CoffeeFiend

+1 to that. So much useless junk running there... +1 to that. I truly don't see the value NOD32 brings over the others which are both quite decent and mainly free. For 4 home PCs, NOD32 is $100/year. I've seen consultants who used to push for NOD32 pretty hard who stopped selling it altogether. It was making the servers it was supposed to protect BSOD quite a lot. They've moved on to selling Kaspersky (I use neither) Then again, any decent AV will do just fine, so long as you try to stay reasonably secure. My first step would be to uninstall Java altogether if possible (it's been named the most vulnerable browser plugin; and it's also incredibly useless IMO), and keeping Adobe stuff updated. That alone should make far more difference than running any commercial AV would.

Today's winner is jeffw1999! They've moved to spamming hergoods.info now seemingly.

You'd have to test if colItems is null, or its count is less than one, and then wrapping the for loop in that. But honestly this is much simpler in PowerShell (the "modern" replacement to batch and vbscript, which also built in modern windows versions and otherwise it's free and easy to install). Your 3 scripts are 3 simple one-liners: Script 1: mv C:\XPC\Output\DocuPrint\*.pdf C:\XPC\Output\DucuPrint_WaitingtoPrint\ Script 2: ls C:\XPC\Output\DucuPrint_WaitingtoPrint\*.pdf|%{start -FilePath $_.FullName -Verb Print} Script 3: rm C:\XPC\Output\DucuPrint_WaitingtoPrint\*.pdf That's all of it, and you won't be getting a single error message either, even if there are no files. I willingly kept the docuprint/ducuprint inconsistency as your folders are likely named that way, so adjust that to your wishes. That's quite a simplistic system though. It assumes you only ever want one copy and obviously no checks are done on client's PDF files i.e. is there sufficient resolution on images? are fonts embedded? are there any hairlines? (no point in me listing everything as you certainly know this stuff far better than I do). But if it does whatever you need then why not.

Might not be a bad idea. I ban a spammer for this basically every single day... Claire63 today, Cathleen81 yesterday, jones2012 the day before, and wasson66, dbonelli80, nspokes90, etc.

You probably mean DDC (or it's data, called EDID). Not that it would tell you how old a device is, or if it has touch / multitouch compatibility. If you want to test for that you typically call GetSystemMetrics with either SM_DIGITIZER or SM_MAXIMUMTOUCHES as a parameter. They'd have to ensure it's an internal digitizer that's detected, because I definitely wouldn't want my intuos tablet to enable the "Metro for you!" mandatory bit. Personally, I just think it needs an opt-out, some old-school checkbox or a pair of radio buttons to disable it. Anything really. So long as it can be disabled in any way but I don't see it happening anymore.

That's ATSC feeds, or OTA ATSC feeds. Whatever you wanna call them. ATSC is the standard used to transmit over-the-air in all of North America. Microsoft disabled that feature for us Canadians, even though we use the exact same broadcasting standards (we're supposed to be fully switched to digital by now too). Nice of them, isn't it? We have to resort to rather elaborate tricks for it to work at all, and there's no program guide for my local channels either. I wonder what other countries Microsoft has been locked from having OTA reception besides us. So yes, if I took that away from you *and* CableCARD, now you'd know what it's like in other countries I believe you now fully understand why most of us don't use it. OTA ATSC feeds work fine in basically all programs except media center (and they typically record in more "standard" formats too) They already weren't appealing, now add all the various online hosts going offline with no warning (or being sued), azure crashing on leap days, high prices, trusting another company (and their govt & authorities) with the safety and privacy of your documents... Thanks but no thanks. Funnily, that's another area where MS is failing pretty darn hard: their Azure cloud services.

LOL. I thought CableCARD was the one and only reason some people used WMC in the first place. I mean, if I took that and ATSC feeds away, what are you left with? Yeah, analog 480i capturing... Great. Why not use a VCR while we're at it? CableCARD is what makes it bearable for the tiny part of the world where it's used. I wish. Canadian Netflix doesn't have 10% of the content of their USA counterpart but still costs the same. And since we have low bandwidth (usage) caps on our internet connections it's not much of an option either. At $4.50+taxes/GB over 50GB it could get really expensive very quickly! I mean, just watching one movie in full quality over my cap just once (2h movie @ 4.8mbit video) would cost me $23 extra (you might as well buy the Blu-Ray movie instead). Cablecos and telcos (like Bell which is our main satellite TV provider) saw some competition, and figured they'd crush it by making sure you can't use their competitors' online services by making it too expensive. Bell even tried to push for 25GB limits recently, and most "basic" broadband plans are capped at 5GB/month or lower. That 5GB/month plan is $40/mo if you don't have cable TV with them, or it's $56/mo for the 50GB plan (plus sales tax of course). Welcome to Canada! Actual laughter was produced.

It's not that you're not "our kind of people" necessarily. The forum is mostly based around deploying Windows (IT stuff), silent installations, solving Windows problems, some Win9x guys hanging out and other similar topics. And you're seemingly here to offer wallpapers, icons and similar content which is not most people's main focus as you can see. We had just one post in the "Wallpapers & Icons" section so far thus far for the entire year (before you posted in there), and no replies to it. And 5 posts for all of 2011. So don't be surprised if you're not seeing too much chat in there. It's not like we're deviantart or tumblr.

You don't have MS' permission to distribute their binaries, that's definitely not legal, and such things here will get you insta-banned. You've been warned. Topic closed for obvious reasons.

Honestly, I don't think too many people will even notice it's not there. Almost nobody uses it, and for a couple main reasons: 1) it's a pretty terrible video/audio player: -it supports no popular subtitle formats -it makes it a pain to play .mkv files -it can't seek into FLAC audio files etc 2) outside of the USA media center is just about useless as a DVR: -CableCARD doesn't exist outside the USA -ATSC feeds are USA-only, besides a handful of channels in Canada and WMC disables ATSC support if your country is set to Canada. So you have to hack at the registry to even enable that then. -DVB support (what most of the world is using) is pretty darn awful, if not completely useless specifically for DVB-S (then again Vista didn't support DVB-S cards at all, back when I still had a use for it) So the best thing most of us can do with it is record 480i stuff with an analog TV tuner, from the output of your decoder (changing channels with an IR blaster) in horrible quality. It's no wonder people just buy the HD PVR from their cableco or satellite provider instead. So nothing of value was lost IMO. I've tried it several times from XP to Win7 and it's always been a huge let down.

Talking about that -- their mobile devices not selling: Microsoft Windows Phone Marketing Manager leaves after 5 months in the job. If it doesn't sell, it just might be because people don't want of it, or that they're simply not good enough. I very much see their tablets sharing the same fate. I mean, it's basically WinCE (another product that consumers don't buy) with Metro on top, or the Windows Phone OS on a large phone that can't make calls... Windows, but without Windows apps or anything else that makes it worth using. Oh, and Media Center is now an addon, and not available for what would have been called the "home" edition, but just for the pro edition now? That's going to sell great! Edit: seemingly one of my kids' schools is lending iPads next year. And you can now "borrow" ebooks from our city's public libraries (with DRM/expiry) if you have an iPad. Add too that all the apps and the fantastic hardware and you have a winner, even if the price tag is pretty high.

...and that's most likely what RT stands for. Or that, yes. Or possibly Ridiculous Tablet? Refurbished Trash? Regret This? Or Return-it-to The-store? I dunno. But then there would be an edition that would be worth buying, and if people have the freedom of choosing whether or not to use Metro then nobody will use it. Sure, that would mean a even more certain failure for Metro (just how much higher than 100% can you go really?), but at least it wouldn't be an outright failure for Win 8 as a whole. Seemingly they don't mind the Windows brand to be associated with several major failures and losing market share in what's essentially their "only trick" (desktops), so long as they have that small, tiny chance at selling some tablets. It's quite a gamble and the odds & outcome both look really bad to me. It looks like we have another 4 years or so of hearing "Windows sucks", "LOL Vista Metro", "I'm switching to [other OS]", "Downgrade rights" and "help me upgrading from Win8 to Win7". It's going to suck, especially so soon after the Vista fiasco. Users and developers alike are starting to doubt of the platform's future and to strongly consider alternatives. That's all Ballmer & Sonofski are succeeding at. It's funny how that seems so obvious to everyone but Ballmer and Sinofski. At this point we can only hope that the shareholders will do like RIM's shareholders did. It's about time they get some competent management.

The VC++ runtime has one of the worst installers I've ever seen. It always seems to want to extract itself in the root of one of your drives and then leaving all the installation files there... You'd think MS would have figured it out by now. I mean, they only made the OS, the dev tools, the runtime you're installing, the windows installer engine and everything else involved...

+1. A nice water cooling setup that will perform better than a great heat sink will cost a LOT more than $70. I've seen CPU water blocks that cost more than that with taxes and shipping included. And you still have no reservoir, radiator, pump, coolant, fittings, hoses, fans, etc. And there's no way a water cooling setup could possibly be easier to install than a heat sink.

Ouch. Here for $500 you could get a i5 2500K (can be overclocked), a decent Z68 motherboard (e.g. Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3), 16GB of DDR3 1600 (4x4GB) and a Radeon HD 6750 1GB... That would be equal to 50h of work at minimum wage (gross not net) which is really not that bad if you're working for more than minimum wage. I can't think of an easy way to easily compare cost of living though. I wonder how many hours it would take at minimum wage for the same upgrade kit (a whole year?) Edit: I guess I could use GDP per capita for a simple comparison. Roughly $50000 for Canada vs $10000 for Brazil. And you say the same parts cost 3x the price there too?

Not having a better one doesn't mean this one's any good. But sure, I can try too: it's like Win98: the benefits were very much unclear when it came out. Other than the new "skin" and lots of bloat (vs Win95 on hardware from that era), the only real change seemed to be better USB support but almost nobody had USB devices yet. Yes, it also came with IE4 but you could install it on Win95. Oh, and ACPI too but too bad it never worked reliably on hardware from that era. Or AGP support built in, but Win95 OSR2 had that too -- same for DirectX 5.2. Not by any stretch of the imagination. There's been countless worthwhile improvements over the years, like support for lots of new hardware (multi-core CPUs, USB2/3, SATA, AHCI, Blu-Ray, PCI-e, SSD, etc), new and much improved shells, ACLs, cleartype, better power saving options, being able to have multiple users logged on at once, window composing, plug and play that just works, new network stacks/filesystems/supported formats/management tools/etc, group policy, WMI to manage stuff, active directory, MUI support, new deployment tools, etc. And a 64 bit OS wasn't really that big of a deal at first. You have it completely backwards IMHO. Much like Win98's benefits weren't exactly clear at the time. But now, with dirt cheap RAM, video cards with loads of memory, tons of apps with a 64 bit version (and even some without a 32 bit version) that can both use more RAM when required and also get extra speed from the extra CPU registers... it's a pretty obvious choice in most cases. That's actually assuming he meant x64 in the first place. He was talking about a 64 bit OS. Win NT 3.1 had a 64 bit version back in 1993 for the Alpha architecture. Being 64 bit i.e. the data bus width by itself is no big deal (at all, really). The main advantage of x64 is rather being able to address more RAM (which is not what "64 bit" refers to either -- we only have 48 address lines which limits the address space to a mere 256TB). So yeah, back in 2005 when 4GB RAM costed quite a lot and that the technology wasn't so mature nor compatible it was very much pointless (if not just a cause of undue problems). But fast forward 5 to 7 years, with RAM becoming dirt cheap, video cards having 512MB+ of RAM and x64 software being readily available... The big picture changed significantly since 2005.

DOS extenders did let apps use loads of RAM easily (DOS4GW, Pharlap, etc). Also, DESQview used similar tricks (memory paging & swapping) to give us multitasking in DOS (yes, as in running more than one app at the same time under DOS). It was actually very easy living without Win 3.x -- the main disadvantage was that you had no solitaire or minesweeper Win9x isn't special. Of course there was something before. And there was something before that as well, and so on (lots of things before MS-DOS too). I'd much rather "remember" MS-DOS which was quite a bit more useful, had far more software, was a lot easier and a lot of fun to develop for, was used a lot more and still is to this day... There's also a lot of nice old 8 bit and "non-PC" platforms worth remembering a whole lot more than Win 3.1 IMO. Very bad analogy IMO. How is it unclear in any way? If you want to make full use of 4GB+ of RAM (you can get 8GB of DDR3 for like $40) then you want a 64 bit OS, and that's also its main advantage (being able to use lots of RAM). It's really that simple. I'm not sure what you're not understanding there. There were no such things as service packs back then. Or updates for that matter.

Like I said, this creates a standard network share (not some sort of simplified share). If you want to set advanced options like permissions then you have to to it after (it's not magic). WMI is the standard, built-in way that MS gives admins to administer network shares (and lots of other things).

Indeed. I'd be surprised if they got anywhere near 11%, based on how their Windows Mobile/Windows Phone/Zune/Zune HD/Kin devices are selling. Or not selling rather. Zune, Zune HD and Kin were killed outright, and the phones are well below 1% of the smartphone market share by most website statistics reports. And it's not like it's some new product either: Windows Mobile (now rebranded to Windows Phone) would be 12 years old right now. So much time wasted for so little market share (just like Linux)... You'd think they'd get the point by now and stop pouring money into it. Metro not being very much liked by most (due to being forced on desktops) probably won't help, and WOA tablets being incompatible with anything useful won't help either. Yep. Everyone gets a copy of Windows that sucks because of that.

The standard way to manipulate network shares is using WMI, either via vbscript or powershell (both of which are built into Windows) Here's a quick example on technet's scripting guys that shows (and explains) how it works using powershell and here's the MSDN documentation for the Win32_Share class which you need to use. TL;DR: it's a 2 liner in powershell: $somevarname=[WMICLASS]"Win32_Share" $somevarname.Create("c:\somepath","SomeShareName",0) ...unless you don't plan on doing anything else with shares, then you can even make it a one liner: [WMICLASS]"Win32_Share"|%{$_.Create("c:\somepath","SomeShareName",0)} It needs to be run elevated of course. You may want to change the share or NTFS permissions too.

Me neither. But I remember seeing a lot of DOS menu systems back then, some of which used to be somewhat popular (but my memory fails to remember their names unfortunately). The main problem with them is that they used memory, and it wasn't uncommon to require "at least" some amount of conventional/EMS/XMS memory to run some app (where we had fancy optimized config.sys menus, some with qemm), and the menu used enough for the program not to run...

Before that, people were saying the same thing about 20MB hard drives, and that was a luxury not many could afford either. Floppies also seemed quite large. I mean, you could fit several full games on one, and I'm not talking about 1.44MB floppies either! People have always said that. I almost wonder if people were saying that when cavemen were making drawings on cave's walls... And these days we have no problems filling drives of a few terabytes. These days online hosts have petabytes of data. Megaupload for example had between 25 and 28 petabytes of data -- that's over 25 000 000 GB. I'm not sure how much space Amazon's S3 has, but they have price breaks for customers that use more than 50TB... I don't see this trend stopping anytime soon, nor will people stop saying "this is more than we'll ever need". All these years I thought GEM was an Atari ST-only thing... Not that I've ever used CP/M (I mostly used 8 bit machines before MS-DOS).

Yes. Especially with sleep that just works and that we don't have to reboot nearly as often as we used to. Sure, it's nice to have faster boot times but it's a really minor point when you look at the big picture. Windows needs a lot of work in many areas (I had listed just a few points here before). And when one of them gets addressed it's often in a half-baked, very basic way e.g. how Windows handles zip files natively. It's almost worse than having nothing. Even crappy WinZip 4 from 1995 is a million times better than what Win8 still has... Or just like it's finally getting ISO mounting, but years late and with less features & less supported formats than Daemon Tools 3.02 from 2002. It's like they're not even trying. So much useful things they could do... but instead of making it a truly fantastic desktop OS i.e. further improving what they had, they force this frankeinstein-ish hybrid smartphone/desktop UI on us which might be okay on a tablet but sucks very badly on a desktop.

Exactly. There's a handful of people obsessing over how fast it boots when I reboot like once a month. That might save me all of 2 minutes per year! Or indeed, how it would run better on a ten year old computer which I'd never want to use for anything in the first place. As if those are main concerns, especially when Win7 already works great on 5+ year old hardware. If you take away the new task manager and explorer then there's basically no new worthwhile features left. A pair of minor features doesn't justify the price tag (I mean, SP2 for XP brought us more functionality for free), especially when it comes with that Metro trash which MS won't let you disable.