CoffeeFiend

just taskkill notepad.exe instead of iexplore.exe (or whatever app that actually opens)

Ok, name anything firefox is missing then. Also, look at the extensions. There's nothing I can think of that it cannot do. If you mean opera's mouse gestures, there's a plugin for that too... Once you try most nice plugins for firefox (there's lots of them), then opera feels featureless

They didn't start from scratch for OS X. It's far too much work. No way microsoft (even with their budget) could do something like that. They're making great progress. Also, old code generally means code that has been mostly debugged and fixed, whereas new code still contains bugs. It's all about reusing code, old code is good code. Unless it's a limitation, that you need more features or something like that... Also, major rewrites (like sp2) cost a lot of $, and it can't be helping the already steep price for their products... Anyways, my vote is definately a no (but nothing about h4x0r'ing anything).

A normal Win XP BootCD is not very useful for recovering stuff, it's meant to reinstall windows. You'd be better off trying something else: -WinPE will let you recover files easily (probably your best bet here, or BartPE...) -You could put her HD in another computer to access her files (easy but sometimes not practical) -You could access it from say, a bootable linux distro like knoppix too... It's possible from dos too (3rd party apps req'd if on ntfs) but it's a rather slow process... Unless you meant to reinstall windows on top of itself, in which case you could loose some stuff... And it's not guaranteed to work either.

Or you could just, extract mp10setup.exe's contents with 1 right click with WinRAR, and make it into a WinRAR SFX in a matter of seconds... Yours most likely makes a smaller file though. It's nice to have small installers, but in my case (using a DVD to install, so space isn't a major consideration for a small app) I picked simplicity and speed of creation of the WinRAR SFX instead. I might try the 7zip way instead, I just "default" to using WinRAR as it's installed on my system (7zip isn't) and it's so quick to use... Thanks for sharing [edit] the WinRAR SFX (without UPX compression mind you) weighs in at 13,7MB, so your real savings are 4.4MB, minus what UPX would save on the WinRAR SFX - which I'll try right now, just out of curiosity) [update] UPX is definately no go with the WinRAR SFX. I get a AlreadyPackedException no matter what. Yours method makes a sfx 2/3 of the size of the WinRAR one then, 4.4MB saved. @beppemito at half the size, I'd say yours has a problem. Language shouldn't really change anything on the filesize...

What type of bootcd are you making? WinPE? Normal Win XP? Win98 Boot Floppy onto CD? ... It's not really clear. Without that, some questions don't totally make sense to me (like #1) , and some questions just can't be answered (like #3). As for Q #2 - it's not a problem.

A cache is meant to accelerate things, so one would think it would only slow things down, by how much? Probably not by a great deal... The key is not to come across those bad scripts (you don't usually find them on the average "normal" site) and having a good AV (like kaspersky). Not having a cache would prevent bad scripts from staying in there, but if you visit a bad site and have no protection - you will run it regardless - and it's not like the cahced ones get executed if you don't call them again anyways. So I don't see it as more protection at all, but rather as a minor slowdown.

Someone posted about some app that did require you to have a password to run it. Without it you couldn't see what was on the disc type of deal... Never tried it, don't know how secure, stable, fast or anything about it. Also, I'm guessing that would work only in windows itself - not like it would ask for the password to let you boot from the windows install, so it was mostly useless imho. Most protections rely on something not being being easy to copy (as impossible as they can make it) then once someone tries to use the contents, the programs checks for the flaws on the disc. Some programs will let you add such errors to the disc, but one can just copy the files from it and burn it to a new data cd. It's no protection at all. The most part is - having your programs check for those errors. And there's not much you can do to add that type of checking to 3rd party installers (ie: how to add that to a .msi, installshield or whatever - for every app). Major corporations (macrovision and such) invest millions in this - to sometimes have it bypassed by a 50 cent felt tip marker. So I doubt there is anything the average hobbyist can come up with that'll really stop anything. The only thing I could see right now is - asking for a password at some point, that will be used to extract a password protected SFX with some key files in it, rendering the installers useless without them, but that feels cumbersome, too much hassle to make and what if you enter a bad password? The only reliable way you have to protect it starts with the basics - not giving them physical access to the disc.

Even I gave toughts to that one. At first I wanted to make a database with registry tweaks, but a few hundred tweaks down the road, I figured it was definately too time consuming (especially doing it all by hand!). But, it was the other part of the DB I really cared for. It would have outputted both GUIRunOnce (batch) and RunOnceEx syntaxes. It would have for each app: -Command line to install silently -Associated scripts (if req'd, ie: autoit, ...) -Upgrade information (command lines, how to, ...) -Registration information (reg files with fake info, path to keyfiles, etc) -Common registry tweaks for that specific app (accept EULA, no surveys, no registration, no tip of the day, ...) -Place where default information (basic config) is kept (ie: if you want to have say, customized FeedDemon channels - you backup your old opml files from C:\Program Files\Bradbury\FeedDemon\Data\defaults\Groups and replace the default with those, or whatever/however it's stored or has to be done for that app). -Alternate installation ways (perhaps as links to other entries for the same app - like for people using AutoIt to install specific components or what not instead of a silent command line) (I know I'm forgetting a lot more stuff... It's just off the top of my head) All my app installs are customized like that. It's not about just installing the apps, but rather having them all ready to go. Fully configured, tweaked and everything. After my DVD finished installing, all apps are ready to use. It's all about productivity. It's not so much about saving time installing apps (well, it's nice, but that saves you what, a few hours?) but also about saving you from spending days configuring your system after reinstalling. After I reinstall, I make note of everything that's wrong or misconfigured, and fix it for the next time. Sure, it takes a lot of time to make such a in depth install, but once it works, you never go back. Right now, to add all this to your install disc, you have to spend a great deal of time, searching for switches, registration information, do some snapshots/compares to find some settings, ... Lots of reasearch and time spend to have all this for every app, where we could easily share it all. I think it would have been great. It couldn't cover some of them really in depth ones (ie: firefox) but for the rest, I think it would be a major time saver and central point of knowledge. (easier than searching for forums for every answers too)

You're welcome

@Sanjay That's a working workaround, but ideally we would rather not have to enable it... Until I get around to have a patched and properly working msi installer, I got nothing better to offer

Oh, big surprise, bugs - in beta software? No way 10 People in total had issues. That's hardly relevant. There's like almost a dozen different "releases" of it betwen 50 and 120 megs floating around. The ultra and express versions are now 2 different packages too. Add people using invalid keys and user error on top of that... If the bug will be fixed in the final release? You've ever seen nero (or can you even imagine) not work with valid, paid-for licenses before? Not like ahead won't mind people who paid ~100$ for a burning app being stuck with a demo. Find something more productive? Sure will because I'm sure wasting time with you. (and what's up with the removing panties? You like to do that when you browse forums? - oh wait, we don't wanna know!)

"MICROSOFT PLUS! FOR WINDOWS XP.MSI" /qb and "MICROSOFT PLUS! DIGITAL MEDIA EDITION.MSI" /qb just like you would with any msi installer...

It sounds like you have issues reading multisession discs (don't know if they were created the right way). isobuster could rescue data from them too. i haven't seen such issues with xp sp2 yet, but i don't normally use multisession much...

Far more useful. The other one turns on num lock once. I don't really see any direct practical uses for it... Now if I could just get the F-Lock working on microsoft office keyboards... (the one F-Lock tweak in the registry tweaks thread doesn't work)

It looks like after extraction, it calls "wmsetsdk.exe" /WMFDIST /Quiet /R:N I'll try making a WinRAR SFX that does "wmsetsdk.exe" /DisallowSystemRestore /WMFDIST /Quiet /R:N instead, and see what happens. If everything works as it should, I'll replace it inside the msi and see if it installs properly... [edit] The SFX seems to work fine so far. On my way to edit the msi... [update] After editing the msi file (just replacing the one repacked exe) I had compilation errors about some unrelated resources with the free masai editor (I get the same errors if i change nothing at all and hit save-weird). I ran it by hand once and it didn't nag about the system restore. I'll try to repackage it with something else, I'm not liking this masai job much...

After even more poking around, I found out that calling wmsetsdk.exe with /DisallowSystemRestore on the command line (along with /Q:A for silent), then it doesn't nag - so it looks like we wouldn't really need that byte patch anyways. But, that would still need changes in wmsetsdk.exe inside WinRMSrv.msi (not that it's really hard or anything)

Fortunately for you, no. I was hoping you'd get the point about post quality or usefulness/quantity anyways eh. But I suppose it's expecting too much.

Yes, I know, that's why I mentionned that. (mind you, I don't really want it to be enabled - and the system creating some system restore information, wasting some space for nothing.) @big poppa pump: No. They don't need it. They only warn. I've already posted all the information about this one in this thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=30169 (at the end). If you could repackage it all together. You wouldn't need system restore at all... Other than that, one could use something such as AutoIt to press the button on the system restore nag too.

They say piracy costs billions to the software industry, just like the RIAA says the same song which has been proven untrue many times. I mean, how many kids, students, and people "just playing around" say, 3dsmax, autocad or whatever app would really end up buying it if it wasn't pirated? Just about none of them. People would also use their 20$ dell-bundled version of microsoft works instead of using the very latest office 2003 pro corp. I mean, you can type, save and print - and that's about as much as the average guy really uses (the old 90-10 rule). The industry IS definately loosing money over it, but not quite as much as they'd want us to believe. It has other impacts though. I code for a living, and I also do some web stuff (mostly asp or asp.net; xhtml 1.1 strict and css positionning and all). Good stuff, but who wants to pay you for that when every kid around the corner has a warez'ed copy of frontpage or dreamweaver? Only big corporations would be interested, but how many webmaster jobs does that reall mean? ... IT is a dying field, I'll be glad to be retired in a couple years We could be debating this one for a looooooooong time

powerdvd is just another typical directshow player bundled with a mpeg2 decoder of their own. It'll play other contents if and only if you have the proper codecs installed. There's no way around that one (and those other issues I mentionned earlier can make those issues happen to it just like any other player).

Ok, I got a fix for the nag... in wmsetsdk.exe @1d1d9, change 74 20 for EB 38. No more nags. Now, how about putting the fixed .exe inside wmsetsdk.exe, inside WinRMSrv.msi (no point to put that one back inside wmcsetup.exe... it's alreay packed far too much) Or perhaps we could keep the extracted packs, and make it do what it should, without all these self extracting .exe's. (although the .msi is rather important, for install/uninstall infos, and some other stuff (10 ComponentIDs), but I suppose that could all be imported to registry by a .reg file, and copy the installed files, then have a fixed wmsetsdk.exe made with whatever sfx) If someone has enough spare time to look at it, I'd be grateful. I wish I had the time, but free time here is VERY lacking (Just a hard coded non-conditionnal jump over the offending MessageBoxW - towards the "yes do install anyways" 2 bytes goes a long way... B) ) (Hopefully it's not too much against the forum rules to post that info; it's not like it'll get a pirated copy of windows onto someone else's system or anything... Just trying to be helpful!)

You could also use AutoIt or repackage it... I never tried to install it unattended but I might have a peek.

I can tell you that, no switches or msi editing is gonna fix this. Sorry. The nag isn't even coming from the installer. The only workaround I can imagine for now is re-enabling system restore temporarily.

I suppose it hasn't changed much since v2.0: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=21215