CoffeeFiend

Personally, I've had nothing but troubles USB-wise on them older VIA chipsets. Are you running the latest drivers from VIA?

Coming from you that's a huge compliment! Right. Being in the USA it must be worth it to get a ATSC tuner for them nice high definition/high bitrate and toally free OTA HD feeds (I wish we had some around here), they're only like $50 anyways. (optionally, add a better antenna to have more chans)

This one is pretty decent. AM2+ socket (supports future CPUs), 4 DIMM slots (many mATX boards only have 2) that supports up to 1066MHz (DDR2), Radeon HD3200 onboard (directx 10) which does UVD (decoding of the CPU intensive codecs in hardware, reducing CPU load a LOT), a Realtek ALC889A codec that provides high definition 7.1 audio and advanced features like DTS connect (better than a X-Fi and such) and supports for all the codecs used by Blu-Ray discs, etc. It has pretty much all the inputs/outputs you'd want for a HTPC: DVI and HDMI (with HDCP and all -- I believe sound over HDMI works fine on this board too) and even the old D-sub, a SPDIF out (digital sound output), eSATA on the back (5 SATA internal, plus a PATA just in case), firewire, plenty of USB, gigabit ethernet, etc. And it's a quality board, with nice solid caps and everything. No need for a separate vid card, separate sound card, nor a fancy/fast/expensive CPU. Find a nice mATX case, put a cheap athlon64 CPU, a couple GB of RAM and a Blu-Ray drive and you're set.

You're welcome! Like anyone who had to change names on a LOT of computers before, I always keep a copy handy on my USB drive (it's really a must-have/essential tool for any serious admin), so it only took a minute to compress & upload it.

Here's v2.86: http://www.zshare.net/download/14884701afe4c549/

Actually, they now have some mATX boards with some pretty good video onboard, some of which does H.264 decoding in hardware, greatly reducing CPU usage, and can be passively cooled. Some of them even have HDMI outputs. And most of those will also have high def multichannel sound onboard (realtek codec usually), with digital outputs (toslink and/or spdif) and everything else. On a board like that, a cheap Athlon64 will more than suffice. Makes for a low cost, low heat and quiet PC -- perfect for the living room. Looks at boards built on chipsets like AMD's 740G or 780G in your usual store. Remote wise, it depends on what software you're going to use. Alternately, you could have a look at units like the Popcorn Hour A-100. It does basically the same thing, for cheap too.

I meant that as in what kind of VPN -- PPTP? L2TP? Cisco? OpenVPN? etc But seemingly cluberti already answered it now (seeing the pic you added to your first post) CMAK is an optional component of Windows 2003.

Yeah, in this particular case, it might be a better solution for sure. You have the necessary knowledge of Linux in-house (shouldn't be a problem, unless your bosses consider you might quit some day -- then what?). With only 30 or so employees (and likely as many workstations), there's no need for a fancy AD tree, a NT-style samba domain would suffice for sure. And then unless you have special requirements for IIS already, Apache should do the job fine for a small site or intranet (if there is one) -- mysql if you need a basic lightweight DB. Bind/sendmail/samba could easily handle dns/mail/file shares too, and still have enough resources left to run squid and all that. And much like cluberti said, you could even use VMs for all this, if you have reasonably powerful servers. It might come in handy to keep a windows box around for things like WSUS though (although squid would still cache the downloads of the patches from Akamai's mirrors)

Sure, there is a bit less maintenance on the Linux servers, and the price is sure a lot nicer (0$ -- unless you want support, no CALs, free upgrades, etc). But again, ease of setup is a major thing for most small shops. Any trained monkey can click next, whereas editing config files and such for samba/openldap/bind/sendmail/apache isn't quite as simple. It makes quite a difference for a lot of them, because most don't have an IT staff on hand 24/7, and often very limited access to any kind of Linux expert. MS offers a simple to use product, that also has some extra or different features, like calendar sharing with outlook/exchange, and IIS if you need to run ASP.NET or ASP classic pages/apps. Again, not the cheapest, but it gets the job done reasonably well for most small businesses.

Opening my existing office docs (from various older versions) with the current version causes no such issues, on either XP or Vista. But opening files with a newer version of Office (new versions always use an updated format) is known to always change formatting a bit. Perhaps he was using another font that isn't available on his new system either? Have you tried opening those documents on another computer (with either version of office) to see what happens? Maybe one install has issues, or that the documents get corrupted during transfer or such.

It would help if you said what kind of VPN you're thinking about in the first place.

As far as I know, only Win 2003 Enterprise Ed comes with extra licenses for use in VMs (4). But it's not exactly cheap compared to SBS ($4000 vs like $500). Windows isn't the cheapest thing to run on your servers (well, SBS isn't that bad really), but it's definitely easier to get SBS up and doing everything than configuring a Linux server to handle all the same tasks (Active Directory, Exchange, Network Shares, etc) for most mere mortals.

Lots of the tasks can be accomplished by very simple batch files like we've had since the early DOS days. And of course you could learn a scripting language (or more than one), there's no shortage of them (VBScript, JScript, PowerShell, AutoIt, Winbatch, KiXtart, etc). There's loads of learning resources for most of them, but you'll have to chose one first, and that choice is a personal one. No one can make it for you. None of them is all-around better at everything either. It comes down to needs and preferences. There's no need to double post BTW.

When you use a password, the files in the archive ARE encrypted. You can't set a password without encrypting. The password hash is used to decrypt the files. Unless you meant encrypting the file names too, and of course there's an option for that in the same place you enter your password, see the screenshot:

I always keep an eye on stats (browsers and such), and I just noticed some changes today with the latest hitslink stats. Last month, NT4 had 0.68%, Linux had 0.68% too, and all of Win9x combined had 0.76%. This month, NT4 sits at 0.69%, Win9x (95/98/ME combined) went down by 10% again to settle at 0.69%, tying place with NT4, and Linux went up to 0.8% (17% increase), placing it above the other two. Linux is growing pretty fast. If it continues at this pace, it should overpass Win2k in 6 months to a year (Win2k should be around 1.5% or less by then), and eventually Mac OS Classic too. Meanwhile, Vista goes up by about a percent or so per month, and XP down by one too (Vista is eating away at XP's market share very quickly) The same seems to happen to MacIntel and Mac OS classic (users of the new replacing users of the old). Edit: changed thread title to something more fitting

Those new spinpoints have very fast read & write speeds for sure (better than the WD6400AAKS I was mentioning). Of course it's going to be a LOT faster than a pair of very old maxtors

That's more of a side effect than anything. And it's not like the presence of NTVDM on your box lowered performance or anything. It doesn't really work any better than the x86 version for that (unless you wanna try running x64 compiles). I'm perfectly happy with Vista x86 for that (and VS2008 is perhaps the app I spend the most time in) That's a reason in itself to have waited some more. There isn't a x64 version yet (it's due for next year), and meanwhile running PS under WOW64, adding extra overhead, doesn't make much sense either. And once it's out, it just might need new x64 versions of your plugins and such too. Adobe themselves last time said there was no point going with a x64 version, because it wouldn't have helped at all (it's memory bound, and x64 doesn't make memory access any faster). You're only going to get some benefits, when you work on a few GB worth of images at once (100+ megapixel HDR pano shots? ) And again, most people will need to buy more RAM for it to make use of it in the first place. Yes, I totally agree there. They seriously have to. Windows 7 shouldn't even come in a x86 version. It's not like anyone's going to run it on an old P4 or an Athlon XP, and by then 8GB of RAM will be quite cheap and getting close to mainstream.

I didn't say its use doubled, I said 15% overall. So if you have 4GB and only see 3.5 of it, and install x64 to see the last 512MB, then you don't actually gain anything! (3.5GB + 15% = 4.025GB so in theory you might be losing a tiny bit) It's not the idle resource usage that's high. It's the actual CPU cycles used to do the calculations, like someone else said "it marshals memory access back and forth to adjust pointer sizes", and that makes the CPU usage considerably higher (several other office tasks have the problem, like animations in powerpoint). And nevermind a 64 bit copy of Office will likely never have VBA (like Office 2008 for the Mac), likely won't work with old 32 bit ActiveX controls, etc. And again, it's just one example. *All* apps have extra overhead running under WOW64. Your apps don't get any performance advantages until they are native x64 versions. Then trying playing H.264 in a mkv container for example. Right, no CoreAVC, no Haali splitter. It's very problematic IMO. And videos ARE very math intensive -- perhaps the most math-intensive most people do on their PCs actually (besides games). Codecs are just that -- a LOT of complicated math, and it's VERY demanding on the CPU (just try encoding HD videos with x264). Running codecs and media players (for HD videos at least) under WOW64 sounds like a nightmare.

I sure wouldn't go for such an old raptor myself. It's just not that amazing by today's standards, it's still quite expensive, and it's tiny. Haven't looked at that specific model's speed either lately (the 320GB caviar) Nowadays, you can get some great drives, with lots of space, and great performance too. A single 640GB WD drive (new model, the WD6400AAKS) is nearly as fast as a 300GB velociraptor at most things (not enough difference for most people to tell), and that's for a single drive. The big difference? The 640GB WD6400AAKS is $90, whereas the 300GB velociraptor is $330 -- about 4x the price for only half the space, all that for a ~15% faster boot with Vista, saving you all of 30 seconds a month or so. For half the cost of such a fancy drive, you can get a pair of WD6400AAKS's that will give you over 4x the space, and beat the raptor on a lot of tasks. Besides, Vista boot time shouldn't be a huge concern like Mr Snrub said -- just make it sleep. You shouldn't have to reboot too often (making the velociraptor even more pointless). And app startup times should already be very minimal with SuperFetch (your common apps will already be cached in RAM in advance), again, making the very expensive velociraptor less and less worth it.

Well, if you want to OC it, sure. I'd start with the CPU myself. That CPU can do lots more than that. I have the model underneath that, the E2160 (same FSB, just a 1-lower multiplier), and it runs fine at 3.4GHz on air cooling and all (85% overclock). Yours might not quite reach 3.4 as each chip OC'es differently, but it should easily go up to at least 3. RAM frequency wise, you just need to change the multiplier. If you want to change the timings, then you need to disable "configure using SPD" or such, and then setting it by hand. There's millions of how-to's and such on the web. They explain everything you need to know in great detail. There's even entire websites dedicated just to that. I suggest you do some reading before you try anything.

It totally depends on what you're doing in the first place, what RAID level (0, 1, 10, 5, etc), what drives, what controller, stripe size, etc. There just isn't a one-size-fits-all solution that's better at everything. That's what it comes down to really. Personally, I see a gigantic difference in speed for my use with RAID 0. RAID 0 doesn't help one bit when it comes to latency, but that's not what I care about. What I care, is max throughput (how much MB/sec I can move around) while copying lots of large files around (lots of encoding, maintaining disk images, digital media, etc), and RAID 0 clearly wins there, there's no contest. 10k rpm drives have lower rotational latency (and usually lower seek times in general), so it helps for loading tons of small files, but more often than not, I see MUCH cheaper drives with a far better max throughput than them, and with a far better capacity to boot. 10k rpm drives are just too bloody expensive and WAY too small for me, and they make a lot of heat/noise too. 15k rpm drives are even worse... Sure, in a server loading tons of tiny files from disk every second (like serving web pages), sure, it helps a lot, but when you're moving an ISO image around or such, you can find cheaper & bigger drives that will do that faster. I don't play games, so no idea about those... A $50 vid card is overkill for me Different tasks have different bottlenecks too. By far my main bottleneck is CPU (tasks like encoding H.264) and disk I/O. Again, it ultimately comes down to what someones does with their PC.

Seriously, I've never seen registry size be a real issue on any computer ever. Lots (I'd be tempted to go as far as saying most) reg "cleaning" utils are more like "registry mangling apps" than anything. Yes, some might not hose it to the point where you'd notice instantly, but it feels a bit like playing russian roulette (cross your fingers, with some luck, it just might not crash your system!) They sure have the potential to break things pretty badly. And most of the gains make no real-life difference. Getting rid of a couple unused keys won't really shrink things much either.

alt + 0160 works regardless (it's unicode) alt + 255 will generate either: the exact exact same character, or y with a umlaut: ÿ. If typing alt-255 makes a non-breaking space for you, try alt + 0255 and you'll see... It all depends on the code page being used (like Windows-1252)

I'm afraid I won't be of much help for the WOL problems, never run into those issues. That's kind of strange. Linux supports WAY more devices (including DVB-S/S2/T/C cards, for which MCE has zero support), MCE remotes funnily work FAR better in Linux than they do in Windows, mythtv lets you have separate front ends (to watch tv -- it can be a dirt cheap PC with passive cooling, running off of a flash drive -- totally silent) and back ends (for capturing/storing -- it could easily handle analog capture cards, DVB cards and ATSC tuners at once) -- this way you can watch anything live or pre-recorded from any mythtv box just like if it was local, it has way more nice features like automatic cutting of ads and re-encoding, it has better scheduling, doesn't have issues with the broadcast flag (some ppl had such issues with MCE lately), it's more customizable when it comes to pulling TV guides from different places (like DVB streams, XML TV guides and such), MCE has some issues with various containers and codecs it seems (even with reg hacks and what not, it wouldn't index/find half my stuff), I don't really care for how the menus are laid out in MCE (although that's a personal preference), from what I've seen MCE is quite memory/resource hog too, etc. And MythTV is free, with free updates forever. I love Vista and all, but MythTV is all-around better than MCE in my opinion.

And it's more than just that -- they not only made it 2-way, but they also combined XP's firewall, and the old IPsec policies dating from the win2k days, made it into one, and it's all configured using the same tool now (XP had 2 different things, both configured separately, and no outbound). And it all works, both on ipv4 and v6, right out of the box. And it has fancier filtering. It can be managed via GPO and all. HUGE improvements all-around here. I'm being one-upped by everyone here I have to fix that! 31. Windows Photo Gallery Screensaver. Combined with some nice photos, it looks great on a nice LCD. Ppl are always like "look at that pic!"... It has nice features like showing photo (or not showing them) based on tags and ratings. I have a script scheduled to run everyday, changing the tags. You can also have it change mode between your favorite types (pan & zoom, album, etc), instead of using random which might use other types you don't like so much (look at the key named "Theme" in the same location). 32. Automatic self-defrag when the computer is idle (and when it needs it). About time! This way, people shouldn't have to even think about this anymore. 33. I have to steal cluberti's #12 from the next post. All kinds of small things like that, but it definitely adds up. 3. The reliability monitor seems like a very good way to check on how someone else's pc has been working. You see all the application/hardware/windows failures in one spot, with all the details, curves and all, plus install infos and such 35. IE's protected mode (if you use IE), making it much harder to get your PC all spyware'd up by letting someone else use it for 5 minutes, as well as DEP enhancements (especially on the x64 version) + ASLR which should make buffer overflow exploits mostly harmless (again, less malware hassles on clients/co-workers'/friends PCs and such). And Windows Service Hardening too (way more secure -- blocking possible attack methods like blaster used) 36. The nice new cleartype fonts (Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia, Corbel, Nyala, Segoe, etc) 37. Better power saving options I think I'm out of ideas for good now... There's some other stuff that looks cool, but that I haven't tried or had a need for, like the mobility center for laptop users -- everything in one place (power, battery status, wifi, external displays, sync'ing, etc), offline files seems to have been improved a lot, new and actually useful backup utilities (like Complete PC Backup), remote assistance works thru NAT, and tons of little things like that, many of which we just seem to overlook. Seemingly, when you have the indexing turned on and such, you can even use it to do search remotely (the remote computer does the search)