CoffeeFiend

Haven't counted, but it's certainly not 5x. Besides, I fail to see the real relevance of that particular metric. You could have one single service use up more resources than 50 others combined -- the total amount means very little, and it ain't 5x as many regardless. Also, what do drivers even have to do with this? You seem to think coming with more drivers is somehow a bad thing. I've never seen anyone say that. But a lot of people use a lot of the new features. Again, I fail to see the point here. Like what? I have yet to encounter such a thing. It's really no different than previous versions. You can still disable services you don't want and all that just like before. Except it isn't twice as expensive, it doesn't use 5x more resources, doesn't have 5X more restrictions, etc. To quote cluberti: "you're just spouting FUD". And as far as compatibility goes, just go peek at the "vista software incompatibility" thread. Yep, there's almost nothing on the list (feel free to add some to the list). You're coming off as one of those FUDsters who yap about Vista compatibility without knowing the first thing about it (simply because they never actually tried it). Very, very few stuff doesn't work with it. Yes, I completely agree there. People need to learn Windows from scratch now, double clicking and all that. And it sure takes a rocket scientist to find the Control Panel and the Run box in this very complicated menu: $20 goes to the first person who can spot them first (not). Nevermind to find the control panel if you were too lazy or can't see what's right in your face, hit the start button on your keyboard, then start typing "control" (for control panel), and by the time you typed the 3rd letter or so, it'll have found it (right at the top of the list, just hit enter and it'll open) So if it's expensive, then you don't "get your money's worth", and if it isn't 5x more expensive then "it's certainly isn't 5x better". So if it's expensive, it sucks, and if it isn't, it still sucks. Like they stand a chance winning at that game. Your costs are whatever hardware is required to run the modern OS of your choice (which is really cheap nowadays), plus the price of the OS. The only thing that's changed here, is that a basic PC isn't $2000+ anymore (plenty of them below $500). Are we a milking cow? Well, we're in a capitalist society, and MS is there to make money for their shareholders. Perhaps you might want to change how the economy works? If you don't like the licensing terms, then feel free not to use Windows. There's Macs (lots of people are perfectly happy with those), Linux, BSD and all that. Or you can stick to DOS 6.22 for forever -- their last OS to not have serial numbers, activation, WGA, DRM or any of that (well, it did have some "obfuscated" things like you were referring to before, and undocumented stuff), because that's not about to change anytime soon. Yes, and Bill Gates himself held a gun to my head saying "install Vista or else!" I talked about two? It brings a lot of benefits to most people (it might be more noticeable to them in the long run though). Read cluberti's points for a good summary. JFGI. Plus, see cluberti's points. Except that it's not the case at all. You don't have to "empty" RAM at all. It's not like buckets filled with water... No "calculations" either. Very easy question: letting it sit there doing nothing, while it could be put to good use. While the computer is doing nothing, if it can pre-fill it with the apps & data I'm likely to load next, to make them load faster, then YES! By all means do it. There is NO advantage to let it sit there unused.

I dunno about you, but I'm sure making use of my new hardware. Perhaps you meant the same OS be 5x faster on 5x faster hardware. And for the most part, it is the case. That new 5x faster CPU plays 1080p H.264 video just great and all that. Perhaps what you really were thinking is 5x more responsive. But hardware specs vs responsiveness isn't linear or anything (it's a lot more complicated than that). What? If you're sitting there doing nothing? The box is idle regardless. How much more idle should it be? You should have plenty of them left for use by your apps. It does bring a LOT of new features. Just because you don't see them, or don't know they're there doesn't mean they aren't there. There you go. You want something cheap like most people. By that same logic, Linux and BSD are worth nothing. Price alone means nothing. Everybody with more than 2 brain cells knows software isn't priced like that. Every edition has a specific pricing, and it's all calculated by bean counters to maximize profit (low profit * high volume + medium profit * medium volume + high profit * low volume, to give the maximum total $$$). So anyone who actually sees and understands the benefits of [insert random software] is automatically a fanboy eh? News for you: there's always been a lot of people welcoming the changes, new features and all that instead of living in the past and resisting change, be it an OS or anything else. Calling people "Vista fanboys" makes as much sense as calling people who upgraded to utorrent 1.8 (for they wanted Teredo or IPv6 support or any other feature) "utorrent 1.8 fanboys" (oh-my-god, you're using the latest version! you fanboys!) It has more features for sure, that's a fact. Different features are of varying usefulness to different people, like it's been the case for any new version of any new software ever. For all I know, maybe no new feature is useful to you in any software past what a 1977 vintage Apple II provides (a basic GUI an a way to start apps). And yes, people are requesting those things. Horrendeous restrictions like what exactly? It's a vast improvement. Even the wikipedia page you linked to talks about some of them. There's a lot of whitepapers and such about this stuff. Go read them, then you'll understand how it works, why certain design decisions were made, etc. And in practice, apps are very responsive too. Plus, some of the stuff is just plain obvious (like not paging half of everything to disk for no reason -- free RAM is wasted RAM). And it clearly shows from your lack of fundamental understanding of the software development business. Go ahead, write yourself a trivial app in some low-level language, you'll start to see the light. It's 100% NOT about lazyness (that bit about .NET is not only troll-ish but 100% wrong). You want someone to make you an app in C++ instead of C#? No problem, but it'll take like 4x the lines of code, 10x as long to develop, twice as long to squash the bugs (both in developer time and time you're using the app), hence the price will be about 10x higher (and new versions with the new features you want will be out every 4 years instead of every 6 months). Oh yeah, who was saying a few lines above that they wanted cheap software again? (like, "thanks god it's not 5x the price!") You'd rather pay thousands more for software, or finally having to upgrade past 256MB of RAM? Yeah, I thought so too! 2GB of RAM is $30, whereas you can pay like $150/hour for a consultant writing code (add LOTS of such hours, plus a LOT of QA/testing time and all that). In the end, the software does its job great (you can actually spend time adding new & useful features to solve the problem at hand instead of working on low-level stuff), and runs on commodity hardware, and is inexpensive (a big concern for anyone who'd buy your apps). Besides, you bash .NET and call people who use it "wannabe programmers imposing bloat on us", yet you praise nlite and vlite (oh, sweet irony!) Saying .NET developers are wannabe programmers that need to work hard for their job, is EXACTLY like calling a carpenter who uses power tools lazy, wannabe carpenters who need to earn their wages by cutting every piece of wood with a plain old manual saw, not using nail guns, etc. Both are just tools that let you get the job done quicker, without wasting time on stuff that doesn't really matter, and in the end, costing less for the same end result. Yes, people even have to complete projects on time and budget nowadays! Complex concept, I know. Yes, because it's hard to right click, picking the theme tab, picking one and hitting apply. God forbid they enable pretty eye candy features out of the box and that the 1% that don't want it have to click like 5 times to disable it. Besides, I'd say probably less than 1% of tech calls are related to "skins". Seriously, I've never seen a trouble call or such placed for that, ever.

So you have no internet from when you wake up at like 7am until 9am, and no internet past 8pm, so it'll "only" cost $100/year to power that? Just so it uses Windows? Even if you're dead set on using Windows' inferior NAT solutions, I'd at least use something less power hungry. This might sound harsh, but I hope you won't take it the wrong way. If you don't have enough patience to learn simple command line environments & commands, and using industry standard solutions & tools for problems like this, then perhaps you shouldn't bother with your A+ or IT in general (or getting Visual Studio for that matter). With IT budgets being slashed non-stop, IT people always expected to do more with less and all that, it's not surprising to see Linux's presence to be increasing a LOT, especially on servers (particularly for tasks like NAT and DNS) A cheap box with Linux (or BSD) will handle NAT/firewall a million times better than Windows will (and with VLANs, QoS, advanced routing, etc), and it'll also run Apache + MySQL + PostgreSQL + PHP + Perl + Python and more for your "web" needs, Squid, Tomcat, can be used as a domain controller (using samba) or active directory (using OpenLDAP) controller, handle file shares (CIFS, NFS, etc using samba), print server usage (CUPS), DNS (BIND + OpenDNS), DHCP, PXE, mail, CVS + SVN + Hg + whatever other SCM repositories you want, a DynDNS client (for home), SSH, FTP server duties (+ SFTP & SCP) using one of many rock-solid & full-featured FTP servers, can be used as a SAN (i.e. as a iSCSI target, or ATAoE or whatever you want), handle backup'ing documents/computers over the network, VPN (e.g. OpenVPN), running dozens of great/handy network apps (like Nagios, Munin, Cacti, RRDool, etc), will work as a VM server (using Xen or KVM or VMware Server or whatever), and countless more things. All that (much more than any Windows box could handle) for $0 worth of licenses, $0 worth of CALs, and $0 for each subsequent OS upgrade...

I think they should too, but then 99% of end users would just say "I have no idea WTF any of this technical stuff means". And most of the people that understand how it works in the first place are already aware of some of the kernel changes. Again, I guess they just can't win.

Those are pretty power hungry. You don't really want to have one of those run idle like that 24/7 at your place. It would probably cost you like $200 extra in electricity per year (whereas a good router that runs Linux will only cost you like $50 in the first place, and use almost no power). When it comes to NAT, there's a LOT of better solutions for sure. Most being Linux or BSD based, free, and running on a wide range of hardware from inexpensive low-power embedded devices like routers to high-end servers. From do-it-yourself solutions using standard tools and apps, to ready-to-use solutions (e.g. pfSense, SmoothWall, m0n0wall, ClarkConnect, etc).

Not really. Microsoft has ALWAYS done this. It's nothing specific to Vista, people just don't remember. Win98 & Win98 SE went out of general availability 6 months after XP was released. 2 Years in WinME's case which is still quite bad considering it was released only a year before XP (it was only available for 3 years total). And 2 years + 3 months for Win2k. Again, they've always been doing this (e.g. NT4 not being available a couple years after Win2k was released). Nothing's changed really. Hmmm, no. All modern mainstream OS'es use FAR more than this. For example, Mac OS X calls for at least "9GB of available disk space", and my Ubuntu install is about that size too. Even XP doesn't only use 1GB of disk space when you count the paging file, hibernate file, system restore and all that stuff (FAR from it), and that's without counting anything like the recycle bin usage, the client side cache, browser cache, temp files and all that (in which case the gap narrows even further). So Vista isn't really that bad. Personally, I couldn't care less how many GB it uses, it's dirt cheap anyways. That XP install took ~2GB of disk space back in 2001. A 40GB WD drive in 2001 was $250, which is over $300 in today's dollars (using a very conservative inflation rate of 3%). So it used about $15 of disk space (closer to $20 when you count taxes) -- that's pretty darn bad/expensive! Nowadays, you can get 640GB WD drives for $73, and assuming Vista takes 12GB, that's like $1.50 with taxes -- cheaper than ever! And that's without having to front around $300 for the hard drive in the first place. So XP cost 10x to 15x more in disk space to install -- doesn't look too good when you look at it that way. On that 40GB drive (only ~38 "real" GB), you only had 36GB left. On that dirt cheap 640GB'er (more like 610 "real" GB), you still have 600 or so GB left (over 15x more space left over for your use) In short: MUCH cheaper prices per GB, MUCH cheaper drive costs overall, MUCH more space left, Windows uses a LOT less $$$ worth of disk space, and other OS'es are just as "bad". I fail to see why some people make it sound like it's a big deal when we never had it so good. It's just like complaining things cost 5x more than they used to 20 years ago, completely disregarding you're making over 50 times what you made back then. And the complaint about "bloat" is as old as computers are. Yes, Vista takes more space than XP does. XP takes more space than Win9x does. Win9x also takes a LOT more space than Win3.11 did (full CD vs a few floppies). Win 3.11 was also a lot bigger than DOS 6.22 (like 3x as many floppies -- "just for a GUI"). DOS 6.22 used 3x 1.44MB floppies, which is a lot compared to older versions of it which used less floppies, of lesser capacity. And even those used more space than CP/M (one 175KB 8" floppy), which is still a LOT more than many computers of the time had for the OS (a handful of kilobytes of ROM). And even before that, they used even less (a few bytes, entered via punch cards or using plain old switches). Notice the trend? You could just as easily complain 1975's software was bloated (and most people wouldn't care either). New computers have more power, a vastly different architecture, and also multiple more orders of complexity. Also, the cost of hardware vs the cost of programmers has shifted a great deal (from thousands of $ per kilobyte of space, to over $100/hr of programmer's time -- not counting the extensive testing and all that). And the notion of what people expect out of an OS (and software in general) has greatly changed too. So programming/development techniques/methods and all that have also evolved a lot over the years. Things like using object-oriented programming (to "encapsulate" levels of complexity, by making into several simpler layers), and programming in higher level languages and such (faster to develop, still runs great on commodity hardware, costs less to develop & maintain, etc). And increasingly, more time/money is spent on things like testing & QA, and only optimizing the parts where it really counts (profile the app, and optimize the parts that actually need it), and that's basically market-driven. Those people who never cease to complain about bloat can just get together and start writing their own OS from scratch 100% written in hand-optimized assembly as far as I'm concerned (right, they don't because it's nearly impossible, but they sure like holding others to different standards). Or then software makers could deliver what those people want, but writing everything like that would take like 100x longer to develop (a new version of Windows every 15 years anyone?), so cost 100x more to make (probably MUCH more than that, considering the added complexity, the increase in lines of code, bugs to squash, and everything to test), and in the end, no one would be willing to pay the price (people already complain Windows costs too much heh). When you're Microsoft, you just can't win: -you add new features, they say bloat! you don't, and they say there's no reason to upgrade -you change things, people complain about change. you don't, and people complain it's stale -you make things better, people complain about change and having to learn, you don't, and they complain things are still broken -you bundle a media player and you get sued for billions by the EU, and if you didn't, you'd be the only modern OS that doesn't ship with one -you make the GUI prettier and people will say it's only a new skin on the same old OS, and if you upgrade the kernel then they won't notice any of the changes because they can't see them ... No matter what they do, there's always going to be people complaining. Mind you, there's still a LOT of work that needs to be done about Windows and things that suck about it.

The Datacenter Ed is basically the Enterprise Ed, except it can be used on servers with more than 8 sockets. Considering that it costs $3000 per processor (not counting CALs), nobody would waste money buying it unless you have more than 8 processors (at 8 processors, Enterprise Ed is "only" $4000, and Datacenter Ed is $24000). So your uncle must be filthy rich! Giving away "old" 16 processor servers (likely 64 cores) with a $48000 OS license included. Either ways, Windows makes for a very poor NAT solution (be it using ICS or RRAS), unless you go for the extremely over-complicated/beyond overkill ISA Server 2006 for a mere $1500/CPU option. A $50 WRT54GL works a million times better IMO (and supports VLANs and tons of advanced things, is low power, maintenance|trouble|hassle-free and all that) I like Windows as much as the next guy, but NAT is one of the things it's really not so great for. If you connect at 18Mbps, you should be getting a couple megabytes of data per second, and seemingly you're only getting ~1/4 of that. There's got to be a bottleneck somewhere and it's hard to just guess where it is.

I hate IE as much as the next guy, and I think IE8 is still trash overall, but it's still the first browser we've seen from Microsoft to have decent standard support in a LOT of years. Finally a browser not holding back the web! That's something we've been waiting for MANY years. The same standard page made using standard markup should work on all major browsers without any hacks, browser-specific stylesheets or anything. I'm definitely looking forward to that, even if I'm not going to use it. In other news, 8 is less than 5. It goes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10... See the pic.

I mentioned S3/sleep in post 10 There's plenty of them indeed. I have the DS3R variant of this myself. I'll save you the hassle of the photo, there's loads of them around the web for example, this pic. Yep. Not one electrolytic in sight. I've seen a lot of those people who "have a friend who knows computers" before too... Also, getting rid of a couple parts every few years makes very little difference when you look at the huge amount of garbage most people produce. And that's when you get rid of them even, instead of reusing/selling it/etc, and like Zxian says, you can even recycle a lot of parts now. Seriously, just how much pollution do you create when you swap an older CPU for a newer and more efficient one? I'm tempted to say it's FAR outweighed by the power savings. Not only hoping for the OEMs to support Win95 isn't reasonable like Zxian said, but look at the Win9x market share nowadays, way below 1% (more like 0.01% in Win95's case) and still very rapidly declining. Most people care as much about Win95 compatibility as having drivers for OS/2 2.0 i.e. nobody, except a handful of fanatics or people in the retro computer thing. But the REAL funny thing here, is what you said about onboard sound/video. You couldn't possibly be more wrong. Even $50 motherboards now comes with something like a decent Realtek codec. I have one of them on my motherboard, and it blows every consumer-level sound card I've have the [dis]pleasure to use (with the exception of a couple M-Audio cards perhaps, but the M-Audio card cost more than the motherboad does, and the motherboard audio was pretty much just as good). It has 7.1+2 channel (yes, it plays a 7.1 movie and a 2 channel mp3 at the same time on different outputs just fine!), it does 192KHz/24bit audio, it has spdif and toslink outputs, it supports every codec out there (AC3, DTS, and even those used by Blu-Ray), it has the SNR of Audigy 2 ZS in case you still use analog outs, etc. Some of them even have advanced features like DTS Connect. I don't know what sucks about that, or what more you could hope for (unless you're a musician and need low-latency multitrack ASIO, or a elitist audiophile who needs a $1000 sound card for his $75000 audio setup). SB16 PCI's are utter trash compared to those (not multichannel, only analog outputs, only 16bit/48KHz -- actually it's probably closer to only 12 bits with the EMI from the case and such, the line in is garbage and the ADC is 12 bit only, low ~90 dB SNR, no spdif nor toslink, etc). Creative are also very well known for very sh*tty drivers, not adhering PCI 2.1 specs and having bad voltages on their spdif ports (notably on the SB live), etc. Any onboard sound nowdays is *miles* ahead of a SB16 PCI. I'll be uncorking the champagne when Creative goes under. Similarly, onboard video now often comes with DVI and HDMI outputs (and can pass sound in HDMI's case), supports HDCP for when you might need it (e.g. Blu-Ray), often has a half-decent 3D performance (just not enough for the latest games, but plenty for Aero Glass, WPF apps, Compiz Fusion, some games, etc), and in ATI's case will even decode high bitrate high definition MPEG4 AVC video (H.264 @ 1080p) from sources like Blu-Ray entirely in hardware. I completely fail to see what sucks about it, especially when compared to old cards.

Try ctrl+shift+escape. That's the key combo for it. It's actually MUCH nicer IMO. The services tab is extremely handy to start/stop/restart something, the performance tab is also a lot nicer. Although sometimes I do replace it with Process Explorer (it's nicer for process infos, but it lacks things like the services tab) The task manager still auto-refreshes, nothing's changed at all there. Columns change, new tasks opening get added, etc -- no pressing F5 required. If you're missing some processes (especially background ones), just put a check mark in "Show processes from all users" at the bottom.

Build your own PC, with h**kers and blackjack! In fact, forget about the blackjack. </bender> (yes, I know, I know... I didn't even open that tag!) Actually, the MacBook Pro is quite overpriced. I've seen Dells and such that were better or equal on every single spec than them, for hundreds less. Their Mac Mini is laughable. Yes, it's small and low power, but so is a Asus EEE box (or anything self-built from a Intel Atom or VIA Nano board), at like half the price. The Mini is slow, has very little disk space (plus, it's a slow laptop drive), can't really be upgraded at all, etc. Yuck! The Mac Pro funnily is their only decently-priced box -- comparatively. Try to build a dual socket Xeon workstation (with 4 or 8 cores), using a good workstation motherboard that can use up to 8 FB-DIMMs (yes, fancy ECC RAM modules) and all that. Add the nice case, options like hardware RAID and all that, and you won't really save much, if anything. Go price the same thing from any other vendor (e.g. Dell, HP, etc), and the price will be very similar too. What you should complain about is the lack of a decent choice of hardware. You want a "normal" desktop, with a dual or quad core non-server CPU, with standard non-ECC RAM, on a desktop board and all that, like 99%+ of the population? Well, sorry then, Apple doesn't care/has no product to fill that need, and probably never will. Unless you go for their computer-in-a-monitor joke (iMac), that still has poor hardware choices and poor prices -- $1799 for a dual core with 500GB HD and 4GB RAM + 20" LCD is quite bad really. You could build it for almost half that (or build something MUCH nicer for the price), and not be stuck getting a new computer when the monitor fails, or have to ditch the monitor to upgrade the computer...

Funnily, one of the 3 PCs my E2160 box replaced was a P4 Prescott (519J), and it ran pretty darn hot too... I'm going to to replacing the last old box we got left around pretty soon (one likely reusing my E2160, upgrading that one to a quad core). But the 2nd box is going to be either a Intel Atom or VIA Nano -- it doesn't get much greener than those two (~20W at full load for the board + CPU iirc). While I also have cheap hydro power at $0.10/kWh (sorry puntoMX), some of the upgrades still do pay for themselves. A bunch of smaller older hard drives will often use more in electricity over ~3 years than a new bigger/faster drive costs in the first place. Also, in a lot of places, the power savings are nearly doubled. Yes, during winter the extra watts might be a non-issue, but during summer, it means a higher electricity bill due to AC (I like it cold).

675kWh/year over a few years of lifetime is definitely "thousands". And if you replace a few PCs with a single modern PC (just like I explained I did in my previous post), you're going from say, 3x 125W down to 50, over a few years, it's thousands alright. And yep. ~$135 or so per year sounds about right at that rate. That's about $400 saved over a 3 year period (or about $1750 if you replaced 3 PCs like I did). New hardware also often have better power saving support (e.g. S3/sleep that actually works), so you can save money without having to shutdown a lot.

Looks like you're using a x64 version of Windows, so one needs the 64 bit version of Process Explorer to open that log file, and I'm running a non-x64 OS. Sorry...

He's saving thousands of kWh. So I'd say yes. Not only he's saving on an individual computer, but when you can replace several old ones by a single modern PC (things like vmware help too), then you get amazing savings (this Core 2 Duo replaced 3 old boxes on its own -- a desktop, a box that was encoding nearly 24/7 and a vmware server). And more often than not, the upgrade pays for itself in power savings. 3 years? I see talk about Celeron 633's in here and P166's. Those would be 8 and 12 years old respectively. That's near eternity in the PC world. Besides, even if you upgrade a lot, you don't necessarily throw away every part every 3 years (psu/case/hard drives/dvd-rw/etc are usually kept), and old parts can go in other computers (reused) or sold (makes upgrading even cheaper) or given away. Again, little to no impact on the environment. Much the inverse, especially with all the boards now with all solid caps and all that. And that makes it less durable how?

Yes, but your post lacks the cool factor of that 64 core monster with 2TB of RAM I wish I had one of those to play with... Hey, I'd even settle for half of that Great x264 encoding speeds finally! Seriously, I thought it was a pretty good read. It covers mostly everything in one page, with a decent amount of detail and lots of pretty pics.

Most installers create a log file, which contains a LOT more information (including what failed). That file will let you know where is the problem, so you can take steps to fix it. If I recall correctly, the particular log file for the .NET framework is named netfx.log

There's a LOT of factors: -if the movie you're playing actually has 5.1 sound (i.e. not a rip with stereo/mp3 sound) -the player you're using (PowerDVD, MPC, etc) -the actual codec the player is making use of (e.g. AC3Filter) and its configuration -some speakers/amps have settings for various listening modes etc. There is no easy answer to give here. You're going to have to toy around.

File > Save But yes, the Event Log may also contain some useful information.

MDAC doesn't include ODBC drivers for Oracle, you have to install those separately. See this page for a complete list of all their ODBC drivers (some of which are for 64 bit Windows)

Yes, mmc.exe is what we're interested into. What you should be looking for? Errors in general, and more specifically those associated with ACL problems e.g. result being "ACCESS DENIED". Things like "FAST IO DISALLOWED" are perfectly normal. If in doubt, save the capture, zip it up, and give us a link, we'll have a peek.

You have to download it from there: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb896645.aspx

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1: It's a 831MB ISO. Download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en Also, the Visual Studio Express downloads have been updated with their SP1 versions. And even SQL Server 2008 Express is out!

Nah. Those can crash explorer just about anytime. There's tons of stuff that tends to hook into it (to show special preview thumbnails of certain files, etc), and some shell extensions that associate themselves with all files or folders... They often do bad things (e.g. open file handles and never close them), and eventually explorer.exe crashes. Some of the worst-behaved ones will crash it instantly though.

A large number of those explorer.exe crashes I've seen were due to badly behaving shell extensions, you can disable them using tools like Autoruns. If that fails, enable minidumps, and once it crashes, zip up the memory dump, upload it on rapidshare or any other similar site, and post a link here. We'll have a peek.