CoffeeFiend

The sooner old IE versions die, the better. From a web developer perspective, I care not if people chose to use IE8, Firefox or whatever, as long as it's not an old IE.

.cmd files are just batch files pretty much, not actual programming.

Seemingly it's terminating csrss.exe alright: FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0xF4_IOERR_IMAGE_csrss.exe BUCKET_ID: 0xF4_IOERR_IMAGE_csrss.exe CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION (f4) Arguments: Arg1: 00000003, Process Looking further: EXCEPTION_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000006 - The instruction at 0x%08lx referenced memory at 0x%08lx. The required data was not placed into memory because of an I/O error status of 0x%08lx. BUGCHECK_STR: 0xF4_IOERR Oh, some I/O error. Hmm, I wonder what could prevent it from getting something in memory from disk? (AV driver comes to mind already) Next: DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: DRIVER_FAULT Can't say I'm surprised. Next: ba2274f4 a8608564 8a14db48 c0000006 ba227584 nt!NtTerminateProcess+0x7d WARNING: Stack unwind information not available. Following frames may be wrong. ba227574 805413fc ffffffff c0000006 ba2279b0 SYMEVENT+0x12564 Oh, look! Norton garbage, followed by a call to NtTerminateProcess. Need I say more? SymNRT is your fix. You're doing them a great favor by ditching it, nevermind it's 3 years out of date (Tue Nov 07 22:38:37 2006)

Because that's its "real" capacity i.e. not limited at all. 500GB = 465GiB (much like a 750GB'er shows as 698GiB, or a 1TB shows as 931GiB). It's not limited to 137GB (128GiB) as it's not using your onboard ATA66 controllers but the one in the enclosure.

People still use DDO's? Last time I've even seen one was around 1994 or so (as in, 15 years ago), for the 528MB barrier on a 486 (which was a limit based on the int 13 handler in the BIOS, not the chipset)

And he doesn't. The Intel 810 chipset is 10 years old and ATA66 only, so no LBA48. He'll only see up to 137GB, unless he buys a controller card with it.

From a value perspective, even velociraptors aren't too good. Price in $ USD vs Size in GB: And like you said, the performance advantage the faster drives have is fairly minimal... Personally, I'd rather have a half dozen 1TB drives instead of 2 velociraptors. Both the SSDs and velociraptors are niche, expensive products for those who want the ultimate speed. Anyways. I think it's too early to buy i7's still, if not just from seeing the issues they had with RAM voltages. That, and I'm certainly not going to spend $1160 for a CPU/motherboard and 6GB of RAM anytime soon. Sure, it depends on what one does with their computer. I just built a pair of new boxes for the kids (enough to do any everyday task, play 1080p H.264 video and all): Not bad for ~$300/ea (admittedly not including the HD, for which I reused an old pair of HDs that were replaced with a new 1TB model. Edit: I seemingly also forgot the Samsung DVDRW, another $25) Low power too: the 4850e has a 45W TDP (then uses Cool'n'Quiet, AUS AI Nap, Vista's sleep), 80plus PSU, etc. Quiet too. Anyways. Some people want the ultimate performance, others want value... Nothing wrong with either.

I think it was fairly obvious to most people. Only because you misread it. And yes, again you blame others... Keep trolling... I'm done wasting time answering anything you write. I should've listened to bledd obviously.

Which are the very same limitations we've been discussing from the very start. Yeah, others need to work on their reading comprehension... Which like we said from the start is mostly inaccurate. You can enable PAE, but the ONLY thing that changes is that special apps such as SQL Server could use the extra RAM, and for data ONLY. It DOESN'T make your everyday apps make use of 4GB+ (either per process, or for for all processes combined), and as such it's not just not a solution to the problem (besides not solving other issues and limitations), just as cluberti very well explained in post #3 Except, we already said x64 versions (Win 7 included) already do support PAE (not that you need it in the first place). As for 32 bit version, again, it doesn't solve the problem anyways, and using chunks from an older kernel into Win 7 is unlikely to work (Vista and Win 2008 use the same codebase, so it's not surprising bits and pieces can be mixed).

You sound like you even believe what you say (Cornficker is just a big MS conspiracy to make you upgrade somehow -- just because some story says Vista is safe? even though they patched 2k/xp/vista?). Scary thought. Except it's neither nonfunctional nor DRM crippled. To quote cluberti (same applies to Vista as Win 7): Not that a firewall protects against viruses in any way...

Quick update. Not much new, same trends as before pretty much. New pic: Edit: new pic with a scale of 100%, kind of paints the overall picture better IMO, even though you can't really see anything at the bottom:

No, no. It's a fisher price + teletubbies look, get it right! C'mon now, teletubbies look enterprisey, don't they? If you don't know what teletubbies are then you're very lucky, just be thankful! Edit: I had forgotten about the fisher price dog from the search too. It just doesn't get more professional looking than this!

Either you're trying to be funny or you're seriously paranoid.

Compatibility is such a major issue in Vista: just see this very long list of incompatible apps </sarcasm>. There's all of 2 entries on it (and 2 more with minor issues, and 2 more which have "internal issues" which I wouldn't blame on windows).

There is no bias in that, it's strictly factual. And stating wikipedia as the "obvious correct documentation" is kind of funny, as more or less any hack could have written that page (even heavily biased hacks) -- over references like Windows Internals 4th Ed no less. So what you're saying is: you know better than all of the most knowledgeable industry experts, both on the hardware and software side (or what they should have done at least), who all seemingly screwed up? Perfect solutions to any problem hardly ever exist. "Good enough" (i.e. compromises) is what we usually end up using. PAE is barely what I'd call a solution in itself (more like an ugly hack around a real limitation). AMD64 actually solves the problem quite nicely. We do get a flat memory model with access to > 4GB (no fancy tricks to manipulate more address lines on the CPU than EIP has bits which greatly complicates things) and long mode to go with it. We get a larger physical and virtual address space. We finally get more [general purpose & SIMD] registers and -- bigger ones indeed (they're actually useful too). And we move away from like a half-dozen calling conventions (cdecl, stdcall, etc) down to one single, clean, modern convention. It's a great move overall. Except it's not actually the same OS. And only allowing PAE in server-class OS'es back then made sense, as it was pointless on a desktop anyways, since you need *all* your software to be written specifically to use it. And basically, only server software made use of it -- very little of it actually: the only one I've encountered so far is SQL Server. Not that it actually solves this problem either, as you can't run code in there anyways (only useful in cases where you have many GBs of data to load), and it doesn't fix any other issues with the old 32 bit memory model (adress space and other limits). PAE isn't a "general purpose" way of going past 4GB. And you don't need to pay 1000's of $ either as cluberti said. Indeed, I shouldn't have

It's not a trivial solution, having an adequate HSF is the only solution. The temps you get when idle mean nothing. One install seemingly has more background stuff running, keeping your CPU busier (hence hotter). It changes nothing at all. In both cases, your HSF has to be sufficient to handle 100% CPU load, at which the temps will be the same regardless of OS used. Your CPU will use a certain number of watts when @ 100% load, regardless of OS, and given the same HSF, same ambient temp, airflow and all, the temps will be identical. The OS you use changes *nothing* to this.

No. Nobody develops for an OS with a less of a market share than even Linux.

"the more room for OC" It doesn't matter at all which OS you use. You must have sufficient cooling for the times where your CPU load will hit 100%, and that's all there is to it. It doesn't matter how much the OS or apps use, or in what proportions. The temp reached @ 100% CPU usage will be the exact same no matter what OS you use (or version of it), it's only a question of wattage/thermal resistance/airflow. If your temps are too high @ 100%, then your HSF is inadequate for the power it has to dissipate (assuming ambient temp is not being an issue)

Then use an app that uses lots of memory. There are apps written specifically for this, like testlimit.

I tend to use scripting languages all the time, for many different things. But here I fail to see the point. Why not use cmd's built-in del & rd commands and shutdown.exe -- those built-in commands can easily do everything you asked for, without any scripting. It's one of the few cases left where batch files are still good enough IMO.

Not all drives will boot in AHCI mode. See this thread. Perhaps this should be moved to the hardware section.

And that matters how? They just decided to use that to trigger the event instead, it works just the same (same purpose). Big deal.

User mode apps like this can't actually cause BSODs. The thing is that they generate a fair amount of traffic, which only exacerbates issues caused by poor network-related drivers (such as AVG's). Most of such conclusions I've seen are often completely wrong, as most end users are just not capable of diagnosing such issues by themselves. It just seems to me like they managed to get less BSODs caused by network-related drivers simply by minimizing network traffic (much like you're less prone to flat tires when you leave the car in the driveway -- not that it actually solved anything). Correlation is not causation. cluberti really knows what he's saying. His crash dump analysis is certainly worth a LOT more than what a couple of average end-users think is the issue (not much more than plain old guessing, and not always an informed guess even). Besides, IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL are most frequently caused by poor drivers (or otherwise broken hardware). And the crash dump shows avg's driver (avgtdix.sys -- described as "AVG Network connection watcher") in the call stack right before it bugchecked... On a side note, looks like Windows Internals 5th ed should be out in about 3 months!

In addition to cluberti's usual most excellent recommendations, I'd like to add Tess' blog on MSDN which I've been following a while. Great resources, and great TechDays presentation too I must say. Mark Russinovich's blog also goes into that stuff sometimes. I've been considering buying some of Dmitry Vostokov's books too, cheap, but no idea if they're any good. He has a pretty decent site too.

The numbers do change, unless you happen to have picked solid black or solid white, in which case the brightness/luminosity will make the RGB values 0,0,0 or 255,255,255 regardless of hue and saturation. That's how color pickers work. As for alt-o, it's the hotkey for the Color|Solid box (swatch). Nothing hidden anywhere.