jcarle

For information on creating OEMLOGOs including how to set transparent backgrounds, read this thread.

Agreed and understood.

sfc_os.dll, what in the hell does it do? I mean, it disables Windows File Protection supposedly, ok, but I don't get it. I installed the hacked DLL and I'm SURE it's installed because I swapped it into my source CD before the install and I know it gets installed because it bitches about it in the setuperr.log. I add the registry tweak to disable Windows File Protection because I know the DLL by itself is not sufficient and that you need the registry setting set as well. But when windows boots up and I go into Program Files and try to delete any of those damned protected folders like Xerox, it just won't let me. So is WFP really disabled or is windows just playing with my mind?

What in the hell are you talking about? If you think that Serial ATA is going to disappear like the BetaMax did, you've got some serious revision of the future of the PC market to do. If we were discussing the future of say, BTX form factor motherboards, I'd be 100% with you. However, Serial ATA IS a proven technology, it's an available technology and it is the future standard of storage technology. This is no TOY that people are just checking out, it's the much needed replacement for the aging technology of EIDE. It supports all the functionality and advantages that SCSI could deliver but at a cost-benefit ratio that makes the product affordable and that's why it's growing in popularity so quickly. And also why EVERY SINGLE storage manufacturer is moving their technology towards Serial ATA based drives. So much so that they're even migrating their technology within their optical drives as well. And the use of a bridge chip is EXPECTED this early in the adoption cycle. It's a suicidal approach to manufacture native solutions when the growth cycle hasn't even begun it's real take off. There are chances that due to the slowdown in pc replacements in the last few years due to the increase in lifespan of a typical new pc that the changeover could take well over a decade. However, in 20 years from now, just like a REGULAR IDE (not EIDE) drive STILL works in a NEW pc, your Serial ATA drive that is bought with current generation bridge technology will STILL be good in the new pcs of then. The performance difference between a Serial ATA drive and a Parallel ATA drive is most often NIL. That is to be expected since they're usually THE SAME DRIVE. What you fail to take into consideration is the INTERFACE advantages of Serial ATA. A quote from SearchStorage.com demonstrates this: There are also NUMEROUS advantages to Serial ATA that have nothing to do with performance, such as: Improved air flow within the computer's case due to reduced air flow restriction. Elimination of the cost of replacing the hard drive (or purchase of an EIDE interface card) in a future motherboard upgrade if EIDE is not supported on board of the motherboard. Serial ATA supports Hot Plugging, Parallel ATA does not. Serial ATA requires no master/slave/device id configuration. Serial ATA is not like going to buy a "concept" car, it's like taking out the cash and driving a car of the year fresh of the dealer's lot instead of buying and older, perhaps last year's model car. It's to be expected that if you want the cutting-edge, freshest, to be future technology that you'll have to pay. But it does not mean it does not have it's benefits. The argument could be said with cars too. Someone in 1985 who decided that they were going to spend the extra $5,000 to buy the brand-new car that feature brand-new technology called Fuel Injection were the ones laughing in the end after everyone was done scaring away from this unknown future technology that's "bound to never catch on" because in the winter while everyone was pumping their carburetors trying to get their damned cars started, they just turned their key and left. It would be a recommendation that because you predict the demise of a future technology that you properly educate yourself in the current developments of that said technology, because as it seems to be right now, you know few people that have serial ata drives and you find them to expensive. That doesn't make a good basis to determine the future outlook of technology. I hope you didn't make the same uninformed prediction about the demise of, say, cd-roms or dvds?

and goes to heaven... This is the ULTIMATE Bill Gates joke. Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven. When he got there, he had to wait in the reception area. Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their way through the crowd. Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until one of the staffers finally approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow letters. "Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel, and I'll be your induction coordinator." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel. Now give me your name, last name first." "Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching though the sheaf of papers on his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?" Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the president of a large software company. Is that right?" "Yes." "Heaven is decades behind in building its data processing infrastructure," explained Gabriel. "As you've seen, we're still doing everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries." "I had to wait three weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven, it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well then, do the math. When Saint Peter started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now there are six billion people on earth. With that large a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all personally?" "I guess not." "You guess right. Peter had to franchise the operation. Now he's the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the actual induction." Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more and continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment." "Job assignment?" "Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting around and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to pull your weight." Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's not that Abraham." Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up." Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the largest computing facility ever -- a half million computers connected by a multisegment fiber optic network, all running into a backend server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel. Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works." Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This really is Heaven!" "We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations soon. Would you like to go see the center now?" "You bet!" Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place, getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. The center was dominated by the computers -- a half million computers, arranged neatly row-by-row, a half million Macintoshes, each running FileMaker Pro and AppleWorks. Not a PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code! The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill. "What about PCs?" he exclaimed. "What about Windows? What about Excel? What about Word?" "You're forgetting something," said Abraham. "What's that?" asked Bill plaintively. "This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "We need a computer system that's heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based on PCs running Windows, you'll have to go to Hell."

My suggestion is do what I did. Learn Visual C# for Windows .NET. Best thing you could ever learn. (I coded in Visual Basic 3, 4, 5 and 6 for YEARS.)

Buy SATA. Why buy PATA? SATA is the future standard. PATA is on it's slow death. It's like saying, "I'm going to buy a new car." then going into a dealer and buying a 77 Chevrolet Impala.

McAfee Virus Information The virus map on that page is also quite interesting.

I wouldn't buy something as sensitive and expensive as an LCD from eBay. Stick to reliable companies with large pocketbooks and good return policies that will save you headaches if you have problems with your hardware.

The size shouldn't matter, what you should be concerned with is the refresh times... you want something as close to 16ms as possible.

Upgrading from Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003 Top 10 Benefits of Windows Server 2003 Top 10 Features for Organizations Upgrading from Windows 2000 Server

Windows 2003 is like Windows 2000 infused with Windows XP.

The proper spelling is desk.

I did notice that if you touch LAYOUT.INF even just one bit, windows freaks, even during text-mode setup.

http://www.iconarchive.com/ has loads of decent icons.

A clean install is the ONLY way to do a PROPER windows installation. Other ways should be bloody outlawed!

Modify your HIVECLS.INF file. Here's an example using .ini files. HKCR,".ini","",0x00000000,"inifile" HKCR,"inifile","",0x00000002,"Configuration Settings" HKCR,"inifile\DefaultIcon","",0x00020002,"%SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,-151" HKCR,"inifile\shell",,0x00000012 HKCR,"inifile\shell\open",,0x00000012 HKCR,"inifile\shell\open\command","",0x00020002,"%SystemRoot%\System32\NOTEPAD.EXE %1" For your sxw files, do the following: Replace .ini with .sxw. Replace inifile with sxwfile. Replace "Configuration Settings" with a proper description of your file type. On the DefaultIcon line, replace "%SystemRoot%\System32\shell32.dll,-151" with the path to the icon for your file type. Replace "%SystemRoot%\System32\NOTEPAD.EXE %1" with the execution path of the application used to open your file type.

If it does not beep at all when you try to boot it with only the motherboard, cpu and ram (yes, no videocard), then one of those three things hit rock bottom and went to kentucky fried heaven.

LCD vs diskspace anyday. Why? Because how often do you change a monitor vs a hard drive? And how cheap do hard drives keep coming down in $/GB?

If you bought a cheap case or a used one, chances are your power supply is crap. If it's a low wattage one, it could be choking on the demand for power. Go out and buy a good quality, 450w+ power supply. That will eliminate one of the most problematic, important and hard to find issues with PC blue screens, crashes and operational inconsistencies.

Outlook 2003 with Service Pack 1 (That's the office service pack, not the windows one).

To get the official SP2 cd labels, you'll have to wait a bit since the retail copies don't even exist yet. The labels should start coming out next month or so.

Anyone figure out what the difference is supposed to be between txtsetup.inf and layout.inf? We all know that the text-based setup on a cd boot install uses txtsetup.inf, but what about layout.inf? When does THAT get used? And they're almost identical in content, I'd love to know why there's two files of nearly identical content.

Or even better, go to your local flea market or used computer parts store and find yourself the same keyboard I have. An old IBM metal interior keyboard that's indestructible and great to smash on while playing games since it weights so much, it's not going to move at all. Plus it doesn't have all that extra garbage like Internet Keys, Media Keys, Windows Keys... it's a TRUE 101-Key keyboard.

None of the above. I use a Windows XP Professional Corporate because I $?/*&$("/$ hate activation.