CoffeeFiend

You really should submit that one to thedailywtf (Error'd section)

Yes, I still find that one annoying. The thing with 2k & XP was, there was the screen where you can lock your computer that can be shown when you do ctrl-alt-delete OR the task manager... Now ctrl-alt-del brings up the former, and the latter is ctrl-shift-esc. I think it's a good idea overall because you can bring up the one you want, but hitting ctrl-shift-esc... 3 buttons at once, spanning 6 rows of keys (and the gap above the row with numbers), all with your left hand, isn't quite as easy/doesn't feel as natural. I tend to lay my thumb across ctrl & shift (never had to do that before) and hitting escape with my middle finger (longest finger, easier to reach). Doesn't feel quite right... (well, you can use ctrl-shift on the right hand side, but I just don't really think about them keys on the right side). It shouldn't be that slow on such a machine though. It's somewhat faster than my box, and everything is instantaneous on it. Either ways, this topic is off on a tangent. This is about apps that aren't compatible (so far only a couple). Edit: Was missing a f in "shift" (keyboard batteries low), got censored

XP x64 and 2003 x64 have the same kernel even. Crappy drivers have been around for quite a while. x64 isn't new, but there hasn't been too much interest by most users yet, nor from most software developers seemingly. There are still loads of devices without any drivers, and even most of the common ones still have some odd problems. It's slowly getting there though. 2 brand new cards in SLI, on the newest OS -- the x64 version no less, with a new driver model, a new DirectX version and all that, is pretty cutting edge. Unfortunately, cutting edge often means the bugs and various issues haven't quite all been resolved yet.

Win 2008 isn't designed for gaming and 3D performance, so I'm hardly surprised by that. Vista x64 drivers aren't very mature IMO. x64 drivers already seem to have some issues, now combine that with a brand new driver model (WDDM), and a brand new version of DirectX (10.1), it's not really surprising the performance isn't the best yet (especially if you also have Aero Glass + desktop composing enabled on top of that). Having 2 cards in SLI might affect things too... Chances are, the card, and drivers are still mostly optimized for DirectX 9 and XP's driver model. Or maybe it is optimized for DirectX 10, as in, it would get better performance than XP would (if it had DX10) while running DX 10 games/tests. And, I've seen people report having almost twice the FPS in Vista x86 than Vista x64... SP1 might fix some issues related to that too. But I'm merely guessing here, I'm NOT a gamer at all (my 8500GT is beyond overkill for me) and I don't follow the fancy vid card stuff at all. They're not the same drivers, even if it says the same number. the XP ones are WDM, the Vista ones are WDDM (Windows Vista Display Driver Model).

Indeed! LOTS of such programs won't work under XP if you're not an admin either, which has been a VERY common issue for quite a while in any big environment where we don't just make everyone a local admin.

The ONLY difference between when your PC has been off for an hour or so, or just a few seconds, is it had time to cool down while it was off for an hour. Installing is CPU intensive, and I/O intensive too (hard disk and DVD drive). CPUs under load makes heat, an DVD drives reading data non-stop for a while makes a considerable amount of heat too. When it runs normally, the CPU is not always at max load, and your DVD drive isn't reading non-stop too. Both combined makes for a lot of heat. Try looking at the temperature of the air coming out of it while it installs (fan speed/noise can be a good indication too). If you have some cold environment where you can place it while you install (like right by the exit of an air conditioner), you could try that, just to see how far it gets.

Looks like a poor airflow problem. Side fans don't tend to really help much actually. Which case did you order? That's not a speed monster by any stretch of the imagination. It's not even dual core. A $37 Celeron 430 is faster without even overclocking it (and they're good overclockers). You can get dual core CPUs for as low as $50, and quad core CPUs like the Q6600 for $200 nowadays. As for the GeForce 6600, a $135 Bfg GeForce 8800GT OC runs circles around it. Even a $48 860GT would be significantly faster. Edit: not trying to put you down, just saying it's not really fast by today's standards, that's all.

It comes down to preferences really. We got Ubuntu on a couple boxes here (dual booting), but we've used plenty of others too. Edit: I can't say it's exactly perfect either though... I had to recompile alsa-everything to have audio working, I had to edit the x.org config file to have a non-stupid resolution on the login screen (this is getting seriously old), other users weren't sudo'ers in the first place (was pretty restrictive for some stuff, like having to change user to be able to install the flash player), it's a pain having to select your language every time you log in (if someone else used it, and picked a different language meanwhile), the selection of a beta version of firefox for which most extensions weren't working with at the time of release, having to use autocutsel for copy/paste in VNC to work at all, an update breaking a perfectly good and working OpenLDAP install, etc. All kinds of stuff Works great for a lot of things, but they're not dual booting XP for no reason. Server wise, I prefer Debian to RHEL/CentOS precisely because of deb & apt instead of rpm But even there, there's so many options... So many distros. And some people do indeed prefer FreeBSD.

That doesn't make sense. We like an OS, and it works just fine for most people. Similarly, you like XP, and XP did cost money too, and you didn't give people copies, but that doesn't make you a "Micro$oft's pimp$". C'mon now... That's a double standard if I've ever seen one. Besides, we're not pushing Vista on anyone here, just debunking the common myth that basically nothing works. Hardly anything changed. The start menu is shown differently (just like going from 9x or 2k to XP did). And the control panel stuff is shuffled around (ditto). By that standard, XP is incompatible. You make it sound like people have to learn to double click all over again. It's not nearly as drastic as say, the windows Win 3.11 to Win 95 change was, and people adapted to that just fine. It's THEIR OWN FAULT. Who else are we supposed to blame for it? Some kind of universal scapegoat that we should blame should anything go wrong for any reason? Like when a computer BSODs because of buggy drivers, who do people blame? Yep, "teh evil evil M$!" Exactly the inverse than what you say -- hardware makers had a free ride for far too long, they can BSOD your box every 5 minutes, and all people will say is "Windows sucks! *#$#@$%$ Microsoft!" But, their x86 drivers suck just as much so there's truly no excuse. And Comodo will sell them a signing certificate for $80/year, I hope Epson can afford that! Besides, NONE of the signing money goes to Microsoft, no matter who you get your cert from, so how's that extortion? The certs have a purpose: so you can tell for sure who made that driver/binary (you'll have to prove your identity before they issue you a cert). On a side note, the latest Epson print CD works with Vista, and older versions can be made to work (pick tray 2 manually, you might have to use XP's drivers - thank Epson for that!)

Not at all. You try to run programs 3 or 4 versions out of date, and are surprised they don't run (actually, spacesurfer got it to work). That's EXACTLY the same as saying Nero 2 doesn't work on XP (3 versions out of date at the time of release) and such. Over 99% of apps that run on XP also work on Vista as-is. Besides, CD burning apps have been notorious to need upgrades to work with almost any OS (early Roxio versions were real bad for that). In fact, most apps even used to require upgrades to work with newer burners! And nevermind all the technology changes that happened in the underlying tech (different ASPI layers, ASAPI, SPTI, and various proprietary methods).

I looked everywhere at least twice, and it doesn't say so anywhere. And again, I very strongly disagree over that one. There are NO compelling reasons to use x64 on your average desktop right now, much the inverse. Memory gains on systems with 4GB are pretty much negated by the extra memory usage of processes (due to double sized pointers & such things -- it even makes your cpu cache hold less instructions) Gains made from the handful of extra CPU registers are pretty much negated when you're pretty much running everything under WOW64 (again, the excel 2007 example, twice the CPU usage under WOW64) And then, you get all the quirks from not so mature drivers like seen here... Add to that the many devices without any drivers, the lack of crucial codecs for AV playback on x64 (e.g. CoreAVC, Haali splitter, etc) resulting in much higher resource usage or lack of functionality, and the overall lack of x64 apps in the first place (no point running everything under WOW64)... I can't think of a single reason to move to x64, there's just no advantages yet (any potential advantage is outweighed), unless you have like 8GB of RAM, which is definitely NOT cheap yet (~$250 for quality fast DDR2), and most people wouldn't have a use for that much in desktop in the first place.

Another vote for WinME. 'nuff said!

Sounds a lot like what I said (I wish there were x64 drivers for all my hardware actually...)

How is it wasted? It runs everything just as good as XP does. In fact, it does many things BETTER. Imagine that! Them boxes are only good for very simple tasks indeed (and only run XP at decent speed if they have enough RAM). My point was, why do you keep 10 such slow machines? There's always 10 people that have to be surfing the web at the very same time? A plain old P4 could easily handle what a half dozen of those can. You just hate me because I don't have a $500 monthly electric bill Talk about missing the point of my post altogether (see geek's post for a recap), and flaming someone for using Vista (on one PC out of a few), nevermind it runs just as good. geek: it's not like you'd even need that much, it's not like all the boxes are at 100% resource usage 24/7. Most likely, they all sit mostly idle, most of the time. A plain old P4 3GHz could likely handle all the tasks of every single box on the network, excluding the core 2 duo. It's not like NAT, squid and a couple print servers and such uses much resources even combined...

Looks like you have the Obsorb trojan (Ezy.exe). Remove the malware, and problem should be solved.

Not a bad idea at all, if s478 CPUs are that bloody expensive. Celeron 430 $37.40 Gigabyte GA-945GCM-S2C Motherboard $49.76 2x1GB OCZ Plat DDR2 PC6400 CL4 $25.99 Total price $113.15 (well below $200, not much more than the P4 costs), for: -a FAR better motherboard. A much better newer and stable intel chipset, USB2 (more of them too) and SATA (which your old boards didn't have -- not sure if they even supported LBA48), and nice solid caps, etc. It has onbard video, and a pci-e slot should you need better video at some point, high def 5.1 audio, etc. -a much better non-P4 era CPU (Conroe-L core), which is faster than the P4 2.8 on half the power, supports more SIMD instruction sets like SSE3, is 64 bit, has higher FSB,, which you can still upgrade to something faster later on, on the same motherboard -likely lots more ram, and it's faster too Quite often, I've seen Athlon64 3500+ barebones (CPU, a cheap mATX motherboard, 1GB of cheap PC4200 ram, and a cheap case) for ~100$ at places like tigerdirect. I sure wouldn't spend close to $100 on an old P4, and going for almost 2GHz wouldn't really be much of an upgrade either. I think puntoMX had the best solution (as usual!). As for the P4 3GHz @ $200 LOL. I'll sell you an entire P4 3GHz box for that much...

This sections seems to be 90% polls dating from 2003 -- people answering questions which have been stale for years, so here's a new one! What's your favorite sites for high resolution and high quality wallpapers? (e.g. 1920x1200, dual monitor, etc -- NOT 1024x768 and the like) Some of my favs: interfacelift.com wallpaperstock.net A collection of extra Vista wallpapers on MSDN (available as full zips) mandolux.com for those with dual monitors I know someone's dying to answer digitalblasphemy already, but IMO 99.9% of them just don't look good (looks fake/cheap CGI for the main part). And besides the places that has some great content, but are flooded with pure crap. flickr and photobucket have a bad to good ratio of 1000000:1 or so. There's some gems, if you're willing to spend a lot of time to find them.

Alright, I'm going for round 2 then! Zxian's post: I had indexing turned off, but I gave it a shot. Once the indexes are built, it's VERY convenient finding anything system-wide in < 1 sec. The day the extra 60MB overhead is too much, I'll get some more RAM (@30$/2GB, 60MB is less than a dollar's worth, and it saves me a LOT of time looking around for a file) geek's point #5 -- not naming everything "my this" and "my that", and "Users" is a LOT quicker to type than "Documents and Settings". Nice for sure. the sidebar with some nice addons e.g. weatherbug, the clock, the notes, app launcher (think quicklaunch, but with enough space), etc With indexing enabled, the new start menu is kind of nice (press start, type some 2 or 3 letters and it'll find the app -- good for the stuff buried deeply, or menus with a very large number of entries) the new and very useful new cmd line utils that come with it (e.g. mklink), the upgrades to existing commands (e.g. dir /al), and some of them being there by default instead of an addition (e.g. icacls) ClearType enabled by default, and it doesn't run at 640x480 on first boot, then nags to go up to 800x600, to then have to change it yet again. better driver set in the standard install disc (XP's is fairly dated, pretty much requires driverpacks, especially for mass storage adapters), most stuff works out of the box now The lack of all the old crappy and outdated apps that comes by default on XP (MSN, Windows Messenger, Oulook Express, etc) the nicer/better networking (ipv6 out of the box, nicer setup, has auto RWIN scaling, etc) very good WMI improvements, like being able to know how many Physical and Logical CPUs (2k or XP lacked this badly, it was kind of a pain "guessing" if was a P4 with HT, or 2 CPUs)

Remote desktop doesn't use a VPN by default. You can use it over one though, much like joe43wv said. It uses the RDP protocol (based on the ICA protocol from Citrix), on port 3389 (TCP). It does have some basic encryption built-in, but over a VPN would be more secure for sure (restricting usage of that port to certain IPs or such via firewall isn't a bad idea either)

Linux is a good platform quickly gaining popularity (quicker than macs -- 48% increase in 10 months, versus 30% increase for macs in the same time frame), with a future ahead, and one of the main alternatives to Windows. Win9x is a platform almost no one uses already, and still on a quick and steady decline (55% decrease in the same time frame). Linux on the desktop already has as many users as all of Win9x combined, and is gaining more real fast, while Win9x losing theirs just as quickly. In 10 months at this rate, Linux will have at least 3x the market share of all Win9x combined, and 10 months after that, you're talking about 10x bigger. I don't see what makes that a reason to support Win9x in any way -- much the inverse (not worth wasting time over). No. Sure, if you look at w3schools' counters, those only reflect their own site's usage. But places like net applications collect that data from thousands of places (from about 160M hits per month). You could even add their counter to your site if you wanted to. Edit: Actually, another way to look at it, is that Mac OS X on new Intel boxes, gained FIVE TIMES as many users in the last 10 months, as there are Win98 users left. And there's nearly 6x as many Mac OS Classic (a platform Apple themselves abandoned) users as Win98 users. Right now, there's roughly SIXTEEN TIMES more Mac users as Win98 users. Some stats now bundle up Win98 users in the "other" category, along with WebTV and such. And Apple is still on the rise, so is Linux, both showing no sign of that growth slowing down anytime soon. On a side note, Win2k users are also becoming a small minority very quickly (lost 40% of its users in the last 10 months). And in a few more days, this month's stats should be in, Vista/Macs/Linux will be up again, XP/2k/9x down yet again.

Pussies who like adequate inexpensive all-in-one solutions to a problem, low power usage, no moving parts, no fan noise, no extra computers kicking around (especially not old ones), as well as set-and-forget solutions (like a WRT54GL running DD-WRT, Tomato or such). It does NAT, DHCP, runs a bunch of other apps like radvd, lets me use iptables' PREROUTING for various things (like passing web traffic thru squid first), lets me do 6to4 tunneling, has SSH (even using PKI)/web/telnet access, has a bunch of advanced features (like VLANs), has plenty of CPU power for the task, can handle all the traffic of any kind we can throw at it, serves as a perfectly good access point and all. Just what else do you think your average home user needs? If not wanting a crappy old computer kicking around, that wastes power, makes noise/heat, takes space, has moving parts (like fans, and often hard drives) that WILL fail eventually, and all that, and then needing a separate access point with it too (often using a router in the first place), then I'm glad to be a pussy! I dunno why you keep so many crappy old boxes around really (5 boxes 1GHz and under). 10 computer total (half of which I'd get rid of same day). Looks like a waste of power to me (1 "modern" box could handle everything half of these do easily, on less power -- and no, no one needs 10 PCs around to surf the web). Besides, most of them old computers are worn out (crappy old PSUs with caps about to fail, worn out fans everywhere, old hard drives, etc) which is just not all that reliable, and more often than not, it costs more to fix them old boxes than newer ones (e.g. DDR2 is cheaper than SDRAM), that's when you can even find parts for it... You can't exactly blame people for not wanting to have 10 unsightly old heat/noise-producing computers sucking power in their home, plus all the wiring mess and such. Instead, they buy a router that just does the job just fine (and is lots simpler too).

Then it's a hard hang, which is most of the time broken hardware. If it was the CPU, I don't think it would quite last this long before crashing. Socket 478 CPUs don't really have stability problems in general (they're just old, and not particularly fast), the sales guy didn't know what he was saying there (or he did, and wanted to sell you something else more expensive, to make more $) The motherboard and PSU are the first 2 places I'd look.

The installers extract the .exe's yes. That's what *ALL* installers do with them. There is no such thing as "installing a .exe", it's jut extracting/copying a file. If you want the installer to do something else with them, you'll have to tell it to.

nLite/vLite = used by a lot of people who like to strip everything down to the very strict minimum required for it to even run (the main 2 reasons being: getting that extra 1 fps in games, and lower disk usage even though disk space is like 15 cents a GB nowadays -- or that's what it seems like to me at least). And WAIK is a large download. That pretty much sums it up I guess. (I don't use either personally)

Then take a look at DeepFreeze. It does exactly that.