CoffeeFiend

That sounds very much like school homework...

windbg and knowledge about the system's internals. Debugging simple errors is easy, but doing fairly advanced/in-depth analysis and really understanding what is going on (there are degrees of difficulty obviously) is a lot harder. Anyways. I've never been a big fan of AVG myself. winpcap isn't to blame for such issues either. It's widely used by a lot of people (myself included), and we're not getting those BSODs. It's really AVG.

They're not forcing anything on anyone. Feel free to stick to your existing Windows XP. They're not going to prevent you from using it. Similarly, you can move to another platform. They decided to move forward with a new GUI and new ways to do things, much like they have with Win95 (or windows on top of DOS). They didn't offer you a choice back then either. If someone really wants their old ways so badly, then they can stick to their old software. As for the "if it's better it will win win over" thing, it's not quite that simple. A large amount of people wouldn't change to anything significantly better, just because they know the old one. And if we always bent over backwards for them people, we'd still have an option for a win 3.1-like GUI in Win 8. They kept the old Win9x-era start menu as an option for all of XP's and Vista's lifetime, that's already pretty good. Eventually you have to lose the old legacy crap.

All your questions are answered here

I don't get what the issue is in the first place. Now I have no need to move my hand to the mouse, move the cursor across half the screen, click start, move up, click programs, look around, click some program group (repeat previous steps if apps are in subdirs), look for the program, move the mouse, click again. I just hit the start key, and within 2 or 3 key presses the app is there. I can usually find the app quicker than it takes me to move a mouse to the start button. There's also the pinned apps at the top (and recent ones which often contain the app you're looking for too -- you can increase the number too), and the start key + number combos. In the ~1% of cases where this doesn't really work, then you have an extra click or something like that over the old way. The search also gets to "deeper" items much faster, e.g. the device manager: start dev enter (no need to even touch the mouse). You're already there. vs move to the start button, click, move up to settings if you're using the classic menu, click again, move to control panel, click again, wait for the control panel to open, spend a couple seconds to find the right icon, move the mouse to system, double click, read the tabs, move mouse to the hardware tab, look for the device manager button, move mouse, click on it. (you gotta reach for the mouse, look around for stuff and then move it 6 times, and click a half dozen times to get there) Almost everything is faster to get at like that. Almost everything is, including MMC snapins: start then iis gets your the IIS snapin, start then ev gets you the event viewer, etc. It's like a million times better -- a real godsend if you ask me. If that's what you call hectic, then I'll take all the hectic they wanna serve me!

In layman's terms, no. When an app isn't active (like, minimized, not doing anything), then you can take the contents of whatever memory it fills, and write that to the hard drive. Then overwrite that physical RAM's content with other stuff you load from the hard drive, so you can execute it. When anything wants to interact with that program, it has to be loaded from disk first (which usually means writing another processes' memory to disk first). It allows more apps to share that same amount of RAM, but with a big performance hit. On a standard 32 bit Windows version, a "typical" app can't access even near 4GB (there's less than 4GB available to the system in the first place, and then the kernel and such uses a large part of whatever is available). It's more like half that. Nope. That same 2GB window of user mode RAM is shared by all apps. Virtual memory doesn't change anything to that. You want your apps to use 4GB or more, you have to move on to x64. Well, if the said hack BSODs your box, it's not that irrelevant... Sure, it would mean a faster page file, so faster paging, but that's about it. But with a x64 platform, your apps can actually use all of that RAM as they need (and not have to page nearly as much), and page whatever is unnecessary to disk if extra RAM is required, leaving even more free. Having that much RAM available makes some applications really fly (I had photoshop CS4 x64 up to 3.5GB recently on a pano shot, and it was still REAL fast). And that still doesn't address many of the other limitations (e.g. paged pool, non-paged pool, etc). And there's the page file size limit too... There's very few reasons not to move on to x64 anyways, so I don't really see the point of the ramdisk in the first place.

Virtual memory doesn't give you a bigger address space. It merely lets you swap pages in and out to/from disk. RAM disks don't change anything to that picture at all. They can only be created inside RAM you can address in the first place. Unless it fiddles with the MMU directly (I wouldn't really want that personally), and even then it's pretty much an ugly hack if anything.

frozen78: read post #3 by cluberti. Nothing will give you > 4GB on a 32 bit OS (besides the only one exception, on server OS'es, hardware permitting, which requires software to be specifically written for it like mats was referring to, and even then no code can run in there, just data). You want 4GB or more, you move on to x64. It's that simple.

Except it has to physically fit in there. Kelsenellenelvian already linked to a bunch of suitable cards. There's very few high-height/low-profile cards with high performance. Then again, cooling might become an issue in a tiny case. It doesn't seem like they come with a very beefy PSU either (as in probably not enough to power a fancy card), and it doesn't seem to use standard ATX PSUs either (TFX rather -- slim case, yet again). Good luck finding one, even newegg only carries one model, and it's a 300W unit too. You just might be better off getting a standard ATX case, along with a standard ATX PSU, and whatever video card you wish. I wouldn't get a geforce 9500 either, not a gaming card at all.

QFT. They're rather crappy sites. And mass-posting the same identical junk to several times (just like here) all the time is borderline what I'd call spam. This is a community site, not a place where you post all your unrelated stuff, along with 150 other forums. And the blurb about Win 7 is laughable. It merely links to another site which is very well known for daily anti-Windows FUD and bashing. The content linked to has NO references of any kind or anything like it. It claims Win 7 has extreme DRM (which somehow explains his bad sound -- not bad drivers on a beta OS for sure!) because somehow using a crack on software makes it not work anymore (that's windows' fault, right?), especially when you try to copy it in a folder that doesn't even exist. Win 7 and Vista are no worse for your privacy than XP. Sound like you just have no idea what you're talking about here.

Well, it sure beats whatever most sites used before (quicktime, eww). There are only so many alternatives... People would also complain if it was WMV or Silverlight based. As for requiring the latest player, that's not a problem with flash, it's the site owners that willingly force you to upgrade. Not that I've ever seen that be an issue.

You gotta be kidding. The only people I've seen who said such things are the people who only know that stuff. What's wrong? So much stuff that I barely know where to start! muddled-together bunch of tags and bits of script, all in one big ugly mess -- yuck! no support for actually nice languages (no vbscript isn't one, unless that's all you know or understand) not strongly typed no compilation no proper OOP no proper error handling (i.e. try/catch blocks) if you're using vbscript no access to the exhaustive list of functions contained in the .NET framework or anything like it no nice data access methods (i.e. no ADO.Net, only crappy old recordsets and the like) no nice data providers either (e.g. no SqlClient) none of the more "modern" data access stuff e.g. LINQ and various ORMs no databinding no easy localization nothing like ASP.Net's built-in security no caching built-in no master pages (no, includes aren't the same thing at all) no http handlers no web services, much less WCF no XML config (web.config) no nice tools (nothing that comes even close to the latest visual studio) none of the cool modern web development stuff, like the new ASP.NET AJAX and MVC frameworks not any of the totally amazing tricks VS2010 manages to pull (dynamic intellisense for jQuery and what not) hardly any of the training resources (like the countless webcasts, starter kits, training videos and what not) harder to deploy ... Need I go on? You're also spending countless hours writing inane, boring, repetitive crap, like ways to store user logins and passwords, their preferences, and all that kind of stuff. Whereas all that stuff is built-in right into ASP.Net. You can have a full membership system (with roles and all, user preferences and all), using 0 lines of code. And it's secure too. All the basic forms (login, logout, signup, lost password, etc) for it are all pre-made too (you can obviously write a custom one, or extend one if you prefer to). There's TONS of such controls that saves us hundreds of hours in development time. Want to have a simple form in classic ASP? Fine, enjoy writing all the cross-browser client-side javascript to validate it all before postback, and then all the server-side validation too (you can do all this in 0 lines of code in ASP.Net again). Sucking data out of your database (CRUD operations, using sprocs or parameterized queries), spitting it into a table, sorting it based on which column header is clicked, paging it efficiently (either by page numbers, or next/previous style links/buttons), then updating the database based on your changes and all that? Tons of "fun" in classic ASP for sure (especially when you start to account for concurrency problems, table relationships, using transactions, etc), whereas you can do this in 0 lines of code in ASP.Net yet again (just like you could databind to business objects instead). From navigation, to calendars, to plain old tables, to reporting, to whatever else you need, there's controls to do it saving you a lot of time. It would be a LOT quicker listing what ISN'T wrong with classic ASP. I have yet to see a basic web technology that isn't very easy to learn. Feel free to debunk any misinformation I may have provided instead of calling people names. You're very much a beginner at this stuff and it clearly shows. When I see you recommending classic ASP, the one thing that comes to my mind is "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail". Other techs are far better, you just don't seem to know anything about them. You're hardly qualified to make recommendations. If I was going with a lightweight, low on features, easy to learn scripting tech, I'd sooner pick php. It's better in many ways (and believe me, you don't see me praising php too often!), not quite as stale, and dirt cheap to host too.

Actually, that registry path doesn't even exist anymore (FYI).

As of Vista the list of patches isn't kept in the registry anymore (highly likely that Win 7 and Win 2008 too work just the same) but rather in DataStore.edb I'm not sure if it's the same .edb files as the Win CE database format or Exchange's, and not sure if there's a OLEDB provider for it or anything (probably not) Either ways, you'd want to use the WUA API instead, which is documented here. And here's a fairly good example on how to use it.

Nope. Hardly accurate. All win95 and 98 editions were pretty good for their times. Only one truly sucked (ME). On the NT side, I don't recall one truly sucking either. The only one that comes close is Vista, and even then only as a marketing failure (like cluberti just said). All of them suffered their share of issues at the time of release, which were eventually fixed by service packs. Your sample size is only 4 (ME, XP, Vista, 7), and you're switching between lines (ME -> XP), and one of those you're counting as a failure is very arguable (Vista). Had you taken more samples, or switched to the NT line at a different point in history, or looked at both series individually, or have a different view on what defines Vista's success i.e. anything but the one specific scenario you picked, then it doesn't hold true.

Not quite! ME removed features or hidden them (like real mode DOS). And the only new feature it seemed to bring was system restore, which was useful for re-infecting your PC if you used it... Vista brought us TONS new new stuff, like a new shell (new explorer, new start menu that doesn't suck, etc), SMB 2.0, desktop composing, the sidebar, aero glass (and thumbnail previews in the taskbar like win7 has, and flip 3d over alt-tab), a great x64 OS, a totally new installer (no more NT 3.1-era installer), a new deployment method (WDS instead of RIS), image-based deployments that are not HAL and language specific, MUI in Windows Update, built-in search, it gave us the same version of IIS than the latest win server (2008) has, some nice new apps (photo gallery, sniping tool, new games, etc), some updates to MCE, DirectX 10, MUCH improved power management (sleep, which acts like a hybrid between S3 and hibernate, and actually works!), the mobility center, some nice new fonts, and TONS more. Nearly 1 out of 4 computers is running it, and many of us are happily using it everyday. Hardly a ME-like failure.

It's the most (if not only) out of date tech for sure. 9 years without any actual upgrades... And it hardly offers anything over say, PHP even. I have yet to find anyone who couldn't grasp the basic concepts. And if they can't, then I'd be tempted to say they're in the wrong line of work. There's TONS of free training resources out there too. And with databinding and powerful pre-made components, most everyday tasks are far easier and quicker than before. ASP doesn't use VB, it rather uses VBScript (which isn't exactly great) or JScript. As for Perl, that's a no, unless you install a 3rd party extension that gives you PerlScript support, but if you wanted perl, why not use apache + mod_perl anyways? It doesn't really make any sense. Learning very outdated ASP tech dating from the NT4 days makes no sense these days. It's already been replaced for 7 years by something FAR better. I'd sooner learn PHP, even if I very much dislike it. Apache and IIS works fine for ~99% of the web. But yeah, use something else no one else does instead... Wow. Where to begin? No doctype? check. Missing basic tags such as the <html> tag? check. Having duplicate tags that shouldn't be duplicated such the <body> tag? check. No character encoding? check. Tons of improperly nested tags? check. Poor usage of CSS & selectors in general? check. Bad CSS that doesn't work using many browsers? check (can't see anything in IE, hardly a unheard of browser) No domain name? check. Page loaded with ads? check. Unprofessional-looking popups on a site that's seemingly meant to sell your services? check. Using some free hosting (untd.com)? check. No actual design to speak of (for someone who claims to be in design)? check. ... I could go on, and on, and on. I hate to say this, but even for a beginner, it's not exactly what I'd expect. One could do better just from reading the w3schools tutorials. And your page claims you specialize in this stuff... Don't take this personally, but after seeing your comments, like "php is kinda hard for me", "asp.net is harder to learn" and such, and from seeing you struggle with very basic things in other topics, and also from seeing your results (websites), you're not exactly the person I'd be asking for advice. And that's ignoring the other weird stuff (Word is part of Windows? learn HTAs? "I have no C or C++ compiler"? ...). And your sites don't even use any server-side tech (much less a database, which you also seem to find too complicated) anyways (yet you're obviously struggling), so you can't really make recommendations here. Time for a reality check perhaps. I fail to see how your computer having crashed is relevant to any of that.

Well, you can work your way around it indeed. You could also write a COM component too, and then use COM interop to call it... Or one could write apache modules in C++. With enough hackery and workarounds, you could probably use use anything really (GWBasic? VBA? ...). I guess you could probably count IE-only ActiveX components written in C++ in that category too. Let's put it that way: the day my boss asks me to do something like this is the day I put in my 2 weeks notice (I value my sanity, or whatever's left of it). Virtually everybody who does ASP.Net uses C# or VB [.Net], I'd say about 99% of the classic ASP'ers use VBScript (the other 1% being JSCript, sprinkle in tidbits of homemade COM components which most often are written in VB6), and then you have the other usual languages: PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, CF... No one in their right mind picks C++ for this, and his "so im stuck without C++ or C" comment was totally irrelevant with regards to modern web apps, and only shows his lack of basic, fundamental knowledge regarding web development (just like he thinks MS Word is included in Windows XP or Vista, instead of MS Office). I think you'll agree his posts are misleading at best (HTAs? VBA inside Word which is supposedly part of Windows? Telling him to learn VB when he mentioned PHP in his first post? ...), and it's really not getting him started in the right direction. The intent might have been good, but it's not helping him at all. I don't think he's in much of a position to be telling people what to learn by the looks of his other posts in this section (can't get a extremely simple app working, saying php is too hard, etc).

Because no one wants of it, and that's the only way it'll be installed on any computers. Most people do know about other browsers (once upon a time, most people used Netscape). And seeing Firefox's current market share (not counting those who tried it, but didn't like it), obviously a large number of people know there is "something else" they can use. They've been trying to get people to use their app for over a dozen years, they're giving it away, and yet their market share is still well below 1% and pretty much flat lined/not showing any increase. People are overwhelmingly choosing spyware-infested browsers like Chrome over it even... Even Netscape 6 has faster growth! I think at this point we can safely say no one wants of it. Even Linux on the desktop has more users, and that's saying a lot. Especially when we can already see Linux as failing quite badly in the adoption area. Macs grew an additional 2.17% of the market share in the last 6 months. Meanwhile, Linux went up by 0.01%. When the people abandoning Windows overwhelmingly chose another closed-source, proprietary, non Free platform that's just as expensive as Windows, even when it means you can only buy [pricey] hardware from a single vendor (hardware vendor lock-in -- with rather poor choices too) over the one you've been giving away for many years... By a ratio of 217 to 1, you know there's a real problem with your product. If Microsoft didn't exist, I wonder who they'd be blaming for their failures. Meanwhile, other companies manage to do quite well regardless (e.g. Apple) and aren't complaining about MS funnily.

I willingly left those out. I figured you already had plenty lined up as it is. An awful lot of people just don't take time to learn things properly (e.g. I've seen web masters who don't actually understand or even know the CSS box model). Once you know the things I mentioned, then you can worry about the rest. You'll have to make some choices next anyways. Do you want something where you can develop web apps real quick, even though it means more expensive hosting? In that case I'd go with something like asp.net. Or do you want hosting at rock-bottom prices, even if that means being stuck with a fairly ghetto language? In that case, more like php. All these technologies use vastly different languages, and access databases quite differently too. And from one database to another (MSSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, etc) things change a great deal too (price, features, speed, interface, you name it, it all changes). What you'll have to learn next will depend on those choices. Nooooooooooooooooo! First, there isn't a single technology that uses "classic" VB like that (unless you're going to make COM components out of your VB code, and use those? *shudder*). As for VB.Net (not that it's really called that anymore), it's ONLY useful if you're going to do asp.net, and even then, I think one's much better off learning a language with a more universal C-style syntax -- if he's going with asp.net then C# makes a lot of sense. VBScript? You gotta be kidding... The only thing that uses that, is classic ASP, a platform that's been replaced by asp.net back in 2002 (7 years ago), and hasn't had any real improvements since Win2k came out almost 10 years ago. IIS still serves that legacy stuff, but there's no way one should use that for new projects these days. Also, HTAs run on the client side, on your local machine, it's not the same thing *at all*. Again, web apps don't use C or C++ (unless you're going to write apache modules or something similar *shudders again*). VBA isn't used by anything either. If one wants good compilers for cheap, there's tons of them around, like the free MS Express Edition series -- including their Visual Web Developer app which is made specifically for making web apps in ASP.Net (using C# or VB ".Net" as languages). Database wise, they have SQL Server 2008 Express on that page too, but then again, hosting with SQL Server 2008 isn't the cheapest, and you still gotta make those choices. I mainly use ASP.Net with C# and SQL Server 2008 myself (developing using Visual Studio 2008), but people have different needs and make different choices. There's no point in telling him he should be learning ANY language at this point until he's at the point where he has to make those choices (language/database, based on several factors). You have to learn to walk before you run.

If you want to learn about making web sites, web apps and the like, you'll have to start with the very basics. In this case, it's learning HTML first. I would recommend w3schools' intro to HTML. You'll be writing markup in no time at all. Then start to learn CSS (make sure you get a good understanding of the box model) and Javascript next (they also have tutorials for those). Then you can worry about server-side technologies to generate HTML for you, databases (make sure to learn about SQL injection attacks), and all the other frameworks and stuff (e.g. jQuery).

I figured you wouldn't really get an answer as there doesn't seem to be too many embedded guys around here. There are many types of servos so it's not much help knowing just that (not that I actually use any). I'm not familiar with arduino board series either (I do however know the MCUs they use, it's just that we design & manufacture our own boards). As long as it has enough inputs/outputs of each kind you need and enough flash to store your code (which should be quite simple as you seemingly will make the EEE handle all the logic) you should be good to go. USB-wise, it just uses a simple FTDI chip, nothing special there. Seeing as you're from the Netherlands, I looked at both Arduino stores in that country. They both carry the Arduino Duemilanove (which looks OK) and not much else. Pretty cheap too: 26.18€ or 26.18€ (about $34 USD). Just review the specs and make sure if does what you need before buying it.

It supports some phenoms (limited max TDP/wattage though -- I doubt the 140W 9950BE will work, seems to be 125W max), but either ways, you'll likely have to update the BIOS for newer CPUs. Edit: looks like James_A beat me to it. Darn. OC wise, never tried that board, so no idea if it's any good at it (google for some reviews, most of them show boards' OC potential). I just bought a pair of M3A78-EM for the kids as their old box died last weekend. Very nice board. 7.1 channel 192KHz/24bit audio with a spdif out, 5 sata with raid plus one esata, gigabit ethernet, firewire (1394a), vga/dvi/hdmi (with sound too) and even displayport! And you can use 2 different outputs for a dual head setup. PCI-e x16 2.0 and CrossFireX, 4 DIMM slots up to 1066 even including ECC memory, Solid caps, etc -- it's got it all. 780G does H.264/VC1/MPEG2 decoding in hardware too, and it's a DirectX 10 GPU, Pixel Shader 4.0, and even does OpenGL 3 with the latest drivers. It supports CPUs that use up to 140W (not that I'd want one) and has HT3. Not bad at all for a $80 board (especially considering I won't even need to buy vid cards). Picked up a pair of 45W (should be even lower using Cool'n'Quiet) 4850E's with them too (and 4GB of DDR2 for each as well). Oh yeah, and I'm now XP-free, and all running x64 OS'es too now. Yay!

There's been about 100 users on here who reported a bad drive. Sure, that's not everyone whose drive failed, but still... 100 users out of hundreds of millions? It's way less than one per million i.e. nothing at all. Seems like a small number indeed. Especially if you compare to any drive that had "real" issues before (e.g. "deathstars", or the old Fujitsus where it's more like 50% affected). Meanwhile, I had 2 WD drives die on me in the last 3 months, and those can't easily be recovered using a RS232 cable -- they're dead for good, no way to get my data back (not even a new controller would work). And there seems to be firmware updates out for most models too, which makes it even less of an issue now. So, way under 1% of drives affected by a firmware bug that's actually fixed, and can be recovered otherwise in 5 minutes? Big deal. In fact, now I'm thinking I'll be getting a pair of 1.5TB Seagates in the next couple of weeks. Thanks, I wouldn't have risked it if you hadn't pointed this out. You essentially just sold some Seagate drives

Except he does say he does have one or more. No. There isn't an app in the world that will make you 100% sure it's all gone. No such thing. Here's where you're completely wrong. Nothing will survive even the most simple format. Nothing ever "survives", it just doesn't work like that. Sure, it doesn't work for stuff on other partitions (I never claimed so), but your install is clean. Eh? Your infected winlogon is on C: (unless you installed elsewhere -- and him too), and it semingly infects other .exe's everwhere in his case (so even more right), and reformatting the nasties sure works. The two are not mutually exclusive. It sounds like you have a nice mix of malware rather. Rootkit + IRC backdoor and what not. You also mentioned viruses and spyware... The botnet stuff mostly acts as a delivery method if I can say so (makes your PC download even more nasties, update, and do other bad stuff) If you say so Either ways, I won't waste time arguing any further with you, as you've also completely ignored all relevant advice from other very knowledgeable members i.e. DigeratiPrime & Tarun. You obviously think you know better than us all, and you're not looking for help or advice. No skin off my back, *I* am malware-free