CoffeeFiend

It's a time-limited buggy pre-beta that will expire in March. That isn't free by any stretch of the imagination. Not anymore than Vista & Win 7 which also run for a limited time, with re-arming for a certain number of days, or the 180 day evals of previous Windows versions that have existed for a number of years. Nah, Windows 8 has several nice new features. However, I refuse to believe MS would be stupid enough to ship Win 8 without the ability to disable Metro easily. Nobody would want of that OS, PR-wise it would be worse than WinME+Vista combined, all you'd hear about is "downgrade rights" and so on. If anything, it would just make people think Windows is turning into a confused mess, and drive more people to buy Macs while everybody else stays on Win 7 until Win 9 comes out in 2015 or whatever. I might be dense, but I don't think that's what they want. Releasing a Metro-only Windows 8 would be worse than not releasing it at all. All it would do is damage their image/reputation. And no, I don't actually think tablets are the future. And I say that as someone who's used a HP tablet (with Win 7, an i3 CPU and all) for a while at work and who also owns an Archos tablet with Android on it (basically a fancy mp3 player). And without Windows "tablet" catching on (which I don't see happening) there won't really be much Metro apps either, so little use for Metro, and with no users that means no developers hoping to get rich from the app store... It feels like they're trying to duplicate Apple's idea for mobile devices but on a traditional desktop OS which always had better options in the first place. I don't see millions of PC apps selling for $1 being available anytime soon either. It will most likely fail pretty hard, much like their Azure "cloud" offerings. Edit: not that I think Win 8 so far is a worthwhile upgrade over Win 7 specifically (more like a suitable replacement on new PCs, if you can disable Metro). Hyper-V might be a "nice to have" thing but it'll never replace VMware Workstation/vSphere/ESXi for me, heat maps in task manager are nice but not a must have (I'll still use process explorer half the time anyway), mounting ISOs is nice too but daemon tools lite is free anyway (and works great still), which only leaves the few explorer enhancements (mainly for copying lots of large files at once, which you only do once in a while) for me, and I don't think those aren't worth $100+ per pc.

Most people don't use it because they prefer to use a mouse and a keyboard. Voice control would make most tasks quite tedious, painful, or downright impossible. Just imagine trying to retouch a photo using voice commands, or explaining to a card game which card to move where, telling a browser which hyperlink to click or which picture from the page to save... As for the text to speech, it's not what I'd call "good enough", even with MS' latest/best SAPI voice (that would be Anna -- not that I've tested extensively every other voice from the MS Speech Platform v11, or in other languages). I mean, I have to concentrate and make a real effort to understand what's being said for most general purpose text... IMO speech recognition is a great technology that works best in some specialized software, written for specific tasks. For example, I have an advanced "alarm clock" application running on a netbook, which also happens to show the local weather forecast. I could press a key or click a button with the trackpad to force a refresh, but it's a lot easier to just say "weather forecast" while you're getting dressed and have it fetch the latest data and say it out loud (it does sound good enough for that, with some text & SSML tweaks). It's also very useful to stop the alarm, snooze, set alarms, etc. I think it would also be fantastic if it could read the news headlines in the morning (from an RSS feed) but let's say I gave up on that very quickly after hearing how it sounds! I really wish MS would make text-to-speech sound a lot better, and also fix the long-standing speech synthesizer bug in the .NET framework that leaks memory (a WAVEHDR or SPVTEXTFRAG) each time it says something... I'm definitely not holding my breath for either. if MS fixed those then I'm sure we'd see it being used a lot more.

I very much like Glenfiddich but Chivas Regal and Johnnie Walker are perfectly fine too. Glenfiddich is a single malt (from the Speyside region specifically) whereas Chivas Regal and Johnnie Walker are blended scotches (neither is inherently better). I'm no scotch expert though, I just drink the stuff (and pretty much everything else with alcohol in it)

Different strokes for different folks I guess. We're probably addressing different needs with vSphere (me) and Hyper-V (you). We use it as a thin "shim" (ESXi that is) to have an OS that will run/restore on any hardware (we've had to do it too), and some server consolidation too, whereas you're most likely using it for server consolidation. Hyper-V as a "host" is heavier and takes longer to install, and around here all consultants only support/recommend vSphere (we even rented a temp server that was running it), and we already had significant experience & investment in VMWare's solutions, so it was really a no-brainer for us (I'm not suggesting that's the one and only universal solution for everybody though) As for his setup, I'm guessing he probably wants to use a bunch of separate DCs across different sites and for redundancy, which running a Enterprise or Datacenter edition with Hyper-V wouldn't really help for. But I'm sure it's a nice option for Datacenters and the like. That essentially means nothing at all, besides that they're Intel CPUs that have been produced somewhere in the last 14 years. Xeons span from the Pentium 2-based Xeon @ 400MHz from 1998, all the way to Sandy Bridge based ones (like the latest 2nd generation i7's). For all we know, it could be P3-era hardware (that's fairly likely given the OS) that barely runs Win2k adequately. Combine that with older SCSI disks, slow single core CPUs, not so much RAM and the like, and you get something I definitely wouldn't want to upgrade to 2008 (essentially "Vista Server", not quite the same overhead as Win2k!) or 2008 R2. I would check the minimum requirements first. If you do attempt to upgrade ancient hardware, be prepared to roll back the old installation when the inevitable happens

Well, recover how? From a network capture? From an outlook pst file? The question isn't very clear. But basically you have to know how it's encoded (e.g. base64) and how it's stored (data structures) or transmitted (protocols). Email is sent via other protocols (e.g. SMTP) which use TCP underneath. Again, it's mainly a matter of understanding the protocols used. Then again, the protocol may be encrypted too (SSL/TLS) which is a lot more "fun". That depends on which protocol it was sent with and so on. I'm not sure what would be the best way to learn the tools. Obviously, you have to know how to use the basics of wireshark, but MUCH more importantly, it's understanding the traffic that it shows. There is no way around having a solid understanding of how TCP/IP works and various other protocols. If you don't know how a TCP handshake works, how addressing works, how NAT works, the difference between UDP and TCP and so on (ARP, HTTP, DHCP, ICMP, etc), you're not going to really understand much of anything Wireshark will show you.

This. That's the only way I would do it personally. And with a virtualization platform too (vSphere or Hyper-V). I sure wouldn't want to be running 2008 or 2008 R2 on Win 2000/2003 era hardware.

Plain old egg nog? pfft. Canadian Moose Milk is where it's at: milk, vanilla ice cream, your favorite kind of rum (or whiskey if that's your thing) and your favorite coffee liqueur (Khalua or Tia Maria). Optionally add eggs, vodka, maple syrup, and then some nutmeg to taste. Oh, and happy holidays / Christmas / Hanukkah / Festivus / Saturnalia /Yule / winter solstice / New Years or whatever else I've forgotten!

Easily! First, import the said txt file into excel. Now on another worksheet, use a simple formula like shown here to copy the data over. Don't worry, you only have to type the first cell, then you just drag the cell's corner handle thingy to fill in adjacent cells with it.

Cheap consumer routers often tend to have issues with prolonged heavy usage (fixed by a reset) but downloading one large file wouldn't cause that. The switches in them also overheat and the network connection just "disappears" then, but that requires a LOT more data than that (like 100GB+, depending on the model). But DSL modems... They tend to run pretty darn hot in the first place. I know my old DSL modem had issues EXACTLY like those you mention. I'd let it cool down and the problem would fix itself. Next time you download a large file, I would have a look at its signal strength to see if it drops or such.

That's really easy to do but we don't know where the backup is (what files to delete or what backup program you're talking about). I typically use PowerShell for such automated tasks, but that's an optional download on older OS'es like XP. A quick example of how one can get a list of drives with < 200GB free in powershell: gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk -filter "DriveType=3" | ? {$_.FreeSpace -lt 200GB} gwmi is an alias for Get-WmiObject which gets WMI objects, sort of like wmic does. I ask it to list instances of Win32_LogicalDisk. The -filter "DriveType=3" part tells it to filter the results based on the DriveType, 3 being "Local Disk". The | character pipes the output of that to the next part on the right. ? is an alias for where, which here I use to filter yet again, this time on the FreeSpace property being less than (-lt) 200GB.

It's ok. I don't do batch stuff anymore myself. I wasn't so much picking at your particular batch file, I'm just saying that doing such things isn't quite as reliable as newer ways. No idea. Plain vanilla Win 7 x64 install. Then again, fsutil won't run if you're not an administrator, nor will it run without being ran elevated (UAC popup and all). Those are far more serious issues IMO (at least if you're going to run it on an OS that is less than a decade old)

wmic/vbscript/powershell at least wouldn't require both administrative privileges and also being elevated to even run... It would also make it easier to filter by drive type (e.g. not running against optical disks, removable devices like USB keys or mapped drives), or logging/reporting and so on. It would also be a LOT more reliable than a batch hack job (iamtheky's batch doesn't even run here, I just get an error message: "200 was unexpected at this time."). Your loss.

So it only has to be able to read any format and save in any format? You should have said so sooner, we'd have let you know that magic software doesn't exist? If you set the bar a little lower, than Excel will do just that (if you know how to use it, much like jaclaz said) with most common formats (or some other programs, for specific given tasks). Anything beyond that will pretty much require you to write your own specialized software for specific jobs.

You're comparing entry-level but modern video, with an average video card from 2004 (7 years ago) meant for old AGP slots. Definitely not worth "upgrading" to. If you want something that's a lot faster than what you have right now (like 4x the speed, going by the same bench as MagicAndre1981 used), without a gamer's card price tag, you could buy a Radeon 5670 or similar around $70. ncix currently has one of those for $45 after mail in rebate.

If you're using either the 1/8" minijacks or RCA connectors, then those signals are analog, and the sound depends on your sound card being good enough (and then there is interference, possible ground loops, hum, poor wiring, etc) If you use TOSLINK (optical) or S/PDIF over coax (or audio over HDMI for that matter), then it's your amplifier's DACs which now do the conversion to analog (eliminating all the problems listed above), and your sound card is mostly irrelevant. It works regardless of if it's a stereo signal, 5.1 or whatever else, but some stuff will work better with more modern audio chips and sound cards. Things like passing DTS sound or various HD audio formats from Blu-Ray discs and the like as-is to your amplifier (otherwise they will be converted to a "simpler" signal first, before sending it to your amplifier -- and yes, you still keep the 5.1), but then again your amplifier has to support decoding that format too (and unless it's very recent, it most likely won't). Sound quality wise, it's better with a digital link (coax or optical), unless your amplifier costed less than your sound card or something freaky like that.

I'm not sure why people would go out of their way to download a 3rd party util when sc.exe which comes with the OS does this just fine (even on remote PCs). PowerShell (and vbscript/jscript) can also do this by the WMI way: enum Win32_Service, filtering on the service name, then call the Delete method on it -- in a simple one-liner: (gwmi win32_service -filter "name='ServiceNameHere'").delete() Obviously, sc.exe/PowerShell or whatever will have to be run elevated for it to work.

The coax signal is called S/PDIF (it usually uses a RCA plug), whereas the fiber optic is called TOSLINK. One uses plain old coax cable whereas the other typically uses cheap plastic fiber optic (unlike the glass fiber used in networks) which carries the same signal anyway. Both carry the S/PDIF signal, so both work with 5.1 setups just the same. I actually use both with my onboard Realtek audio (2 amplifiers, only 2 digital outputs on my motherboard) and both work great.

Not at all. He meant "brute forcing" as in "checking if it sounds like a recycle bin folder", or other obvious ways (checking hardcoded, commonly used folder names). Using the API I linked to, Windows tells you authoritatively (not guessing based on how the name sounds) if it's used for that or not, no matter what it may be called (in any language or locale, also regardless of the OS version). If a MS empoyee on MSDN tells me it's the way, then it's good enough for me. It doesn't pick them up because using WMI like that doesn't produce the results you'd expect. That specific query won't tell you those folders you just created even exist (yet, many others are returned several times over), so you're never even given the chance to guess if they are used for that or not. Add a subfolder to them and now they will be seen, and indeed it will say they're recycle bins, because they have "recy" in them. Either ways, even disregarding all that, he didn't want to "brute force" check folders this way (even if it worked, that's not what he was looking for). TL;DR: he was not looking for a port of dir *recy* /ad or variants of it (I mean, just who actually needs help to figure this out? Seriously?) to some other language he almost certainly isn't using but an actual way to detect it. You're basically ignoring his actual question altogether. Either ways, it looks like he picked something that works for him now.

Yes. It asks WMI to get all folders' names, then it checks if they contain "recy" -- which Glen9999 called "brute forcing" and doesn't care for. That was precisely his question: how NOT to do it this way. Like I linked to, the "official" (from MSDN) way to do it is to enumerate folders the good ol' fashioned way (not using WMI, and on local hard drives only). Then on the folders found, you call the GetFolderDescriptionId API, which will set the CLSID_RecycleBin bit in the filled SHDESCRIPTIONID struct if it's actually used by the recycle bin (and not "it kind of sounds like recycle in english", like "local recycling program" on a mapped network drive...)

The "A" in "WAMP" stands for Apache. So that wouldn't use IIS. And no, VS 2010 SP1 doesn't use IIS for ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC projects (which are still completely unrelated to what you're doing) but rather IIS express. Not that it has anything to do with a WAMP installation in any way. Both are completely unrelated. You could still use VS as a PHP or text editor but I really don't see the point. It's not much of a web developer/designer tool in the first place, nor a "scripting" tool, and it's really not geared towards PHP (there's zero support for it built-in). You basically get none of the features that makes VS a fantastic IDE in the first place (like intellisense, the debugging, the designers, great compilers for several languages, the solution explorer with a logical layout, server explorer, class editor, MSDN documentation, setup projects, etc) so why bother? I'd much sooner use a decent text editor like notepad++ or a web design tool like dreamweaver for this (not that I'm into PHP in any way), or any of the other tools meant precisely for this. I absolutely love Visual Studio but it just feels like the wrong tool for the job here. I think it would feel a bit like eating soup with a pitchfork.

That's pretty unusual. I've never seen anyone use VS for that. Well, for starters we don't know what database you're using, how/where it's setup or anything of the sort.

This

That makes no sense. The SFX tool is a 3rd party tool (as in, doesn't come with the OS). Using vbscript to create a shortcut wouldn't have been, but then again, a vbscript is very much like yet another tool to a lot of people (but you have to write it yourself too). Still, if your compressor handles it, then why not make use of it?

...and if you choose the latter you may go for Windows 7 x64 .

^^ What he said. You could make a multi-million dollar site using notepad or any old text editor. That means very little about the text editor, it's more about running a business than anything else. Also, I wouldn't call Alleycode "well known" at all, even in the web development world (and "not at all" as for "traditional" programmers). The big player is obviously Dreamweaver, followed by dozens of small yet somewhat popular apps, including many text editors (notepad++, notepad2, textmate, ultraedit, pspad, gedit, emacs, vim, nano, etc) and several HTML editors (Expression Web, FrontPage before that, Nvu, etc). I've never heard of Alleycode before, and I will be surprised if I ever hear about again. That kind of task (search and replace strings, with very simple text I/O) is well within reach of scripting newbies, let alone decent programmers. Either ways, it sounds like he can afford to hire someone to do it.