CoffeeFiend

Like I said, you can try to keep using it like that, but why would you really want to? You know there are problems with the disk surface for sure and it's not gonna get any better, likely worse. Corrosion? Hopefully not because that spreads a lot. Wear? Again, spreads. Heads landed? who knows... Likely SMART data reports serious problems too. You're at risk of losing important data, and data corruption in general causing various problems (crashes, hangs and BSODs namely). One a bad block in the wrong spot can totally corrupt your filesystem, and then hopefully you manage to recover your data. It's a disaster waiting to happen as far as I'm concerned. In fact, on modern drives you shouldn't see bad sectors EVER. The drives have plenty of spare sectors that they remap with transparently. So if it starts to show some, it's run out of sectors to remap with, so it's definitely spreading a lot (SMART data would have details). Data is far more valuable than an old worn out defective hard drive costs to replace. Even if you didn't need 750GB or didn't have $90 to spend, you can get a 250GB'er for $45. It's brand new (no mechanical wear), the disk surface doesn't have problems, it's likely faster, has a warranty and all.

That's not the case at all. Keyboards only send make & break codes. It's not even close to being the same.

Not even! NT4 needed more than its fair share of bugfixes (7 service packs if you count SP6a, plus the rollup too). And the time, driver availability wasn't quite that great. Most manufacturers made drivers mainly for windows 95 and such. For instance, my old Epson Stylus Color II, the only driver that existed for it would only print at half the resolution and such (and if I recall properly, I had to wait to even get that, it came in a service pack). A very large amount of apps from those days plain didn't work at all either (a lot of stuff was still for dos/win9x -- not really written having NT in mind). It wasn't exactly flawless! Exactly. And there will be plenty of those complaining about Windows 7 soon too. Win2k was particularly atrocious at first in my experience -- not quite that stable (especially pre-sp2), somewhat buggy, and the lack of drivers for most of our computers was pretty apparent... Some drivers just took forever to come out for it (in a non-broken state), like Creative's... There's really NOTHING new at all about most of of the complaints about the new versions (bloated, space it takes, lack of drivers, slow, interface changes or differences in general, price... the old one works fine/I don't need this, etc). Eventually everybody moves to it. History repeats itself with every new version.

I just looked at broadsat's plans, specifically opensky which seems to be what you're referring to: it's 35 euros for (40 if not on a plan) for: 10 GB a month at up to 2 Mbps. That's not a whole lot of data at all, and not really fast either. Chances are your existing ADSL is better than that... Around here, with ISPs like teksavvy you can get 5mbit down/800kbit up ADSL w/o any data caps for $40 CAD (25 euros) a month, or $30 (19 euros) if you can live with a 200GB/month cap (20x more than that sat plan), and that's not just a 1-way thing that requires you already have internet.

You can't just use variable names in the middle of a string. You have to close the string, add your variable, then add the last part (each part must be properly enclosed in quotes). Set objGroup = GetObject ("LDAP://cn=" & strDepartment & ",OU=NLC Departments,dc=nlc,dc=com") Set objUser = GetObject("LDAP://cn=" & strUser & ",OU=NLC Users,dc=nlc,dc=com") objGroup.add(objUser.ADsPath)

The speeds will vary a LOT depending on where the server is located, routing in general, network congestion, etc. There's just too many factors that come in play IMO. I've never seen one of those that was worth anything (for the locations where I tried at least). Like the last time I tried when I visited my dad, the max I'd get from any of them test places was 70KB/sec (basic cable plan -- more than enough for email), yet I'd have no problems at all pulling 100KB/sec anytime downloading files from various places. They're often 50%+ off from what I experienced.

Sometimes they only one bad block and stay like that for a while, but more often than not, you have more than one, and they tend to "multiply". Some people keep using them despite of this, but I don't trust my data to a drive with obvious signs of failure (likely on an old drive with a decent amount of wear), especially nowadays, when you get can a brand new 750GB'er for $90. In disk management you should be able to find out which of the two it is. But Harddisk1 is your 2nd hard drive (and it says D too) -- not the one you're booting from.

I already mentioned dosbox and tamedos in post #7. But seemingly he's not willing to try any of those, nor reinstalling an older OS, nor using a post dos-era compiler. In other words, he's chosen to not solve the problem.

What do you mean? You can use a UPS on any computer regardless of the OS. XP's built-in monitoring tools are limited to serial & USB connections (actually, even win2k does), but there are other apps from different vendors that will let you monitor them differently if you need to (SNMP, etc)

Stay patched, use some kind of firewall (a good router works), if at all possible don't use IE, and don't run any .exe from anywhere (including email attachments) blindly. If you do that, you'll go for years without any viruses.

god i hate to think of the past with me and applications and drivers for vista. Actually, Vista is much better for that. For one thing, video drivers run in user mode now (lots more stuff does actually), so they won't take down your system (it'll just restart the driver), unlike in XP. And god knows them ATI/GeForce drivers are often the ones who do so... (That, and crappy unstable chipsets with poor drivers)

Another long running poll I see. VMware for me, because: It's reliable and time-tested (mature), and still fast & easy You have a full-featured desktop app for those with more complex needs, and it just keeps getting better and better: ACE, VDI, record/replay debugging, etc You have the freeware player You have a free version for servers (also works fine for "standard" needs on a workstation) You have an upgrade path to a high-end server product (ESX/ESXi) Lots of extremely powerful & useful features on the server products, such as VMotion Large set of different management tools for different needs -- they're good too It runs on different platforms and also accepts mostly anything as a guest OS There's loads of pre-built appliances for it Advanced networking: multiple virtual NICs per guest, multiple virtual switches, VLANs, etc, using one or more physical NICs/ports All the other and extremely useful apps that one uses with it, like P2V and the Converter The powerful scripting APIs: VmPerl (using perl) and VmCOM (using any language that supports COM objects -- VBScript, JScript, C++, C#, VB.NET, Java, etc) & VIX The incredibly cool Visual Studio addon (debug your processes running inside a VM!) and so many other perks for programmers The new and amazing VI toolkit, that lets you use PowerShell to do anything with your VMs The various SDKs supplementing the scripting APIs Support for a good range of hardware, like USB devices and smardcard readers in guest OS'es, plus 3D acceleration and such Solid drivers for the guest OS'es (and not just for windows either) Great documentation Support forums, blogs, sites, books written about it, support contracts if you need it, etc. Doesn't require you to rush out to buy Win2008 licenses + CALs and all that expensive stuff to use (unlike Hyper V) -- it'll even run on a free OS! And that's just off the top of my head... Nothing comes even close. It's light-years ahead of the rest.

Very strange. I've heard no such complaints anywhere, or from anybody else yet. And I've personally had 0 issues thus far with any XP SP3 installations, so if you have more details...

Like for instance? I've heard of only 2 issues so far with SP3: -the first, is a reboot loop problem on HP disk images (HP's fault for loading an Intel driver on AMD boxes) -and the last, a problem with Microsoft Dynamics RMS (quickly solved) And that would be the complete list of issues I'm aware of so far.

Using doskbd is surely approved by MS -- it's one of their own tools... Edit: Well, nevermind. doskbd is NT4 only. Looks like they expect us to have migrated away from badly behaving dos-era app by now... But then again, you're handed a super old box, and are forced to run win2k on it (can't reinstall win98, even if you explained it to them?), and also forced to use that ancient compiler too?

You don't really want to reuse an old DLL from the SP2 on a fully patched SP3 box. Reusing old DLLs that we know for sure have been patched for some exploits is opening yourself to some problems. Doubly so when you know they also have changed features in that since SP2 (like adding Network Access Protection). You want to use a patched version of the latest one. It only takes a couple minutes to do anyways. Here's a link to a very quickly patched one (limit raised from 10 to 500 half open conns, should be plenty) from a fully patched XP SP3 box (en-CA locale): http://www.zshare.net/download/150739280f6ffd3d/ Ready to drop in an existing windows install (tested, works fine) And it's already modifype'd, so you only need to makecab it to put on your CD if you want... (not tested)

IDK, IDT one TLA is OTT Finally someone who speaks my language! But yeah, if he's willing to post more wireshark caps of his network issues (like those problems with network shares so we can see what really happens), I'd have a look too (this time, I'll have to beat Mr Snrub to it!)

Server Message Block

That's easy to do, both using the previous, excruciatingly slow and non-win2003 friendly WMI way, and reading from the registry. WMI wise, the Win32_Product class doesn't have a property for the uninstall string, but it has a Uninstall method. You call that, and it gets uninstalled. Registry wise, it's only a matter of enumerating the keys for each installed app, and in each keys looking at the right values -- QuietUninstallString or UninstallString, for each app (DisplayName being the app name). You could probably do it with a .cmd file, but that would be truly fugly (using reg.exe and "for /f" a LOT) You could also use things like the WindowsInstaller.Installer object directly, but the end result is the same (the Win32_Product WMI class is merely a different way to use it). I haven't looked at the code used by WPI, but if it tries to do a plain old string comparison (appname == "some app"), indeed that wouldn't work. You'd have to use the .indexOf method instead.

I dunno about the nlite part (I don't use it), but that driver works great. Except, it does have one problem if you're a TrueCrypt user: when you mount a truecrypt volume (any filesystem), it'll BSOD your box... The author has acknowledged this problem, and says he has it fixed and to "wait for v1.2", and as you can see, we've been waiting for a fix for the most part of 6 months... Just a FYI, in case you also use (or plan on using) TrueCrypt.

Configure To Order

Well, the user could just hit cancel and keep his unauthorized apps... I thought you intended to use that to uninstall an old version of an app, prior to installing the newer one (silently), where user interaction isn't typically desired. We tend to deal with this differently. We keep lists of generally authorized apps (those just get ignored), list of apps with licenses only for some workstations or users, and everything else not on those, gets spit out to an excel sheet, that someone looks at. New apps get either added to the old list of authorized apps (like say, a driver package), or the user gets a phone call/visit from someone (e.g. game found on their computer), and often the user's local admin rights are pulled (assuming they had them in the first place). But I guess every place has its own ways to deal with this. As for other apps that we don't push via GPO or such, we tend to include links in their start menu (for the apps they need/are authorized to use), that launch a script instead of the app. The first time they run it, the script installs the app. The script also checks for updates before starting the app. It's not perfect, but it's simple, it works reliably and it costs nothing. Most places I've seen using workgroups were pretty small (especially when you can throw together a domain controller out of a old/spare box with linux + samba in mere minutes for free), so it wasn't too much of a problem managing the few computers by hand. YMMV...

Well, it's an ancient compiler, running on pretty old hardware too, so why not throw Windows 95 on it or such (or even DOS 6.22). It should run fine under that. Old dos apps like that won't play nice on newer operating systems. Not a whole lot you can do about that. The main 2 alternatives are: not using such an ancient compiler (dos app), like I mentioned before using an older OS (from the same era, that it was written for) Or as a last resort, the other "workarounds" (doskbd, TameDOS, dosbox, etc). It's not remotely as complicated as programming anything past "hello world" in C++...

Usually the reason they suck 100% of your CPU is because they're pre-windows apps. Back then apps weren't written to leave CPU time for other apps (what? running more than one app at once you say?), so when idle, it just runs a loop polling for keyboard input (usually using int 0x16), sucking the CPU dry. There are some utilities that help with these very old apps (doskbd and TameDOS comes to mind), but at some point, you have to make the move to modern apps. And in this case, there's perfectly good/vastly better solutions available for free. You could also try running it under dosbox (yeah, it's really become THAT old). There's such a generation gap between that compiler and his OS (DOS era and 64 bit OS), it's hardly surprising there are problems.

I'm slowly giving up on it these days. From GRUB problems, to having to recompile ALSA everything & editing the alsa config file to have audio working (over spdif), to Hardy Heron freezing solid on the kids box pretty much daily (I tend to blame the ati drivers for that one -- too bad it's not windows, no minidumps to check!), a LOT of flickering of the screen on some stuff like supertux which one of my daughters likes a lot (ATI again) -- thankfully it runs great on Windows, and sometimes sound doesn't work at all until you reboot (probably something with the SB live 5.1 having problems with the newly adopted Pulse Audio) but it's hardly surprising when you know how much of a mess Linux audio is, power saving not working nearly as smooth as Windows' on that box (pretty annoying), numerous issues with Hardy Heron in general that I didn't have with 7.10: Network Manager sucks, the update manager saying its up to date when sometimes it isn't, not coming with the tools to create network shares anymore (install nautilus-share, then reboot, and to change workgroup name, you again have to edit the samba config file by hand), not having the most interesting options of compiz fusion enabled by default, nor having the app to configure it installed by default, etc. So 2 of my boxes are no longer dual booting... I just don't have the time to try another dozen distros, learn all the specific quirks those have, and all the necessary workarounds/fixes. Windows just works on these boxes, all the time, reliably. No crashes, freezes, strange problems or anything... Linux only seems to bring you different problems (and more of them from what I've seen).