jaclaz

Haven't had time to check this out yet, but let me ask you where in your opinion that this editor falls in the scheme of things when compared to PFE32 ( very lightweight ASCII text editor), EDXOR ( a little more featured ) and UltraEdit ( full blown programmer package )? Just wondering though, I will get to it eventually. I see they mention "portable" ( no registry I assume ? ) Always in the market for ASCII word processors with special functions, because I find it easier to have two or three different editors open rather than several instances of the same product. YMMV. It falls in the category of "simplicity". It is simple, Full screen, portable. See here: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/q10-a-full-screen-minimalist-word-processor/ The idea is that when you write (in the sense of "create" something as opposed to "edit a document" or "make it pretty looking") you need no distractions, and nothing like a full screen text editor, with "reversed colours" (but these are customizable, of course) i.e. with a dark background and "amber monitor like" and with nothing else on the screen can help you reach and mantain the needed concentration and help your creativity flowing. There are several Word Processors similar to it (i.e. sharing the same concepts) often called "zen word processors", Q10 is IMHO besides the smallest one, a good choice among them. The more explicit "manifest" for them is Write Room (for Mac only): http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/writeroom and that of the correspondiing Dark Room (which needs .Net ), please note the site address: http://they.misled.us/dark-room Talking of the good ol' days, you will have to pry out of my dead hands the copy of q I have. And yes, these were not really "news", or you were not paying much attention : jaclaz

@ChrisR Very good. jaclaz

Yes, all of them that do have a fan sucking air inside them. Of course this does NOT apply "normally" to: tv, cd players, phones, washing machines (as they do NOT normally have a fan, though you would be surprised on how dust - over many years of service - can affect the functioning of a TV ) it may apply to: game consoles, toys (if they have a fan sucking air) It definitely applies to: hair dryers <- but for a completely different reason, which is called "hygiene" jaclaz

Perfect. OP: What you are suggesting is NOT about having blinking text, but rather about cyclically clear and re-display the whole console text area. jaclaz

For NO apparent reason : http://www.baara.com/q10/ There is no issue whatsoever with the concept of simplicity, and of having no distractions when working. That is EXACTLY the reason why I don't want tiles telling me what the weather is, or what time is it or how is the Dow Jones going. Anyhow, just as an example, I have open in this very moment: 12 (twelve) Explorer windows 2 (two) Browsers (Opera and Srware Iron) <- the OPera window is maximized to reply here) 1 (one) Virtual Machine (Qemu Manager) 1 (one) Vitual disk driver control panel (IMDISK) 2 (two) Hex Editor (Tiny Hexer) windows, one of which has additionally open a "structure viewer" windows 2 (two) Spreadsheets (Excel) 1 (one) Calculator 6 (six) Command Line prompts (open in different paths) 1 (one) PDF viewer (Foxit) 7 (seven) 7-zip windows (opening on different archives/paths) I may be not particularly "organized" in the way I work, but I can assure you that there are REASONS why I have all these windows opened together and the ability to "tile" them and compare between them (and copy/paste among them). jaclaz

It is a possibility (not necessarily appying to your case). It greatly depends on manufacturing quality and temperature (which you may also read as "on how clean is the board/environment". ) READ the given links, they were posted for this. jaclaz

harkaz, sorry , I don't want to be a nuisance , but could you possibly upload the actual .pdf to some hosting site? For whatever reasons scribd is either slow or buggy (or both) for me, and I have not a facebook account nor I won't make an account on scribd. jaclaz

Look at how many capacitors on that card! A rule of thumb being that an electronic circuit board has as many probabilities to have issues - expecially when aging - as the number of electrolytic capacitors on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague Also, just imagine how much dust could hide under them! (and how much dust/dirt could affect the 10-degree rule) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_capacitor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_capacitor#Reliability_and_length_of_life jaclaz

While I am pretty sure that the PSU has nothing to do with your issue, be aware that the highlighted part does not make much "absolute" sense. The specs of your PSU may be largely sufficient, but if there is an hardware issue with it, now, how it worked years ago (or even until yesterday morning or a mere nano second ago) is not relevant, power supplies fail, components in them decay. And BTW the type of failures of a PSU are typically: will not switch on at all ("catastrophic" failure) will not provide as much power (Amperes) as before, but a smaller amount, often only on some of the different voltage rails ("aging" failure). Of course while the first is very easy to diagnose, the second could be elusive. jaclaz

Trip, you are missing a part. I am not saying this, is the "Finding on facts" in the known US vs. Microsoft case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Licensing_agreements Basically till recently (and there are also some doubts after 2010) MS substantially forced the OEM's to ship PC's with their installed OS, jaclaz

Just to add to the collection: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57560912-75/windows-8-wrestles-with-pcs-legacy/ And this one is a good one: http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/desktop/microsoft-surface-rt-best-tablet-ever-re/240144582 jaclaz

The issue is not much about the software (a simple disk editor would do) but rather about finding out what actually happened. The MBR holds 4 partition slots. From what you report, you had three of them taken by the original install and the fourth one by the extended partition that contains the logical volume on which Windows 8 was later installed. The idea was to set the BIOS to permanently have the boot order as: CD first USB second Internal hard disk third then boot from the cd with the disk ALREADY connected (and needing NOT to press any key to select anything during boot). There is NO way on earth (if there is such a setting as Boot order in the BIOS and if the CD/DVD is actually bootable) that your laptop should boot to anything different from the CD/DVD. When you connect the hard disk to your desktop, you don't want to check if actual volumes are mounted in Explorer, you want to check if the added disk is found in Disk Management. If it is, use Hdhacker (or a disk editor) to get a backup of the MBR of that disk (first sector of the \\.\PhysicalDrive). http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/ Compress the backup in a .zip file and attach the .zip to your next post or upload it on some free hosting site and post a link, and' I'll have a look at it. jaclaz

I seem to remember that older versions of Vista transformation pack did support Windows 2000 . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vista_Transformation_Pack The actual reason why one would want to add some overhead to a clean, working system/UI to imitate an uglier, less efficient one, totally escapes me, though. jaclaz

Maybe what you want is to install from a .iso image. I hope we are not (again/still) in this situation : http://reboot.pro/topic/8043-booting-vista2008w7-from-usb-sub-folder/ See: http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/firawiniso and/or install from a minimal PE: jaclaz

As a matter of fact, we have a fixation for having working systems and our experience is that having them clean is often a key part of the success. If you prefer, our clean systems work, or, all our systems work (including their sound cards) and they are clean. Coincidence? Possibly. But the base fact remains (our systems, maintained/cleaned/fixed our way, do work). jaclaz

Usually issues with power supply give different symptoms, in most cases the PC simply shuts itself off when the issue is connected with power supply (and/or overheating of the power supply itself). What OP describes sounds a lot like RAM issues, what I would personally do would be (besides the memtest that is being carried) clean the contacts of the sticks. Easiest would be using some specific contact cleaner (spray) for the motherboard contacts (and blow away any residual with compressed air and make sure everytihing is completely dry before re-connecting mains) and a mildly abrasive eraser for the actual sticks contacts. BUT it could well be a number of other things, including a cold solder somewhere and/or the dreaded "failing capacitors" issue. jaclaz

As I see it, it is a perfectly legitimate desire, in the rare occasions when I have the same, I tend to open a command prompt and in it type: C: md I386 and when I am tired of it I do : rd C:\I386 but I am NOT a programmer. (though I did stay At a Holiday Inn) . I thought that long before "making sure programs work correctly which includes checking for conditions before the program starts" a programmer should be able to clearly list: the final goal the theory of operation devised to reach that goal AND when for whatever reasons the theory does not work and he/she needs asking for help, being able to communicate the above along the Standard Litany: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html jaclaz

Be aware of bunnies Take care . jaclaz

I thought that electrons traveled INSIDE the components, NOT on the surface. Though it has ALREADY become a matter of joke . http://www.megavolt.co.il/humor.html (electrical jokes are rarely funny, however) Now, for NO apparent reason a pictorial message to Phaenius : jaclaz

Oh, yes , you have been contesting it since jumper initially suggested it , and there were a few posts (by me) detailing to the uttermost minutiae HOW exactly the cleaning and or washing should be carried, which I realize were just some wasted time on my side ... Re-read, possibly slowly, this thread starting form here: you have been doing nothing BUT disputing the theory (besides the practice) AND you still believe it doesn't apply to your case (pardon me the pun ). jaclaz

I dont' get it. What is actually your goal? I mean "update" WHICH system to WHICH other system visual looks? jaclaz

Well, just for the record, there is also a (still experimental/alpha or maybe early beta) LCARS Windows Shell here: http://www.lcarsx32.com/lcars/index.php http://www.lcarsx32.com/lcars/download.php being .NET based is IMHO "pure folly", but it does have a couple nice features . jaclaz

Yes. I don't remember other brands with the dual Master/single and Master settings. No, you are seemingly having problems in reading/understanding what is written. There exist (in 40 wires cable) BOTH Cable Select Enabled and "plain" NON Cable Select ones, on the 40 wires CSE cables the Slave is at the end of the cable . The 80 wires are all (or should be all) Cable Select Enabled and the Slave is in the middle. On *any* bus of *any*kind (and not only PC/Computer related) having an end of a cable "free" with nothing connected to it is NOT smart and it is a possible source of trouble. Do you remember the good ol' SCSI bus and it's "terminators"? jaclaz

Yep, you did not take into account Murphy's Law. What we don't really know is if the disk is still recoverable (by a "Pro" with tools like the PC3000 or similar), what we do knw is that "at the state of the art" it is NOT recoverable with DIY tools. You are welcome . jaclaz

Sure, creating a dd-like image before fiddling with ANY disk tool is ALWAYS a good idea . First thing I would try would be FIPS . You can get it from the UBCD (which contains several more possibly useful DOs/FreedDOS utilities) allright: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ Or from here: http://ftp.dk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/tools/srcs/fips/ Some instructions/info: http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=32084&seqNum=2 http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/doc/redhat/redhat7.2/rhl-ig-x86-en-7.2/dualboot-fips.html jaclaz