CoffeeFiend

XP still runs on nearly half the computers out there. That's hardly what I'd call dead. Dying on the other hand... that's undeniable. Or you know, the many great new features like the start menu (search), taskbar (jump lists), new explorer, etc (tons of useful features!), improved security, being 64 bit, SSD support, DirectX 11, tray icons & volume control that don't suck anymore, extra stability, support for several new APIs and protocols, MUI, exFAT support, etc. After people actually give it a good chance (instead of just dismissing it instantly because it's different and not wanting to learn anything new -- and that handful of vocal extremists who are stuck in the past) they usually do the switch. I've been XP-free for 3 or 4 years and couldn't be happier (very much looking forward to Windows 8 too)

That wouldn't do you any good really. You can already access the handful of IPv6 websites via a tunnel broker if you need to, but the vast majority of websites will stay on IPv4 for the foreseeable future (easily another decade).

Same here. I've seen plenty of bad cables overall. SATA cables are pretty brittle too. I've seen defective CPUs, including some that "cooked" due to a fan failure (I've even had one replaced under warranty for that myself!) RAM - defective RAM with errors is hardly uncommon, especially in old PCs (memtest86+ isn't well known for no reason) Motherboard - millions of them dead due to bad caps alone, or look at all the laptops with G86 GPUs on them which are dying from it, they are easily killed by a faulty cheapo PSU too (e.g. the 5VSB spikes on the old Bestec) Monitor - old CRTs were easy to damage (just pick a unsupported res/timing) and even now, now CCFLs are dying instead, and I've even seen some that are burned in (first hand) CD or DVD drive or burner - lasers weaken/die after a while, I've replaced a lot of those Expansion cards - I've at least a couple dozen of bad video cards. As far as "other cards" (NICs, modems and so on) it's not quite as bad though. Keyboard - again, I've seen at least a couple dozen where you really had to pound on some key for it to work (especially keys used a lot in some games). Older keyboards with mechanical switches lasted FAR longer. Fans - duh... who hasn't heard a fan that's completely shot and makes quite a lot of noise? That's when the HSF isn't filled with dust/lint in the first place. Mouse - it's rather common that the microswitches in them fail (bouncing as they do, where your computer sees a double click when you've only clicked; or where you really have to mash on the buttons for them to work) Power Supplies - tons of them dead, especially those from the bad cap era, or those cheapos that some people buy that sometimes fry the whole PC hard drives are one of the worst: thermal problems (IBM "deathstars"), bad firmware bricking them (seagates), or back then fujitsu who lost a similar class action lawsuit due to their drives failing .... None of it is guaranteed to last forever, and anyone's who worked in this stuff for long enough has seen just about any kind of part that has failed. Funnily, the stuff that tends to last longer (e.g. speakers or PCI cards) are also the easiest to find replacements for.

My 2 cents: the new explorer UI is somewhat nicer, and so are the improved copy dialogs (especially for those who of us who move many large files around all the time) task manager isn't quite process explorer but it's nicer hyper-v brings a better VM environment to the desktop. Although I will keep vmware instead, in part due to using vsphere/vcenter and workstation at work. mounting ISOs and VHDs is nice to have but it's too basic Metro is beyond awful though. Edit: Pfft, edit.com! Edlin is where it's at... Ok, not. That was truly horrific (although I've seen worse), especially compared to qedit!

You mean, totally without knowing what you're trying to do or for what purpose, your skill level (with computers in general, or at scripting/programming) , languages you might know, your preferences, what resources (time, money or otherwise) are available, who the end user is, what platform(s) it should run onto, performance goals you might have, what support you may need, features you require, etc? I might as well recommend a banana then. That's the thing with guessing based on no information whatsoever. The results tend to suck. It's a bit like asking "pick a vehicle for me", without knowing if it needs to fly, float, carry cargo, budget limits or anything like that. You need a bit of infos first, before you can actually make any sensible recommendations. Not even knowing what kind of thing it's meant to protect I'm not sure you're not totally wasting your time in the first place. It could be something as trivial as this for all we know, which TONS of people could easily write from scratch in a variety of languages in less than 5 minutes anyway (or perhaps find other tools that do the same thing but without restrictions). There's no point in even wasting time protecting something simple like that. Then again, I have absolutely no idea what you're working onto here so I might be completely off.

None, in the sense that they will all be obsolete in a matter of a few short years regardless. But say, if you wanted to buy something, with the intent of having a great "museum piece" in like 20 years, then some parts will stand the test of time a lot better for sure. Anything with mechanical parts will fail first (CD/DVD drives, fans on anything, hard drives, input devices, etc).

Yet, there's insight hiding in there. A protection written in batch will only get in the way of complete n00bs. I might be repeating myself here, but I'd start by not using batch files. Then again it's very easy recreating whatever a batch file can accomplish from scratch (in a few minutes) so I wouldn't worry so much about protecting it in the first place. Your call...

Not quite:

I've never been a fan of Apple products (poor hardware selection, high prices, poor compatibility with most useful software, etc) but it's definitely sad news.

At some point you have to realize batch files are 1980's best (MS-DOS era technology, before Windows even existed) and as such are severely limited. It's much easier to do this kind of stuff using any other language or scripting language. For starters, batch files don't have a native way to scrape web pages like that, and it's also quite a pain dealing with dates in batch files due to regional formatting differences. At some point you're better off moving to a more modern technology than batch files.

Your internal network can use IPv6 (for the most part), regardless of your router (inside the LAN it's typically just switched traffic, at the layer 2 level i.e. the switch doesn't care if it's IPv4 or 6). It's mainly a question of which OS you use. Vista and newer will use IPv6 by default (first, unless you can't reach something in which case it'll use IPv4 as a fallback), and mostly everything should work as-is without configuring anything. But many apps still aren't IPv6 aware, most networked devices still aren't IPv6 aware and so on. So if you go out of your way to disable IPv4 or such then you won't be able to browse the web, use several apps or access some devices as as they still use IPv4. It's best to just leave things as-is. Where you really have to setup something is if you want to access the handful of mostly useless websites that use ipv6 (you're really not losing much). Then either you need an ISP that supports IPv6 (and only a tiny minority does, like teksavvy around here) or otherwise you have to use a tunnel broker service (hurricane electric or similar) which is quite a bit of fun to setup (I do use DD-WRT for this, a "normal" router would be useless. Otherwise you could setup a linux pc from scratch...)

It totally depends on which particular task. There isn't one single thing to blame for all slowdowns and delays. It could be the CPU (like encoding), it could be the GPU (like games), it could be disk performance (like many business apps), it could be network I/O (like downloading something), etc. And usually it's a combination of more than one factor (e.g. when gaming, your CPU could become the bottleneck if your GPU isn't, or the disk I/O when loading levels, or network latency when playing online, etc). Sometimes it's the amount of RAM available that's the bottleneck. Sometimes it's the L2/L3 cache on your CPU. Sometimes more cores, or hyperthreading or new instruction sets help. And yes, sometimes software is poorly written and that never helps. TL;DR: everything.

You got more issues than that. Making it run once is really simple (I'd just set a "within IP range" boolean flag myself for this) and logic/flow can be simplified (like using a nested "for each" instead of all the Z1/Z2/Ip stuff and using some guard clauses) but the main issue is that your IP range checking is completely broken in the first place. You're doing a string comparison on groups of numbers separated by dots and that just doesn't work. Just try this: if "192.168.180.100" < "192.168.180.99" then msgbox "I told you..." Why that says 100 is less than 99? Because it's only looking at each number character per character, comparing their individual values, and 1 (first digit after the 3rd dot, in 100) is less than 9 (first digit after the 3rd dot, in 99). Similarly, a dot that isn't placed exactly in the same spot (in cases where you don't get 3 digits i.e. very often) will make the tests "fail" too, by comparing the dot with a number (the dot always being worth "less" than any number). For example: if "123.123.123.123" > "123.123.12.123" then msgbox "A dot is worth less than a 3" This snippet only works because the dot after 12 is worth 46 and the 3 in the first number is worth 51 -- NOT because 123 is larger than 12. I'm sure you're starting to see the various issues here. So you will have to split the IPs in each of its different octets, then use those to test the IP ranges. Another method people use sometimes is converting the IP to one very large number but then it's never obvious what you're comparing to without proper comments, a calculator and some time.

It did come across my mind but I'm currently very busy (and sleep deprived). If nobody has by next weekend (and that I don't forget about this) then I'll probably write something quick. I had missed that (only seen the VBA stuff). I can't say I'm a huge fan of C++ & MFC (way too much work and complexity for very little benefit). I'll have to look sometime. Sorry about that. I hadn't followed that link. It sounded a page like generic vocabulary about general terms which I already know, being into typography and working with this kind of stuff in InDesign & Photoshop.

You're slowly building a list of what a lot of people call "programmer's fonts" You can get all of that information in the NEWTEXTMETRIC struct. You get this information by calling EnumFontFamiliesEx, which returns data using a EnumFontFamExProc callback. That callback will either get a NEWTEXTMETRICEX struct (which contains the NEWTEXTMETRIC struct) if it's a TTF, or otherwise an old TEXTMETRIC struct which contains most of the infos. Is that a yes/no answer? Here it really means the NTM_NONNEGATIVE_AC bit is set. Or that the space is NOT set to a negative amount ever, while being displayed at any particular size, which would normally be used to maintain proper kerning with some specific surrounding letters e.g. VA where the bottom of the A is located well under the V, instead of having that large empty oblique space between both (see the attached png, using Helvetica Neue LT Pro as-is on top with its standard negative spacing, and on the bottom using manual kerning to get rid of the said negative space to illustrate the effect) It's just a matter of writing a small font "enumerator" which will check for some bits being set or not in the returned struct, and when they match then display the font's name. It should be pretty straightforward. HTH

i.e. it couldn't access your hard disk, and eventually crashed (hence the BSOD). Most of the time I've seen this it was a problem with the hard disk's connections (power or data -- either one will do it). I'd definitely try re-seating both connectors.

That's the power supply's job, along with the power bar and/or UPS. A good PSUs can still operate normally during "mild" brownouts (voltage being a bit on the low side). And when it drops below that (very low) then your computer will typically freeze/crash or turn off only, not suffer physical damage. Any cheap UPS will take care of that (staying on) for some time. Any good power bar (with a built-in varistor for surge supression) will handle cases like this (save for extreme cases where basically nothing will anyway). Then again, good PSUs also have this type of protection and more built-in. Any UPS will take care of that for some time -- how long depending on its Volt Amps capacity. And when you run too low then the computer can be instructed to shut down. They also protect against most hardware damage (which happens when the voltage is too high for a reason or another), like most decent power bars would. Nothing is 100.0000% safe. A good PSU and a decent power bar is a must. Having a UPS too is nice but not strictly necessary. Anything beyond that is a bit overkill for most cases. A $85 UPS will give you some time that will protect against short outages and shutdown properly (hopefully you didn't have any unsaved work) but that's about it. In fact, I can't even be bothered to buy a UPS myself. Mostly because of very stable power, proper data backups, and also being tired of changing UPS batteries all the time (not very ecological either)

It always takes some time to get used to a new OS and improved ways to work. I for one wouldn't go back to XP even if they were giving it away. -Finally a 64 bit platform that just works (unless you have some old and poorly supported devices with no 64 bit drivers) which is about time -It can make use of machines with "modern" specs (4GB+ of RAM, SSDs, etc) -the start menu search. I don't think I could ever go back, manually looking for something in the menus (such a pain) -common apps docked on the taskbar (beats cluttering the desktop with a million icons, which are always hiding behind all the opened apps anyway), with jumplists where you not only have recent documents (big time saver) but where you can also pin common stuff (another huge time saver and again, less desktop icons). I increase the jumplist to 20 entries myself. XP's taskbar is a disaster compared to Win7 (even Vista's was a nice improvement over that). -less annoying tray icons ('nuff said) -aero snap (not eye candy at all, very useful, especially if you know the keyboard shortcuts) -far more stable (including cool things like restarting video drivers instead of BSOD'ing), and seemingly never needs reinstalling -loads of new cool techs apps can use (like directx 11, direct2d, etc) and other cool stuff like powershell built-in -far more secure overall (service hardening, UAC, all the 64-bit related enhancements over XP, IE protected mode, etc) -finally having MUI available through windows update -better explorer. You've seen, breadcrumbs but there's the new copying dialog, the waiting 'till the end of the copy for errors (instead of nagging 50 times while it comes, right in the middle of it), etc -an audio mixer that makes lifes much easier (apps not hijacking the master volume anymore) ... I think it's fantastic.

Because the interface is clearly meant for playing videos and I think it would really suck quite badly for playing music. I'd much rather keep using WMP for music, where things are neatly organized by albums/groups/whatever and rated, where I can sync my mp3 player, where the same songs can be streamed to other computers and devices or even used in media center and so on.

Then stick to HTML 4 and nothing more. (emphasis mine) 64-bit IE is hardly a common browser (probably well below 1%). Not that I would use silverlight in the first place as not enough people have it installed (nor is its future certain). And the percentage of browsers that properly supports a decent subset of the HTML 5 features is still WAY too low to be "viewable universally" like you want. Flash has a good install base but it's not supported by a some devices, like the iphone/ipod/ipad and a bunch of other mobile devices (including a lot of android devices). If you can live without those gadgets, then HTML 4 + Flash is still an option.

Yet another thing that's so much easier in powershell (removing everything in a directory, including subfolders): dir | del -r That's all of it. Or you can even use: ls|rm -r 8 chars total Of course, that has to be ran from the proper folder (using cd or adding the path after dir or whatever you like). With every passing day it feels like vbscript is becoming more of a dead end (where batch files were a decade ago)... So much code for so little work (not that it ever was what one would call a "nice" language). Yes, it's far more powerful than batch, but it's come to a point where even many programming languages make scripting easier and faster than that scripting language (god forbid if you actually have to do something simple, like sorting something)... It's kinda sad really (thankfully powershell often saves the day). Even in C# creating a specialized console app just for this task (let's call it, EmptyFolder.exe or such) is less code: using System.IO; class EmptyFolder { static void Main(string[] args) { DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(args[0]); foreach (FileInfo file in di.GetFiles()) file.Delete(); foreach (DirectoryInfo subdir in di.GetDirectories()) subdir.Delete(true); } } One should add a guard clause in case the specified path doesn't exist though, and perhaps an error message (usage) if no param or more than one is passed (definitely not what I'd call "finished" yet). Or even easier: using System.IO; class EmptyFolder { static void Main(string[] args) { DirectoryInfo di = new DirectoryInfo(args[0]); di.Delete(true); di.Create(); } } Although the recursion method tends to work better in some scenarios, like when you have files that cannot be deleted.

I personally never recommended MPC or MPC HC as a music player. Don't blame me I only use it for movies myself. I stick to plain old Windows Media Player for music, and I'm quite happy with it. It has an equalizer but I've never used it, nor am I planning on that... No, that's the ffdshow audio decoder, which has that particular feature (haven't used it either) which you'd access from a (fairly annoying) tray icon, or from your player if it exposes its functionality. It's still not a player (it's used by a player rather) I've never tried. But I wouldn't want to use it for that either.

It's not a music player, so there isn't one. That a codec (decoder), not a player.

That says But yeah, if you're going to install any software on there after the OS you'll need plenty more. Many common apps require several GB of disk space and games are even worse. Just the Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection takes 25GB of disk space on its own...

Same here. Lots of small partitions for me always is a sure way to run out of space on some of them, and that's a real pain to fix later on. It just seems to me as a way to restrict how much space something can use, based on horribly inacurrate "guesstimations" ahead of time. Using folders you'll never run into this problem. I don't really see how small partitions really ease up backuping either (it's just as simple backing up a folder with most backup apps), nor keep things much tidier than using a decent tree structure to hold your stuff (perhaps it forces it on you in a way), nor do I recall an occurrence where a "small boot partition" (especially that small) would have came in handy either. YMMV. Use whatever works for you.