CoffeeFiend

So much pointless harping over paint.net using the .NET framework (something that is shared by many apps, not used exclusively by one; it surely doesn't make paint.net "need 200 Mb of space")... Meanwhile you seem to have no issues over nLite and other apps using it (how come do I never see anyone cry over this one?) If they're already using nLite, paint.net will only take a couple MBs of space or such. Not that it's a mspaint equivalent or anything, but comparing paint.net to MS Office and OOo is simply ludicrous.

When you're infected this deeply (rootkits and all), the only sure way to clean it all is a clean reformat.

I meant that the other way around, not many of us around to answer such questions for others.

I only linked to a couple, but it's not exactly hard to find. I linked to 3, but google can easily find more (I even included a sample search query, many other queries work fine too) The algo is pretty simple, and it's really easy to port it from C# if you're more of a VB person -- there's even automated tools to do this for you, even online versions of it... And porting an existing vbscript to VB isn't exactly hard either as both languages are very similar in syntax. And like MagicAndre1981 said, you could even use reflector for this. I doubt it stopped working just because it doesn't explicitly mention on its home page that it's been tested with a unreleased beta OS, as those same digitalproductid's haven't changed in just about forever (Win2k era at least), nor their locations. Even more so as Win 7 is pretty much Vista R2, and all those old tools still work fine on Vista. Indeed, without the source it's in the wrong section. But I honestly don't see this section as a very good place to share code anyways. Useful bits tend to just get moved at the very end of a "repository" thread no one seemingly reads, which explains why I haven't bothered sharing FixPE (a C# app that does much the same as modifype.exe -- except it works on OS'es past XP and lacks a couple of its bugs), and even removed my font installer (fontinst.exe replacement) & screen saver scripts a while ago. Not that anyone noticed (as it just gets no readers). Feel free to delete the posts with no content. If anything, it would be FAR better if the section was split into more relevant subsections: a batch/cmd section, a scripting section (e.g. vbscript/jscript/autoit), an actual programming section (C, C++, C#, Java, ...) and perhaps one to share tools and toys (create a new post for your new tool, where people can reply, make requests, report bugs, ask for features, etc). Right now, most of what we see in here is along the lines of "help me [write for me] a batch file to do xyz" and not so much programming related anyways. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of programmers (as in people who this for a living) hanging around either.

Don't wanna p*** on anyone's parade, but I kind of fail to see the point. There's been apps to do exactly this for ages e.g. magical jellybean keyfinder, and they're open source too. Want to see how it's done? Download its source code, and look at TForm1.DecodeMSKey. Don't like or can't understand pascal? Fine, you can easily find sample code in basically any other language that exists within seconds using google searching for common related terms, like this. There's even pre-written vbscripts that do this... Or C# versions. Having yet-another-app that does this brings very, very little, especially when it's closed source.

Sure, you could do it in C# if you wanted, but that's quite overkill, and not so flexible: you'd have to recompile every time you make some small changes... Or you could avoid that at the expense of having to use a XML config file (i.e. app.config) which again seems a little over the top for something so simple. Plain old notepad is more than sufficient for this.

Not automatically. The easy solution is to make a quick script that: starts the required service(s) starts the application (and waits in the background, hidden) when the app terminates, it stops the services again A simple vbscript (or jscript or whatever) could easily do this for you in a few lines (about a dozen or so). Have a peek at the Win32_Service WMI class (specifically the StartService and StopService methods), and the Run method of the Wscript.Shell object.

Still voting for PerfectDisk. I've upgraded to the "for vmware" version recently (on Vista x64), which also defrags my VMs, without even having to install it in them. The Virtual Enterprise Ed is looking good too. It's still a lot better than Diskeeper and priced better too

I used to have a LOT of respect for the MVP title (especially in categories like C# and SQL Server), until I looked at the kind of people who get MVP awards for "desktop experience"... Some of the recipients in that category may be worth something, but as far as I've noticed...

Please change my username to CoffeeFiend. Thanks in advance!

I hate to say it, but his english is a LOT better than yours. Don't take it personally -- it's not meant as an insult, just stating cold hard facts. I can very easily understand his post (it's actually very clear) and the problem he's having (not that I can help as I'm not using Win 7), but I can't say the same about some of your posts (some of which I can barely understand or have to guess what you mean, and some replies who seem completely off-topic making me wonder if you understood what was asked/said in previous posts).

@cluberti: *was* is the keyword here (and even then, that's rather arguable). By today's standards, it's absolute crap though. Anyhow. Same stuff this month... Win95 stopped being rounded up to 0.01%, so it's now below 0.005%, and bundled in "Unknown". Win98 dropped much like usual (lost ~15% of its users last month). Ditto for WinME. That makes combined Win9x market share about 1/3 of 1% (and still dropping quite fast). Win2k down a bit too. Win 7 just appeared on the map, and sits at 0.1% (not that bad for a 1 month old beta of a unreleased OS I guess) Linux still stuck around the same 0.8% or so Vista up a bit, XP down a bit... (both by 1.x % like usual) Vista being pretty much 2 years old now day for day (gen avail was jan 30th 2007), and it gained 22% of the market share since then (close to a steady 1%/month). XP dropped by 22% since too. Firefox gone up a bit, IE 8 is still climbing slowly (0.9%-ish, IE 7 also up a bit, IE6 dropping fast), Chrome around the same (1%-ish), and Opera way behind as always. New pic as usual.

I got a crappy old phone that only makes actual phone calls (no SMS, no email, no camera, no java, no mp3 player, no fancy OS or anything like that). And I don't think I've even bothered charging it once in the last 2 years I don't have a use for one in the first place. I got a phone at home and on my desk at work, and my commute is only like 5 minutes too. My old mobile carrier expects to charge 70 cents/min for long distance calls (while I can get basic phone service with unlimited LD for $20 a month or less at home -- I couldn't talk a half hour on my mobile for $20!). And going with the new fancy phones, I'd get stuck with like a 3 year contract where I gotta pay like $70 or $80 monthly for a voice + data plan (several thousands of $ for something I got no use for in the first place)... Thanks, but no thanks!

You went out of your way to buy a crippled WMP-less version... You're the first person I even hear of that's done so (there is no demand at all for it, only 1500 units of XP N was sold to OEMs and even less so to customers, likely even less for Vista N). I wouldn't be surprised if lots of media stuff doesn't work on it, much like many apps don't work for those who insist on stripping IE from the OS. BTW, Paul Thurrott seems to have had no particular issues with XP N. Not that I've tried either, nor ever plan on doing so.

If you leave things alone, they'll actually work. WMP is a real POS IMO, but it's not Microsoft's fault is your install isn't working here.

Tools for what? Testing? I haven't really found anything great for that (easier to write your own). As far as Teracopy goes, I never saw any actual speed gains, perceived or measured. I tried it like a several times, and always went back to Windows' built-in copy.

Last I heard, signatures didn't have separate chapters... Never seen anyone try to cram so much in there before.

That statement is second to none as far as being uninformed.

QFT x3! These are the best posts I've read in a good while. Those people who chose not to adapt and for the most part quite lazy & unwilling to learn anything new and change their ways can keep living in the past for a while, but they'll soon enough find themselves replaced by people who aren't afraid of change & fighting it for no good reason. I'm starting to get a feel where Dilbert's "Mordac: The Preventer of Information Services" comes from right now. There's a lot of IT staff that just gets in your way like that, and I think we're seeing a prime example of that here. There's a lot of pointless whining, all over small changes in a *start menu* ffs. Then again, perhaps they just adapted to the Win95 start menu last year, and before that they were angry because MS took their so-much-better Win 3.11 GUI from them...

That's very much like saying "the BEST Vanilla Ice album" or something -- it's not saying much, at all! Even "least bad" is an understatement here. Not that I think v9 is actually any better than all the others. While I don't like nor use WMP, I see no real point to get the N version. Just don't use the player, it doesn't get in your way, start by itself or anything... Just like IE: worst POS ever, but there's nothing forcing me to use it either.

...just like for every other pre-built, pretty much. People want cheap, so they build using cheap parts (and then it breaks). Anyways. It's pretty hard to guess from so little information. And it's normal that it won't work without RAM, and that it'll beep (it's an error code indicating you have no RAM).

While I very much dislike (and the words are very weak) everything Blu-Ray stands for: Region coding AACS encryption BD+ DRM that can be re-secured & already has been... offering feature-incomplete players (i.e. profiles) making stuff I see as essential merely optional (like support for "better" codecs) very slow, buggy and overpriced players overpriced titles (movies/discs) going with java nonsense over simple and elegant markup like HD DVD did overpriced burners and discs (with not enough layers to really be worth it anyways) (etc), I don't think it's going to die. They're slowly getting some market share, albeit mostly due to the PS3, and the fact that there's nowhere else to go HD-wise... I wish H.264 in mkv files would get even more popular though (DivX 7 just moved on to that, which may help speed up things). I won't be sad if it goes the way of LaserDiscs though. Well, when our choice is between Intel's X-25E -- 32GB @ $600 for extreme performance (cheaper options are for the most part crap, often slower than HDs!), when you can get like 6TB of space for the same price... For a lot of us the choice is obvious. The gap may be narrowing, but it's still huge. The previous raptor-buying enthusiasts may soon start to buy smaller SSDs for use as OS drives, but that's an extremely small, tiny market. Not only it doesn't really mean much, but 1.5 million hours isn't impressive at all, considering it has no moving parts yet it's almost no better than purely mechanical devices: WD RE series drives claim 1.2M hours (and enterprise class SAS drives and the like claiming even more)

Yeah, no kidding. Late 80's/early 90's era stuff (Turbo C v2 is 20 years old!)... It's hard to believe there's people teaching using such grossly outdated/museum-ready stuff when there's vastly better options out for free. I'd sooner sign up for a different course than use that old crap -- a course that preferably uses technology out of this century, not 386's and MS-DOS 4.

Great way to get into court over anti-trust, i.e. competitors claiming Microsoft uses their "monopoly" over the OS to force their own virtualization products on their customers, thereby killing their business... Lots of people disagree. Either ways, if you don't like it, it's trivial to disable (even msconfig has entries for it, only takes 2 clicks) Processes? Just quit the apps you don't want open. Task manager also works. Or if you mean startup processes then just use autoruns... Services? services.msc has been there since pretty much forever. There's also the services tab in the task manager, and if you're a command line guy (like you say you are), then you'd also know about net start/net stop and sc.exe too. Lots of options here. I disagree. I think it's better this way. Yes, sometimes it's an extra click to get to things, but I think it's still better than having like a hundred different icons in the control panel and having to find the right one... No big deal either ways. And if you really can't adapt, then just use the classic view. Things will always move around with new versions of *any* OS, get used to it, it's called change. It's the way forward for sure, but there's still a lot of people & company with legacy stuff around. Yeah, so basic users pay as much as companies and power users (only to have features they don't care for anyways). News for ya: people want cheap, and MS isn't going to sell the equivalent of Win 7 Ultimate for $100 or less. You must be joking! If you're the kind of person who "uses the cmd line more than click around", surely getting to cmd.exe isn't an issue for you: hit start, c, o and there Command Prompt is right at the top, just hit enter (can also be pinned at the top of the start menu) hit start + r, then type cmd and enter (just like before) make a shortcut on your desktop (just like before) make a quickstart icon (or "pin" it in Win 7 I guess), much like before (no need to even click on them anymore as of vista -- just use the shortcut keys) use any of the "cmd here" registry entries/tweaks or make your own use any of the alternative cmd shells (tons of them around, even as "addons" for various apps e.g. VSCmdShell for Visual Studio) etc... If you use the cmd prompt even more than that, then you can even have it open as a startup entry, or just not close it all the time or something. It never was hard, and it's not getting any harder. No idea what you're expecting here.

No one ever said it can't (I only pointed out the standard tool to do this, built right into Windows -- why reinvent the wheel? Yes, I *am* lazy, why do you ask?) And yes, it's definitely a LOT more capable than bat/cmd files (then again, pretty much everything is). As for the vbscript (or using anything else), well, it depends how you want it to work, like how you expect to tell it what characters to use. It's trivial to do, we just need to know what you want.