jaclaz

The point is whether the cops will come to your house and handcuff the painter or if they will handcuff you because somewhere in the papers (the ones you did not read at the time you bought your home) there is written how there is mandatory repainting of your house in a colour chosen by the municipality (this year the chosen one is shocking pink ). jaclaz

Hard to say, however it is a non-issue . Though the actual CVE has not even be filled yet , it is simply "reserved" right now: http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-1769 it is seemingly one of the zilllion "escalation of privileges" from a LOCAL (physical) access. More or less the only ones that should be worried by this are Internet Cafes, Libraries or other organization where physical access to a given machine is provided to "perfect strangers", BTW, if such local, physical access to strangers is provided, particularly if not under surveillance, there are tens, hundreds or maybe thousands of possible ways to obtain the same and pwn the machine. jaclaz

Yep , it might be unpopular, but truth often is unpopular. jaclaz

Now I am lost (again ) and seemingly this also nullifies also the initial answer by dencorso (as at the time Nomen did not mention using either HIMEM or EMM386), as well the math seemingly is not right, as 48*64=3072? but it's ok. Let's try to sum up (please correct/amend where incorrect): on machines with less than x Mb of RAM SMARTDRV needs "nothing". on machines with more than y Mb of RAM SMARTDRV needs ONLY HIMEM.SYS in config.sys on machines with more than 2.5 Mb of RAM if EMM386 is used then HIMEM.SYS is needed AND it must be loaded with the /NUMHANDLES=64And now (I know that dencorso was waiting for this question ), how would a DOS 8.x (from ME or from the actual "create DOS floppy inside the XP") behave, at the light of the above and of this past reference?: http://reboot.pro/topic/5497-ms-dos-71/?p=99242 After all, if one wants to install XP from DOS, it is likely that he can extract the (ME) files from the source he/she has handy: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16745 jaclaz

Meanwhile in (or around ) Cupertino .... BETRAYED : http://blog.seanbonner.com/2015/08/10/betrayed/ jaclaz

Well, "not as good" should be slightly different from "providing half the download speed". jaclaz

I'll try to type this slowly. Reshacker has built-in a very primitive scripting language that has NO provision for anything but - after having set 3 (three) specific variables, the Exe to be edited, the new name to which it will be saved and an optional log file - executing in sequence, one by one, any number of explicit command lines, where each line corresponds to a single command with the appropriate parameters. You want to use a Reshacker script in order to change tens or hundreds of resources. You can well write manually tens or hundreds of command lines, adding them to the script or automate (in batch or any other scripting language) the generation of these tens of command lines. Batch (or *any* other scripting language) is the tool that may allow you to create these tens of lines of the ResHacker script. You are not wanting to squeeze an orange with your hands (that would be done with a Hex Editor in the case of resources), you want to squeeze tens or hundreds of oranges with your nice orange juicer (the ResHacker), BUT: you don't want to walk and take a new orange from the box after having squeezed the previous one. What I proposed you was not to build an orange juicer , you already have the orange juicer, it was to build something like this: an automatic feeder for your juicer. jaclaz

@dencorso Good . @all So, to recap. When more than 3 Gb (2 Gb is still OK) it is needed a CONFIG.SYS with: DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS //NUMHANDLES=64 And then one can simply run SMARTDRV on command line. Or is also emm386 needed? Like: DEVICE=C:\EMM386.EXE And/or any other parameter to the one or the other in CONFIG.SYS? (here I am looking for the "bare minimum" needed, but if some added parameter makes or could make a noticeable performance difference then it would be good to know) This (just for the record) is the basic MS article: https://support.microsoft.com/it-it/kb/307848 jaclaz

... and hence the reference to thiotimoline, though of course a time pussy or Pallan cat would have worked more or less the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Pussy 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