CoffeeFiend

Edit: I just tested installing on a plain vanilla Intel G43 based motherboard (Core 2 Duo) with onboard Realtek NIC. Everything worked out of the box, including the Realtek 8111E NIC. So I guess v5 isn't too picky about hardware after all... Didn't have to disable C1E or anything either.

It sounds like it doesn't like your hardware Try disabling C1E in the BIOS. If that doesn't work then no idea... BTW it can be pretty picky about NICs too.

I haven't really looked at them so I can't really say. It's pretty straightforward (and quick) though. You most likely want to setup a static IP (at the console, press F2, enter root pwd, configure management network, ip configuration, set it however you want and apply the changes -- you may want to configure DNS later so you don't have to remember the IP); while you're there, feel free to enable the shell (accessed using alt+f1) and SSH too (for access using putty or another SSH client) Then in the vSphere Client (login again with root and the same root pwd -- and the static IP you've set obviously), go to inventory, select your ESXi server, then the configuration tab, "licensed features" on the left, and then "edit" hiding waaaaaaaaaaay over there at the top right and enter your serial number. This program is what you'll be using to manage pretty much everything now. By the way, you could convert your existing install of Win2008R2 to a VM with the free vCenter Converter (you'd probably want to remove the Hyper-V role then)

A couple other points: -many apps of the time won't work on modern hardware (even if MS-DOS boots) for various reasons, including this -running DOS and/or Win 3.x in a VM (as-is) will consume as much CPU power as it will be able to (look into dosidle)

That is exactly what I meant by bare metal

The point of ESXi was to replace the Hyper-V part of your project and nothing more. It's a better hypervisor and environment IMO. You would install your Win2008R2 under that as a VM (alongside any other VMs you may want or need) instead of Hyper-V being a role inside Win2008R2. You can basically think of ESXi as a VMware Workstation-like product which installs on the bare hardware (not an app running in Windows) Downloading the ESXi ISO and the vSphere client (might as well get the free license key for ESXi at the same time too, in case you want to use it past the initial 60 days). But you don't really sound like you're in for another fun adventure (been living with chronic pain for ~10 years here, so I know what it feels like sometimes) Either ways, it changes essentially nothing to the other parts of your project (especially the MDT part, for which I'm afraid I can't even offer 2 cents worth!) and as such, solves none of the other problems you may have. Then again, if you want simplicity on a small-ish setup, then SBS was created just for that and it works quite well too.

We're happily using VMware ESXi / vSphere at work (still on the old 4.1 though) and also Workstation on several PCs. No complaints whatsoever. I also talked to 4 or 5 of the biggest consulting firms around here in the last ~3 months (presidents, sales folks, various techs) and none of them actually deploy Hyper-V in a production environment nor recommend it. All of them install and support lots of vmware servers (some even offer cloud-based services). In case of a catastrophic failure we could even "rent" an emergency server that already has ESXi installed (not that it takes long to install) and have it here an hour or so, and then restore our VMs on it... The support at every level is fantastic. Everything just works. Plus, it works hand-in-hand with Workstation: not only the VMs are compatible but workstation will also export VMs to ESXi and so on (Microsoft's offering is sorely missing a Workstation-like product). PowerCLI is also nice (you can manage your VMs using PowerShell) and the various scripting APIs are very useful too. In fact, I've done a test run of installing ESXi 5 on a "home server" recently and I'm quite impressed overall (it's quite lightweight too). I want to see how Openfiler performs as a iSCSI target (for ESXi, over Gbit ethernet) next. I'd definitely give ESXi a try (it's free too). Just my $0.02.

That's your answer. It's because it's an old-ish, slow video card: 128-bit GDDR2 memory @ 400MHz and 16 stream processors. Intel video on new CPUs is faster than that. It's somewhat faster than the onboard video you had before but the main advantage is that it doesn't suck your computer's memory for video now. Compare it to a modern middle-low-end card like the GTS 250 ($60 at my usual store) which has 256-bit GDDR3 memory @ 1100MHz and 128 stream processors... or even my current video card, a Radeon 4850 (2 generations behind) which has 256-bit GDDR3 memory @ 993MHz and 800 stream processors (its WEI is 5.9 for graphics and 6.6 for gaming graphics)... And I'm not comparing to fancy gamer's cards here, like the Radeon 6870 ($170 or so) with 256-bit GDDR5 memory @ 4200MHz and 1120 shader processors. Edit: even the $20 video card (Radeon 5450) in my HTPC beats it. TL;DR: slow cards rate low.

I think you'll soon discover it's not always too simple. From the different subsystems used, completely different libraries available, things that aren't covered by the language being quite different (e.g. for C++ code, posix threads being different than Windows', requiring the Pthreads-w32 lib), many things which work rather differently (no fork), compiler incompatibilities (even across different compilers on the same OS!), etc. For simple command line tools it might be pretty simple and quick but for fancy GUI apps it might be quite the undertaking. Not that I really know of any useful apps that run on Linux but not on Windows or that don't have equivalents... As far as C and C++ compilers, the best 2 are commercial (Microsoft's and Intel's), and others like C++ builder are also commercial. You're mostly left with minority and open-source compilers like DJGPP. Edit: others point cygwin and mingw but when you're essentially installing linux and gcc under windows, but that's where I stop to call it porting. You might as well just run Linux in a virtual machine...

Another vote for Notepad++! It's lightweight, it has tabs, syntax highlighting, code folding, auto updates, many useful plugins, auto-completion (a bit like intellisense in VS -- just hit ctrl+space or ctrl+enter), vertical dotted lines with the indentation (curly braces), nice keyboard shortcuts for a lot of useful stuff (like Ctrl+K to comment out stuff, which is similar to ctrl+k + ctrl+c combo in VS, find in files and much, much more. IMO it totally pwnz SciTE. Edit: HippoEDIT and E-TextEditor are also worth a shot (newer offerings)

Right now I totally agree with the MPC/HC choice for movies. All the way. Back in 2003 though, most codec packs were too "experimental" and they broke playback in a number of ways (including things like the dreaded mmswitch.ax that often played video upside down). ZP and custom filter graphs were pretty much the ultimate cure to all of that. You could control exactly what type of content was played how, decoded and processed by exactly what you told it to. But that problem is mostly solved now and MPC HC has pretty good control over codecs too (built-in or otherwise). I was a big fan of CoreAVC back then too, because of its stellar performance on the CPUs we had back then, but nowadays even MPC HC's built-in H.264 decoding (with DXVA acceleration) really is good enough. I kind of wish Media Center could start use it like that... I actually just bought parts for a mini ITX system yesterday to use as a HTPC (E5700, 4GB DDR2, Radeon 5450, MCE remote, etc -- some was spare parts, some new. $200 total!) I'll soon see how well media center works on a dedicated PC, without a keyboard or mouse.

That's got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever done to a PC for sure...

That's ok. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch Et français aussi Instead of WinRE? Nothing. I simply don't have a use for it. Ouch. Didn't see that one coming as I don't use WinPE or WinRE. But yeah, it's pretty limited -- no .NET framework built-in either. The good news is recompiling should fix that (or using the 32 bit version of WnPE)

Very much appreciated! Chances are that it's compiled in a way that requires you to install the Visual C++ redist first. No. 32 bit apps work fine on a 64 bit OS. If you paste the actual error message (even if it's not in english) then we might know what the problem is for sure. It could be a number of other things, like your app working fine but WinRE not supporting HTA files (not having the winpe-hta package built-in). Not that I use WinRE or WinPE.

You could have just read what I wrote directly above: I thought that was pretty clear... I didn't. Please stop using the acute accent (´) as if it's some sort of single quote!

Visual C++ Express Edition is very limited (none of the MFC/ATL/WTL bits for starters), and indeed, there is no resource editor included. It's by far the most limited of all the "Express Edition" compilers. Then again, if you're new to programming then perhaps using C++ isn't the best choice. Any programming language will let you do this easily (use ShellExecute on that HTA). You're making this a lot harder than it has to be (unless this runs under WinPE which very much narrows down your choices).

Then again, I have several of those old P4 3GHz setups (board/CPU/RAM) somewhere. I haven't thrown them out yet but nobody even wants of that kind of hardware here -- that's the kind of thing people are getting rid of in the first place. I even got a spare E2180 CPU this week which is likely never going to be used again (from a setup which had a dead motherboard). Now, that would still be perfectly usable for a good while (especially on a OC-friendly board)

Again, you can easily find a second hand dual core CPU + motherboard + enough RAM for under $100. That will give a HUGE boost in performance (like 300% gain). Whereas finding a second hand Athlon XP 3200+ (still a ghetto CPU without SSE2 -- about the same speed as a P4 2.2GHz in tasks like encoding XviD for example) will cost half of that and offer a ~10% speed boost (not enough to be noticeable, and zero help in running more demanding apps or games i.e. a pointless waste of money) if it actually works and that's not exactly guaranteed either. At some point an upgrade really is the best option, and here getting anything reasonably faster and more modern isn't a huge expense. Heck, even "garbage diving" for an old P4 (free) would be a much better option. At least you'd get SSE2 out of it, you'd likely also get more RAM slots on the motherboard. People who spend half the money of a real upgrade on something that does essentially zero difference on an ancient system (especially when it isn't guaranteed to work) are even funnier Doubly so when you can find better PCs in the trash...

Exactly. There's no real point in upgrading that for such a minuscule gain (so little that I probably wouldn't bother, even if the "new" CPU was free). At that point, even a second hand Athlon64 X2 or Core 2 Duo would be MUCH faster and still dirt cheap.

That old CPU should overclock nicely for sure. My old E2180 OC'ed ran faster than this E7500 I now have does. But yeah, you need a OC-friendly board first. Then again, when you look at the price of a new board and new CPU vs the extra performance you get, and it still makes the i3 very tempting (budget permitting): GA-G41MT-USB3 = $65 E3500 = $60 Total price = $125 for something ~45% faster -- about $2.77 for each % of speed increase vs an inexpensive board (e.g. GA-H61M-DS2) at $60 or so i3 2100 = $125 Total price = $185 for something ~340% faster -- about $0.54 for each % of speed increase Personally I'd spend the $60 more if I could afford it and get something MUCH faster out of it. Honestly, buying a socket 775 CPU in late 2011 isn't the best option (unless you get a really good deal)

I'd love to see you prove that "live" with double-blind tests Then again, I use the spdif and toslink outs of the realtek (and not the cheapest realtek chip either), and I see absolutely no difference from a fancy sound card (I wouldn't call myself deaf either -- I have very good hearing) The specs are also quite good on the realtek chips. The difference is so minimal that I don't see myself buying another soundcard ever. Anyway. Good news for sure. I thought they had given up.

Its FSB speed? Not really. They (Intel or AMD) ensure it's fast enough to feed the CPU with the instructions, and it's typically faster than it really needs to be anyway. The only things that would make a difference with that other old CPU is: -it's clocked at 2.33GHz vs 2GHz for your E2180 (~15% faster across the board) -it has more L2 cache (1MB vs 4MB) which will gain you another small boost (more in some apps, less in others) Overall, the difference in speed between both CPUs is pretty minimal. It's just enough to notice if you're paying attention to that (or in a benchmark), but not enough to make a marked difference in everyday scenarios. Unless it's really cheap (like my E7500 was) then why not. I sure wouldn't pay a lot for a 4 year old CPU that's almost no faster than what you already have.

Well, that doesn't really make any sense: -why waste the extra money on a new board, just to get faster RAM, when the benches I've linked to clearly show it makes no actual improvements? -why buy a discontinued Core 2 Duo which is clocked almost at the same speed? It'll make very little improvement over your E2180 in most tasks (about 25%, barely enough to notice anything) I would personally call that a waste of money (I'd sooner keep what you had as-is and keep the money too) Edit: MagicAndre1981 adds a 4th option: AMD. Same price as a i3 setup really. It's basically a trade-off between less cores that are way faster (i3) vs more cores that are way slower (AMD). If your workloads benefit from a lot of cores AMD wins, otherwise Intel does. I personally have no use for a large amount of slow cores. More cores sitting idle does nothing for me, especially while those that do get used are a lot slower! I mean, it's quite sad to see the entry level Intel i3 2100 score on par with AMD's most "high end" 6 cored monster X6 1100T from AMD in Photoshop... or actually score higher in sysmark... But also getting more FPS in pretty much every single game is a big deal killer for most. Its higher price and higher TDP are only adding insult to injury. Unless you're into video encoding a lot or such, then AMD might be a good pick still.

Then you must have got your DVD drives from the same manufacturer as your motherboards Or your clients think it's a cup holder perhaps? I've seen occasional lockups (paperclip fix) but none of them seized or such. Seriously, even on this forum I've seen several posts like "why will my DVD burner only see CDs but not DVDs anymore?" or such. It's a VERY common problem with optical drives. As far as mechanisms that don't work I've only seen a handful myself.

I wouldn't bother with it as it's not going to make any difference in system performance. Just see for yourself in any benchmark, like this one that google returned as the first result. If it's fast enough for what you do then keep the CPU. If it's not fast enough then you have 3 main options: a basic Core 2 Duo based CPU that will be a bit faster e.g. a Pentium E5700. That's the cheapest route you can take, with a ~75% increase in speed (noticeable but not quite like a "modern" CPU either) a somewhat faster Core 2 Duo like my current CPU (the FSB speed is mostly irrelevant), a Core 2 Duo E7500 (I only got it because it was free) which still sells for $130 and really isn't worth the price IMO. A newer i3 2100 at $125 is almost twice as fast (almost 4x faster than your E2180) and that's the entry-level CPU of the current generation moving on to something newer, like a 2nd generation Nehalem CPU (i3 2100, i5 2500k, etc) which would make a huge difference in speed but for more $