it would be good practice to check if D: (or whatever drive) exists first, too (not sure how you plan to handle the partitionning/formatting). Perhaps have a "opt-out" for the script altogether, or a way to confirm/change the path of the user's base home directory... Perhaps there's a setting to change so the new users' default home directory is moved too (registry entry most likely) So there's also a lot of other considerations and testing to do. Instead, I just set it manually right now (in the user account's advanced tab). Doesn't really take that much time to do, and it sure beats having them all in "C:\Documents and Settings" It could also be a way to create some users, set the accounts default properties too, stuff like that. Perhaps the app could find it's own "answer file" for the paths and such on a file stored onto a floppy or usb drive? ... [edit] bucketbuster beat me at posting faster. If you can post any observations, findings, or results, it would be nice. I won't be back to see until wednesday (leaving on a trip today)

AutoPlay looks for the autorun.inf to start the "AutoRun", I don't think there's an easy way out of this one... (that's why disabling the latter is done by disabling the first) I've been meaning to code a nice app to do this job properly for a while, all I'd need is some free time - which I'm not likely to have for that purpose anytime soon Unless you can email me some btw, the autorun.inf has NOTHING to do with setupapi. Same extension as the other inf files, but completely different beast.

There is no simple way of doing that, sorry.

I hesitated on picking the 4th option in the poll I just bought that pioneer (btw, the first 2 sites I checked were cheaper: 99$ cdn at oemexpress, 103$ at ncix... most places will price match too) and it's working just as well as my last pioneer worked. No complaints whatsoever. I haven't really checked this LG model. LG's quality/reliability seems to vary a lot on a per model basis, and since the pioneer drive was cheaper and that I already know and trust the brand... If speed isn't a great issue, then the liteon 812s makes for a cheap 75$ rpc1 832s too (after reflashing firmware).

ZoomPlayer, hands down! Both for DVD and media files. Best interface, more options than anything else, custom filtergraphs for outstanding video and audio. Lots of features that nothing else offers... For DVD I set it up to use NvDVD 4 + ffdshow raw post processing, and ac3 filter for audio; For media files, in most cases it will use ffdshow for the video (you can choose), and the codec you want for audio, but I also have it use some DirectX filters to enhance the sound (normalize volume, DPSs, ...) It plays HD DVDs nicely as well (even the DRM'ed ones), transportstreams and what not. It's controlled nicely by my remote control as well (great to use with a mouse too, and lots of customizable keyboard shortcuts). There's really nothing even remotely that good imho Next picks on my list would be: -for media files: BSPlayer, Media Player Classic, and a whole bunch of very similarly featured DirectShow Players... -for DVDs: Theatertek 2, NvDVD 4, then WinDVD and PowerDVD...

Same thing than I do, just with more : 's (oh, and %%d verus %%a) Works nicely (Sorry for being a few seconds faster lol)

Is it installing from HD or CD? (you need -f2 parameter if from CD) Also, check the error code inside the log file.

Why everybody seems to insist on doing it this way is beyond me (almost all post about their CDRom var seem to be like that anyways) for %%a in (C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z) do if exist %%a:\path\to\file.xyz set CDROM=%%a: Works for all letters. One clean command line.

Oh, don't take this as a feature request, it's just a side comment. It would be hard making an app like that which could handle it all properly.