cluberti

Is this a machine with a NUMA architecture, by chance?

You can easily virtualize 2000, XP, 2003, and 2008/Vista easily - it's just that you need 2008 or Vista SP1, or a Linux with a Xen kernel to get enlightenment in the OS. As to hyper-v licensing, if you purchase datacenter (and yes, it's costly, but hear it out) you get unlimited virtual licenses. Unlimited. And you can downgrade those licenses at will to run lesser OSes, also unlimited licenses. Does this help the small business? Probably not, but if you're buying hyper-v to consolidate servers, you probably want to get 10:1 or more per server consilidation, and once you start purchasing 3, 4, more servers to do consolidation, it actually (price-wise) makes sense to purchase datacenter for those servers and use the unlimited licenses (Enterprise gives you 4 freebies, not to be totally out in the cold).And long term, using a microkernel + synthetic drivers will actually provide better overall performance vs VMWare's macrokernel/paravirtualization model. Also, this being a v1 product, it's not exactly feature-complete compared to ESX, and I can easily and readily admit that v2 of hyper-v will compete far better. However, hyper-v has no features I absolutely must have missing that VMWare provides, and I can wait for live migration support until V2. Hyper-v isn't exactly slow on I/O, and the only load I still won't put on a hyper-v box is SQL (and that'll change with SQL 2008, hopefully, but I've not tried/tested it yet).

No. x64 will use more RAM if you have it (and the binaries are larger and processes use more space on load, so it will use more memory by default), but having 2 - 4GB of RAM doesn't preclude you from using and benefitting from x64. Ask for an explanation, or if they're just regurgitating something they heard somewhere .

IE uses the CreateFile function to copy the file from it's temporary cache to the filesystem, thus the "modified" date will get the date/time of the file copy. You won't be able to do this without a 3rd party add-on.

No, they're still in an emulated 32bit environment. They still have 4GB virtual address space, of which 2GB is available to the app. And they still have access to the same 32 registers that they would on a 32bit box (although wow64 can dynamically assign these to memory above 4GB or to registers not native to 32bit, it's not something the 32bit app can take advantage of - this is done by wow64 purely as a load-balancing feature so as to run *it's* 64bit environment efficiently.

Is that a zipped or rar'ed file? If not, compress it.

Honestly, without a network trace showing if the client actually requested \\server\home\user instead of \\server\home, it'd be hard to say.

http://www.msfn.org/board/KDW-FCWIN2K-t120936.html The post right below yours . Hopefully that will help.

Hard to say - that's just saying something inside of a svchost.exe tried to contact someone/something on the internet. Usually windows update, but there are about 20 other services on your box by default that run in a svchost.exe (and other vendors can use it too, so it's not a guarantee it's Microsoft either). What IP address or host name did it try to contact, btw?

By default, a domain machine will log into the domain by default unless you use a well-known name that will exist locally (like "administrator"). You'll notice at the logon that it states "Log on to:<domain>" by default once a machine is joined to the domain, until someone tries to log on locally. So by default, you shouldn't need to enter a domain at all, just a username and password. However, Mr Snrub is correct - the trend is to try and move people to using UPN logon names, as they're more universal (and easier for users to remember, long term - email versus domain\user).

Sounds like a visit to perfmon is in order - under Performance Monitor (start > perfmon > Performance Monitor), under the "Process" object, add "private bytes", "virtual bytes", and "working set" counters for the "<All Instances>" process listing. Then, you can see which memory objects go up or down, and in which process.

Just to wit, I'm not easily offended, and get called all sorts of things I won't repeat because of my choices in work. If you want to send me a PM or email to take some of your questions offline, that's cool. I'd send you a PM, but your PM is disabled it seems.

I can't really address the first part here, but as to the second, if you pay for the OS and thus are funding the development/manufacture, eventually at cost it does become a consumer problem. Microsoft isn't going to spend more on a product than they can get a return on (at least not in the Windows or Office space - media stuff notwithstanding). Well, SMB 1.0 (CFCS) isn't a "standard" either, technically - it started out as a project at IBM for DOS networking, and was bolted onto OS/2 (and thus Windows) way back when in the late 80s and early 90s. It's a Microsoft standard, I guess if you look at it one way, for doing file transfers. It's fully documented (now), just like NFS is a file sharing standard. It's sad to see the lack of working together that XP and Vista machines have on a network (with the LLTS update to XP it makes it easier on Vista, but it doesn't go the reverse for XP without some tweaking), and I can agree it's a pain point. But again, the only real way to fix it would have been to make XP SMB 2.0 compliant, which just is not possible without a TCP stack rewrite (amongst other things). Let me see if I can find you something that I can send you - give me some time, if it exists, I'll find it. That probably wasn't the case a year ago (and maybe with good reason - Vista RTM was NOT ready for primetime, but SP1 certainly is). I guess that's what happens when you reboot an OS project 50% through and start over. All monopolies? There are quite a few out there that are not spelled "Microsoft" that (at least those of us in the US) have to deal with every day... I've read them all, and there's a LOT of guesswork done. Suffice it to say Microsoft isn't going to stand up to the big media companies, and neither is Apple, or probably any other for-profit OS vendor. It's not in their (and their shareholders') best interest to limit multimedia choice just because the vendor pushes DRM. The market will have to vote with their wallets whether or not they want DRM content (and I for one do not either, but again, we make our choices). Microsoft is not responsible for making that choice for us, we are. Microsoft is just making a business decision to allow it, based on the fact that the media studios (et al) are not going to (currently) release media without DRM. If Microsoft wants to allow these media formats to be playable on Windows, they will include avenues for DRM. It's not personal, it's business. . True - but that perspective makes money and isn't illegal, so until it doesn't or becomes a point of contention for the DOJ or EU, it won't change. I see it, but I have to agree to disagree. Windows is pirated en masse today mostly because it was easy to do so up until XP (and even then, that was easy to a large degree). I think for the most part pirates are not going to pay for Windows regardless, so it's a lost sale either way. However, *forcing* someone who is going to use your product to do it legally and provide you revenue when possible really isn't a horrible idea. It's a little heavy-handed, I'll agree, but the alternative is to leave things be, and have 500+ million legal copies of Windows out there, and even more (yes, it's more than 50% currently) pirated. If you could get even 10% of those people to have to pay to use the product, as the rest of us do, would you not? As a company, they again have a duty to protect their intellectual property (sorry, had to throw that out there) that people are using - they have to answer to the market, and their shareholders.

First - let me start off by saying you are as right about your opinions as I am about mine, and these are just that. However, since I'm now a Vista fanboi, I'll take my place: What exactly do you want to "use" the hardware for? I personally prefer the OS to *cache the hell out of anything and everything I use into RAM*, and *utilize the hell out of the processor*. Why? Because it makes the apps and the OS faster, and I paid for the hardware. No point in not using it - and I personally prefer Vista's way of handling it. Apparently you've never written new features onto existing code. Microsoft is *not* in the business of writing the smallest OS (aka the linux or BSD design) nor are they interested in leaving a small hard drive footprint (although, again, ~8% is where Microsoft has always been, right around what Apple and most laden linux distributions weigh in at). Microsoft's design is about features, providing the broadest support for the most hardware and applications (thus the WinSXS cache, for instance), and backwards compatibility (hence things like WOW64). Again, *I* prefer features over writing the absolute smallest code. It costs lots of money to write hundreds of millions of lines of code, and money is FAR better spent on this scale writing in features rather than making it small and as fast as it can possibly be. When the average consumer buys a machine and gets an OS, is that consumer looking for features, or will they care about having every binary on the box under 4K and running in 3bytes of RAM? for 99.99% of the human population, it's the former, and Microsoft knows this and caters to their wallets. Eventually you have to force people off of netbios and onto network stacks that weren't last updated in 1996 (SMB 1.0). Netbios doesn't scale, and SMB 1.0 just wasn't designed for the realites of such large file sizes and network speeds we see today, hence SMB 2.0. And no, it's not trivial to backport it, so it ultimately (again, money versus return when writing code) stays a Vista / Server 2008 and v.next feature moving forward. Yes, Vista can be a pain on netbios networks, but at some point you have to pull people into the 21st century, just like when x86 finally dies and we can all live on x64 - someone, somewhere, will complain about it. And yes, when using SMB 2.0 from client to server, it is MUCH faster and MUCH more scalable than SMB 1.0 is/was. Eventually, you can't cater backwards-compatibility to everyone. You make the cut, deal with the wound, and move on. It's been documented in many places (especially considering Vista actually *understands* the difference between a physical and a logical processor, and can schedule accordingly, for an example; 2000 didn't understand proc differences at all, and XP only really understood hyperthreading at a VERY basic level). Also, some of the major tech rags did comparisons and found Vista and XP to run fairly the same or Vista slightly faster in synthetic benchmarks, which also improved with Vista SP1. Again, don't expect a new OS to be "5x faster" just because the hardware is newer. I'd say with all the features (or bloat, depending on how you see it) and the fact that Vista is doing more "under the covers" during your day-to-day operations, that's quite good. And that explains your point of view on a lot of these. If you expect every for-profit company to cater to the (vocal) 1% versus focusing on adding the features most people will want to use, they'll all go out of business. You complain about features bringing bloat, but then you state that if we don't improve (I read this as add useful, functional features) then we'll go back to the stone age. Bipolar much? If you mean better by meaning removing features to increase speed, go buy a VAX. If the vitriol wasn't so thick on the anti-Microsoft syrup you pour, I'd take stock of your complaints. You just hate Microsoft - admit it. It's popular because people have control issues. How many people do you know who know about vLite or nLite - probably a lot, right? How many people in the general populace know about it? It's not a lot - probably less than 1% of the computing population that uses Windows (XP, Vista, whatever). And as to "doing less", that's just absurd - you speak of DRM, I know the undertones when I see them. If you don't like DRM, don't use Windows native formats (and you have a choice NOT to use DRM - I fail to see where Windows DRM affects you at all). If you can prove how DRM will impact negatively your Vista experience, with actual facts or proof, I'll listen. Until then you're just spouting FUD. The market in general *loves* the way the Mac looks, *loves* Compiz, and from what I can assume, *loves* eye candy. Why would Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) ship an OS with the "classic" look (2000 for Microsoft, OS 9.x for Apple)? Seriously? That makes no sense. Activation is here to stay. It doesn't keep out the hardcore pirates (never will), but the low-hanging fruit (still tens of millions of users) will no longer be able to pirate Vista - they'll either have to actually buy a license, or use something else. That's Microsoft's perogative, and since theft is technically a crime the world over, I see nothing wrong with it.

Why is it that OS X takes 8 - 9GB of hard disk space on install and yet Vista's 10GB is "raising eyebrows"? Even on a 160GB drive, this is _not_ a lot of space. Most of the complaints against Vista I see is that "It's not XP" - that's basically it. I do see the odd person who has an app that just isn't compatible, and to that I say it's probably a good reason not to run Vista if that app is important and a new compatible version cannot be acquired. To the vast other majority who don't like Vista because it's not XP, that's perfectly fine - but XP is going to die, just like 98, and if you want to keep running it, you're perfectly welcome to do so. Some of us actually do *like* the features Vista provides, and thus it's not *bloat* to us. Plus, a 500GB drive is ~$70USD (and most machines you can buy nowadays come with a HDD this size). If you can't devote 2% of a "normal" sized hard disk by today's standards to the OS, that's just odd.

All it has to do is run the desktop properly - I don't game, so silence over performance .

Nice rig. Only a few issues, starting with the video card. I like the "silent" variants, as the last few cards I've used with fans sound like vacuum cleaners, which is why I'd stick with an MSI 2600 card or an Asus Silent going forward.

Everything - otherwise, the EU sues them for inclusion. Heck, I'm surprised some notepad vendor hasn't sued for the inclusion of a notepad program. But seriously, good job, glad to see you figured it out .

One, it's buggy because it's a BETA. Two, it fully supports CSS 2.1 - anything above and beyond is still not a finalized spec, so it's likely not supported properly (if at all) because the decision (well publicized) with IE was to support standards - but only final ones that aren't going to change (and will end up giving you what happened with IE6).

If you've got a Windows Live ID, SkyDrive is a good place for it.

It's a trampoline of sorts - it tells the application doing the lookup to use the same .dll file, but load a specific (different, newer) version of it. So yes, killbit'ed controls with an AlternateCLSID will actually slow a page load down (it shouldn't be as much that it would be that noticeable, but I guess it is indeed possible).Note that it was killed for security reasons, so removing the killbit means you're loading the old (less secure) control again.

The MSI board is slated to work with the OCZ 4x4GB package I found for $395 at newegg - 16GB. Finally reasonably priced!

Well, not entirely sure (yet) why it's failing the codec, but try downloading something like Media Player Classic and try opening the file - if it opens, you'll know the codec you need is installed properly and working. If not, then that'll at least point to a codec issue that can be further traced down.

True, I suppose, but it's not worth $2,500 bucks to me for the 30 minutes it'll take to build/test the box. Plus, I spec'ed out basically the same config (16GB RAM) and the box shot up to ~$7,900 - so the markup isn't ~$2,500, it's actually more like $5,800! - so that makes the MacOS price $4,300 (if you are correct that the apple logo was $1,500) .

So assuming the hardware was similar and the pricing was about the same, that makes the MacOS about $2K? So, Vista ultimate really *is* cheaper, by about $1,800! .