CoffeeFiend

Wow. I guess you are really due for a new laptop then! That's basically it. And the fringerprint reader option is only worth $50 anyways. So it's essentially $100 extra for looks. And you have less choices of OS (no Vista Home Premium x64 option, which is free on the cheaper model)

The pro version of the other calculator does that too, but it costs $2 to use (yeah, I know). Still better than one that offers such results, but whose results are completely off... As for the other points, I'm not gonna quote them all... P35 board << yes Isn't that it will update and calculate itself? << it would, if your CPU is on the list, otherwise, you have to enter your wattage by hand -- it only has a handful of CPUs (47 vs over 750!) so you'll likely have to lookup the wattage of it with google first WOW! So many SATAs. << I like/need my storage I'm looking forward to more/bigger drives still. Anyway it shouldn't vary much from one to another. << precisely my point. Why offer countless options over something that essentially makes no difference? The same thing applies to fans, RAM speed, etc. It feels like say, if a there was a calculator for how much MPG you'd get using a certain car, this would be asking the color of the seats and type of carpet mats. They ought to just use a decent average value... There's no PCIe x1 as a choice. (I selected 8600GTS as workaround, +20W than 8500GT) << it's more like 10W, probably less (extra NIC for VMware) Don't RAM size and RAM speed have an effect on PSU/UPS? << it doesn't actually make a huge difference (power doesn't scale linearly with frequency), and again, it depends on the chips used, etc. Again, why not use a standard average i.e. 4 to 5 watts? And yes, 1.8v too (same story) Normal case fans or...? how much watt/amp do those fans use? << same story again. They're whatever case fans came with the CM stacker 810 and the modules in it. There's just no way I'm going to waste time looking for the specs of each fan, when it'll only make a total change of a couple watts over the whole system build. (I put 0.5 for both fans) << they don't use nearly that much power. That's 6 watts you've added per fan, so no wonder you calculator results are much higher. all the fans in the box combined likely use about 10 watts total. You did take its recommended value (not the actual value), didn't you? << I'm going by "Recommended PSU wattage for decent brand PSU" Your startup 12V1 draw needs a frightening 38.8A << non-issue This beastie has plenty of rails, and can handle 54A continuous on the 12v rails combined (more for a few minutes). This is exactly why the 367w figure it calculates isn't even close to being enough. (Also, if you don't enter 0.5A for each fan, it only calculates like 35A, not nearly 40) So does your motherboard supports this technology? << Definitely not! But a $800 Areca ARC-1230 SATA RAID PCI-E controller would have it though... Been dreaming of one for ages, but it's a little on the expensive side And even at 572W, it's not really what I'd want. A good 450w didn't work (it would at the very least need 500 or 550), so 572w wouldn't really have much left for upgrades, or to account for cap aging. I'd likely have to replace it within a couple of years... Just saying. It's not exactly my fav calculator. It's not very convenient, asks for too much detail over things that makes hardly any difference, has very few CPUs, etc. And seeing the results, I don't really trust it. That's all.

Good luck with that. It's meant to be used in C++ mainly. I've seen some wrappers for .NET languages (C#, VB.NET, etc) but when it comes to VB6, you're pretty much on your own.

Batteries also lose a LOT of capacity when they age. If your current laptop is fast enough for your uses, then maybe just getting a new battery or 2 of decent capacity is all you really need. There are laptops that support it, but they'll cost more. The built-in wifi is likely acceptable. Not sure what chipset it uses (haven't looked). If you want the basic intel one instead it's only $15 more (not sure if it's any better mind you). The 4965AGN ($40) is a wireless N adapter (replaces G, but also compatible with it), capable of faster connection speeds (no real benefits when you do things like surf the web, only useful for things like large file transfers), assuming you already have a wireless N access point or router (likely not). If you already have a wireless N router, and plan on transferring large files over wireless, sure, go for that option. Otherwise, it's an interesting option, but just that. You can upgrade the wireless card anytime you want anyways (like when you get a router that has wireless N) and for cheap, so no real rush. The $65 option is the exact same, but also gives you bluetooth (only useful if you have any bluetooth devices, or plan on buying some). It's up to you... Nobody can tell you if the options are going to be of any use to you, much less worth the asking price.

Why use an app for this in the first place? The service pack has a /integrate switch for a reason. It's the standard way to slipstream, and it's very easy. Example: step 1) copy CD contents into C:\XP step 2) run WindowsXP-KB936929-SP3-x86-ENU.exe /integrate:C:\XP step 3) there is no step 3! (reuse your winnt.sif, apply your other changes and burn away) VMware

Exactly. That works fine. You have to enclose parameters that have spaces in them with quotes (like for any other cmd line util), otherwise the 2 parts are passed as 2 separate arguments. Do you have unicode inf files? (I've never seen one as far as I recall). Either ways, you'd only need to make minor changes to the 2 lines that open files to make it work with unicode files, like such: Set f = fso.OpenTextFile(filename, 1, False, -1) '1=ForReading, -1=TristateTrue and Set f = fso.CreateTextFile(filename, True, True) If you have some of both kinds (again, strange...) then you could easily detect it (look for byte order mark, i.e. 0xFF 0xFE for Little Endian, first 2 bytes of the file), then open the file accordingly (wouldn't take 5 minutes to do)

The 8400 isn't exactly a good card for gaming anyways. And as poor as Intel GMA cards are at 3D stuff, they're sufficient for most tasks. I had Intel GMA 950 in the old P4 I sold last week, and not once I wished I had something faster. Intel's drivers are pretty good (no crashes ever), not only on windows, but also for Linux. The jump to 2.1 (only 100MHz extra and a little more cache) wouldn't make much of a change. The 2.4 is somewhat faster, but I don't think I'd spend the extra $150 for all of 400MHz. The 2.5GHz CPU is quite a nice chip (T9300): 0.5 GHz more, 3x the cache (6MB vs only 2MB on the 2GHz), plus a few other little things, like a faster FSB (with FSB throttling for extra power savings) and SSE 4.1. It's a nice step up, but it's also $225 extra, on a ~$600$ laptop (ouch). So if you do a lot of CPU-bound tasks on your laptop (most people don't, it just sucks the battery dry too fast), and have a fair bit of money to spare for it (and perhaps the extra $ for a spare battery, and the strength to lug it around), why not? 4GB is nicer, but $100 for that? You could get the 3GB model, and buy a 2x2GB kit of DDR2 800MHz CL5 (SODIMM) for $80 and install that in the laptop yourself (remove the two 512MB modules -- it's not 3x1GB!) for $80, boosting you to 6GB total (assuming the laptop supports it), for $20 less! It's a somewhat worthwhile upgrade, but definitely not at that price (1GB extra for $100, when 4GB costs less?) The extra RAM would make Vista fly (superfetch would make good use of it for sure), and it would likely run Windows 7 nicely too. Photoshop needs a fair amount of RAM, but we're not talking about gigabytes of RAM (unless you do work on multiple-layer 100 megapixel images or something). Long story short, if I was buying it, I'd leave it as-is, and buy a 2x2GB kit of DDR2 elsewhere for it, like this kit that's only $52 after mail in rebate (check the manual first in their support section, to see what kind of RAM it uses/accept/max size/etc) Edit: seemingly, after a quick peek at the manual, it only has 2 slots for RAM. So 3GB must be 2GB + 1GB modules. And it only supports 4GB max. So all you'd need to upgrade to 4GB yourself, is one 2GB module to replace the 1GB stick. And since they use PC2-5300, it would be even cheaper (from $35). Still no point in spending $100 for the upgrade... That ~$70 saved would nicely pay for the 120GB to 250GB hard drive upgrade or a better battery and a mini laser mouse.

Neither do I, but I sure do love to argument, and you could say I'm strongly opinionated on certain things You're certainly right on this one. We could throw it back and forth for just about forever without flaming, but I can't see myself change my mind over this, and seemingly not you either. So I think we can leave it at "agree to disagree" too.

This list could be significantly bigger, there's still a LOT of stuff missing. Some others: Network stuff Tunnelier, an alternative to PuTTY COPSSH, openssh + cygwin + a few extras, along with a usable installer nmap + zenmap gui, port scanner mRemote, supports RDP/VNC/ICA/SSH/etc connections httrack to copy websites wget to download files from the command line various VNCs, like ultravnc and tightvnc etc. Office stuff Sumatra PDF, an alternative to foxit and acrobat reader Internet stuff FeedDemon, RSS reader Music stuff: musicbrainz tagger, for automatic tagging of your mp3's (it will even guess the artist/song name for you) Packing/Repackaging tools: installrite, nsis, inno, etc Virtualization stuff vmware server and tons more addons/related products and such System stuff memtest86+, gparted, etc Encoding tools: avisynth virtualdubmod mkvtoolnix dgindex eac3to (url will likely change over time) many codecs: xvid, ffdshow, ac3filter, x264, haali etc Dev tools Visual Studio, Express Edition eclipse NetBeans & Sun Studio Mercurial, SVN, etc Databases like SQL Server Express, Oracle 10g Express, IBM DB2 Express-C, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, etc TONS of utils, CruiseControl.NET, NAnt, NUnit, MbUnit, Reflector, etc (VERY long list) Literally countless frameworks, libraries, ORMs, addons, utils, etc.

Because Win 2003 & XP x64 both have the same kernel, which is not the same as XP x86.

It's trivial to do, but you would need 2 things first (which you likely won't get): -enough privileges on the boxes to list processes (a user account on every box), preferably using the same credentials on every box -the name of every computer you'll have to connect to (to see what processes are running)

No, I just like to paste URLs to articles I haven't read From what he says, it's the combination of Win 2003 + slow network, and the issue is with Win2003 itself. They made Vista SP1 use a somewhat slower transfer (smaller blocks) to prevent a problem with Windows 2003's cache manager, instead of fixing Win 2003. I'd hardly blame Vista or this... Besides, just how much difference does it make in real life? 10% slower perhaps? And how often is your network that bloody slow that it affects your servers? And again, would you really rather have a somewhat faster transfer, and then your Win 2003 server crashing because of it? Again, it's not that simple. A lot of design decisions are tradeoffs. Smaller I/O buffers, for a more responsive system, or bigger chunks for a slightly faster transfer, but a not as responsive system? The problem only applies when you copy to/from the same disk, which is actually not all that common. Most of the time when you do something on the same disk, you move files, not make copies of it, and if it's 2 different drives, then it doesn't increase seeking anyways. It's not like it will make a HUGE difference either (one could make a small app to benchmark a file copy like that with different buffer sizes in no time at all). And again, like he says, this is more of an issue with older disks that don't have NCQ and such. Disk fragmentation itself could easily have a lot more effect than this (increasing seeking lots more). It's really not that bad, and if it makes the system more responsive, then why not? Another screenshot, about this specific "issue", that speaks for itself (and I really ought to defrag sometime): I think this is still very acceptable. We're still a VERY long shot from his 10KB/sec file copy issues (by a factor of about 10 thousand) That was a problem with the RTM, which needed some tweaks, and as he says: As in, it's always faster at all file operations than XP and below, with a couple minor exceptions where it's slower than Vista RTM (where performance isn't bad anyways, just reduced a tiny bit). Notice he doesn't say anywhere that XP is actually faster at anything anywhere. I don't think that really sounds bad. How's that reinventing the wheel? Using caching (nothing new), tuning buffer size (like any app that does file I/O does), auto RWIN resize (a VERY good thing for your network at high speeds, we used to have to do that by hand), and the next version of the plain old SMB protocol. What's so drastically changed? I'm just not seeing it. It works just fine.

You have a few options: -trying to copy an existing install of the app from another machine (or repackaging it), and trying to run that on this new computer - it might be just the installer that won't work right -downgrading the OS to something older -- in this case, the older the better... since it uses NTVDM.exe, it's a 16 bit app (DOS, or win 3.11 app) -looking for a old & dirt cheap computer that will run it (you can pick up an old P3 with Win9x or such for like $40, check craigslist and classifieds) -getting a patch from the vendor (might cost you some $) -looking into different a more modern POS solution. It might not be a big problem yet, but some OS'es (e.g. Vista x64 & win 2003 x64) have ditched support for 16 bit apps altogether, so eventually you'll have to get rid of legacy DOS apps

Well, there you go. Try with SP1 and up to date drivers, it'll make quite a difference. Much like the people who were complaining about their games running slower, that's been solved too for the most part. The thing is, an OS can only be as good as the drivers for your hardware are. Your drivers suck? Windows is gonna suck too -- no matter what version. That's what it all comes down to. There's no reason for it to be sluggish on a "very high end machine", when it works just as fast as XP on a decent dual core box (that isn't memory starved). Besides, right after installing, things are always a bit more sluggish -- defrag hasn't done its job yet (it'll run when your PC is idle), the index has to be built from scratch, superfetch isn't tuned yet, and just like XP there's some optional stuff you might want to disable (e.g. system restore), etc.

One more reason to think you have a driver problem under Vista (problems with nvidia's drivers would hardly be surprising) They've actually improved it quite a bit. Details here. File copy also works correctly under Vista. They're hardly reinventing the wheel here... Just a very quick screenshot of transferring a 770MB test file between 2 drives (between SATA drives, from a temp folder folder on C, and the disk I use for VMware images) That's not even close to the fastest I've seen, but I'd say this is still a perfectly acceptable speed.

You realized you just dug up a post that's 3 years old, right?

Yes. The OS must be rubbish! It couldn't be a driver issue (USB or mass storage) or anything like that While I haven't used Vista pre-SP1 (that might have had issues), I'm just not seeing the transfer speed problems you're having. My transfer speeds between SATA drives (pushing over 100MB/sec sustained), SATA drives and USB2 external stuff (less speed, mostly limited by the garbage USB chipsets in enclosures or flash write speeds), and over the network aren't much different than XP's overall. I've never seen anyone with such slow transfers on any box, using any version of windows before, or any other OS for that matter (unless you want to include laplink transfer speeds on a 486 in the contest?) That should tell you something -- it's not a Vista problem, something is definitely wrong with your box (either the hardware, bad drivers, or something along those lines).

What he said. Things like this makes ALL the difference when it comes to admins. You have basic/junior admins who can click around Windows and do things by hand, writ simple batch files and apply some reg tweaks and such. And then you have the good admins -- those who know all the very useful command line utils, how to script things, and how to use various technologies to make it happen (WMI, ADSI, etc). Using scripting, a good admin will apply changes on 2000+ computers faster than a "junior" admin will make them on 10.

You're welcome... I only added a couple words to that script, it was a 15 second job. No need for such thanks As far as I know, there's 2 different locations for System Restore settings: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SystemRestore\ and HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\ + either sr & srservice (2 keys) Never looked much into it, as I never use system restore. In my opinion it's completely useless and a unnecessary resource hog. Either ways, a lot of system settings aren't meant to be toyed with from the registry (and sometimes it'll just overwrite changes you make in it, or won't work the same on 2 different machines -- it depends what). Scripts make use of interfaces with the system meant precisely do make such changes (in this case, using the SystemRestore WMI class). It's more powerful and versatile, and easier to maintain than a complex reg tweak. Scripting wise, there's a LOT of resources around. And it depends on which scripting language you're talking, and what you intend to do with it.

It's just a very simple and basic slip ring assembly (brushes and rings). So your wire can rotate freely. That would have to have some kind of spring always pulling on the cable (annoying), or requiring you to rewind it after use (no thanks). Besides, we used coiled handset cables for a reason. It's an effective system that works fine (besides the tangling).

Around here you can buy phone wire detanglers at the dollar store much like this one. Or then again, you can use a cordless phone.

In addition to what cluberti linked to, there's a couple more points: -.cmd being the new extension, won't run on older OS'es (i.e. Win9x and DOS) -to quote a ex-MS employee (Mark Zbikowski): So for most uses, there's not a whole lot of difference. That being said, there's no reason to still use the very old .bat extension, unless you're writing a batch file for legacy systems (pre-NT)

HHCTRL.OCX is part of the help system (html help ActiveX control), perhaps you might have removed something related to that. In both cases, it's caused by things you've removed with nLite (can't say what for sure as I don't use it). On a stock XP SP3 install, HHCTRL.OCX is there, and the command line tools are there too. So it's not really a slipstreaming problem.

I've never used it (didn't even know what it was until 5 minutes ago), but I just wanted to say a big "THANKS!!" for sharing the source with us all. So much people just stop supporting their utilities and don't release the source, often forcing us to seek alternatives as a problem arises.

Assuming the last script in the thread you linked to actually works, you only have to add one condition to make it do what you want (same thing, but skipping drive C) The old script was: Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set lDrives = fso.drives Set SRP = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\default:SystemRestore") For Each d In lDrives If d.DriveType = 2 Then SRP.disable(d.Path & "\") Next The line disables System Restore on all fixed drives, you just have to make it disable it on all fixed drives where the drive letter isn't C, like such: Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set lDrives = fso.drives Set SRP = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\default:SystemRestore") For Each d In lDrives If d.DriveType = 2 and d.DriveLetter <> "C" Then SRP.disable(d.Path & "\") Next Not tested (I always have that 100% disabled, and I'm just not enabling it to test that, sorry).