CoffeeFiend

That he has no idea what he's talking about (either that, or MS doesn't know how their own OS is licensed and also that he knows better than everybody else). I've long given up trying to argue with him, especially when CPUs are involved.

Right from the absolute most basic info from the crash dump: MODULE_NAME: WLIHVUI IMAGE_NAME: WLIHVUI.dll BUCKET_ID: c06d007e_WLIHVUI!DllUnregisterServer+bdcc FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: APPLICATION_FAULT_c06d007e_WLIHVUI.dll!DllUnregisterServer WLIHVUI.dll is part of the drivers for the intel proset/wireless driver. Kind of a late reply on my part. Not really useful anymore, I know... It most likely won't. The chances of a specific explorer.exe crash being due to that specific driver problem is well below 1%. It could have been basically anything else (including any driver for any hardware pretty much). One has to have the crash dump to be able to know.

Sounds like malware.

Unfortunately we have no dmp files to look at, and no useful information from them (even the most basic one) as your symbol path is invalid. We can't do anything from this.

Don't really have time to go over it or to try it out, but I figured I'd let you know you can actually debug scripts, by adding //X as a parameter i.e. "yourscriptnamehere.vbs //X" (w/o the quotes...). If you don't have visual studio (express eds are free BTW) or another suitable debugger (many good tools out there), then there's the old script debugger from here. Notice I didn't say to try to run the script inside the debugger using the //X parameter -- you run the script (from the run box, cmd prompt or whatever) with that parameter, then your script debugger (whatever you chose to use) will popup. There's a large number of people who do a lot of scripting that don't even know about that one, so I'd figure it would probably also benefit others. The RPC error is likely due to the TCP/IP connection being broken as the adapter changes its IP.

Unfortunately, I'd say ~99% of NAS'es I've seen didn't meet several of your criterias, and were abysmally slow (EXTREMELY common in comsumer NAS products!) I'd definitely look for real-life benchmarks of any product before buying anything. In fact, if you want a NAS that doesn't suck (poor features, unitasker, but mainly slow as molasses), it'll most likely cost quite a bit more than your FreeNAS box. I've long given up on even trying to find a decent NAS. BTW, I'd also look at openfiler. Some also build theirs based on opensolaris (ZFS being a big selling point) I've finally decided (after a lot of wasted time with this all -- overall slowness, CUPS being a nightmare, no nice AD replacement and samba/openldap being a REAL pain, poor integration, nothing like Hyper-V built-in, etc) to go with Win2008, likely R2 as it'll RTM real soon (going to build it sometime after summer). You really get what you pay for here. Edit: BTW the Netgear ReadyNAS Pro in the next post is $1200 (or $1650 for us canucks) + the six hard drives (+ potential RAM upgrade) + taxes and ship... Just like I was saying (it'll most likely cost quite a bit more than your FreeNAS box). For ~40MB/sec write speeds (beyond the first few MBs where you're only "writing" to a cache in RAM) in RAID5 -- assuming you're on gigabit ethernet, and that your whole network is capable of jumbo frames. A whole lot better than most, but nothing spectacular besides the price tag (would cost me $2500+ CAD for one with 6TB i.e. 5TB in RAID5, that's $500+/TB!!!) You're really only getting a low-end Linux box with software RAID here, hardly anything to warrant the hefty price tag, especially when you look at what you can build for the same $1200 e.g. Norco RPC-4020 4U case (OS drive + slim DVD writer + 20 hot-swap SATA bays), Phenom II X4 940 with 8GB of fast DDR2 (nice for VMs and such) on a nice Asus or Gigabyte 790 board, powered by a high end enermax revolution 85+ 1050w (modular too) PSU, a slim DVD writer, locking SATA cables for all, and 4 inexpensive SATA controllers (PCI and/or PCI-e) like Syba (use software RAID like the NAS does if you want to) and have 22 ports total (6 on mobo, 4x 4 port cards) -- one for OS drive, one for the DVD writer, and 20 left for the 20 hotswap bays. Not perfect (an ARC-1680IX-24-2G would be nicer for sure), but it still truly puts the same-priced NAS to shame all-around (drive bays, CPU/RAM, power, expandability, etc)

In fact, I don't see any logical reason to even think it's caused the HDD (much the inverse as it doesn't even POST), and there is no reason to believe he has a Seagate drive either. Not only it's a pretty extreme measure, but the lawsuit is for a totally unrelated problem.

3 months later... Added Win7. Removed separate Win9x versions (only Win9x combined share now). Overall: Bottom 5% (you can actually see Win7 on there): Quick comments: The general trends aren't changing much. Vista still climbing, XP and older all going down at similar rates as before. Linux at ~1% (after 20 years of trying to give their OS away), giving it nearly 4x more users than Win9x combined, and getting quite close to the also quickly dying Win2k (should tie next month) Win7 getting near a half percent, not bad for an OS in pre-RTM (beta/RC) stage iphone + ipod combined gives them 0.75% (3x more than Win9x, and quickly getting close to overtaking Linux and win2k -- less than 6 months away) At the current rates, XP and Vista's market shares should be pretty much equal in a year (Win7 release will likely change the results a little bit around the holidays)

It's not even a Windows tool. A google search or Yzöwl's link would have told you that much. In fact, I considered moving it to the "other OS'es" section (it clearly had NOTHING to do with programming), but it seems more like you're trying to somehow use it on a unrelated platform instead. No idea what you're trying to accomplish either, especially since you use an outdated OS that doesn't even have ACLs in the first place.

Actually, they're made specifically for the 360 (they're commonly referred to as intercoolers, usually made by nyko). I heard from various people that they work pretty good and have decent airflow (3 extra fans, over the one inside it), and lowers the temps half-decently. As for the price, cheap fans usually work just fine (as in, $3 fans work just fine), but they just don't tend to have an incredible airflow/not always a great static pressure/not always real silent/not always durable. At $15 it's not much of a bargain though, I've seen them locally for like $20 before. No idea what they're like noise-wise, nor if the fans die in a year or whatever else as I don't have a 360 (I might buy one sometime though). Would I recommend one? Probably not!

I had numerous such experiences with UPS. From lost packages (thanks god it was insured, but it was a REAL pain trying to get them to honor it), to regularly having to call them to schedule a 2nd delivery attempt (they only try once, then you have to go pick it up? wow), to extremely long delivery times, often due to screw-ups (tracking saying things like "parcel not loaded on vehicle", or them just forgetting to load it on the delivery truck, even if it says "out for delivery"). Customs clearance with them also sucks. Overall, about half the time I run into issues and have to call them. My last order from NCIX using UPS took 9 entire days to get here. Next NCIX order was using Purolator, to the same address, from the same warehouse and all, took all of 14 hours to get here, without any of the kinds of issues that always seem to happen using UPS. The cost was also basically the same (within 10%).

He's completely right. So stick with the old thread, as this one's now closed. Also, please learn to post in the proper sections, and review forum rule #12 (about meaningless titles)

You're most likely gonna have to get your hands dirty. Never seen one. However, the checking email part is simple. There's examples on MSDN (e.g. here in an old Coding4Fun article), various community sites like codeproject.com and so on. That is even simpler, but you'll have to use something like PortIO to do it. Most of these sort of things are also easy to get using technologies like WMI (as for the computer being locked you could probably manage something using the task scheduler)

Via C7 CPUs are very, very slow. That thing performs about the same as a mid-class Pentium 3. I've seen C7's that were slower than the faster Pentium 2's even. They're very well known for being quite slow. It's not very surprising that an OS doesn't run great on a CPU that's a decade behind it in terms of performance (that's like running XP on a 486DX2-50 or Win98 on a 386 @ 16MHz, to put things in perspective), and when paired with less RAM than I used to use with XP (back when I still used it)

Well, there's a whole lot more to an app than just being 64 bit, or being freeware. 7zip's shell extension hasn't really been an issue for me so far. But the GUI and overall polish (2 places where 7zip is sorely lacking -- it looks like it's straight out of 1995) and such things also matter, or features like creating rar archives for that matter... If 7zip finally made their GUI not look this bloody awful, perhaps more people would use it. It's not like it would be hard either. And yes, I'm aware there are "patchers" for this too.

Hell no. I'm more of a "once every 3 years" kind of person...

Hooray indeed! One of my fav apps finally getting a real x64 version, and noticeable speed boosts! I'll definitely try this one tonight. Edit: it's fast!

I'll keep that in mind next time I'm playing frisbee with my data backups Mind you, I've seen a LOT of discs damaged this very way (sliding across the floor as it lands, scratching it). I've seen TONS of optical media age not-so-well too... It's hardly perfect. Either ways, it's just getting WAY too small for a lot of practical purposes (e.g. backuping my main computer with its 12 HDs, would take nearly 2000 DVD5's -- that's only 40 full spindles to burn!)

As in, maybe, eventually (in a long, long time -- over 10 years), but we're only speculating. Meanwhile, Inphase technologies has been promising holographic storage for what? Must be at least 5 years now. And it looks like they might finally deliver (horribly short on their capacity promises). 300GB discs at $180/ea (which buys you over 2TB of HD space), and the device to read/write them will only cost $18 000... It makes Fiber Channel SANs look cheap Even Blu-Ray sucks. The writer prices haven't gone down a penny in just about forever (a couple years for sure). The disc prices have gone down a bit, but they still cost a LOT more per GB than hard drives (just for the media -- not counting the initial price of buying all those $250 drives for all your PCs either, and that no one else has the drive so the usefulness is still limited), and they're still small single layer 25GB discs (barely 3x the size of a DVD9). By the time multi-layer discs are affordable (if ever) and same drives that can actually write them, many years will have passed, and those sizes won't look so big anymore. Even today it doesn't look that great -- they're already selling 2TB HDs! It would already take 10 of those super 8-layer 200GB media to backup a single drive (instead of 80 single layer Blu-Ray discs, or 200+ DVD9's, or 400+ DVD5's). Even DVD9's can barely compete with hard drives in terms of $/GB (both around $0.10/GB or so) Wake me up in 10+ years, when one of those people delivers anything worthwhile, at decent prices. I think optical storage is dying as it just can't keep up. Flash isn't going to eat hard drive manufacturer's lunches anytime soon either (performance issues, TRIM and such stuff, and despite dropping in price fast, still costing several dozens of times more per GB)

Video about it, download instructions and everything else over here Good stuff!

Many tasks, many options... I don't know of any free tool that will do everything you may wish for, but there's built-in ways to do most of those things. administrative shares (e.g. \\computername\c$) can easily be scripted (or even use batchfiles applying a .reg file or using reg.exe), and regedit has an option to connect to other computers too can be scripted, some people do update checks/applying them in their login scripts... mind you, I'd just push updates using WSUS (free) can be scripted if needed too. many ways to do this remote desktop. many other solutions exist too, such as vnc Lots of people use System Management Server / System Center Configuration Manager for a lot of similar/related tasks, but unfortunately it's not free.

MDT doesn't make any drives, it merely resells drives from other manufacturers -- those it gets for dirt cheap like refurbished drives. Not surprising at all if it dies on you. I sure wouldn't put my data on this drive.

Exactly. Stating they will turn off activation like that (or are likely to do so) is truly deceitful. They'd be sued by countless millions of people in every country if they did so (doesn't that already make you think they wouldn't do it?), and providing activation servers costs ~nothing so no reason to turn them off in the first place. Once it becomes so old that no one uses it anymore, then they can release the patch.

It's not planned obsolescence. It's people parting with older crappy tech, for newer stuff. PATA ports are shared between 2 devices so you never get the full speed of both -- especially if you're copying from one to the other unlike SATA (1 cable per drive), and it can make the other slower (like if you plug your DVD writer with a HD on the same cable), they take up a lot of precious real-estate on motherboards (not only the large connectors, but all the traces on the PCB that goes to them as well as the controller chips for it -- they're not part of the chipset anymore), and those old large ribbon cables were a pain to "twist" around sometimes and tend to block airflow significantly. SATA is all-around much better (save perhaps for not always being as sturdy -- locking connectors are better for sure). No more jumpers to fiddle with either. That being said, like puntoMX said, never drives are all significantly faster than your old drive. And drive speed is pretty much the main bottleneck on any computer (it's so much slower than RAM it's not even funny). A new HD is cheap (my usual place has 1TB drives for as low as $85 this week! That's $0.085/GB). As for the optical drive, it's the inverse. While a new hard drive will be a LOT faster, SATA DVD writers aren't really any faster than the old PATA ones. My current 22x SATA DVD writer is barely faster than my old 16x PATA (can't even notice -- it only seems to be louder). That old writer won't slow down everything you do with your PC like the HD will, it would only make burning DVDs slower by a handful of seconds. Day and night. I'm using an old/discontinued budget CPU, an Intel E2160 (much like Kelsenellenelvian's CPU), and once OC'ed to 3.4GHz, it benches 3x faster than the old P4 3GHz it replaced, and it actually works that much faster too (e.g. encoding XviD in 1/3 of the time the P4 used to take, 3x the frames per second). Anything modern you can buy today (like puntoMX said too) will run circles around that old thing. Also, more cores is definitely a good thing, even if a particular app won't make use of the other core(s), other apps running in the background most certainly can. A new CPU also means a longer lifespan for a box (being useful longer), and being able to "get with the times" i.e. eventually replacing XP (from 2001) with Win7, watching Blu-Ray/H.264 movies or ATSC OTA feeds (free high def!), using it as a DVR/media center and everything else they may want in the next few years.

It very much depends what you expect out of a "laptop" bag. I've been known to carry my old laptop in one of these backpacks more than it's "real" backpack... I like the "kill two birds with one stone" approach, but it's not exactly lightweight, nor very small. Great for travel though.