CoffeeFiend

That's the very nature of doing this stuff for a living (then again, so is software development). Vague requirements, many constraints (often including some stuff that's just not possible), many late changes, lots of compromises, too much time wasted in meetings, but mainly design by committee -- all while staying within the number of billable hours quoted. Whatever the client wants. Often the end result isn't quite what I wish it was or what I would have chosen but it's their money so you deliver what they ask for.

Nah, definitely not! I'm more of a photographer who likes to tinker with painting. I truly suck at drawing and such things. I can turn out pretty decent photos anytime (I'd totally do it for a living if 99% of the work didn't suck) but being good at painting will probably never happen. But no. There is no real "danger" to worry about. I just like anonymity so I keep my work (personal or otherwise, of any nature) off of the internet. I stay away from things like facebook as well.

Ah, that was more than just a little bit. Seemingly I had missed that part. It makes complete sense now Pretty good trick too. @puntoMX: I can't say I looked at them much but from a quick glance they sure look nice. I'll investigate! Thanks I'm a bit hesitant about EFIS BIOS'es too. Not that it's really "cutting edge" tech but it's still mostly new to these manufacturers and I'd rather not buy the generation where all the problems are found out...

@gUiTaR_mIkE: Hmm, perhaps that's not the picture you meant to attach, or I must be missing the point of it (AM3 boards for a i5?) But yeah. The Core i5 2500k is a great pick if you can afford it. Chipset wise, there is H57 with the onboard video (which won't cut it for gaming) and more basic boards overall, or P67 which is the one which OCs and tends to have fancier boards. The P67 can also use 2 video cards (at x8 each). IMO a P67 board from the OEMs PuntoMX mentioned is your best choice. If you're on a budget I'd pick MSI. If you can afford it then ASUS or Gigabyte have some fantastic boards (just compare the featuresets and prices when the time comes to buy)

For gaming, the i3 550 would get you about 20-something percent more FPS on average (sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the particular game) over your E8200. You could get most of that by OC'ing your existing CPU. Then again, you could OC the i3 too... Socket 1156 has already been replaced by Socket 1155. The i3 2100 has a pretty decent lead over the i3 550 in some games and the price between both is identical too. It also uses the new socket 1155. Like PuntoMX said, AMD has some inexpensive options too. However: -the low price point is all they have left these days IMO -they don't offer very fast CPUs anymore and speed is typically why we upgrade -their single threaded perf is pretty lacking (basically no improvement at all in the last few years, just more cores): the $125 Intel i3 2100 destroys the $140 AMD A8-3850 -- the AMD chip also loses badly in the games listed on that page -the "entry level" $125 Core i3 2100 is faster than the $150 Phenom X4 970 (one of their most high end chips) in almost all games -they've pretty much ditched their socket compatibility which was nice for cheap upgrades (then again, most of their new CPUs aren't much of an upgrade over your old one) -the days of their tech advantage (like introducing 64 bit, higher IPC than netburst and so on) is very much over, and seemingly their only way to somewhat compete now is bumping the frequency up like Intel was doing back with Netburst... Their 3.7GHz Phenom II X4 gets pwned by a i3 with half the cores at 3.1GHz in most tasks. I've even seen benches where the i7 was up to 60% faster than the Phenom II X4 clock-for-clock (single threaded perf)... -they don't really compete that well based on price anymore either (unless you don't buy a GPU and want a entry-class CPU, in which case it's almost a tie anyway) -their new GPU in that A8 chip isn't even good enough for a HTPC either, much less for gaming and I can't say I care for the direction they're taking with their Bulldozer chips: more slow cores that will sit idle 99% of the time, along with a shared FPU between them? Ow. I don't think this will solve the problem at all. It's sad because I'd hate to see them go out of business. If you have the budget for a Core i3 2100, it's a very good choice IMO

XP is already pretty close to the stone age IMO. Going back to Vista is tolerable (mainly it's missing the new must-have taskbar) but I truly don't care for XP anymore. Same story for Photoshop almost. While the CS5.5 suite brings essentially nothing to Photoshop, CS5 is still very nice and CS4 is alright. CS3 though is already a very big step behind, and I'd rather never have to use anything older. Oh yeah. Here's a tease for the painter in you. A quick screenshot of the brush option palettes from Corel Painter 12 (there are more options beyond those): There's hundreds of existing brushes from all kinds of different media types and you can easily create new and very cool variants based on them. Oh, and don't worry about double posts, we just delete 'em, no biggie. Edit: no, sorry. I'm not sharing personal work over a forum. Call me paranoid... Not that I'm a great painter or anything (far from it)

There's a great tool called wsname for this. No need to write WMI code or anything. It'll rename the computer itself and its account in AD, and it can base the name on the asset tag if you want (using $ASSETTAG). It's great stuff It's the best tool for the job IMO. Unfortunately the official host is often down when you need it, so here's an alternate link...

Oh well. Perhaps that didn't work back with version 5? Yes. That is what I meant (poor choice of words on my part) Useful when the colors change like in a photo but in a screenie of a forum the background is completely uniform, so that really changes nothing. I already had #fafbfc, or (like gUiTaR_mIkE said): in decimal RGB format: Red: 250 Green: 251 Blue: 252

Well, you could get it from the style sheet (CSS) but it's far simpler with photoshop already open: -move your photoshop window to the side a bit (or make it a bit smaller) so you can see the web browser AND Photoshop at once -select the color picker (just press i) -click with the color picker anywhere in whatever image you were working on but keep the mouse button pressed! -while your finger is still holding the mouse button down, drag the cursor to the part of the browser window you wish to sample (yes, outside of Photoshop's screen) then release the button Your foreground color should now be #fafbfc (then again different forum skins may change the colors)

Same here. Works wonders. Set it up once, never have to think about it again (also added a couple custom folders to its list)

Unfortunately, that's its only redeeming quality. I'd MUCH rather keep using an outdated Photoshop 5, heh. Even older versions of Photoshop are superior in many ways. That's probably your best workaround for not being able to control kerning in that old version... That's precisely what's called a clipping path Ouch. You're not kidding when you're saying "accomplish more than it was intended to". These days not only there are subscript/superscript buttons to fake it (much like in word and other apps) but there's also options (hidden in a fly-out menu) to use "real" subscript/superscript from opentype fonts which have that feature (it looks quite a bit better). And of course, it all works on the same layer

I haven't looked at the app but building something like this from scratch should be pretty simple using the well documented Setup API: -Call SetupDiGetClassDevs with Flags = DIGCF_PRESENT | DIGCF_ALLCLASSES (you can also specify if you want just USB or just PCI devices or whatever, if that suits your needs better) -if it doesn't return INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE, then use SetupDiEnumDeviceInfo with the returned handle to enumerate the devices (incrementing the index with each pass) -if that call succeeds, use SetupDiGetDeviceRegistryProperty with Property = SPDRP_HARDWAREID to get a Hardware ID from it (or SPDRP_FRIENDLYNAME would get you names and so on) -it would be possible to then call SetupDiGetDeviceRegistryProperty with Property = SPDRP_INSTALL_STATE to get its DEVICE_INSTALL_STATE (if drivers are already installed) and filter based on that (only install drivers for what isn't working) Once you have these Hardware IDs (same as you'd see in device manager), it's fairly trivial to match that with a text or XML file (especially with LINQ), and if it matches, then run the command line contained in the said text or XML file. Alternately, if someone just wanted to check for which video driver to install, then you could simply call EnumDisplayDevices to get the same info, along with some filtering (making sure DISPLAY_DEVICE_MIRRORING_DRIVER isn't set, etc) It would take perhaps an hour to write this in C# from scratch (or about 15 mins for the video-only version). The only thing is, you're probably using this from WinPE so that wouldn't be of any help for you... And I'm not going to write that in C++ as then it's not exactly an hour long project anymore (at least not for me!)

16 bit apps don't work on 64 bit OS'es as the CPUs can't actually run 16 bit and 64 bit operations at the same time. Have a look at dosbox, or install it (OS+app) in a virtual machine (XP mode for Win7, vmware, virtualpc, etc) Google language tools probably work far better though

That's not what we generally mean by destructive, but rather that applying any effect this way throws away the original pixels. You can't go back to them. When you use adjustment layers, you can disable it, delete it, mask certain portions of it, and even change the settings on it later on (or use completely different adjustments instead). The underlying pixels on the layer underneath remain unchanged. That's the big difference: you're not throwing away the original pixels. Brightness/contrast in older versions of PS was a great way to destroy images (very much like every other photo app out there besides PS still works today). It was improved dramatically with CS3. The best thing you can do (besides upgrade) is to not use it... There's many better options. That was kind of obvious Smart Objects (especially with nesting) far improve the layer effects possibilities but that was added with CS2... Another cool thing you can do with type is using clipping paths (using the letters to reveal parts of a photo/texture/gradient or what not) -- without having to rasterize the type and then using it as a channel mask (then you couldn't edit the text anymore; it also lets you easily move both independently of each other). I just saw yet another nice example of that used on a local musem's website a couple days ago (pic here). Photoshop (at least the modern versions -- not totally sure when that was introduced. With 7/CS perhaps?) are pretty powerful as far as type goes. You can easily make use of nice opentype features (real small caps, fancy ligatures, etc -- just check this out) like edit leading, tracking, kerning, shift the baseline, tweak hyphenation, etc (there's 2 palettes just for this) Feel free to PM me anytime for anything Photoshop related Mind you I haven't used v5 in over a decade...

I know it was somewhat off-topic from your post, indeed. I just thought that if you gave up on painting because of allergies, then you still had some other options -- and definitely not the "last resort" kind either. Worst case scenario, Painter Essentials 4 is $60 (also with a free trial) but then again you lose a huge part of it when you're not using a tablet... Or perhaps TwistedBrush Open Studio (free but quite limited)? That's not the way to do it. You want to use adjustment layers instead which are non-destructive (it's been a far better way of working, since v4 back in '96). I can't tell you for sure where they were back in Photoshop 5 though (been WAY too long; Layer > Adjustment Options?)... And they definitely aren't in the same place as in CS5 (completely different interface with panels). As a bonus, you can add layer masks to them (and blending modes too) which can be very useful. I won't get into the new fancy smart filters that are in the newer versions of Photoshop Not that I use that many filters (gaussian blur, despeckle, reduce noise and smart sharpen mainly -- a few others sparingly for specific desired effects).

For the record, I wouldn't recommend buying Photoshop for this (painting specifically), even as an avid/advanced Photoshop user & definite fanboy. Corel Painter is totally where it's at for painting. I think you'd have a blast with a Intuos4 Large, the art pen (sold as an accessory) and Corel Painter's RealBristle brushes (and many other nice ones). The brushes behave very much like real ones (loading them with multiple colors at once, mix or smear colors as you want, you can rotate non-round brushes with the pen and such, there is ink thickness or impasto, pens react to the "paper" texture or surface, etc), there are countless nice brushes (not only brushes that emulate paint but also other mediums) with TONS of possible adjustments and many things traditional paint just can't do (layers, undo ability, the tracing paper, etc). It's truly amazing what it can do. But that kind of setup would set you back ~$1000, or about $600 with Painter Essentials...

You should look into Corel Painter (or Corel Painter Essentials) and a nice wacom tablet It's a fantastic combo for this. There's a free trial version of it too. Also, Photoshop CS5 has made very significant improvements over CS4 in the area of painting with the new bristle tip brushes (again, this works best with a nice wacom tablet and the brush panel's options set to vary the stroke with pressure/tilt/rotation) and the mixer brush tool. There's also the new shortcuts for adjusting brush size/hardness (hold alt, drag cursor) which is another must-have, and the improved HUD color picker too. Photoshop 5 is very dated compared to modern offerings (not so surprising as it's 9 versions behind and from 13+ years ago), and that is probably holding you back quite a bit. Not just compared to Corel Painter and Photoshop but also TwistedBrush, ZBrush and many others.

Like submix8c said, non-standard PSUs in Dell are pretty much a thing of the past. That's complete and absolute nonsense. From a n00b I could almost understand, but when it's coming from a guy whose job is to solely to recommend hardware, I can only qualify this of gross incompetence. Anyway. You picked a nice model (good brand, 80plus cert, etc) but 600W is quite overkill. In the same series, there is the 430W model at $45 which is still more than enough to run that system at full load. Just another option Then again, there's many other good options around the $60 price you picked, like this 520W Antec.

Why even bother with that ghetto executable? Just start the MSI installers directly with the usual switches in the same order (same thing the installer does anyway). Problem solved...

You speak the truth:) Getting at those advanced infos is a pretty major undertaking no matter which way one tackles it. Maintaining lists of Vendor/Device IDs, decoding SMBIOS tables, writing kernel mode drivers to chat on the SMBUS (taking in consideration every chipset's features/addresses and so on), etc. None of it is easy, nor fast, nor gives the results you'd really wish for. There's many utilities like jaclaz mentioned that can get partial infos, including devcon (most are GUI based though) Just don't expect to find the perfect program that does it all, nor an easy way to write one (too much low-level wizardry for one guy)

To be fair, WMI is only so much help here. You'll get the low hanging fruit with almost zero effort -- that's the nice part. But lots of those things: -are quite painful to get at (like firmware versions using the MSDeviceUI_FirmwareRevision class to retreive the infos from an instance name you have to get first) -are just completely unreliable or borderline useless depending on your hardware. Like detecting PCI cards (which includes most stuff on his list) as it will only list what windows has drivers for and already works... If it doesn't work in WinPE then it won't tell you it's there, much less give you infos about it. Unless you have drivers for it all slipstreamed. Otherwise you'd have to enumerate PCI/USB VendorID's & DeviceID's and match those with self-maintained lists... -not quite what you'd hope for (like video cards notoriously returning their family instead of their precise model) -don't offer quite as much infos as you'd hope for (like for memory sticks) -are probably impossible to get at (like RAID setup, from the cards' BIOS) Fortunately we don't deal with any of that at work since we just deploy on top of ESXi

There's always the option of buying a common drive for which there is RPC-1 firmware available (assuming it's legal in your country -- I'm no laywer). There's also some popular utilities that bypass this kind of stuff like AnyDVD and some players that pretty much just ignore region coding like VLC. Or you can do like me and rip them to MPEG4 (H.264, XviD or similar) and play them over the network.

I've been using Windows since 3.1 and I've never encountered, nor heard of a notebad bug before this (including a number of years of doing IT work for relatives/friends or for a living). It's hardly the support nightmare you make it out to be... In fact, given your environment, I'd be tempted to blame something else first. [topic moved to relevant section]

Nice Amon Amarth - Guardians of Asgaard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fpfmdIW5Pc

My current code should work. I just have to test it first. But it's a major PITA to hex edit dozens of files to have all possible combinations of newer/older pairs of everything (or finding non-PE files or those without a text version), so I can test every single corner case... That will take WAY more time than writing the tool did