CoffeeFiend

From his other threads, it looks like he's using an old P3-era Celeron with 384MB RAM, a GeForce 2 MX 400, and a DVD drive that won't read DVDs anymore... Need I say more?

which I had already mentioned before: The quality they offer compared to modern codecs is very bad. Every other codec out there (xvid, "real" divx, 3ivx, real video and several others) were *all* already a lot better over 5 years ago. Most codecs comparisons stopped even including it like 5 years ago, because it was just WAY outclassed. And in the last 5 years, we've had *major* advances. H.264 is where it's at these days. The old "DivX ;-)" hacked codec is over 10 years old now, and its best left rotting in its grave. Then again, encoding with a 466Mhz Celeron is like trying to compete in drag racing with a kids' tricycle.

Yeah, but it's more of an exception (no others seem to have done that yet). And they didn't roll it out as a way to solve the bandwidth "shortage" they all whine about. The bandwidth cap is higher, but it's this part that bothers me: $1.50 per additional gigabyte. No billing limit. Ouch. At least, if you're going to charge unlimited, charge me a decent monthly fee for the service and base your profits on that (and they sure do), and then whatever it costs them for the extra or at least near that (a few percent overhead? sure). Here, they're happy to charge us over 10x what it costs them with no actual limits of how much they can charge (buy all the very overpriced bandwidth you want!) I can live with 1/10 of that speed (I don't need anything to finish downloading before I even clicked -- 7mbit is plenty fast for me), but the caps bother me, a lot. If you use VPN to/from work a lot, have several people at your place checking high def movie previews at Apple's site (~150MB each, ~4 per movie) and who also enjoy streaming audio/video, if you have any kind of membership to sites like lynda.com (or kelbytraining.com or whatever else), if you like watching various large videos on Channel9/Adobe TV and such places (nevermind anywhere like hulu, or a netflix subscription), if you maintain a WSUS server, if you download many large packages (Win7 betas, VS 2010 beta, service packs, etc), if you use steam, if you have a VOIP phone line and countless other little things... You very quickly go over most bandwidth caps (with zero P2P usage). Some of us do more than check email, and it seems like ISPs expect us to keep paying more and more for faster pipes that we're not actually going to use. On that 50mbit plan videotron has, you could hit the monthly bandwidth cap in 4 1/2h... If you were to max it out for a whole month (of 31 days) which is admittedly a bit excessive, you'd be paying in excess fees alone (on top of your plan) a hair over $28000 including taxes (you could likely have a OC12 for that much -- 622Mbps). Thanks god it's not at $8/GB like their other plans, otherwise that would be about $150000 for a month.

Canadians are really getting screwed over as far as ISPs go. Nearly all ISPs have fairly low BW caps: Bell: 25 GB on their 6mbit plan Cogeco: 30GB on their 7mbit plan Videotron: 30GB on their 7.5mbit plan + $8/GB! (capped at like $120/mo), or other plans at $1.5/GB extra, with NO limits of how much extra they can charge. Rogers: 60Gb on their 10mbit plan and the handful that don't are usually throttled pretty heavily, and with that change in pricing you can be sure all the "resellers" (independent DSL ISPs) are going to change their pricing accordingly... Low caps and/or throttling everywhere. Add to that the constant price hikes despite their rapidly decreasing costs (and record profits) and decrease in service (caps/throttling)... I wouldn't mind paying for what I use, but $8/GB is ridiculous. They can only get away with it because they're monopolies and that there's no competition whatsoever. It's at the point wish the gov't would do something about it, but the only thing we can expect is the CRTC to side against us as usual. Forget about ISPs rolling out DOCSIS 3 either, they have no reason to, and they'd rather keep charging us more for less every year.

After looking at yet another entry on Mark Russinovich's blog, I figured I'd share this info with everyone. We had a computer that would logon really, really slowly. It didn't seem to be the user profile, it wasn't some bad processes, the event log didn't really have anything useful, nor did any log files (including userenv.log). So I decided to capture the network traffic, using Wireshark. The problem is, how are you supposed to keep wireshark running (dumping packets) when you log off and log in again? Here's how: First, Wireshark must be installed (duh...) and you have to have psexec handy, on the local machine, or another one handy, depending on where you want to start the capture from. Next, you're going to need to know the index of the network interface it should capture from. Open a cmd prompt, go in your wireshark install folder and type: dumpcap -D Yes, that is case sensitive. You should see something a list of interfaces, the physical adapter should stand out. On this box, it shows up as: 2. \Device\NPF_{7CBB213B-F378-4C1C-9AA8-D9406AEAF85E} (Realtek RTL8168B/8111B PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC) That would mean I have to use index 2. If you start it locally, you'll be logging the logout traffic first. So you can log off from the machine that you want to capture traffic with, and run the command on a remote computer instead. Here's the important part to do it locally: psexec -d -s "c:\program files\wireshark\dumpcap.exe" -i 2 Assuming it's installed in "c:\program files\wireshark\". Feel free to use environment variables like %ProgramFiles% or %ProgramFiles(x86)%, or "Program Files (x86)", or whatever it's named on your system. I'm sure you can figure that part out. Notice the 2 at the end of the command line. Replace this with the index of *your* network interface (it was 2 in my case). If you pick the wrong index, it won't capture anything. Now logoff, and logon again, it'll capture both. You can wait a few seconds before loging in, and use that gap to filter the capture later (i.e. using frame.time_relative >= 123 where 123 is the time where you want it to start) If you want to run it remotely, you may have to use psexec's -u and -p switches so you're allowed to spawn the remote process on the other box i.e. if you're not in a domain (you can try remotely spawning calc.exe or something like that first, see if that works). This works fine: psexec \\remote_computer_name -d -s -u your_username -p your_pwd "c:\program files\wireshark\dumpcap.exe" -i 2 Then just login (you'll have just the login captured, unlike if you want it locally). Once the login process is complete, start task manager (ctrl-shift-esc) and end task on dumpcap.exe so it stops capturing. You now have a capture file inside c:\windows\temp named something like wiresharkXXXX?????? or similar (the last characters change). Just open it in wireshark and have at it!

An awful large bunch of obnoxious Linux zealots keep repeating and telling everyone Windows is insecure though. And that it's also more secure because everyone can look at the source code, and that this "many eyeballs" way makes these things never happen. And that with things like SELinux, they're 100% protected against everything. Whereas in reality, it's a VERY different picture. If you count from around Y2K or so (starting from the Linux kernel 2.2.x and Win2k Server to Win2008), we get very similar pictures: Linux: 280 advisories, 475 vulnerabilities with 7% unpatched (worst being rated "less critical") Win: 472 advisories, 580 vulnerabilities with 7% unpatched (worst being rated "less critical") It only looks somewhat favorable to Linux in this case because basically no one really looked at Linux back when Win2k was out, and there are basically nothing about it (2.2.x: 8 advisories, 5 vulnerabilities) whereas the new kernels which a lot more people use and gets a lot more attention (2.6.x: 187 advisories, 353 vulnerabilities) If you look from 2003-now (a time frame where more eyes were laid on Linux, due to having more users), we get this: Linux 2.6.x: 187 advisories, 353 vulnerabilities, 5.8% unpatched (worst being rated "less critical") -- spanning over 5 years and 8 months. Win2k3+: 242 advisories, 341 vulnerabilities, 5.3% unpatched (worst being rated "less critical") -- spanning over 6 years and 4 months (2/3 of a year extra, or 12% longer) If you were to adjust the numbers for an identical time span (or remove all the bugs discovered in the first 8 months Win2003 was out), then Linux looks even worse. And here, we're merely comparing Linux' kernel flaws against an entire OS and all of its components combined. That's not even remotely fair! If you were to take the current version of most common commercial server-oriented Linux distro (that would be RHEL 5), compared to the latest version of Windows server (the best/latest the two biggest companies have to offer), we get these: RHEL 5: 273 Secunia advisories, 829 Vulnerabilities, 0 unpatched, been out for 2 years, 5 months Win 2008: 40 Secunia advisories, 82 Vulnerabilities, 0 unpatched, been out for 1 year, 6 1/2 months Yes, RHEL has been around for 50% longer, but even if you boost Win 2008's numbers up by 50%, we're *nowhere near* RHEL 5's numbers. 600% more advisories and 1000% more vulnerabilities in 50% longer? Simple comparison (I'm not going to manually compare 1000's of bugs spanning over several years, sorry), but I think it makes a point regardless. It hardly looks like the perfect, 100% bulletproof, inpenetrable fort knox they make it out to be now, doesn't it? That doesn't prevent them from laughing "M$ Windoze is insecure! LOL BSOD!" all the time. That very much explains PC_LOAD_LETTER's point. And if this wasn't MSFN, there would be people calling me a paid shill or astroturfer within mere seconds of posting this. As if Bill himself personally hands a fat cheque to everyone who likes Windows and ever said so on the internet. And if ever anything has ever not worked on Linux then it's either my fault for being too stupid (including when drivers don't exist), that it should STFU and fix it myself and submit a patch (yeah, exactly what the average end user wants!), or because I've been too lazy to try these other 52 other distros, or whatever other nonsense. Only to tell me afterwards that the GIMP is a perfectly good replacement for Photoshop CS4, evolution for Outlook, OOo for MS Office and so on.

Thanks for the heads up! Wouldn't this belong best in the news section though?

Again, with the questions that have no answers. People with different amount of memory and running apps with different RAM usage patterns, and a varying amount of apps at once, on different OS'es... You're not going to have the definitive answer you seem to be looking for. See what works best for your needs, that's what it comes down to. Keep in mind removing the page file breaks several things (like jcarle said), including being able to write memory dumps when a box crashes. It has been discussed for thousands of posts on this very forum according to Google, and little of that has changed. You just seem to be unwilling to read up, and rather open a new topic for every little thing that comes across your mind. Search and read, and stop re-asking every little thing like: -Win7 or XP -how does nlite work -XP SP2 or SP3 -page file or not -win9x or XP & later (nevermind the existing thread 4 posts below) -what router is best -how to secure windows -is dd-wrt good ... Nevermind all those who have been trashed. We're not going to spoon feed you all the answers. Consider this your final warning. [CLOSED]

Nonsense. It does no such thing. I've seen a lot of XP SP3 boxes running MS Office 2007 with no issues, with daily usage of Outlook 2007. I don't know how could anyone even think that Microsoft would have released SP3, without noticing it breaks MS Office (as if no one had ever used MS Office with any of the betas or RCs) As for having problems with SP3, the only issue I ever encountered is a Wifi driver that needed to be updated. Hardly the nightmare the previous poster seems to make it out to be. I can't think of a single valid reason to stay with SP2.

That's a problem for sure. Then again, it's a problem with DD-WRT too, which mostly works with older Broadcom chips (and to a lesser extent, Atheros based chips and a handful of others), which are used mostly in older pre-N routers... It's slowly getting better. DD-WRT is better in some ways, like the Wiviz scan, having differently sized/featured images (mini, micro, vpn...), a better linux CLI to some extent (they vary quite a bit from one to another), etc. OpenWRT seems to be a bit more bleeding edge, but perhaps not as user friendly. Personally, I'm more or less giving up on all of them. Even though I'm using Tomato, the hardware itself sucks. And it's very hard to find a router I want of (G and N, with *good* signal i.e. not those cheapo 2 or 3dBi rubber ducky antennas, RP-SMA connectors, plenty of flash and RAM, decently built i.e. won't overheat all the time, etc). Routerboards like this one are alright, but they're just that (no enclosure, no wifi cards, etc). So I'm going to get one of these kits soon (1/2W, 15dBi antenna, good sensitivity) which will be plugged to a computer with virtually unlimited resources (compared to any embedded device)

Well, that's akin to asking what's the best color for a car pretty much. There is no actual answer. And there are FAR too many factors, even if you disregarded configuration whatsoever (which would be totally stupid), like which device, which version of the said device (sometimes it bears the same name, but that's where the similarity ends), which version of the firmware it shipped with (which can change quite a bit from a version to another) and so on. You really think the input of random folks on the internet, who for the most part have little to no knowledge of networking fundamentals like TCP/IP (much less firewalls and such complex topics) is relevant? They'll just say whichever name they know or have heard of. *Nobody* can tell you across dozens of manufacturers, thousands of devices, each with several different hardware revisions *and* different firmware versions (based on a lot of different software which is at different versions and sometimes forked), different default configs and so on, which ones are the most secure in every possible way. This is at best an exercise in futility.

Stop opening new topics for subjects which already have some, where it's already been discussed quite a bit, and aren't even hard to find, like this post, 4 below yours. [closed]

There is no answer to this. Any firewall or similar device is only as secure as its configuration. You can have a million dollar firewall badly configured and thus being less secure than a $5 after mail-in-rebates junker. I'm not sure what's with your obsession about everything being the "utmost absolute most secure ever" (thinking about your crippling securing XP post too). If you want something so ridiculously hack-proof, then unplug the network and turn it off basically.

He's not talking about XHTML with a application/xhtml+xml MIME type which no version of IE supports (although serving as text/html *is* valid now, see this, particularly section 3.2), but viewing a XML file directly, which has a XLST stylesheet linked, just like this example. But that does work perfectly fine in IE 7 and 8, and Firefox, and Chrome, and Safari and pretty much everything else. Besides, I've never seen a website built this way (beyond highly impractical, it's just meant to show a XML file in a easily human-readable way, NOT a replacement for HTML) Hardly a reason to keep IE6 (I can't actually think of a single valid reason)

It's a very good idea, as it gets maintained/updated a LOT better than most original firmwares, and it also has a LOT more options than the competition, with regards to security (more encryption options, radius, mac filtering, custom iptables rules, not broadcasting SSID, access via SSH instead of telnet, etc) and other features as well. By a LONG shot (I'd say non-3rd party firmwares have about 5% of the features) The firmware itself is, but that's not saying much about the hardware it runs onto which more often than not sucks. I haven't had wireless performance or streaming issues personally. In fact, the performance with it has been quite good, especially because you can boost the power and also use "quiter" channels other firmwares wouldn't let you pick (far better SNR, so better speeds) Either ways, I've moved to Tomato a while ago.

Same here. I don't actually do any of that. And the last time I ran into a virus is 2003 or 2004 (around the SP2 days -- never caught one on Vista or Win7). And that was entirely my fault too (willingly ran it as admin). None of this would have helped one bit (only took a couple mins to get rid of it too). None of this is replacement for the user not doing stupid things, like running shady executables from stange places as admin, which probably accounts for 99.9% of infections all by itself. I wouldn't waste too much time on that other 0.1%, especially when it more or less makes your computer useless. We're not using any AV or antispyware type of app on any of our boxes. When it happens again in 5+ years, I'll remove it manually.

Ideally, you don't use XP You're missing a bunch of simple stuff, like strong passwords (not only on user's accounts). You also need to monitor your event logs and such. Other things you could think about: -changing which accounts some services run under -renaming the administrator account As for latest windows patches, it's not just about having the latest applied at install (obviously), it's about making sure they keep getting updated. And not just Windows' either. Either ways, a LOT of the stuff on your list seems pretty extreme, and I certainly wouldn't put up with using a box that severely limited (100% useless for me). I'd be reformatting that box in less than 5 minutes (and not reinstalling XP either )

Even then I still wouldn't really bother. You can safely assume none of them gigabit routers don't support jumbo frames. And switches in a LOT of routers are so crappy I wouldn't want to rely on them, especially for large amounts of traffic. Older D-Link products were truly awful for this (haven't tried their latest stuff). You'd try to push a few GB across the network, but the switch chip would get so ridiculously hot (despite being in a well cooled location) that it would drop all your network connections. Your PCs would all say "network cable disconnected", you'd peek over and see your transfer aborted, and your connection would come back once it cools off. Switches in a LOT of routers are fairly ghetto like that, hence why I recommended a separate, decent quality gigabit switch instead. Also, most people with such networking needs tend in general to require more than 4 ports (not only server/desktops and such -- now printers, gaming consoles, VOIP boxes and what not tend to use up some). And here it's more like 3, or that's what you have left after you waste a port to connect to your other switch. 3 gigabit ports ain't much. That's the other thing. If you push too much data through, most consumers routers will crap out on you fairly quickly (e.g. Linksys WRT54* line tends to overheat quite a bit, and there isn't a heat sink in there anywhere in sight -- that's what happens when everyone competes with chinese built $20 routers). And when it finally dies on you, I'd rather have the gigabit switch separate and only have to replace the router.

Then again, PerfectDisk also does this, it's significantly cheaper, defrags better IMO, has several very useful editions that Diskeeper doesn't (e.g. those made specifically Exchange/VMware/Hyper-V), the VSS compatible mode works out of the box, supports multi-TB volumes for cheaper (diskeeper won't, unless you buy very expensive versions with TVE), requires less free disk space to do its job, has somewhat better admin tools and a bunch more things.

Totally. The firmware makes all the difference. Any consumer router with DD-WRT or Tomato or similar is about a million times better than any other consumer router with factory firmware (in terms of features, stability, speed and just about everything else). It's not gigabit, but that's useless for most people (mostly limited by the wireless speeds, and not moving loads of huge files around all day long). Unless you were planning to use it between 2 boxes with gigabit NICs, to move a lot of very large files around (in which case I'd still pick that router, along with a separate gigabit switch)

You should be styling your table using CSS, not manually like this.

Yes, it's long been known. Been posted a good dozen times on this very forum too. Not only it funds it, but they basically force it on their employees. See here for example. Just one of the many reasons I don't buy their stuff (there's better apps for cheaper anyway)

So your suggestion, as a solution to IE6 sucking, is that we should make ugly looking websites? You're essentially saying that only content matters, not looks, but I believe most people would disagree and pick [X] give me both. The 2 aren't mutually exclusive. By your way how measuring how good something is, then Google news, Yahoo news, AOL news, CNN news, NY times, MSNBC, Washington post, USA Today and several others are all far better (and interestingly enough, they also all look a LOT better too). Either ways, I'd say that's just a measure of popularity, not how good it is. I wouldn't call the music that sells the most the best music either. Is that supposed to be the only reason to make something look good? Most people like the eye candy, usability and so on. It's easy for the most part too, it's only IE6 that makes it a pain, and it's only a matter of time before we drop support for it. As for pre-IE6 browsers, we long have stopped supporting those (it has accounted for 0% of our traffic for as long as I can remember).

Like BenoitRen said before, older versions of IE have really poor support for any modern standard (namely CSS2 and the DOM for IE6 -- before that? borked box model, no png alpha channel and TONS more). IE6 was OK when it came out, back in 2001 (compared to Netscape). But 8 years have passed and browsers have improved quite a bit. It directly makes web developers' and web designers' lives hell (like PC_LOAD_LETTER seems to have noticed), and it has real costs directly associated with it. An old pic that's somewhat funny, but so very true (the red quarter shrank a lot since 2006 but that's about it): I spend more time to get something to work with IE6, than it takes to design/build it in the first place (and make it work with all other browsers combined). Half my time wasted on this = double the development costs, because if IE6. There's a lot of ways to deal with that bast*** child that IE6 is: really fugly CSS hacks (which usually break with every new version of IE, and can make other browsers screw up), browser-specific style sheets (one for IE6, one for everything else), and conditional comments. The sooner IE6 dies, the better. When it does, we can widely use features that it doesn't support (or keep using it without having to feed IE6 a separate, retarded style sheet so it kind of works), and also build web sites and apps a LOT quicker, which also means cheaper. Most of us would have better ways to spend that extra time and money than designing/developing for the absolute lowest common denominator (we'd also cut down on the swearing quite a bit too). Millions of us are dreaming about this.

Such early "divx" codecs have NOTHING to do with the modern ones. They were merely a hacked codec from MS (was rewritten later). And the quality of such old codecs is pretty horrible by today's standards. Seriously, why bother trying to find ancient software (with very poor quality), just so you can keep using a 10 year old computer (with a cut down budget version of a Pentium 2 CPU)? People have been throwing away & giving away P4 boxes for a while around here. And even when it's not free, it's dirt cheap (seen someone buy a P4 3GHz box with fancy vid card and all for $50 recently-ish)