CoffeeFiend

AHCI mode can be problematic, it depends on the chipset and drives... That's intended for when you want to use RAID, so normally that wouldn't work. Depends on the chipset, some newer chipsets that came out after Vista did will need this for sure. If all your hardware is supported by it, then it can be. But then again, if Vista supports your hardware out of the box (like any intel chipset) it's no harder. I have yet to need a driver to install it. XP is much like Vista, except it comes with only a tiny minority of the drivers Vista does, and that it expects a floppy in case they're not on there (it's only bearable because you can add them on the CD by hand). Surely it can' be that hard to load drivers on a USB flash drive and to tell Vista to use those...

Well, quad cores usually don't have tiny caches (they're not low end CPUs). I've never seen any dual core reach 5.9, even OC'ed. But with quad cores, it's pretty common. A "basic" quad core like the Q6600 will get 5.9, the main reason they can get that extra .1 is that they encode windows media faster (it's part of the CPU benchmark). But yeah, it doesn't seem to reflect real life performance much.

Yes, those settings are in the BIOS, and usually you do get in there by pressing delete indeed. Changing mode might give you a STOP error though (BSOD INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE).

It depends what mode your SATA ports are in (IDE, AHCI or RAID), what modes your DVD writer supports, etc. See here. It's not a driver problem.

Most decent SATA HDs will give you 5.9 or very close to it. RAM wise, even 2GB of plain old 800MHz DDR2 (CL5) gets 5.9, so basically anything decent you can buy will get that. Yeah, it doesn't mean a whole lot. I get 5.9 on RAM and disk, and 5.7 on CPU (you likely need a quad core to get 5.9 there), but then my vid card (a totally 1337 GeForce 8500GT that's overkill for my needs) brings my overall score down to 5.0 (it gets 5.0 on "desktop performence for aero"), but Vista is really fast regardless. I fail to see how a power hungry gamer's video card I have no need for would make things any faster. RAM and disk aren't your issue if you want a 5.9 score (not that it makes any difference) but rather CPU and vid card.

If that's your only issue, then just buy a network switch, and plug everything in that (nothing to configure or whatever). You can find basic 8 port 10/100 switches for as little as little as $15. Hopefully that has enough ports to also get rid of the hub (most of them suck). Wireless would also work, but since you don't have enough ports using a router and a switch, that would mean you'd have to buy lots of wireless cards. It adds up very quickly. Not really. The PCI cards normally have better antennas (sometimes on a cable, so you can place in a good location), and you can also usually replace them as required with higher gain antennas and such. Lots of them USB sticks are bulky (blocks other ports), and they're basically stuck behind your computer (nice metal case blocking the signal), and their internal antennas tend to suck. Wireless will also be affected by 2.4GHz cordless phones if you have any, as well as things like using your microwave. And it increases transfer times being slower (noticeable on larger files, nor for things like browsing web pages). It works great for certain things like using a laptop around the house, but for desktops there's no point really. 2 words: network shares. There's no need to copy files like that.

All you should need is imagex.exe, peimg.exe and pkgmgr.exe to integrate it all in the .WIM file yourself. They're all documented too: imagex, peimg and pkgmgr cmd line arguments.

Yes. The router will handle NAT and everything else you need for internet sharing just fine all by itself. No need for that NT4 box at all, but if you insist on keeping the NT4 box for other stuff, just give it a static IP (I'd sooner stick Linux on it personally, if the hardware is even worth keeping around/not just wasting electricity, NT4 is just too dated IMO). Then again, some people would just stick linux or BSD on the old NT4 box and use that as a router...

This would take a while to answer thoroughly. However, everything WCF is fully documented on MSDN here. There's a getting started tutorial, samples and all. Plus. there's the WCF section of their dev center, lots of blogs covering that stuff, relevant MS forums and newsgroups to ask questions, plenty of videos on channel9, likely lots of sample code and tutorials on places like codeproject, codeplex, etc. Just gotta look around a bit -- there's no shortage of resources. There's also plenty of good books wrote on the subject.

Working with MTP devices is usually done in C++. You can take a look at the Windows Media Device Manager 10 SDK.

@neo: how's that even related? Maybe I'm missing something here... There is an Aero Wizard Demo in the Windows SDK .NET Framework 3.0 Samples. Download it here (inside CrossTechnologySamples.exe)

Some polls ought to have an expiry date, or to be closed & recreated with a set of modern choices. But there's no point for a normal forum user to create v2 of this poll unless this one is closed really. Perhaps a mod can take care of it? Right now, the choices are mostly: WinRAR 7zip windows built-in zip support WinZip PowerArchiver IZArc TugZip There's several factors that come into play: price (not everybody wants to spend $50 on this), formats handled (zip, rar, 7z, etc), compression speed, max compression ratio, how good the interface is (options, layout, etc) and shell integration is, support for names containing unicode chars, etc. For some others, advanced features might make the difference, like a good set of command line options too. I might find time to make a quick comparison of them sometime soon. Anything to do with ace, lha or arj just don't belong on a modern list much like arc and others. I haven't seen anyone use or even mention any of those format in over 10 years.

Mostly seagates, couple WDs too.

Yeah, I tend to assume most people are going to reuse their existing OS when they replace an old computer, but you're completely right. Vid card wise? From you I really, really don't ever follow those. Any time I look at a vid card, I only look at things like H.264 decoding and such. For the rest, it's various sources, preferences, and what I felt like picking today: fast dual core chip, standard Gigabyte board with a P43 chipset (P43 mainly for PCI-E 2.0), a decent HD (cost/speed/size), and I left the rest up to him. If he's got the $, he could go for something like an Antec 900, but there's still lots of good options for cheaper. Same applies for PSUs, some are going to recommend high-end $150 models, but lots of people get by on a $40 Fortron too... It comes down to preferences and budget a lot really. P.S. Please, lose that font

Exactly. You can build nicer for the price. None of those has a very good vid card for gamers either (the dell's isn't that bad I guess, but it's also $300 more and has lower specs besides the vid card) One quick example of that: CPU: E8400 $175 Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L motherboard $95 4GB RAM around $70 ATI HD4850 $175 WD6400AAKS 640GB hard drive $90 DVD writer of your choice ~$30 that still leaves you with ~$165 for a case and quality PSU before you reach the price of the slowest computer you were looking at. The CPU is faster, the vid card is much better for games, it has a quality motherboard (pre-built PCs normally use cheap/ghetto motherboards), a bigger/faster hard drive, and if you make a couple good choices, a far better power supply (pre-builts use junk PSUs) and a better quality case with better airflow too. And it's customized to your needs, you pick the parts you want.

VMware decided to make their ESXi product free as of July 28th! This is gonna make Hyper-V adoption slow down to a crawl for sure. The overhead is smaller: it uses only 32MB of disk space total, it can run more simultaneous VMs on the same hardware (memory overcommit -- 40 VMs with 512MB each running in only 4GB of RAM anyone?), and seemingly it has better I/O performance too (MS was caught using SSDs to make their product's speed look decent). And even before it was free, it was a whole lot cheaper than Win 2008: -ESXi was $495, and that was your total expense (now $0) -Win 2008 standard with Hyper-V is $999, plus an extra $140/every 5 users for extra CALs (only 5 included) e.g. $700 more if you need 25 extra CALs And ESXi has more features too, like live migration, and being able to add more RAM to a server without even having to reboot it. With this, I can't think of any reason to use Hyper-V anymore.

For gaming, both cards aren't good. For VMs, both are über-overkill. A basic Q6600 is plenty. 8GB of RAM is fine. Again, no. Plain old SATA disks in pass-through mode will give you better VM performance overall, in RAID0 if you need more than that. That will also give you WAY more space for the money, which is very much needed with VMs in general (especially things like Exchange that store a LOT of data). The extra space is always useful -- you can keep a library of basic disk images (compressed), ready to deploy (decompress the disk image in a new folder, add the machine, start it), etc. 15k rpm disks are VERY expensive and very small. You can have more space and more IOPS out of more (larger & inexpensive) spindles. And when SATA RAID0 doesn't suffice, then you're pretty much starting to look into SANs and such anyways. That's what I've been saying all along: -A inexpensive VM server e.g. Q6600, 8GB RAM, basic onboard video is plenty good, a few good/fast/quality SATA disks on a decent controller. That's likely WAY beyond what you need for those 3 VMs (depending on load) -A gaming box, e.g. E8400, ATI HD4850 vid card and all that, which will play any modern game at good settings, without slowing down your VMs down to a crawl, or game having problems because of VM load Combined, it will cost lots way less than the Xeon monster, and perform much better at both tasks (you could even use the gaming box sometimes to fire up a few more VMs if you wanted to)

SAV isn't exactly lightweight either, and RAM usage is only a small part of the problem. A lot of them are also sucking CPU cycles like there's no tomorrow when they do their job.

The mem usage column in task manager isn't the memory usage, it's rather the working set size (not the same thing at all). You want the "VM Size" column if on XP (you actually want what's called "private bytes"). Or use process explorer to have sanely named columns. I know. It's a very bad choice for that to be the default column, and they're all all named in confusing/misleading ways. Blame MS for that one. Edit: NOD32 2.7: nod32krn.exe 28,768 KB nod32kui.exe 2,976 KB Total 31,744 KB (31MB)

Except, you can't even do that. Not only they use bad caps, but most of them extremely overstate their specs (and dies at half the rated watts in a test), use junk parts that will soon break regardless, are often rated at unrealistic temps, and you just can't account for that kind of stuff. And often at the very first time the line is non-optimal (e.g. brownout) they die. Even the best caps age, albeit not as much. Yeah, @ 45C perhaps. In real life operating conditions, with some load temps are gonna be higher than that, especially on a lower wattage PSU that's always running nearly maxed out. And that "life" is rated for a 20% loss in capacity, which again might be too much on a barely sufficient PSU (i.e. you didn't actually add overhead for this). Plus, if every cap loses 20% capacity, in the end, your total power available likely isn't just 20% less. In real life, you see barely sufficient PSUs failing MUCH quicker than that (often only a year). Very, very few PSUs make it anywhere near 20+ years of 24/7 use without breaking down. Simply not true. Like I said before, they DO underestimate. On the 367W they calculate for my rig, it likely wouldn't even POST! (it just might put on a pretty fireworks show) A quality 450W has proven to be insufficient. They let you change the % of TDP to anything you want if you think a conservative value of 85% is too much. It's not crazy at all. You have to look at when the drives spin up. And at that time, they easily use 24W (in the very first few miliseconds, it's a lot more than that actually, like for any motor start current) Using anything less than 20W for this is plain wrong. And the results come to LESS than what your system needs. How good is that? Again, how good is a calculator that severely under-estimates how much wattage your system needs? And he claims to have included "headroom on top for safety" LOL. With a quality PSU ~100W more than what they calculate, my computer didn't even work right, so there... 550W perhaps might have sufficed (then add a minimum for cap aging, and some room for expansion, and 750W isn't really that overkill), but 367W isn't ANYWHERE NEAR what it needs. I don't go as far as doubling watts, but using aanet's as-is is a great way to buy something inadequate. You can try to defend them all you want, but that still makes their calculator fundamentally broken and 100% useless as far as I'm concerned. I'd sooner pay $2 for the outervision pro calc than rely on aanet's... At this point, I'll have to borrow jaclaz's line: "Go and buy your 300W PSU" I'm not going to waste further time arguing over a broken/useless calculator...

Strange. I've never seen the issue. It normally works out of the box. Maybe you're running some kind of firewall that blocks connections to it? Also, it would be helpful to have a more descriptive error message than "cannot display the page". Edit: oops. looks like you got it solved. So much for opening 50 different tabs and answering them later.

Try updating your video drivers then. Seemingly it uses GMA 950. Direct link to download version 15.8.3.1504 here (7.14.10.1504, yes I know, 2 different version numbers...) If there's any problems with it, then use "roll back driver".

Indeed, it's no different than any other app. But nuhi doesn't have redistribution rights for it, much like autopatcher didn't have rights to redistribute patches (and aren't doing so anymore). Various runtimes (VB, C++, etc) have different licenses permitting redistribution with compiled apps. But in WAIK's case, the license forbids it, blurbs like: It even forbids several uses, like "you may not use these portions of the software for any other purpose, including without limitation for purposes of backing up your Windows operating system" (and then again, isn't vLite essentially making a copy of the OS from the DVD? yay for ambiguous wording). Plus, they have a "genuine windows" check on the download page, so I doubt they'd want people to redist files protected by that (it would likely be seen as a way to bypass validation) Nuhi doesn't want to receive letters from the lawyers @ One Microsoft Way, Redmond. And it's pretty understandable. It's a required component, yes. It's actually fairly common to have to download a full SDK for a single utility. And it's 992MB (still big, I know). Besides, it's not just a hugely oversized installer for a 200KB file, it's just that you don't happen to use the actual app you're downloading, but rather a component from it. I understand it sucks, but then again one can grab it from other places too. It's not in the package for legal reasons. There's nothing silly about that.

Wikipedia says so, so it must be true! Or again, perhaps they just meat it has no performance loss by doing this, versus an typical emulated environment... Did you actually read it? Because it acknowledges some of my points i.e. "API thunk overhead". They say the performance hit is small, but it is definitely there. Yes, the instructions are ran natively, no one ever said otherwise (it's not emulated). No performance loss there. But the thunking/marshalling overhead remains (some apps are affected more than others). I never said the overhead is super heavy, but it's there nonetheless, and 32 bit apps surely won't run faster like someone said before, that's all.

The tool itself won't do that, but sure, it could easily be scripted. The only hard part, is figuring out how you want it to work. One way, would be making a script check a list with mac addresses and the names of PC with those mac addresses should have (like the standard format wsname supports). Then you enumerate at the NICs, and see if the name matches, if it doesn't, then you make it run wsname. You could run that script anytime you want, but it will need administrative privileges to use wsname. Similarly, the mac address -> names list could be kept on a web server (in a database or XML file or whatever you want), and accessed as a REST web service by a script (e.g. a VBScript or JScript using a XMLHttpRequest), which would have a method that would return the name for the mac address specified (and have methods to add new names to it and such). Or then again, you could just use asset tags, if your PCs all have them... So many possibilities. And yes, you could spawn the process remotely (very simple), but users might not appreciate too much when their PC reboots without warning. Edit: very strange, the site isn't back online yet (no DNS entry for mystuff.clarke.co.nz)... Not looking good