jaclaz

Yep , but in a nutshell you are again saying that Windows 8.1: is not noticeably faster than Windows 7 on a "same" machine, possibly it is even slightly slower. It is now "as stable as" Windows 7, after a long initial period of somewhat "less stable" status It is unbearable unless heavily tweaked and with a number of third party applications that mitigate the stupidity and ugliness of it's interfaceHardly "intangible reasons to stay current" , as a matter of fact they sound a lot like "very tangible reasons to avoid upgrading to it from Windows 7" unless really needed for some other reason or (and these are the good news IMHO ) "very tangible reasons" why you don't (anymore) really *need* to downgrade to Windows 7 on a new machine that came with Windows 8/8.1 pre-installed: the stupid OS can be tamed, through it will need applying a number of tweaks and installing a bunch of third party tools, and there are also good signs that even the new 10 thingy can as well be made into a working system (with even more work/tweaks), not that bad, if you look at the half full glass : jaclaz

But seemingly there is already an update to the update: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/173127-december-windows-81-updates-please-contribute-your-experiences/#entry1090847 http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/139877-post-sp1-updates-for-windows-7-updated-09122014/?p=1090889 jaclaz

... on the other hand, you might loose most of the fun in finding the issues (if any) and solve them, and additionally other people may feel authorised to call you a coward But this is another thing. One thing is having "latest" OS (for whatever reasons, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder) and another one is to risk its stability or integrity (particularly if it is a "production system") because the actual manufacturer of the OS (or their quality control or their beta testing division or whomever) suck (and suck big while we are at it) in what should be their FIRST duty (make sure that NO machine is brought to its kneels because of a stupid update) by allowing "silent" updates or by applying manually them on a non-test machine. This time it happened to Windows 7 users, as you recalled a few days ago it happened to NoelC with the conflict with Avast on his Windows 8.1 (let's remember how this is currently the "flagship", whilst the 10 is the "experimental future quantum leap" ), possibly next victim will be a 10 user, you cannot say. The key point is however always the same, the updates should be tested, and tested thoroughfully, before being made available, be it on Windows Update or for manual download, everyone can do mistakes but lately the good MS guys - for one reason or the other - effectively changed the perception of the thingy from "oh good, I'm gonna have the system updated with some new things and increased security!" to "**** it, it is again patch tuesday, will my system survive it?" jaclaz

Poor fellows , do they have a small compensation in their wages for "stressing environment"? Or were the MS HR/PR be so clever as to manage to list Windows 8.1 usage as "fringe benefit"? jaclaz

Whatever you attached does open fine in 7-zip (as expected). The contents of the zip extracted to a temporary disk image mounted as drive K: \ show here (XP SP2): and also it opens in my Explorer (though listed as "blank") The "á" is ALT+160 (am I allowed to say "as expected" ?), it is displayed fine in my command window (possibly because of some codepage/font/whatever). But you cannot select/copy/paste to (say) Notepad, as the "á" becomes a "blank". It is very possible that there is simply NO way to "enter" into that folder from command line/batch, unless you manipulate directly the filesystem structures or you use an alternate program/shell/command processor, BUT double quotes may help: i.e. this *almost* works: jaclaz

Ahhh, the good ol' times: http://www.compmiscellanea.com/en/arachne-installing-and-setting-up-ethernet.htm why in my day ... ... we used to fight till the end for a bunch of Kb of free memory.... ...and we LIKED it! Kids today .... https://tinyapps.org/blog/misc/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html jaclaz

Sure , and no harm whatever was done to any living creature in the making of this thread . Still, Rule #8 is still there: and there is not a trailing: I am pretty sure that you commented in perfect good faith and with the best of the intentions (positive), but until that Rule will not be changed/amended, it remains the fact that you broke it and now that this has been brought to your attention, you are now discussing on the Rule itself: I am notoriously an extremely picky guy, besides been grumpy, and while I would be happy to discuss with you on the broken windows theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory and on the usefulness (or fairness) of zero tolerance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_tolerance right now I am more interested in understanding which is the positive part in the message (very bluntly put): jaclaz

Try what 7-zip sees, only seemingly unrelated, JFYI: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/131103-win-ntbt-can-be-omitted/ jaclaz

Oww, come on , no need to blush, I am just kidding of course . jaclaz

That's another question. Dave-H asked something to test Internet under DOS, I tried replying to that question, and I don't think you can have Internet without TCP/IP , whether this will help in the more general "task" is to be seen , but possibly in one of the given pages there may be found the *something* (if it exists) that is missing. jaclaz

And all this time I thought that moderation was NOT up to debate as per Rule #8: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?app=forums&module=extras&section=boardrules I guess some people has some non-written privileges .... jaclaz

What do you mean? They used to work: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/j_helmig/doscltcp.htm Or maybe the specific drivers/card Dave-H has cannot work? jaclaz

Well, to be a retro-computing enthusiast, you are probably not (yet) retro enough! Time to go through textfiles to remember how it was like in the good ol' times : http://textfiles.com/ and what actually amused us long before videos and lolcats appeared: http://textfiles.com/computers/glossary.txt (though of course I still jiggle at the definition of "guru" and of "handshaking protocol" ) jaclaz

Arachne: http://www.glennmcc.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachne_(web_browser) This may also be of use generally for your issue: http://www.compmiscellanea.com/en/arachne-installing-and-setting-up-ethernet.htm jaclaz

Hmmm. It could be an idea to write in Lolcode and use the Lolcode to javascript translator. http://fullvolume.co.uk/static/lolcode/ http://code.google.com/p/loljs/ or even better use the .NET compiler with it: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LolCode http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DotNet jaclaz

UNlikely. The new Metro NCI Control Panel will be called "Flipper" and will allow the user to choose between two main settings: Automagical setting we determined to be optimal for forehead sticks, one-size-fits-allSomething else we wont' tell you, you'd better choose the other setting advised. jaclaz

If the "bad area" includes the MBR there is simply NO address where to look for the actual partitons (JFYI: Windows asks to initialize the disk when the "Magic Bytes" 55AA miss from the end of first sector). But this does not mean that *all* the disk contents are lost (though it is possible). The generic procedure is to create a "clone" of the disk (or an image of it) using a dedicated tool, like the mentioned ddrescue, which basically: attempts to read a sector (and repeats the attempt reading it a given number of times) if it succeeds in reading the sector, it writes the sector to the target if it fails in reading the sector, it writes a 00ed sector to the target then it goes on next sector and loops to #1 the actual algorithm is more complex, but you get the idea. Once ddrescue has finished, you start examining the target (be it clone or image) and see what you can recover from it, in some cases you can get a whole partition/filesystem "sound enough" to be mounted and accessed normally or almost normally, in most you get only "RAW" sectors and when this happens recovering contiguous (i.e. defragmented) files is normally possible, if the files are fragmented (or very large, or both) you can still have some chances through more advanced carving/rebuilding techniques, it's impossible to say what will happen in a specific case, too many factors affect the chances of partial data recovery. Generally speaking, it is a terrible idea to scan the failed disk for fragments or attempting to recover sectors, if you suspect that the disk is failing as it is possible that you have one chance and once only to read a sector, and this chance should be used to copy the sector on a surely working target, but again it depends on which is the actual issue at hand, I have very old disk drives that developed a given "bad area" but that - excluded that area - continued working for years (limited to the non bad sectors) and as well I have seen disks that once started developing bad sectors increased their number very fast. jaclaz

If I get this right, changing the "Flags" value to 59 enables *something*, and resetting it to 58 disables it. So one could open Regedit, change the "AutoRepeatRate" to "20" and the "AutoRepeatDelay" to "440" (or other sensible values) "permanently" and use just the Flags value to flip the thing on and off, leaving the other values changed. It seemingly has not changed much since Windows 7: http://superuser.com/questions/388160/keyboard-repeat-rate-repeat-delay-values-in-win7 and not even XP or earlier. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/windows/desktop/dd318079(v=vs.85).aspx possibly the 59 is hex 3B coming from 1+2+8+10+20 hex? Maybe you could check if this thingy here works on 10: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=41881.0 jaclaz

ran, your drive is NOT bricked (or at least it WAS NOT bricked at the time you attempted using the CA-42 cable). It is NOT LBA. It is NOT BSY. Both BIOS and Windows "see" the device. Hard disk die , it is a fact of life . Some die suddenly, some start developing area(s) of "bad sectors" (what you call "a bunch of LBA access errors) and are simply "ill". The illness is called "bad sectors" or "LBA access errors" (or "bad head(s)" or "bad areas") and is NOT "bricking", or it may be anything among a number of other possible maladies, including "bad SA" (whatever it is), "incorrect adaptative" (again whatever it is) or some other ones, but it is more probable that it is simply a "bad area" or a "bad head/translator". It is like, actually it is exactly like, you had a flu and you decided to put your left ankle in a cast (which may be a good cure for a broken ankle but totally irrelevant for the flu). If it is only a "bad area", it is maybe possible to recover part of the sectors using something like ddrescue to copy *whatever* remains accessible to another hard disk, if it is a bad head, a whole side of a platter is simply "lost forever", if it is *anything else* as well the disk is lost forever unless - maybe, and I want to underline maybe - a professional data recovery company can fix it. Sorry for your loss , but really nothing that you can do with a CA-42 cable. jaclaz

The UBCD contains a (relatively complex) menu system that basically loads a floppy image + a number of chosen tools. It is much easier to make a new floppy image with a DOS and RPM than to "extract" it from the UBCD, I suggested because you reported failing to get RPM by itself. You can try again, getting Ranish Partition Manager from here: http://www.ranish.com/part/ I just tested the doanload of version 2.40 and had no issues in getting the file. You were not paying attention (or were not in class) when the teacher explained MBR partitions. Quick recap: A MBR's partition table has 4 available entries. These can be filled maximum with 4 primary partitions or with 3 primary + 1 Extended (containing *any* number of logical volumes). There cannot be more than one Extended partition on a disk. There are of course no limits to the number of partitions formatted with a "same" filesystem. The only real "need" is to have the DOS be residing on the first hard disk, on an active partition, formatted as FAT16 (for DOS up to 6.22) or as FAT16 or FAT32 (for DOS 7.x/8.x, please read as Win9x/Me). You have to put things into it's historical perspective. When Windows NT 3.1 and soon after 3.51 and 4.00 came out, people were running DOS 5.00 (or so), and later 6.00 and 6.22. DOS up to 6.22 wants for "itself" an active primary partition and it wants it formatted as FAT16. Additionally the built-in FDISK will allow only one primary partition and one Extended partition. So (remember that we are talking of disks that were typically 300-500 Mb in size and lated grew to 1.0 Gb, 2.1 Gb or 4.3 Gb) NT was designed to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the extended partition. The DOS would go to first partition (primary and active) together with a few "needed for booting files" from NT, i.e. NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, BOOT.INI and in some cases a SCSI driver NTBOOTDD.SYS, while the rest (large part) of the NT system would go on a logical volume inside extended. BUT still, NT 4.00 had some limits to the size of a volume/partition, typically only the first 7.8 Gb of the disk would be accessible at boot time and the windows NT setup would not work if the first, active partition (what contains NTLDR and that MS calls, reversed "system") was not FAT16 and within 4Gb of size. Consider how the size of files that need to go on the "system" partition is just a few kilobytes and that the "whole" NT 4.00 installation (on the volume that MS calls "boot", i.e. the one that contains \WINNT\System32) is around 100 Mb or so. So, typically an "average" at the time 500 Mb hard disk dual booting DOS and NT would usually be partitioned in: a first, primary, active, partition 100 Mb or less with DOS 5.00-6.22 a second partition extended, containing a logical volume inside extended sized 200 Mb or so for the NT 4.00 OS and another logical volume around 200 Mb for "data"Since there were - since day 1 - issues (depending on the order on which what was installed and/or when some other tools were used) bootpart was developed (it dates back to Windows NT 3.x times) to allow to "switch" between the NT loader and the DOS IO.SYS booting or repair "botched" installs. Only later came third party tools (like Partition Magic) capable of making more advanced settings/changes to the partitioning scheme. Then came Windows 9x. A typical Windows 95 system with a same "average" 500 Mb hard disk with Windows 95 (OSR2+) installed would come with a single active primary partition, usually formatted as FAT32. Most people that already had a DOS system and that already was dual-booting with NT 4.00 would of course want to try the new Windows 95, and so every kind of tool and approach were developed. In such a scenario(s) there were not that much difficulties, systems with more than one hard disk were rare, you had only one disk, you always had a primary partition on it (that always got C:\ as drive letter on *any* OS and it was always formatted as FAT16, the very first version of Windows 95 did NOT have FAT32 support, NT was limited to either FAT16 or NTFS, if the volumes in the extended partition were FAT16 they got a drive letter in all OSes, if they were NTFS only got additional drive letters and were accessibly under NT, the DOS 6.20 or 6.22 and the Windows 95/DOS7.0 were resident on the first partition and the NT stayed on it's logical volume. But soon came the new version of Windows 95 with FAT32 support (and that attempted to remove the dual boot with "previous DOS versions") and everyone wanted to test this new filesystem and even more tools were developed to make these OS easier to manage. MS intention was clear: DOS was the "only" OS available used by both the businesses and consumers. Windows 3.x was it's graphical version. NT was the New Technology for businesses (and for businesses only) Windows 95 was the new GUI OS for consumers (and for consumers only) Later: Windows 98 was the enhanced new GUI OS for comsumers (and for consumers only) Windows ME was the enhanced (only worsened) new GUI OS for consumers (and for consumers only) Windows 2000 was the New Technology enhanced for businesses (and for businesses only) Then they changed their mind an forced down the throat of everyone a "business OS" (XP is actually very like 2000 with some added bells and whistles besides a few actual enhancements). But in any case, the idea was that you had only one OS, at the most (and limited to the few people that already had DOS and wanted to try a NT system) a dual boot was "allowed", in their mind, no machine should have ever dual booted a Windows 9x/Me with a NT 4.00, and the very day Windows 2000 was available, everyone should have ditched NT 4.00 replacing it with Windows 2000. This is part of the reasons why making a Windows 9x/Me live together with BOTH a NT 4.00 AND a Windows 2000 needs some planning before and has a few limits that one must know when attempting to put these OS all together on the same machine. To know how is currently (or at any time) your system partitioned (including CHS data) you can get PartIn9x.zip (for 9x use) and PartInNT.zip (for NT/2K use) from Symantec they are "Partition INFO" tools, they are "safe" because they are "Read Only": ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/ And you may want to review the Ranish "Partitioning primer" which for some reasons is unavailable online, but that can be retrieved through the Wayback Machine, like here: https://web.archive.org/web/20050830030859/http://www.ranish.com/part/primer.htm At the light of the above info, try thinking of how you think you would like to setup your system, and post your idea, and we will check together if it is doable, if it "hits" again one of the known limitations (or only it is likely to cause issues) and needs to be changed, and how exactly to make it. jaclaz

Something *like* http://sourceforge.net/projects/sacddecoder/ or more like a DSD converter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Stream_Digital and/or "ripper": http://code.google.com/p/sacd-ripper/ Warning: the latter NEEDS a compatible PS3 and the use of it may (or may not) be allowed in your country. jaclaz

@gunsmokingman The point is (was) IMHO to find a "fast" (as opposed to or at least not necessarily "elegant") way to find that stupid file, in my (BTW VERY 1984ish ) experience WMI is not that fast (please read as usually slow) and it may actually not be running (or running properly) on the target machines. Could you try "timing" your WMI approach? @jumper Another interesting idea , that should also be timed to have a comparison with the other tests. jaclaz

Are you sure that actual WRITABLE (i.e. that can be "burned" and not "pressed") SACD media exist? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD jaclaz

If you read the actual .script, it shouldn't be that much difficult to find out which files and which Registry changes are needed. If you need to extract the files encoded, you can use, besides Winbuilder itself, this: http://reboot.pro/topic/10783-release-unwbzip/ jaclaz

The syswow64 support has been added in this project: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170546-win81se/ If you cannot/do not want to use it, you can still look in it to see how/which files, etc. are added for it: http://win81se.cwcodes.net/projectindex.php http://win81se.cwcodes.net/Projects/Win8.1SE/Build/5-Wow64.script jaclaz