cluberti

No, the test simply runs certain DOM, HTML, and script against the browser's rendering engine to see how much of the standards it supports. The OS really won't matter, and if you want to use a browser that is more standards-compliant with newer standards like DOM2, CSS3, and HTML5, you'll probably have to use Opera 10 (it's the only browser on the list of apps that work in Win9x that passes the test) or Firefox 2.0 (52/100). K-Meleon uses the Gecko engine, and it's still on the 1.8 trunk (the latest version of K-Meleon, 1.5.3, uses Gecko 1.8.21 as the rendering engine and scores 52/100). When K-Meleon ships a newer version based on the Gecko 1.9 engine, they'll pick up the better rendering engine and the Acid3 scores will go up (Gecko is the engine that Firefox uses, and FF 3.5 uses Gecko 1.9.1.x and scores 93/100 on Acid3). Hopefully I didn't just dump too much info on you in a response, but if so check out the wikipedia pages on K-Meleon and the Gecko layout engine for more info in easier-to-digest format .

If you've got a black screen and ctrl-alt-del doesn't work at any res higher than 800x600, consider a linux live-CD to test. If you have problems there as well, it's definitely a hardware (not driver) issue, although if the liveCD works you might just be able to boot your XP CD and do a repair install to get back to normal.

I've been OK with my onboard for a 5.1 setup for HTPC, but again it's hard to hear the difference to me, even on good speakers, versus the SB Live I had previously. I ditched it when I went to Vista (driver issues), and honestly I'm just as satisfied with the onboard sound on my P5Q Deluxe (ADI AD2000B, an Asus-specific custom version of the ADI 1989B chipset that supports things like EAX 4.0 in emulation - very, very good onboard sound). If you're an audiophile, a PCI-E card would probably provide better results, but for those of us just watching some movies or listening to music, a good onboard chip like the Realtek 88x or the ADI 19xx or 2xxx chips will save you $100 and not really give you any real sound differences over a discrete PCI-E card.

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using.html

Correct - one must still choose the classic menu, and this changes the shell's load point for the start menu. I believe this is stored in a preference hex blob in the user's profile, but I honestly don't remember where (I used to know for XP, but I never bothered figuring out for Vista), and I don't know if you can copy it from one profile to another and have it actually work either, even if you do find it.

Acid3 is a good test for compliance with CSS3, DOM2, and HTML5 standard definitions, but passing (or not passing) the test probably doesn't matter much to the average user. However, if we can get most (all?) current browsers to pass it, we'll have a much more standards-compliant web, and really the only major-browser laggard is IE in this respect (even IE8 only gets 20 / 100). We'll have to see what IE9 does, but if it doesn't come at least as close as FF 3.5 (93/100, the next lowest score out of the other 3 of the "big 4" - Opera, Google Chrome, and Safari all score 100) I think IE will start to really fall off as IE6 users move to something other than IE. We'll still have a good number of company PCs running IE for internal apps and backwards compat with things they developed for IE6 when it was *the* browser around the 2000/XP timeframe, but the rest of the web has already started to move on and IE9 will accelerate that if Microsoft doesn't start taking the draft and recommendation standards (at the very least) seriously. Again, with IE9, I think anything less than 93/100 on Acid3 will be a failure, and considering there are already 3 other major browsers that score 100, I don't know why they wouldn't already be shooting for a 100/100 score. Silverlight is no more or less evil than using Flash for video, and Silverlight does have advantages for people who want to write web apps that work offline. While I'd rather the web continue to move more towards standards-compliance and rely less on plugins, I don't see plugins as evil (or even as a bad thing) speaking as someone who does this for a living. Silverlight isn't going to take over the web (and Microsoft is no longer in a position to foist it on everyone anymore, anyway) and the folks who use Silverlight will do so because it offers them something that they want or need (mostly this is running a WPF .net app inside a plugin that's browser-agnostic). And given that the heaviest users of this is still Microsoft and usage inside companies on their intranets, I'm not sure it's not making a mountain out of a molehill anyway (I don't see Silverlight replacing flash as the dominant web video plugin anyway, for example). If you want to write a WPF app and put it online, you can use silverlight. If you're designing a web page and just want to embed video, you will probably do everything in HTML and embed using the <video> tag, with a silverlight or flash video object as a fallback for those who use browsers who don't support it. I don't see this becoming much of anything long term, because IE is slowly dying and Microsoft no longer has a stranglehold on browser marketshare. Had they done this 10 years ago, however, I think the outcome would be vastly different.

My suggestion would be to post that request in the network and internet section, you'll probably get better help there for that.

Key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer Value: NoSimpleStartMenu Type: REG_DWORD Data: 1 This came from startmenu.admx, the policy that contains this setting that you saw - in the future, if you find a policy that sets something you want to do, just start looking around in the .adm and/or .admx files, and you'll find what you're looking for.

Well, if that's the case, vote with the ol' wallet and buy something other than Creative - I've got to imagine most anything in that price range should be a fairly good choice .

Actually, the English word menu comes from the old French "menu", which itself comes from the Latin minutus, ultimately meaning "small" or "tiny". Given that the "start" menu in Win7 (it's not a start button anymore, obviously, but I'll call it that as that's it's commonly accepted name) really is a smaller representation of a larger list that you can search for what you want to find, it actually lives up to it's grammatical monicker much more accurately than the "classic" start menu found in previous versions of Windows did. Just nitpicking . Joking aside, if people want to replace the current menu with the old-style start menu, then they should use the tools and do it. However, ultimately Microsoft decided that it was time to give the old start menu/taskbar a little work, and in version 2 of the new menu they've removed access to the old one. Given Microsoft has stated that part of the reason for removal was that they no longer share the same code base, it does make sense from a practical perspective. However, the folks that feel super strongly about this should be voicing their concerns to Microsoft, as screaming on the internet about it won't be much more productive than screaming into a pillow.

Make sure to at least give Daniel_K's Vista x64 drivers a shot before dropping cash down on new hardware. Most people find those drivers work fine in Win7 and have the features of the card enabled. If those don't work, I would say the Asus card is probably a good deal, but there's nothing wrong with the Creative card you have other than the vendor behind it is money-grubbing and p***-poor at driver development. Thankfully Daniel_K is neither and his drivers do usually work very well, even if unofficial.

Agreed - assuming your disk is defragmented regularly (and Win7 already does this for you on a schedule) and you keep your temp internet files clear of junk via apps like CCleaner, you should be fine. This used to be a real problem back in the 9x days, but even since W2K you can pretty much keep a "clean" machine for years if you are careful what you install and uninstall, keep your TIF clean, and defrag regularly. This mantra worked then, it worked on XP, it worked on Vista, and it works with Win7.

It's possible, but you have to take it up with the OEM, not the retailer - so if you buy a laptop from CompUSA or BestBuy and it didn't already ship without Windows, you'd have to buy it with the OS and then go back to the OEM and get your money back from them. Of course if you purchase it directly from the OEM, usually you have to spec out the machine, then phone order it to get the line item to remove the Windows license as part of the sale, as I've not seen any OEMs sell machines online other than Dell that allow you to buy a "naked" machine.

The P for personal computer came at a time when computers were all giant mainframes. It wasn't meant to denote that it was Burger King and you could have everything "your way" . But in all seriousness, the more most folks use the new start menu and taskbar, the more they like it almost to a person. However, there will *always* be folks who want the old way, and fortunately (or unfortunately, however you look at it) they will either have to stay on their older OSes that do things the way they want and give up (in increasing amounts as time goes on) hardware, driver, and software compatibility and vendor support, or they'll have to hack something on as this project does. There's nothing wrong with it, and using the best tool for the job is almost always the best way to approach these sorts of things, but it's always wise to give "the new" a try before you simply fall back on the old. It might work for you, it might not, but you won't really know until you force yourself to try for a week or three, and then see how it does or does not work for you. The start menu/taskbar change is no different, and you can bet Microsoft spent millions on this one thing alone in user acceptance testing, considering they spend billions on the project as a whole.

Depended on the OEM. However, if you didn't accept the OEM license (did this with Dell a few times), you had to either send back or destroy the XP media and documentation shipped with the product. Unless that OEM copy was purchased from a retail outlet, and not shipped with the machine, you can't resell it, give it away, etc unless you're also selling the machine with it in the US. Otherwise, it's not a legal licensed copy for whomever receives it.

Works and works well are two different things though - especially if we're talking about x86. Running Exchange on an x86 server properly requires you to use the /3GB switch in boot.ini, which means 1GB for kernel-mode VA. Most of what a DC does won't work well with 1GB VA when you scale more than 5 - 10 users, and you'll be slowing down your DC (and causing disk swap hits to boot, never good on an Exchange server). Small Business Server has special code for these products to work "better" in these environments, so unless you're running Exchange/DC/kitchen sink on an SBS server specifically, the best answer is to not do it because the regular versions of these other Microsoft server products aren't designed to minimize the impact that they put on the x86 Windows kernel VA - they're designed to have the resources to themselves. If we're talking about 75 users or less, using SBS is actually a good idea (saves money) if the server underneath is beefy enough to handle the load and you don't mind having a single point of failure for your services in your domain. However, if we're talking about anything above that (or if you need more than one DC in the environment for redundancy/fault tolerance), it's always best to keep things like Exchange and SQL on their own servers. You can put things like DHCP and DNS on the DCs in the environment, but I'd always shy away from Exchange, SQL, or any other server product (even running a print server on a DC can cause issues I've seen many times).

I'm guessing that (similar to DVR and VCR taping content on your TV) having a copy of a movie or TV show "broadcast" to you over the internet is perfectly legal, assuming the broadcast initially was from a legal source. Sharing it afterwards or making any money off rebroadcast would be illegal, however. You get the same exact disclaimer (at least here in the US) after watching sporting events broadcast under the auspices of the professional league organizations that authorize the broadcast in the first place, but it has already been ruled that having a "taped" (or DVR) copy of such a program is perfectly legal as long as the copy you make is for your use only, and you agree not to resell or redistribute/rebroadcast it in any way to any third parties, for profit or otherwise. I'd say capturing the stream from southparkstudios.com, assuming you are doing this strictly for personal use and are not going to re-broadcast or re-distribute to any other party, would be perfectly legal "fair use" of the content. Assuming you're just making videos of these for storage on your own PC to watch later, you could consider using the open-source CamStudio recorder to make the files. Note I am not a lawyer, of course, but I would be OK with doing it myself if I cared to watch South Park. I personally watch the episodes on XBL, but if I wanted it on my PC this is what I'd do.

Assuming you have 2008 SP1 installation media and a way to run a virtual machine, the easiest way to do it (considering the public 2008 trial ISOs disappared when 2008 R2 was released) is to use the reverse-integration method. Considering it will work almost exactly the same as Vista SP2 slipstreaming, and we have a thread on just such a thing here, I'll just link to that thread and you can read it from there rather than have me duplicate it here.

Yes, the shell controls the z-order, but "control" is a bad word. There's no guarantee that z-order will be the same forward and back when applications are minimized, maximized, brought to foreground/sent to background, etc, unless the application itself makes sure of this in it's own code (and there are very few apps that I know of that do this). It's true that it usually works as expected, but there's no guarantee that it will, and if it's not working as expected it's highly likely some software on the machine is interfering. Anything that interacts with the shell, either via a shell extension or a load hook in a .dll can cause it. You can see and enable/disable some (most) of these by using autoruns and shellexview.

It's not reading anything in the registry, it's simply detecting whether or not the browser supports the max-width CSS2 style property. IE6 and below versions do not support the max height or width properties of CSS2, and will set them to undefined - so checking for it when otherwise configured in the site's CSS means the user is using IE6 if this comes back undefined, as all other newer browsers do support this (including IE7). You can't spoof this in any way (not from the client, anyway) as this is just something of a feature of the rendering engine - IE6 doesn't support this method (whereas FF 1.x, all versions of Safari and Google Chrome, and all versions of Opera back to at least v7 do), so anyone checking for it to be undefined when it is set in CSS for the page will know the user is using either IE6 or an older IE version and can then act on that.As to dencorso's question about the mamabar, it appears it's a method written for the dojo toolkit used to run script on the site for generating the DIV that displays this message, there's nothing special about it. It's just a call to a custom method which from it's input appears to just be a jscript or scripts behind that method that generates HTML code based on the DIV to display the IE6 upgrade banner for the site.

There's not a "controller" for z-order at all, and only applications that explicitly set themselves as background (or foreground) and keep checking can actually (mostly) guarantee that they'll keep their place in the z-order. There was a question about this on this forum about a year ago, I believe, and it ended up being a logitech mouse driver that caused it, so for what it's worth, anything that can interact with the desktop and the user's desktop heap can cause the issue. Has anything changed or been updated on your box on or around the time you noticed this was occurring, and does it also happen in safe mode?

Correct - the hardware is capable (again, short of Aero/DWM, but you already know that), although I would check your software packages as well that you plan on installing for compatibility there as well (again, since the tool won't run, you'll have to do some of this on your own).

With this many reported "issues" and a site with a lack of contact information, it seems that unless you're already a customer and don't wish to split, simply not doing business with these folks is your best option. Sure another hoster may not be as cheap, but you get what you pay for in this instance it would seem.

Generally yes, although it's not 100%. What device(s) are you wondering about?

No, it must run from an XP system or a Vista system - however, given the specs on your PC, you may want to make sure you have at least 1GB of RAM (your system ships with 128MB by default unless it was upgraded on purchase, and can accept a max of 1.5GB, 512MBx3) and a larger hard disk than the 40GB IDE drive that initially shipped. Also, if you want Aero Glass effects and the DWM features, you'll need a newer video card that is capable of running these (that system shipped with an nVidia Vanta 16MB card initially). The P4/1.8GHz CPU won't be blisteringly fast, but it is enough to run Win7. Just don't expect to multitask with speed as you do on Windows 2000 (or even Windows XP) with that CPU and even 1.5GB of RAM.