jaclaz

Well, dencorso has some relevant experience at brain surgery so I would guess it's a tie. And before you ask ... jaclaz

Before the thought passes my mind, Windows 8 (in some versions only) provided downgrade rights (and if I recall correctly even some 7 versions). A good question would be will there be downgrade rights in any version of Windows 10 (not in the next free forced - doesn't it sound strange BTW - update, once the new OS will be so-to-say on the shop shelves as full release) ? jaclaz

Here is an English version: http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/successfully-cancelling-your-windows-10-upgrade-reservation which is seemingly accurate, and has only a typo : which should obviously read: Personally I believe that the good MS guys have been more than nice to allow this change of mind, anyone actually making the reservation (if not as an experiment and/or on an "expendable" machine/VM) IMHO actually deserves to be delivered those goods bads. jaclaz

...which is not actually the case of a LP drive, however . @bitcheck19 Of course only the good Seagate guys know what kind of specific hardware they use to initialize and test a disk drive in the factory. The alternative AFAIK is only a nice little piece of hardware called PC-3000 that some good Russian guys developed which in their simplicity they sell for around US$ 10,000 apiece (+NEEDED training+yearly license fee). The PC-3000 seemingly can "load" a fimware from another device 8Or form PC memory, etc.) and/or edit hexedit an existing one, etc. and is the "reference" tool generally used by the data recovery labs. Besides the fact that that thingy is clearly outside the possibilities of a hobbyist or in a DIY contest, it is - I am told - an exceptionally good product very well upgraded/maintained and offering unique features and they have (again I am told) a nice "regional" approach to the sale price (which is higher in countries where data recovery services are more expensive and lower in countries where that cost is lower). jaclaz

The ST32000542AS is actually a "LP" drive: http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_lp.pdf So you may want to have a look at the (scarce) info/experience we have on those: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/157329-barracuda-lp-no-not-a-720011-nor-a-720012/ http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/161029-seagate-barracuda-lp-green-is-not-recognized-in-bios-suddenly/ BUT please don't be fooled by the usual misconception of the one remedy fixes all illnesses. IF the drive is diagnosed as being either LBA0 or BSY then maybe the respective LBA0 or BSY fix procedure may work. IF the drive is NOT in one of those states (from what you reported sounds more like a drive starting developing bad sectors) there is no sense in attempting to unlock/reset the firmware. The only thing that you can (maybe) possibly be able to do is to attempt using ddrescue or similar (under Linux) to salvage whatever can be read (as RAW sectors) in a disk image (you will need a bigger than 2 Tb disk), any firmware related fix will be ineffective and at the risk of preventing any further data recovery attempt. IF (hopefully) most of the RAW data can be imaged, then it should be possible to extract them from the disk image or "fix" the filesystem in the image. Attempting to recover data from the filesystem while it is still residing on the failing disk is less likely to ever succeed (even if *somehow* it is possible to avoid the Windows locking). jaclaz

It is a "normal" S.M.A.R.T. field (though each manufacturer may use a different notation for the uptime), more specifically it is 0x9 "Power-On Hours (POH)" if you want to draw a line somewhere, it should be about anything manufactured since 2000-2002 (but many disks had S.M.A.R.T. capabilities earlier), at the end of the day, anything with a SATA interface has surely S.M.A.R.T. capabilities as well as anything PATA using advanced Ultra DMA modes (i.e. anything using an 80 wires IDE cable) whilst anything earlier might have it not. jaclaz

Another guess might be that since they need to deploy that awful amount of bloat (BTW how large will it be the "update", I believe something between 3 and 4 Gb ) to billions of machines they good MS guys will somehow need to plan a schedule to not clog their servers, if the data reported here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172826-windows-10-first-impressions/page-36#entry1100580 is even approximately accurate, upgrading just the (source Wikipedia/Netstat April 2005): Windows 7 58.39%Windows XP 15.93%Windows 8.1 11.16%Mac OS X 10.10 4.23%Windows 8 3.50%Windows Vista 1.95%Mac OS X (other) 1.60%Mac OS X 10.9 1.53%Linux 1.52%Windows (other) 0.19% roughly 15 % running Windows 8/8.1 (assuming that those that still run XP might at the most upgrade to 7 and that the ones running Vista are aficionados that won't upgrade anyway and that those on 7 won't be fighting to get the upgrade) it would mean 3.5*0.15*1,500,000,000=787,500,000 Gbytes to be "delivered" or "served" over a limited amount of time (hours, days, weeks? ). So, the "reserving" might behave like a sort of "priority list", the ones that "reserved it" might be served earlier. On the other hand it could provide some preventive data about the success (please read as failure) of the nagging upgrade campaign and it could be a very good promoting slogan. Given that the release day is July 29th 2015, it would be of great effect a campaign (say one or two weeks before) on newspapers and TV going like: More than 300 million[1] people already reserved their upgrade to the new Windows 10.Windows 10 will be soon delivered to them, on the 29th of July.What are you waiting for?Microsoft will deliver the update to all current users of Windows Vista,[2] 7, 8 and 8.1 for free.We are committed to further enhance the user experiences of all our customers.[3]Technology has the power to unite us. it inspires us. Technology has taken us places we've only dreamed. It gives hope to the hopeless, and it has given voice to the voiceless.[4]MicrosoftWindows 10Empowering us all.(of course without the footnotes ) jaclaz [1] the actual number being of course completely independent from the actual number of "reservations" we received, this figure has just been totally faked by our marketing guys because it sounded good .... [2] ... come on, you don't expect us to name that OS, really... [3] ... but we are failing at it badly.... [4]... good technology of course, not the senseless crap we are now shoveling down your throat ...

Naah, no need to be sorry , it is not really "forbidden" to go off-topic, if you go off-topic in good faith the most you might get is a stern look of disapproval , and after all it was the OP that steered it into "what runs not on my system" .... jaclaz

Yep , the base image is here: http://i.imgur.com/jYshZ.jpg a similar (IMHO nicer, or at least with more shelf space) is here: http://i.imgur.com/lcHhN.png (warning images are biggish) Preview: http://www.freeplaza.it/sfondi-desktop-per-arredare-con-le-icone/#more-2612 and here is a more photo-realistic one: http://occhiodivetro.altervista.org/sfondo-desktop-scaricabile/ jaclaz

Well, jaclaz has a clear advantage on you , then. as he is perfectly aware of the existence of binaural sound and beats and the effects they have (or that it is claimed they have) on the brain. But binaural beats are usually "generated" (along a set of given patterns and following some rather strict frequency rules) and not connected with voice, let alone with voice recognition. He is even aware of the existence of "binaural entrainment" (though admittedly he has some serious problems in understanding what the heck it is about from descriptions like: and: To put it bluntly, jaclaz never attempted to break a qualia barrier (basically because he never thought about them barriers) . Is it serious doctor ? jaclaz

But, the question is "How to run the Oxford Hachette thingy I own in the stupid OS I am running now?" It is not really a "generic" virtualization question, given that a VM is slower than the "natively booted" OS and that the virtualized OS would be in this particular case only the means to run a single, specific tool, the simpler the OS in the VM is, the faster the Oxford Hachette will load. All the rest, every single byte, every single additional feature of a newer (or better) OS that is not used to load the Oxford Hachette thingy is unneeded and would (even if "how much exactly" would of course need to be measured) only slow down the user experience, in this particular case, as nothing will be actually done (except running the dictionary) inside the VM. The VM itself will need less memory (which is subtracted from the memory of the machine), the OS image will take less space on the hard disk, etc., etc., only to give a reference these are the default VM RAM settings in Qemu Manager: Windows 95 32 Mb Windows NT 64 Mb Windows 98 64 Mb Windows 2k 128 Mb WindowsXP 256 Mb Windows Vista 1024 which are the mimimum OS requirements and should really-really be doubled to make the VM faster. A "normal install" of Windows 3.x would be running more than OK with 8 Mb or RAM from a disk image 16 Mb or less ( a Minibox will use a much smaller image of course). Still "normal installs" (without reducing source, or removing unused apps and subsystems, etc.) typical HD base space requirements (please read as minimum size of the disk image): Windows 95 60 Mb Windows NT 150 Mb Windows 98 200 Mb Windows 2k 800 Mb WindowsXP 1800 Mb Windows Vista 16000 Mb jaclaz

Maybe you could try to better explain what you are asking for (personally I could not understand WHAT you are actually talking of ). Try to describe what you are after. jaclaz

Well, after a quick look at the contents of that update, there are good news and bad news. The good news are that evidently the whole lot of tracking sh*t that has been deployed till today did not provide enough data to deliver a proper update, so - in relative terms - till today not much data about your system was harvested by the good MS guys, i.e. they know about your system less than what you have feared till today...and possibly with these added info the update may after all go well for all The bad news are that at first sight almost everything in it is either "diagnostics" or "tracking" or both. The further bad news may be that, given this nth added level of "current situation detection" the *whatever* will be downloaded will be more "targeted to the specific" machine and if you have several machines, likely you won't be able to download the stupid amount of bloat, possibly in the several Gb's range, once and re-deploy it to all machines but you will need to re-download the update directly from MS servers on each machine (with an unprecedented overhead of bandwidth consumption - I am thinking of the people that have a metered connection to the internet). I do understand how they may want to field-test the whatever new update model, but maybe - just maybe - providing an install .iso would have not been that bad an idea (and maybe they will eventually decide to go that way, at least as an option or when/if some system will be botched). Just yesterday I read an (unrelated to this, it was about school/edication) article about the need to distinguish between innovation and evolution, the Author Paolo di Stefano gave a good example: that would roughly translate to: jaclaz

Yep that's what I thought was your setup . What I was thinking is that, if I get it right, you have right now: motherboard connected to a "longish" 44 pin IDE cable (the original one possibly not suitable - for *any* reason - for "higher" Ultra Dma mode[1]) on the other side of the cable a "compact set" of : 44 IDE to SATA converter SATAto mSATA adapter mSATA SSD deviceLooking at the manual you posted, I cannot say if it possible (due to space requirements, interferences, etc.), but personally I would like better a setup like: motherboard connected to an extremely short 44 IDE cable *like* http://www.cablesonline.com/244pinidelap.htmlor even "directly" connected to 44 IDE to SATA converter connected to a "longish" SATA cable on the other side of the cable a "compact set" of : SATAto mSATA adapter mSATA SSD deviceIn good ol' times the rule of the thumb whenever a hard disk had issues (since the early SCSI times) was "it can be anything, but you'd better try changing the cable first thing.", those issues went mostly away with IDE, but came back (to a much lesser degree) with Ultra Ata modes and the 80 pin cable, and still go strong with SATA drives. jaclaz [1]or not capable to fully deliver data reliably in a "higher" DMA mode when "forced" by a fastish SSD device to it's upper limits, or *whatever*

Interesting . From the good guys that are going for the "continuous update" model, YAFUP (Yet Another Failed Update Precedent) . jaclaz

It seems like that update is only a replacement for a couple of Windows Media Player .dll's. Are you actually using WMP? In any case it seems like not as "critical" as it is depicted, at least if the system is used correctly (in the sense of using a minimum amount of attention/intelligence): All in all IMHO if someone: runs with Administrator credentials uses Internet Explorer, additionally registered as default browser uses Windows Media Player has it registered in \Internet Explorer\Low Rights\ElevationPolicy happily clicks on links found in an e-mail or IM message from strangersactually deserves to have his/her PC hacked. jaclaz

Sfor used an EeePC with some degrees of success, see the dedicated thread here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/122401-asus-eee-pc-and-windows-9x/ though a 900 not a 1000, but maybe you can find something of use there. jaclaz

We do have a thread where reports about this kind of bridges/adapters/converters are given, I don' think that any (older) BIOS or OS (2K or XP) have any way to "distinguish" a SSD from a "normal" hard disk, at least for "normal" 2.5" SSD's: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/152483-sata-to-ide-adapters-whichwhatwhy/ See particularly this report of success from Tomasz86 http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/152483-sata-to-ide-adapters-whichwhatwhy/?p=982862 Unless the mSATA ones have something different. @Comos If I were you I would try the 44 pin to SATA adapter with a conventional 2.5" SATA hard disk first. This way you take out of the equation - temporarily - the SATA to mSATA adapter, though that should be I believe a totally passive adapter, and the SSD. Still just like it is unfortunately common enough with SATA cables, the SATA/msata adapter may be part of the problem. About the IDE interface, it is entirely possible that Pin 34 for *whatever* reasons is intended to be (as originally was) not connected, and the problem is due to that. The Pin 34 is connected to ground (but not connected to any wire) inside the BLUE connector of a 80 wire cable (the connector that is inserted on the motherboard) : http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html it is used as a sort of "enabler" for any Ultra DMA mode above 2. As well it is possible that the IDE 44 pin cable you are using has simply not the "quality" needed for faster Ultra Dma. If there is the space , you could try something like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Sintech-SATA-to-44pin-mini-IDE-adapter-5CM-44pin-IDE-cable-SATA-22pin-cable-M-F-/320999150606?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4abd0a540e where the 44 pin cable is very short. Check also the IDE/SATA adapter settings (if any) to those apply the same kind of issues about master/slave vs. cable select that have populated our nightmares in the good ol' times of IDE.... jaclaz

@submix8c The one you post is partially unreadable, but on the orignal registration page: http://www.wincert.net/forum/index.php?app=core&module=global&section=register if you try a few times to refresh clicking on this button: you can usually get two readable words in a few attempts. (but I don't see the large B/W dots like in your image, maybe it is a browser difference?) Example of one image: http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/image?c=03AHJ_Vuvx0kgr3DfkD8fw9eYuh3sSgRifbSWI8U-PcsyzbhT3gKcaTR4N7h6RyVjAOGCEiQsLZEoGmITMf4ilSV0X46smJEWO68MzKT_klCUzX7IDyP90qCoP5pWpGBWjZmaumwSCAgNMXuOPYuJGuXyRTcV_nkfqdrVt5zg-6roToDouEtiBJnIOeUNnsTYmrqfeDxbaCza6tc3GbIx6w7Umh4CGQ-4TWa2isYgLZbGEq9jdNlZkfWXdX_w6M5ptSsRLScfkcorb&th=,rl-wC5J7j9XFV5u22rgzod7OqTPwAAAAKaAAAAAG2AC4qHU_qgfHHNH1RTjjaJ8EmrGN6cVUGOWz7b7_pgaN1ZrT7vqbl4dS5DDAvKNiBh64laCPVaElsa1swkQfWqGMWL9MC7GhT1lKtg-mX4G68jsWOMsNZq8iqfWlyfpFlFC14N3jeaZu2D1dB6vMVUDD8hkmoZSIjiu7Lfsimlk-XCTctiWkmyA5Bt4uoyHkVrcXVGepeizNc5DJMJON92DU8hQvkx62wjHGrfsXT3_QIHtl0s8YYsXrWA.jpg for nAversb jaclaz

No. Meaning that the switch between internal and external monitor is at BIOS level, so there is surely a way to set the laptop to boot outputting to the external monitor. The keys to switch between internal and external (like Fn+F6 or similar) should work anyway. There are several ways (to edit an offline registry manually), the point is that they won't likely be of any use (if the scope is to use a malware analyzer that - usually - only works properly from the "live", "booted" system). If you intend to use an anti-malware tool capable of "offline" scanning, then of course you can remove the disk drive physically and connect it to another computer directly (I am assuming SATA) or through an USB adapter. Or, if you boot this other computer from a PE, there are tools like Runscanner designed to automate the mounting of the offline Registry hives. jaclaz

Well the actual point is that EVEN IF such handy little button will be showcased in many situation it is VERY likely to fail to restore the previous OS properly, particularly, consider all the people that had originally 8 and that later upgraded to 8.1, a restore from (say) the OEM recovery partition (which surely was not updated) will bring back 8 (and not 8.1) a "system backup" whilst it may restore to a 8.1, will need a lot of space (that most people won't have), those with one of the small tablets with 8.1 and Wimboot have actually Wimboot systems because they have no storage, etc., etc. Add to this all the possible conflicts with user installed software or partially "botched" systems (imagine as an example that a "common user" has currently deactivated partially - unwantingly - the WMI subsystem though his/her system is running fine in day to day operation and the handy little button actually needs a particular WMI query to succeed...). So, personally I would not trust (as I never do) any such automagic tools (even IF they will be provided) and I would go for a "bare metal recovery" capable solution, imaging the current OS as is before starting the update (but his will require some storage space, some knowledge and also some patience, somwthing that many people do not have). I would like to re-state how: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/172826-windows-10-first-impressions/page-36#entry1100580 the numbers are so big that even a teeny-tiny unsuccessful rate of this hypothetical handy little button may bring down millions of machines (and Myrphy's Law is ALWAYS around to prove itself right once again). While I sincerely wish everyone to have a successful upgrade I would strongly suggest everyone to use the remaining days to prepare a "Plan B" of some kind. jaclaz

You have to understand that a PE is NOT a "full OS" (and as a matter of fact it is not licensed to run as one and additionally it will by default reboot after 72 hours). Among the differences between a "full OS" and a PE is the automatic assignment of X: as a drive letter to the volume that hosts the PE. It can be changed, see: http://reboot.pro/topic/15199-how-to-change-default-boot-drive-letter-x/ http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/149173-winpe-with-systemroot-on-c-or-anything/ see also: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=24365 though there will be more paths to be changed in the Registry. jaclaz

More generally when doing computer archeology, you must always think at the exact time context. Example: Did (say) quake 2 run well under Windows 98 on (say) 15th January 2001? If yes, *anything* published after the 15th January 2001 (every single patch, program or "update") is NOT necessary to run it (and while it may be absolutely OK it may well create an issue or conflict of some kind). jaclaz

Just for the record, Paint Shop Pro is exactly one of those programs that (senselessly) fiddle with something they shouldn't (namely some areas of the Registry) the same issue happens on XP if the user has not Administrator credentials: http://www.realmtech.net/forum/164 different version may need further "fixes", see also: http://www.sevenforums.com/system-security/59871-giving-up-uac-2.html#post540567 Set aside the discussion on UAC (which is mostly a nuisance IMHO and BTW) over the years third party programmers have (sometimes induced by the poor, incomplete and sometimes deceiving documentation by MS, sometimes by sheer stupidity or by excess of self-esteem/mania of grandeur) abused of the Registry contributing to making it the mess it often becomes. jaclaz

Good , to be picky, personally I wouldn't trust much hardcoded paths, particularly the "C:\Program Files (x86)" one, del "%~dpnx0"should be more "flexible". jaclaz