jaclaz

Yep , everything is cool, maybe we were cross-posting, I was adding my appreciation for your nice answer and explanation to my previous post. jaclaz

Which one, the right or the left one? Historically kings have been affected by gout, which tends to result in irritability besides acute pain to a knee or foot, you might want to review your diet and ask to the Royal Chemist if he can provide you with a few chill pills. And for the record, your was a fine answer AND a solution , including the explanation behind and the actual valid value of 64, and confirming that the switch happens around 2 Gb, while dencorso - with all due respect of course - threw a one liner mentioning 80 and then just self-quoted himself to reiterate his suggestion, which may work of course, but that is not an answer (at least to my question). jaclaz

Here is a good candidate for the need to reclaim "space" in firmware : http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/174242-not-really-new-but-imho-preoccupying/ jaclaz

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=29497693&sid=ddf3e32512932172454de515091db014 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:H-SSYRAB0usJ:download.microsoft.com/download/8/A/2/8A2FB72D-9B96-4E2D-A559-4A27CF905A80/windows-platform-binary-table.docx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Actual .docx is here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/A/2/8A2FB72D-9B96-4E2D-A559-4A27CF905A80/windows-platform-binary-table.docx The good Lenovo guys have already a set record for crappy, sneaky things in order to "enhance" the user experience, but the good MS guys IMHO this time are well past any possible decency in the misuse of firmware. It is unreal. Besides the obvious open door for any kind of government three or more letter agencies, how long do you think it will take for someone else to find a way to make use of the mechanism? Anyway, now a lot of things are more clear about the stupid UEFI and the senseless push for it, as the good MS guys - between the lines - say how they also pwn the firmware and can change it's contents (at least limited to WPBT) at will. jaclaz Edit: The Lenovo "mitigation" (remove the crappy tool and - supposedly - disable the "feature") is here: https://support.lenovo.com/nz/en/product_security/lse_bios_desktop

Here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/ The way the data is represented makes IMHO not much sense, but the "general trends" are nonetheless clear. jaclaz

And you could even play Solitaire without paying for it or having crappy ads at each new game.... jaclaz

@alacran Sure , the point was only that "shortening by" is not the same as "decreasing". "Reduced to 1/30th" would have been however much more understandable. The "shortening by" managed to trick JorgeA (whom should be native English speaking) in falling for it, so I wouldn't call your English "poor", rather that of the Author of the referenced article might need some adjustments. jaclaz

Thank you for the indirect and totally gratuitous appreciation, that was very kind of you. Actually I am all ears though my interest is limited to find out if there is the need to amend/integrate/modify the info on the given thread: http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=16713 though nowadays it is not a commonly used method to install XP, but I would have liked to provide EXACT information, i.e. what exactly is needed and when (when more than 2 Gb, more than 3 Gb, more than 4 GB, etc.) an additional memory manager is actually needed or a config.sys needs to be added and with which commands. And no, most probably I will never find out (neither the soft nor the hard way), as this is mainly an S.E.P., unless you will exceptionally descend from your throne and talk to us commoners, spreading your wisdom among the people. jaclaz

OT (but not much) also Office 365 3641/2 had a few issues lately, JFYI: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/06/parliament_microsoft_office_365_outage_cause/ Of course it is not connected , but if the "communication style" inside MS is as described for this issue I guess there is or will be more problems: jaclaz

How exactly are you attempting opening the .zip file? (I mean through through Explorer?) Try using 7-zip: http://www.7-zip.org/ It is possible that the .zip file for *whatever* reason is not fully compatible with the Windows built-in zipfld.dll. jaclaz

Well this is exactly the doubt, as said at the time of the referenced experiments it was not needed, but then again it may be needed in conjunction with 4 Gb (or say more than 2 Gb) RAM, surely at the time of that experiment I had either 512 Mb or 1 Gb on the test machine (cannot obviously say what the OPìs machine had). As well it is possible that what creates the issue is the set of parameters you were using "A- B- C+ /V 4096 4096 /E:8192 /B:8192" while a plain running of SMARTDRV would work nonetheless jaclaz

Actually the troubles may be with the length of the name. A SSID should be 32 characters or less (and some firmware needs a null terminated string, reducing it to 31). by appending _optout_nomap you loose 13 characters and you are left with "only" 19 "meaningful" ones, besides forcefully limiting the fantasy of Wi-Fi naming artists: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicaprobus/no-more-free-wifi jaclaz

I understand, but the line in autoexec.bat is just "C:\dos\smartdrv.exe" or is it: LH C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE A- B- C+ /V 4096 4096 /E:8192 /B:8192 (the LH implies that EMM386 or similar is loaded successfully, AFAICR) jaclaz

Hopefully correct link (the one posted by JorgeA above - coincidentally - resolves into a loop to this same thread ) http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-cumulative-update-causes-reboot-loop-havoc-for-some-users/ jaclaz

Welcome to the club. jaclaz

Yep , and right at the time when everything can be done with (many) MOV's OT, and JFYI: https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator jaclaz

Well, maybe you could start by exposing/describing the actual issue, along the lines of the Standard Litany: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html Or maybe you are risking to slip on a chocolate covered banana : http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.html Really , I cannot make head or tail of your report , you posted either vague or incorrect descriptions and it seems like you blindly threw at that computer everything (and the kitchen sink). IF the "the HDD Bootsector and MBR is totally corrupted" it wouldn't show any message, and in the case of a missing file (or some other misconfiguration, no code known to man would print on screen a message "proclaiming the Boot Manager is missing", the common messages for a XP are in the bootsector (and if you see it it means that the bootsector is loaded, i.e. the MBR did load it successfully): A disk read error occurredNTLDR is missingNTLDR is compressedPress Ctrl+Alt+Del to restartWhile a Vista/7/later OS would have these ones: A disk read error occurredBOOTMGR is missingBOOTMGR is compressedPress Ctrl+Alt+Del to restartNow, if you got the "BOOTMGR is missing" it means that *somehow* the bootsector for the active partition was replaced with one coming from Vista or later, thus invoking BOOTMGR instead of NTLDR. This is normally easily fixable using bootsect.exe or a similar tool, but of course you need to be able to boot that PC to some form of "live OS" (from CD/DVD or from USB) or physically remove the hard disk and connect it to a working machine. What is your situation, now? (i.e. what EXACTLY happens now when you attempt to boot the system) What do you want to do (final GOAL, not what you think is the way to get to it)? Like: Do you want to reinstall the XP? Do you want to troubleshoot the actual issue and attempt to repair the existing OS? jaclaz

It needs to be seen, probably not. The issue here seems that Windows 7 does not include "native" USB 3.0 drivers, which is something that has already caused more than one problem, but one can integrate them fine (provided that Intel will make them available for Windows 7 of course): http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170454-windows-7-slipstream-usb-30-drivers/ http://codeabitwiser.com/2014/03/how-to-install-windows-7-with-only-usb-3-0-ports/ jaclaz

Many years have passed: http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=16713 and my memory is not as good as it used to be, but at the time SMARTDRV was used without EMM386 or HIMEM. I mean, what happens on your machine without any config.sys nor autoexec.bat, simply running SMARTDRV on command line? I want to understand if it is needed to amend/integrate that set of instructions for people having a large amount of RAM to use Himemx. jaclaz

Look, you posted a question in a place that is called: And - strangely enough - you were given some code snippets and some help on implementing code. Of course you are perfectly free to not appreciate any of what was provided, but whining because you didn't have exactly what you expected, or that you cannot find what you want makes little sense. The batch snippet is just an example, you can use any other of the scripting languages you are familiar with to create a valid ResHacker script or a set of ResHacker commands. Yeah, sure, life is tough , sometimes you cannot get for free exactly what you want. Not really, it's like trying to teach someone who speaks another language, and who has a communication problem, who actually asked for assistance in solving the communication problem BUT doesn't want to learn the language that could solve the problem and gets quickly annoyed. But it is actually a non-issue, I had the impression that when someone asks for assistance and receives it he/she would receive it graciously, no matter if it is exactly what he/she expected or not, if needed asking for clarifications, simply this is not the case, and I see no reason to continue attempting to assist you. jaclaz

Please read as "in order to have more things to later block because they are unstable or not suited to customers' access". A BIOS used to be 128 or 256 Kb and motherboards booted just fine, then they became 512 Kb, and then 1024 Kb, now they are up to 16 Mbytes and they say they need to remove OS/Device support in order to save space? jaclaz

And ... should someone believe he/she is safe because they don't use a car... bad news : http://www.wired.com/2015/08/hackers-can-seize-control-of-electric-skateboards-and-toss-riders-boosted-revo/ jaclaz

Well then it was a (queer) timing problem of some kind, if the files actually existed the only change the suggested batch does is to introduces a little lag between commands due to the CALL , the IF EXIST check and the ECHO . jaclaz

Yep, and these kinds of things are what batch files tend to be good for, *like* @ECHO OFFSETLOCAL ENABLEEXTENSIONSCALL :do_something 1FOR /L %%? IN (101, 1, 118) DO CALL :do_something %%?FOR /L %%? IN (141, 1, 158) DO CALL :do_something %%?FOR /L %%? IN (181, 1, 198) DO CALL :do_something %%?::You should have got the idea by nowPAUSEGOTO :EOF:do_somethingECHO Bitmap # is %1GOTO :EOFjaclaz

No, if it says it went well I believe that it's OK. There could be some issues in some (needed) service. Easier would be if you could delete logs (System and Application ones) then reboot and see if there is anything "strange" in any of them. You already did try to run the so called "Fix It 50202" and the "System Update Readiness Tool ", didn't you? https://www.winhelp.us/reinstall-windows-update.html There is also this (Third Party) tool: http://www.tweaking.com/content/page/windows_repair_all_in_one.html cannot say if it may work for your issue, but I have used it in the past (for other network/services related issues) and it worked fine after many other attempts failed. jaclaz