CoffeeFiend

Thanks That's actually a great book you're recommending (I started reading it a couple months ago), but reading it cover to cover might be a bit much as it's 1568 pages long I might be done reading it by the time windows 7 is out...

Exactly. The hard drive is by far the slowest component of a computer nowadays. I mean, RAM latency is in a few nanoseconds which is already a long wait for a CPU, and hard drives in milliseconds, so roughly a million times slower. So I wouldn't willingly go for something slow-ish. And hard drives these days fill up very quickly. From software coming on DVDs now, some mpeg4 videos, TV shows if you use your computer as a PVR (with mce, mythtv or such), DV footage, large digital photos (and I'm not talking about pr0n here), some music (especially if lossless), vmware and ghost/trueimage images, different partitions if you dual boot (or more), ISO's you're working on and what not... I could easily go thru a 640GB in a week if I didn't limit myself. Storage has always been the first thing I run out of, on any computer.

E7200 is actually 139 now, but price matched with this, so $130 P5Q Pro on special for $139 RAM 2x2GB OCZ Gold is 70$ after mail in rebate Graphics Card (Diamond ATI 4850) - $190 Western Digital WD6400AAKS $90 like you said Optical Drive ... $30 (there's TONS of others in the $25 to $30 range) Antec 900 price matched with this, $92 Corsair HX520, if he goes for that model, it's $80 after mail in rebate So including 2 mail in rebates, his total cost is more like $850 even with 4GB of RAM, leaving 50$ for a better CPU HSF.

Then just get ncix to price match it Besides, making a separate order just for a CPU and paying shipping on that alone, would cost you extra (ncix has it for $10 more, and TD's shipping aint cheap) Motherboard wise, that's the one Zxian mentioned earlier. I'd take a couple minutes to re-read some of the mos knowledgeable people's advice. Much like puntoMX and Zxian said, you should look at the Antec 900 instead of the Sonata.

Just an idea. We've been hit repeatedly by the same spammer over and over again. Once today (members russiakeys and xiBuckley), at least once in the last month (those got deleted too), and doing a quick forum search for the garbage they've been spamming, they've done it before too. Members like Josef seem to only be around to pimp that same ******* garbage and pimping the same old ghetto blog. (Just look at his other posts) And most of the time there's another account (created around the same time), used to ask a question, just so they can spam their garbage without having it look like spam. I'm talking about members like hemandog who actually asks for such "solutions" like seen here, yet they have that same blog URL in their signature and profile, promoting the same thing the other account is... And to think 7 out of his 10 posts have been deleted, he must have done it more than once too. I think it's starting to get old. This guy has a lot of determination and time to spare to spam us (not just us actually, just google for it), so can we just ban that word? (*******) I think it would solve the problem for good. Easier than always being on the lookout for him, finding his posts, banning his countless accounts, etc. Otherwise, possibly delete his spam and ban him? Thank you

I wish I had to be that far off for it to look bad. I was visiting my step-sis yesterday, they had a 20" viewsonic... I tried to google for something (local business), sitting on a chair that's just a little too high, and I had to lean over to lower my head, so the LCD didn't look all washed out (everything white). Can't say I was impressed much. You have to look at it from dead center pretty much. They're more expensive for sure, but it makes quite a difference. I can stand up right next to it, slouch or recline in my chair, or look at it from a 45+ degrees angle while on the couch, and it looks great regardless. Once you get a MVA/PVA/IPS panel, you don't go back PS: I don't drive a beemer either.

I dunno about looks, but if you think a good, quality 5.1 sound system goes for 50$... Most of that money of that is for retail sales profit, transport, the fancy box with full color printing, packaging, publicity/marketing, the factory's costs to assemble them, etc. That leaves what, 6$ for the amp, 4$ for the sub, and and about 1$ per satellite speaker or so (the main part of the $ going towards the cheap plastic enclosure). I've never seen even just a subwoofer that sounded good at anywhere near $50. 6 ghetto speakers don't really sound better than 3 better quality ones. The sub is an anemic 5" driver (doesn't move much air, likely doesn't go much below 50Hz), the overall response curve is likely nowhere near flat, and while it probably sounds plenty loud, the specs aren't exactly looking great (I mean, who rates their stuff at 10% THD?). I mean, they probably sound just fine -- for budget speakers. You already had good suggestions for cooling: And no one can guarantee you you'll hit 4GHz, no matter what you get. Odds are, you won't quite hit it (more like 3.6 to 3.8 average). To get high overclocks, you'd have to increase the voltage, which most people prefer not to do. If you need more performance, look at the E8400 or such. The extra cache and such should help when it comes to games. Besides, why lu computers? You'd save around $100 by ordering from ncix (and price matching with directcanada with what's cheaper there). That 100$ savings could go towards something else, like a better set of speakers. They also have a MUCH wider selection of parts. BTW, no one seems to sell the P5K Pro, and Zxian said P5Q Pro anyways.

The price of panels goes up a lot both with size (lower yields) and resolution. And it's not using a crap TN panel like the cheap ones most people are used to. My 24" WUXGA (1920x1200) LCD, with a good MVA panel, with taxes, shipping and insurance was $700. The 30" are much bigger, and have a even higher resolution -- usually WQXGA), so it's perfectly normal they cost a lot more. They're a LOT cheaper than they used to be too (like 3G's). But they can't sell you the monitor for less than the panel costs to produce. You can't exactly compare prices directly with MUCH smaller displays, especially not the ones with TN panels. LCD TVs tend to make poor monitors (they're meant to process the signal to make it better -- not display stuff as-is, and usually much lower DPI and all). There's a reason BMW's costs more than a Hyundai too.

Quite a nice texture to it. That reminds me, I should look for a nice brushed steel one. The other link definitely has some nice ones too!

The site doesn't use Java at all. Actually, the menus expand and collapse, but click the links, they don't work at all. So no it doesn't work perfectly even there. Their site is horribly broken, that's all it is. Their ugly and pointless flash navigation is broke, their ugly flash banner at the bottom has strange blue rectangles on each side, they have countless issues with their markup (as in hml), css errors (it's not even in a separate file either), javascript errors, n00b comments everywhere in the markup, uses a lot of tables for nothing, and it's so ghetto that there isn't even a doctype (it renders in quirks mode). Every problem a web site could have, it has. But then again, it runs on on a ancient version of netscape server (nobody uses that anymore basically) -- we're talking like 10 years old here, and static html... So you can't even be surprised the site sucks. There's absolutely NOTHING you can do on your end that will make this work. It's the site that needs fixing.

We've had 64-way servers for several years already. How much one can spend on a single computer is already unbelievable. To quote myself from another thread: This already costs like 70G's, and it still isn't quite the max you can squeeze in a single case (it's just a plain old 16-way server). HP, IBM and countless others will gladly sell your FAR faster/better ones, providing you have money -- LOTS of it. I mean, if you wanted to waste a million bucks over something totally pointless, you most definitely could.

That's both easy and hard to explain. Your ram usage is quite high, not sure why (that's the hard part). Hard to say why, without being on the box and looking around. Page file wise, it's a misunderstanding on your behalf. The windows task manager has long been labeling things in stupid ways, like actual RAM usage of a process on XP isn't the default column, it's actually called "VM Size" (so you can't really blame people for not getting it right). Similarly, "Page File" isn't actually the page file usage at all, but rather the commit size! That's the total amount of memory used, physical and virtual combined. Long story short, you don't have a 1.5GB page file... Here's a screenshot of a vista box (with only 2GB), done with process explorer (and I think there was a couple extra processes even, like the realtek mixer). Commit charge is only 382MB, 17 of which is used by process explorer, so 365MB used TOTAL. And that's not using vLite or anything. Same tweaks you've done, plus turning off some unnecessary services, nothing special. Don't ask me what the hell your box is doing with that extra 1.2GB of RAM, because I have no idea... Most people don't quite understand Windows memory management, or are fooled by all the mislabeled stuff, and often make comments based on wrong numbers and such (it's extremely common actually). I recommend a GREAT tool that's part of the Sysinternals Suite: process explorer. All their apps are he very best, and extremely useful actually (process monitor, autoruns, etc). The Sysinternals Video Library (with Mark Russinovich himself) is a must-watch too. They specifically talk about Windows management on one of the DVDs. It's $400 admittedly, but most IT training/courses will run you a lot more than that, even for simple things. Dunno about the ADPCM and old games, as I don't play old games. Yes, the status bar file size bug is known, that's certainly an issue. I don't have issues with it "chewing a core" though, navigation works great once you get used to it (much stuff is going this way regardless, and eventually you have to change some things -- not all change is bad). Control panel being shuffled around? They basically did that with every version or just about. As for display properties, they opted for different icons for different tasks, instead of cramming it all in one screen. It's not that hard to find stuff actually. Just why should themes be in the same screen as resolution and all that anyways? Just because it used to be? And the sidebar works just fine in the other language I've tried/used (i.e. french). Some things change with every version, and some people resist to change more than others... That's so far from the truth that I wouldn't know where to start...

The problem isn't really a SP3 problem per se, it's an issue with some images made by companies like HP, that were deployed on AMD boxes, and that had some intel driver in it, which became active wen you installed SP3 or such. I don't recall precisely. But most people installing on AMD boxes had no issues whatsoever (myself included).

I couldn't have said any better!

Everything's cheap if you put it that way. Back in 1995, 8MB of EDO RAM was 800$. Or back in 1980, a 18MB hard drive was 5G's. That still doesn't make it cheap (not everyone has nearly that much $ to spend on RAM nowadays -- at least I don't). Paging already isn't an issue at 4GB with fairly intensive use. With Vista only stuff that really isn't necessary to keep in RAM gets paged to disk. Actually, it even pre-caches stuff you might need later on in the free memory. It's not like XP, it doesn't just dump it all to the page file to have it all free (i.e. unused). Page file usage, looking at any perf counter is already quite low. There's just not much gain to make from having 8GB there for the vast majority of people. I can already have dozens of apps open at once (including firefox, photoshop, etc) and not have paging problems, even on a system with only 2GB RAM. And encoding isn't memory intensive at all, it's 100% a CPU-bound process (try encoding high def stuff with x264, you'll see VERY easily... Low mem usage overall, very low disk I/O, but all cores pegged to 100% solid, and it still crawls) It might be different when it comes to games, no idea there, I don't play any.

Start fresh? That would likely mean WAY more bugs initially (new code, not a codebase that's been tested and fixed for many years), it would likely mean very bad or no support for older/legacy stuff, it would take them MANY years to redo this from scratch, etc. It doesn't really make sense in any way I look at it. Besides, Vista works fine on a recent box. Eh? Everything network-wise has long been configurable. You could configure your TCP/IP stack on Windows 3.x ... Hell, you can even do it with a DOS floppy! That would have been a new feature, hmm, 15 years ago perhaps. No OS is going to magically make your network latency for the countless hops across different routers on your ISP's network and the backbone any faster, nor is it going to make the plan you have with your ISP have a better throughput, nor make the server you make requests from respond any faster. The OS has no impact on any of this, I'm not sure what you're expecting them to do. That would be their biggest mistake EVER. Are you planning on running a version of Windows heavier than Vista on an old P4 or an Athlon XP? No? Then your CPU is 64 bit already. And RAM is already becoming dirt cheap, soon everyone's going to have 4GB or more, and want to use it. If they release a 32 bit version, then you can be sure lots of companies won't really bother releasing x64 versions of their drivers or software, making x64 a pain in general (even though it would be the only version worth using). The point is to FORCE everyone to make their stuff work with x64 already, against their will if it comes down to that. It's the future, no doubts about it in anyone's mind, but some vendors need a kick in the pants to start supporting it. When Win 7 is gonna be released, you'll likely get quad core CPUs for under 100$ and 8GB of RAM for 50$ or so -- why would you want to run a 32 bit OS on that? It doesn't make sense. No happening either. They WANT everyone to have their player, to make their windows media codecs the standard. Besides, there's no demand at all for the versions of windows that doesn't have it (i.e. the N versions). Seriously, there's lots of new stuff they could add, lots of things they could improve and such, but none of those make any sense.

You can, but "the computer account must be trusted for delegation in Active Directory" as technet says. We use 3rd party certificate stuff though, never really played much with Windows' own...

But what does the -ira do? I don't see that documented anywhere. It tells it not to launch the app after installing it iirc.

You can have IIS running on any server you please.

Then it's an issue with WSH or such, because it's supposed to wait, and it does wait then I try it (with another process at least). Or maybe msiexec spawns another process and terminates almost instantly, and then the script continues, in which case a short delay would work (or waiting for the install to be finished)...

There's also the sc.exe command line util: sc start servicename and sc stop servicename as well as the new console (PowerShell), which also has simple commands build in for this: Stop-Service servicename and Start-Service servicename

That, and it's quite a unnecessarily long process. Just set decent default settings, and if I don't like them (like the start page), then I'll change them myself (more often than not by importing a .reg file). Even if I was configuring it by hand, I don't need a stupid wizard to hold my hand, forcing me to click through 4 pages of annoying nonsense, to then go to the options tab anyways to change options I'm looking for (like unchecking the "disable script debugging" option and such)

Ok, this should get you mostly there then: Const cPath1806 = "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\3\1806" Const cCurrentLevel = "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\3\CurrentLevel" Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") 'read old values sPath1806 = objShell.RegRead(cPath1806) sCurrentLevel = objShell.RegRead(cCurrentLevel) 'set temp values objShell.RegWrite cPath1806, 0, "REG_DWORD" objShell.RegWrite cCurrentLevel, 0, "REG_DWORD" 'run program objShell.Run "msiexec /i \\Server\e$\file.msi /qb", 1, True 'restore old values objShell.RegWrite cPath1806, sPath1806, "REG_DWORD" objShell.RegWrite cCurrentLevel, sCurrentLevel, "REG_DWORD" I haven't actually tested running an installer from a network share mind you, so you might have to play with that part (setting reg values is tested though). I put in some comments, so it should be fairly simple to understand.

A lot of them now come with the x64 version, and I'm sure that does work fine for basic work nowadays. But when it comes to doing more than the basics, there always seems to be various issues -- things like missing drivers, codecs and such. Being x64 only would force them all to make their stuff work on x64 platforms for good. Then they must have planned pretty poorly. They had 64 bit NT4 for the old Alpha chips 12 years ago, and x64 adoption is barely starting (true enough, x64 chips aren't quite that old). Despite even XP x64 being 5 years old, there's hardly anyone using it yet (I don't think I've ever seen a XP box running the x64 version actually). And despite being not new at all, the transition isn't always easy. You'd think basically everything would be available in x64 by now (5 years of XP x64 being out isn't long enough?) Even MS' own dev tools were lagging behind when it comes to x64 -- debugging x64 apps with VS2005 was a PITA. The transition to 64 bit on other platforms has been far easier seemingly (like 64 bit Linux, with the exception of flash). I mean, x64 Windows is getting there, but it shouldn't have taken this long. Then again, it's not completely MS' fault -- they can't force hardware/software vendors to release x64 drivers and apps.

I could write that script in a couple minutes (literally). But I'm not sure what you're doing with them reg keys, in your first post you say you remove them, yet you were using reg add (which adds keys/valus), and now you're mentioning RegRead (which reads) -- nothing that deletes keys anywhere. And I don't normally mess with the IE zones too much, so not 100% sure what has to be set to what to not get those warnings on your local intranet. If you said what it has to do in plain terms, i.e. "delete value named xyz in HKLM\Software\whatever" or "set the value named xyz to 123 at HKLM\Software\whatever" or such (and know for a fact that would work), then it would be trivial to write in just about any scripting language. It's hard writing a script for someone else when you're not even sure what it has to do.