Zxian

Hey everyone, I remember reading a while back that you could start the explorer shell in high priority on startup. Is this true or is my mind playing tricks on me? Secondly, would this be a good thing or not? Since Explorer.exe is one of the underlying processes from which everything else is run, wouldn't it be a good thing to have it set at a higher priority so that it can deal with everything it needs to? As a side bar... is it possible to start any startup program in high priority? I've tried doing something like start /HIGH "C:\Program Files\AveDesk\AveDesk.exe" as an example, but I get an error message when I reboot. Thanks for the help!

@IceManND: I think you're getting he *.* because the program is already starting to read the actual arguments. i.e. it hasn't hit any wildcards yet. No one here has copied the arguments exactly as HyperHacker had in his original post... unfortunately I don't have a proper compiler on this computer (I'm at work) so I can't test it out.

You need to check a few places: Startup Folders (All users and your user) HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Delete any values that you don't want. It's as simple as that! Hope this helps.

I think nowadays the difference between the propcessing power PCs and Macs is so minimal that you barely notice a difference in rendering/editing time... so now (and probably for the past 6 months-1 year) PCs can keep up with Macs on any level. 3-4 years ago that wasn't really the case. But, you can only look forward to see what the future holds in store.

While you can do multimedia editing on a PC, Macs are generally much more optimized towards this kind of market. All the big name brand 3D graphics companies use Macs for their development because they're optimized (hardware-wise) for this kind of work. However... HP has been stealing some of the market away since they've been working with Pixar lately...we'll have to see how that one turns out. And yes, I'll take functionality over appearance... and add the appearance if I want it.

Gald to see you're interested. Be sure to have a look at the Forum Rules and Etiquette (just look at prathapml's signature for the links) and everyone will be more than happy to help you out. Welcome to MSFN!

NCIX.com is what it's all about here in Vancouver... great prices and really friendly salespeople.

I'll agree that Java isn't the best programming language, and for the most part, the programs that come out of it are usually less than par, but Azureus is probably the exception to that rule. I tried installing ABC3.0 on my computer... it had the most horrible memory leak. Let me know if it's just my system or not. BitLord = BitComet... go for the original, BitComet if you're gonna give that one a shot. Everyone has their prefs... hope you can find the one you like. If you don't like the amount of RAM that ZA uses, check out Sygate. Much less RAM usage, and much less noticable.

I think that for a pretty GUI, you need to learn about MFC (Microsoft Framework Controls) - I think that's what it's called. This isn't the same thing as .NET Framework, but it's the core of the Windows GUI that's available to programmers. I can tell you with great confidence right now that you should stick with the command line interface for the time being until you get a hold of all the finer details of programming (memory management, data structures, etc). Once you've got those things under control, porting your work over to a GUI is a piece of cake.

You're saying that you need to use the * character itself as an argument to your program? Why would you do this? There are plenty of other characters/strings that you can use for arguments. I think the default behaviour that you're describing is general to most shells. This happens to me when I'm writing in a UNIX environment as well. If you describe what you're program is doing with the arguments, maybe I can help you a bit better. Cheers!

Swedish and English... learned both at the same time. My parents both speak swedish, so we spoke that at home, and English when I went out. I still speak swedish with my parents at home.... makes for great "secret discussions" in front of everyone else... really cheezes them off! I can understand French, German, and Dutch, though, and I'm thinking of doing graduate studies in Europe... so probably one of those is going to improve in about 2 years...

lolcopter... away!!!! lol

Trying to circumvent the activation of XP is illegal if you never do it. It's possible to avoid having to re-activate XP if you copy two specific files from the system32 directory (I can't remember which ones... Google will tell you). By putting these files into your system32 directory UA, you're not in violation of the EULA, and you've just avoided activation.

I would personally recommend PerfectDisk over O&O or Diskeeper. It deals with defragmentation and also file layout on the drive. As for how often, as Tarun said, it depends on how hard you work your drives. I rarely defrag my system drive any more, since I don't install any software or anything like that, and all my documents and files are stored on other partitions. My VMWare partiton on the other hand... probably every 3-4 days, and I don't even use it that hardcore like some others here do. It all depends on how much you use the drive. Analyze the disk every few days and soon enough, you'll get a feel for how often you need to defrag.

Have you tried using modifype on the file in question? It's a stab in the dark, but maybe... Have you tried running the CD into a VM? Not by loading the ISO, but by using the optical drive directly to the VM? See if you get the same results.

It's most definately possible to add this to the CD that nLite creates. You just have to add the relevant UA software installation files in the nLite working directory before you create the ISO. nLite is exactly what you're looking for when you want to remove the "unnecessary things". %systemdrive% = the partition that Windows is installed on, for the most part, C:\ Your best bet to find silent install switches for your apps is by searching. Needless to say, most of the questions you might ask have probably been asked and answered already by someone else. Google is everyone's friend. I can tell you right off the bat... you'll probably want to hold off on installing NOD32 UA, since the option to start the AMON protection automatically will be disabled. We'll have to see how things go when NOD32 2.5 is released. Hope this helps, and good luck!

I think enough has been said here, and I'd just be repeating others words. iPod - Marketing... not much else (oOo... a black silhouette dancing... I want an iPod!) OSX - probably one of the better parts to come out of Mr Jobs' company, still fairly limited in terms of the diversity One of the better things that Apple has produced is the Airport Extreme. The ability to combine a wireless network connection, and a place to hook up your computer to an audio system... now that's cool. The only downside, you have to do it with iTunes (which I absolutely cannot %$&*$^ stand). Yet another big marketing shindig to go along with the iPod. The price of Apple merchandise is rediculous...not to mention that my Compaq Presario X1050CA laptop is much more powerful for everyday apps and gets more battery life than a Powerbook that would have cost me another $500 (at least). My friend and I traded laptops for a while actually. His Powerbook G4 1.33GHz 512MB PC3200 RAM 80GB 5400 RPM HD Superdrive ATI Radeon 9600 Mobility 15.4" WXGA OSX 10.3 Mine Compaq Presario X1050CA Pentium-M 1.4GHz 1GB PC2700 RAM 80GB 5400 RPM HD ATI Radeon 9200 Mobility 15.4" WXGA Windows XP Professional Fairly comparable hardware and overall systems, if you ask me. (Not just numbers... the Pentium-M 1.4 will keep up with a P4 2.4 anyday... search for comparison tests) Anyways, we traded for about a week. He has a PC with Win2K, so he was still fairly used to using the Start Menu and icons and such. For me, even after a week of use, I could not get used to the Dock. Waking up from hibernation... sheeze... the "extra security" setting on the Powerbook caused it to take about 1min30secs to wake up from the Apple equivalent of Hibernation (with no apps running). All you saw for a good long while was a black screen. Not very informative... at least you see a progress bar in Windows. On my Presario, 15 seconds, tops (even with stuff like Outlook, Opera, etc running). All the extra eye candy just doesn't really do it for me. I find it somewhat disorienting when the icon that you're trying to click is moving underneath your cursor... I turned the dock magnification off within about 2 minutes. As for the built-in defragger in OSX, it does defrag files automatically, but it'll do that even if the system is on batteries! Talk about a power drain when you don't want it. For both systems set to minimum screen brightness, maximum power saving, and wireless on, we used the computers like we normally would, chatting online, browsing, writing in Word, stuff like that. His computer lasted 2.5hrs... mine 5. I could go on for a while about the things that I didn't really like about OSX, or that I wasn't impressed with overall. I'll mention though, that when my friend took my laptop, he was hassling me about how it would be slow with the anti-virus and firewall, etc etc... after the week was up, he said he never noticed they were there (NOD32 and Sygate). Apples look pretty... but for anything outside of Multimedia... that's about as far as it goes.

Does this happen if you boot into Safe Mode? A HijackThis log might be useful in helping you sort out what's wrong... Online Virus Scan: http://housecall.trendmicro.com Go and get Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D. One anti-spyware program isn't enough these days... sad but true.

My combo is NOD32 (AV) and Sygate Personal Firewall. I've found that this is the fastest combo out there and at the same time, the least memory intensive. NOD32 is very well known for having a small memory footprint and being blazingly fast. The "tests" that put it in 28th place (or whatever) also test for Trojans and malware, something that NOD32 was not designed to deal with. As for the trojans, read the next bit. Malware is a completely separate topic. If you want to compare an all-in-one solution (like Norton is trying to do nowadays) to NOD32, then you're comparing apples and oranges. Sygate is a fantastic firewall that needs very little setup for the common user. It will ask you the first time a new app tries to connect to the net, and you can choose to have your decision remembered for next time. The only time I've noticed Sygate slow down my computer is when I was transferring files across the network at 12MB/s (total throughput). For common everyday surfing you don't even know it's there. As for content blocking, get Firefox or Opera and configure the corresponding content blockers. It's the best way possible. Hope this helps!

Well, the part about MSN using Java is crap... your intuition serves you well. As for alternate chat clients, I use Miranda. It takes a bit of effort to get setup right, but in the end, you'll have a chat client that's completely personalized to your liking. Don't believe what people tell you that it's buggy... just stay away from IEView and you'll be fine.

I've tried all the different clients out there, and I still come back to Azureus time and time again. Bit Tornado is alright, but the ability to queue torrents is really nice, not to mention the fact that you have one process for every torrent. For every torrent that you have open, BitTornado will use about 30-35MB of RAM... you can probalby do the math yourself. Sorry to say that BitTorrent is a fairly memory hungry ordeal... no real way to get around that.

I've used Miranda now for over 3 months, and it's only crashed once. (that's when I was trying to get IEView working) It's only buggy if you use experimental plugins, like IEView. I've got several other plugins working just fine and it runs like a bat out of hell. (The only thing that doesn't really work quite right is file transfers... they sometimes cause the whole program to lag). For me, using only 2MB of RAM is very nice...not to mention you can configure it to your liking until you're blue in the face. Oh... and Trillian is definately turning to bloat... just like MSN 7.

Just turned 20 a while back... it's turning out to be a nice bell curve here... I guess the Central Limit Theorem really does work...

1280*960*32 @ 72Hz I can't really notice the difference between 72Hz and anything higher. Go lower though, and things start to hurt after about 20 mins...

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