CoffeeFiend

Sounds like your NIC is not getting an IP. Check the connection status (or ipconfig /all in a command window). Maybe you disabled the DHCP client service? If that's not the case, then what kind of modem? Does it have a built-in router? Have you tried resetting it? It could be several other things, but this mostly covers the basics.

Not surprising. Sounds like a story that would get lots of page views, hence make them a lot of $. Not surprising either. There's pretty much uproar on everything over there, as the stories are mostly picked for what will generate user reaction (hence page views/ads served), factual correctness and such being mostly irrelevant. All I'm saying is, a LOT of story titles there are inflammatory or sometimes outright false, and things like misleading summaries are quite common. And then users usually find a way to say it's Microsoft's fault for a reason or another, and even if it's Microsoft (or Bill Gates) doing something good (like giving money to charity or open source projects or such), then it's still bad, it must be a conspiracy or something... Some decent articles are bound to get linked by there too (and there are some good comments), but you eventually tire of the overall hell-bent-on-bashing-teh-evil-evil-M$ style. The funniest part about it all, is that half the time, there are Microsoft ads on that page, which is what's making slashdot money, i.e. bashing the company that's actually feeding them. Sensationalism sells. slashdot and the inquirer are good examples of that.

Quick update! And this month, with pretty pictures Market share, Vista/XP/Win2k: The total stays at a steady 90% (give or take 0.5%). Win2k is dropping very fast (hard to see on that curve though, you'll see it far better in the next graph). And XP is quickly being replaced by Vista (XP and Vista should tie at ~45% in a couple years) Market share, Win2k, NT, Win9x and Linux: Linux surpassed Win9x and NT, still rising, Win2k dropping very fast. At the current speeds, Linux will overtake Win2k in under a year. Same thing, but more representative of Win9x versions usage (not grouped), but more cluttered: And a "zoomed up" version of the bottom 1% to see the Win9x & Linux trends better: Linux is on a steady rise, and Win9x usage still dropping very fast. At the current speeds (% of market share change over the 19 months graphed): -Linux should be up to 1% in about 6 months to a year -Win2k is going to go down to 1% or less within a year -combined Win9x market share down to basically nothing at all within a year (down there with Web TV)

Turns out that wasn't the case at all. There's very little reason to believe half of what you read on a community site hell bent on making anything MS look evil/bad and such (everything there is heavily biased), and where everything must be some kind of conspiracy theory. Other manufacturers also have the problem (namely ASUS and MSI), and the problem originates with the the BIOS, which was entirely written by AMI in the first place (not Foxconn). Similar boards with a non-AMI bios work fine. Foxconn is pressuring AMI to get a fix, so it's very much the inverse. /. is a yellow journalism site of the IT world (worse than INQ most of the time). They use such shocking titles and bad summaries to make people read & comment on them (hence page views -> ads served -> $$) Seriously, it's pretty sad when one OS (which pretends to be Windows no less), has some issues with a specific build of a American Megatrends BIOS (bugs? never head of those!), and that gets turned into "Foxconn hates linux!". Meanwhile, most people are ignoring the issues of lots of GeForce GPUs (G84/G86 chips) failing in massive quantities... I wish I bought a Radeon HD2600 instead now. Oh well.

I can't really confirm or deny anything unfortunately. It would depend a lot on which download manager it is. Some might have BHO's or plugins or such, some are standalone, and some are merely extensions for a browser. Nice, that's good to know I hadn't actually tested it (I don't write any downloaders either as there's already hundreds of them, many of which fill my specific needs, e.g. wget, DownThemAll!, etc)

To set a service's startup type, use sc.exe (one of the many underrated built-in tools): sc config servicename start= auto (don't forget the space after the equal sign) That's assuming you want it set to auto, for manual, use "demand" instead of "auto" As for starting a service, there's 2 common ways: net start servicename or sc start servicename Such things are also very easily scripted (especially using PowerShell), and there's tons of 3rd party utils for this kind of stuff too

Either some error handling for XML parser errors (letting you know your XML isn't well formed i.e. catch (XmlException e) {MessageBox.Show("Your XML is teh suck!"); } ), or perhaps trying escape all ampersands that aren't followed immediately by "amp;" using a regular simple expression (i.e. anything matched by &[^a] isn't escaped for sure, although that isn't perfect). Even blindly replacing all "&" by "&" and immediately after all "&" by "&" (fixing those that might already have been good) would work in most cases, as ghetto as that may be. Or then again doing it right and checking if they all are escaped before replacing. Lots of options His download is a forum attachment, and you need valid cookie infos in the HTTP request to download it (gotta be logged in) Adding the "Cookie: ..." part to the request is trivial (using CookieContainer), but the data has to come from somewhere. You could try to get the cookie data from the browsers, but that might be tricky. IE, Firefox, and Opera all store them in different places/formats. And even just for IE, v6, 7 and 8 likely store them in different places. XP/Vista use different locations for sure, and in protected mode on Vista, it's a different folder too. Similarly, Fx 2 and 3 uses different formats (in a sqlite DB as of v3). And that still wouldn't work, unless you already logged in on the site on that computer previously, using a supported browser (and perhaps a specific version of it), and that the cookie hasn't expired since. Most of those issues can't easily be worked around, unless you're willing to really make your XML schema (and code) more complicated so your app can send HTTP referer, cookies, user agents, HTTP POST with form data, etc. Personally, I don't think it's worth making it all over-complicated, just for a handful of special cases where people went out of their way to make something not easily downloadable. But ultimately it's your call... Supporting 30x server redirects (HttpStatusCode.Moved, HttpStatusCode.MovedPermanently, HttpStatusCode.Redirect, etc) would be a good idea though, if you're looking for something to keep you busy

You can PM me the URL (or paste it here), and I'll see exactly why it works or doesn't. It could be a few other things, like redirects (which a browser or "advanced" download managers would follow, but WUD probably not).

That's indeed how an ampersand is escaped in XML. It should work on anything that uses XML for any purpose, 100% transparently (the XML parser handles it all). I just tried it and it works just fine. The proper request is made. For example, here's a download URL for some sample database off of CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=MSFTDBProdSamples&DownloadId=36602 You'd use: <url>http://www.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=MSFTDBProdSamples&DownloadId=36602</url> in the .ul file (& -> &). And it works as intended just as I expected. Here's the actual HTTP request being made by WUD: GET /Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=MSFTDBProdSamples&DownloadId=36602 HTTP/1.1 Host: www.codeplex.com Connection: Keep-Alive So the problem isn't caused by WUD. What's likely happening here, is the web server checks for a "proper" HTTP referer (yes, "referer" and not "referrer", I know... blame RFC2616!) and if it's not there, it returns an error html page instead of your download (smaller file). Some pages also force you to POST (with form data) instead of GET to download a file. Similarly, they can check for a cookie. Try with the URL above, as it does exactly that: you'll download a file, but it's really a web page, not the .msi file we were expecting. They want to force you to click on "i agree" to download a file. Try that URL in a web browser, it probably won't work either. Or rename the downloaded file to .htm and open it.

Many ways around this... If the HTPC runs MythTV (i.e. Linux), it can handle NAT/DHCP (act as a router) just fine using standard tools like iptables, just add a 2nd NIC going to your switch. Google will find a million different how-to's for this. If you decide to run Windows on it, then there's always ICS but it's not exactly a great way to share internet (low on features, not very reliable), I'd sooner spend $50 on a Linksys WRT54GL (not G or GS) and throw a good 3rd party firmware like DD-WRT or Tomato on it, and just plug everything into that.

Yep. You can put some storage in a HTPC for sure XBMC is truly and by far the best solution when it comes to playback of most standard def stuff. Unfortunately, the old xbox is starting to show its age (old P3 chip), and struggles to play SD content encoded in H.264, and is useless for anything in high def If one only needs playback, personally I'd suggest a Popcorn Hour A-100. If they also want PVR abilities and such, then MythTV all the way

See this. It does mostly what you were asking for

I'd be one of those people too, 12 HDs just in this box alone... Yes, DK has plenty of such artificial limitations/limits. The home version is x86-only (wtf?), has a 1TB limit, and no I-FAAST, no Frag Shield. I'd also be forced to spend $99 per PC on the Pro Premier, which is still artificially limited despite the high cost: no Terabyte Volume Engine/2TB limit (I can already foresee that being a problem with cheap 1TB drives, and yes, $1000 price tag then!), still no centralized admin console (you need the $250 admin app for that), etc. PerfectDisk indeed does do a GREAT job of defragmenting (better than DisKeeper IMO) and has better features. And even their $39 product (Pro version) has no artificial drive/array size limitations whatsoever, works fine with the free (and better) centralized admin console and everything else. And yes, if you have more than one PC, there's also bundles, 3 licenses for $23/PC which is a great price for home users (DK Pro is 4x the price, and is still limited) PerfectDisk is not only much better priced, but also offers more standard features, and has other specialized versions for VMware (defrags inside VMs) and Exchange Servers (defrags the data store itself) for which DisKeeper has no solution AFAIK. Most people who recommend DK do it because it's the name they know, not out of technical merit.

Tough one, if you exclude Windows itself (and perhaps the obvious like MS Office), and "too specialized" apps (like Altium Designer): Firefox & extensions Visual Studio 2008 & various dev tools SyInternals Suite VMware Photoshop CS3 Media Player Classic (bundled in K-Lite) VirtualDubMod (in combination with AviSynth) Wireshark ACDSee Winamp Runners up: Acronis True Image (getting replaced by ImageX) Nero (imgburn is starting to replace it for a lot of tasks) ultraedit/notepad++ (both have their strenghts) WinRAR (7zip is getting there) Foxit Reader CCleaner Daemon Tools UltraIso FtpRush SnagIt

It might have something to do with VistaPE, because it runs just fine as-is on Vista, no error messages at all.

Yikes! That's a whole new level of expensive for a NAS. You can roll out a full featured iSCSI SAN using OpenFiler (also has NAS features like NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP, rsync, etc) for a fraction of a cost of that NAS... But yeah, it's not exactly something portable you'd plug in using a USB cable (neither would I want to lug around that LaCie 1U server either) But yes, there's the ready-to-use vs roll-your-own factor for sure (unless your time has no value), and there's nothing wrong with spending more for a pre-made solution either.

Oh please. Every other major defragmenter does everything Diskeeper does, and then some. Care to elaborate about all those very special features that only Diskeeper has and that makes it oh-so-great? I have a hunch it'll be a VERY short list (~0 lines), or one filled with factual errors. I can't even think of any way how it's superior to O&O and Perfectdisk, much the inverse. If anything, it sounds to me like you never used anything else, or much like jaclaz says, that your opinion is heavily biased towards what makes you money/stuff you sell. And talking about money, that's a place where Diskeeper is "greater" for sure -- charging more $ for the same feature set.

From what I've seen over the years, there's 2 kinds of NAS: -inexpensive ones, usually with abysmal performance (and often various other issues, limited protocol support, a sucky management interface, limited capabilities, etc) -OK ones, at ridiculous prices, which is especially apparent if they have more than one HD If they made good/fast and cheap NAS devices, everyone would have one (I'd probably have a dozen). Before you buy one that you can actually afford, check the reviews, you'll likely see it has really bad transfer rates. Why? Because they go for underpowered embedded processors and such to keep their costs down so they can sell for cheaper. As you found out, most also use a ext filesystem or such, also to keep their costs down as jaclaz mentioned. LaCie products mostly fit in description #2: -$319 for a 1GB LaCie Ethernet Big Disk (single drive), considering a good 1TB HD can be had for under $140 so ~$179 for the drive-less NAS with no expansion capabilities whatsoever ($179 overhead on every drive, more than double the cost of he storage space itself) or if you want something closer to what I'd call a "real" NAS i.e. something with more than 1 drive, with some room for expansion, and a good capacity: -between $850 and $2020 for a LaCie Ethernet Disk RAID with between 1TB and 4TB capacity. You can buy 4TB of space (4x 1TB HDs) for $560 and then throw that in a brand spanking new low power PC (built around an Intel Atom processor or VIA board or whatever you want) for MUCH less $$$ (4TB for less than LaCie wants for their 1TB model). That will also run any OS you want, use any filesystem you can think of, use any level of RAID you might want, and do anything else you want (any protocol, app, or whatever you want it to do). There's even some great specialized software made just for this task e.g. OpenFiler or FreeNAS. Anyways, a popular option is also the Linksys NSLU2 at around $85, but again, it's single drive (and no gigabit ethernet). Throw one large HD in that, and it'll be sufficient for some mp3's and photos. But if you want more than that (like your video collection and such), you're better off not buying a NAS, at least when it comes down to price. As for the ext drivers, they work well, but there's been a glitch with them for months unfortunately, so the bug fixing speed isn't stellar... (just try mounting a TrueCrypt disk image, your PC will BSOD).

That's a great idea actually. Good enough that one could probably sell an app to do this (it would be useful to a LOT of admins out there). Not that I would charge for it, just saying it's the kind of idea most developers wish they had more often. I'll be looking into that for sure! The other option would be to handle the conversions and to make use of an external editor of your choice (which would likely be a better text editor, e.g. notepad++) instead of a sucky built-in editor (convert .reg file from hex to unicode, save as temp file, generate SHA1 hash of it, spawn editor, wait for the editor process to quit, if hash is the same just quit, if hash has changed, convert it back to hex and overwrite the .reg file)

Wikipedia says so, but no quoted sources or anything... (I'd love to see some download stats or such) That part of the page was written back in 2004, which seems to be based on the sole evidence of a page about "History of Data Compression in Japan", that was first written back in 1991. Mind you, it very well might still be the case (I'm just not going on a trip to Japan just to find out), but in any case that would be an exception... Format wise (unless you live in Japan perhaps), there's only 3 big players: -zip, not very good, but universally supported -rar, good, but winrar isn't free -7zip, can compress a little bit better than rar, and there's free software, but the compression times are longer (can be quite long for large files @ max compression) (unless you happen to use Linux, where gzip and such is pretty common...)

It comes down to preferences in the end. Opera is definitely more secure and less resource hungry then IE, but then again, every browser beats IE on those 2 things, so it's not exactly a big achievement. It also has a couple cool things, like XHTML+Voice (although it's ultimately useless as no other browser supports it, hence no one uses it). But as for its user interface, I'd personally rank Opera dead last (and by that I don't mean behind just Firefox and IE...) Again, that's my own opinion, someone else just might prefer it precisely for it's UI, and there wouldn't be anything wrong with that either. I've been hooked on Firefox since v0.8 (circa 2004), and until anything else comes with extensions that rival Firefox's I have no plans to switch. I'd buy 2GB of RAM extra for it if I had to in order to use it. The features are totally worth it. Hell, I'd even pay for Firefox if it went commercial. It makes using the web and developing/debugging web apps not suck -- finally. It's an absolutely fantastic tool, especially when combined with some extremely useful extensions (e.g. Web Developer toolbar, Firebug, DOM Inspector, FoxyProxy, Tamper Data, Live HTTP Headers, HttpFox, DownThemAll, etc) Besides, it doesn't really have "caching issues". If you don't like the default value, just change it (or disable it altogether). Lower values will make it use less memory if that's your concern, but it'll make it somewhat slower. 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM being ~$30 these days I ain't too worried about it using 200MB (I also currently have VMware, Photoshop, Visual Studio and VirtualDubMod open right now, each of which uses up as much, if not more RAM than Firefox) Edit: also, Adblock Plus is very nice for blocking "ads" for religion-oriented sites in ppl's signatures...

There's a couple that look quite nice (ReNamer an the one frodo mentionned) judging by the screenshots. Personally, I've been mostly using a script to do this... Uncommenting certain parts, editing things, etc to do what I need it to at the moment. Mainly for the lack of time to try the 98797867896 different apps out there todo this, and that most of the time, I end up needing it to do something almost none will do (like take #s from in front of the file, and move them at the end, etc). It takes a couple minutes to copy the script there, and editing it to do what you want, but it sure is a LOT faster (and less error prone) than renaming thousands of files by hand. I'll be trying those for sure.

Some people prefer doing things by hand over point and click (and letting the app do all the "complex" stuff, hoping it does it right, and without having to know or knowing how it works). I can understand that. It comes down to trust, and some people preferring to do things their way (you know when you do a certain thing, it will work 100% of the time, exactly as you intended) I have to disagree on this one. When you're copying the files you created by hand (scripts, .reg & .inf files, etc) where you want them, and make them execute when you want it and such, you're definitely the one in control. No illusions there. Different needs, different preferences and different solutions. I don't see anything wrong with that. And with other way, you're not always wasting time either. In most cases, you can reuse most of your previous work. nLite was obviously created to solve a problem the way you wanted it solved. Others might prefer doing things by hand, or using other apps to do a similar job. I don't see anything wrong with that either. Choice is good. (never used HFSLIP either, no idea what it's like) You obviously know exactly how nLite works at its lowest level, so for you it's different. When you pick some option you know EXACTLY what it's going to do (e.g. make specific changes to a certain .inf file) since it's your app. For others, it's not always that obvious what goes on behind the scenes when you select something, and some people just don't really feel great about that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing nLite. I'm just saying that there's nothing wrong with not using nLite either, or any other methods for that matter.

While I cannot speak for Vista, as far as XP goes, you can run sysprep until you tire of it, and it's not a problem. I've seen images that were sysprep'ed probably 50+ times, without any issues at all. Sysprep has a specific set of tasks to accomplish (generates new SIDs, etc), and repeating that process shouldn't break things.

So you're asking if they have a way to catch you, if you illegally install it on more than one computer/violate the licensing terms and that by some way I can't think of you also managed to somehow get them to activate it too? It's illegal regardless, whatever the chances (or ways) of "getting caught" are. Again, you want to run it on 2 PCs? You buy 2 licenses. Too expensive? Use another OS.