Zxian

@Thauzar - Did you research what those stop codes mean before just applying "tweaks" to solve the problems? Now... 0x77 seems like it might have something to do with the pagefile, but 0xF4? It's not the first thing that I would think of. Also - you've changed two things about your system, and said that it's the second that fixed the problem. What happens if you keep the pagefile at its reduced size and undo the tweaks. Do you still get blue screens? Basic troubleshooting tip - change one thing at a time, and don't change anything else until you know what's changed in the behaviour of the system.

Yes... just now. I'm making an installer for WUD, and in the uninstall section of the script, I had removed the example script's location for the uninstall information, but forgotten to add in the location for WUD... so the script was removing the following key... HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\ Where's that damned System Restore...

4Gigs? That's hardly enough really... Everything about your system running should be on the system partition, and all other files should be on another.

Well consider the alternative - you don't set your pagefile large enough. Now the program tries to request memory, and Windows won't give it. The program stops or crashes - is that better than it slowing down temporarily? And if you're running a server that pages a lot when opening/running a particular program - you need more RAM. Those tweaks don't do anything in XP. XP is pretty much tweaked as it is. IIRC, that "tweak" became obsolete in NT5 - but don't quote me on that.

Using WUD 2.22.435 - Screenshot The picture says it all... I think. The location of the "Refresh" button is where it is in the main window as well. Other than that - so far so good!

UltraVNC is also my non-XP-Pro remote administration tool of choice. It's simple to set up, and it works. Just be sure to install the Video Hook driver to get decent speed.

1) What version of Photoshop are you using? 2) Why is your C: full? It's really bad for your disk to have less than 10% free space... Resize that sucker with Acronis Disk Director to give your system some more breathing room.

Are you sure your computer is completely clean of malware? (viruses, spyware, adware) That's always the first check. Use your installed anti-virus to check for viruses at first, and then use TrendMicro HouseCall. Are you using Microsoft Update as well? I've heard of people having high CPU troubles with Automatic Updates checking all the updates and not just the Windows updates.

1GB OCZ Rally - stupidly fast speeds. I used to have a 1GB Memorex as well. I've also got an 80GB Hitachi notebook drive for those larger files.

Well, 1 and 2 are maybe a little unnecessary. I think instead, it will be better to simply have each UL available for download seperately. I'm working on a WUD official homepage right now to do that.I think he was talking about having WUD download each UL's downloads to a specific folder, and then the subfolders below that... so you get something like X:\Downloads\Windows XP x86 ENU\<all XP updates here> X:\Downloads\Windows 2003 Server x86 ENU\<all 2K3 updates here> Since both Windows XP and Server 2003 have "Critical Updates", and otherwise you'd get updates for both in the same folder.

I'm running Server 2003 and I'm hoping to make an update list in the near future... I've just got a couple of other things on my plate at the moment.

Sure... and we can also start worrying about memory leaks with those programming languages as well. Have you used jcarle's WUD yet? Sure, it starts at 20MB RAM usage, but it at 20MB... for a LONG time. I've redownloaded all the updates from various sources and it never climbs above 20MB. Try making an app in VC++ in the space of a day that has that kind of reliability. It's way way harder.

Thank you! Why do people care about this so much? Programming in .NET is much easier than in MFC/C++. the only people who would really care about this that much are people who have 4GB hard drives, but then again, they shouldn't be running XP in that case. ANYWAYS - Good work XPero.

@LLXX - How exactly does higher platter density translate into lower tolerance to vibrations? The main cause of failure due to vibrations is either a head crash (read/write heads touch the spinning surface), or the motor becoming misaligned and wearing faster than usual. The higher density also comes primarily from having more sectors on a track... not more tracks, so the precision in the read/write arm isn't that much higher than a standard drive.

You need to wait more than half an hour before asking for help again. We will see your post when we check the forums. As for your problem - go through the basic troubleshooting tests. There are two ways that you can do this: 1) Remove all hardware except for the absolute basics. Run stability tests to see if the system is stable. If it is, add one piece of hardware and run the tests again. Continue doing this until all your hardware is installed. Hopefully at some point, you'll have encountered the problem and you'll be able to pinpoint or narrow down the source of the problem. 2) Remove one piece of hardware at a time, run tests, and see if the problem persists. The fact that the error messages aren't consistent leads me to think that it's either a motherboard issue or a power supply issue. Check your voltages to make sure things are in check. Anything more than 10% off what it should be is a possible source of the problem. Moved to Hardware Hangout

I got a bug here... Quite often when I run it, I get the "Windows Update Downloader has encountered an error..." meesage, and then WUD closes. When i debug it with the Microsoft CLR debugger, I get the following error message: CPU usage is still fairly high (8-10%) - maybe try only updating the GUI every 500ms or 1s? That's pretty much the time scale of what people are used to in more applications (Windows Update, Internet Explorer downloads, FTP clients, etc etc). The 100ms is too "in between" to be confortable to most users - it's not continuous enough to be smooth, while it's also not spaced out enough to be a timed update.

Well... how are people measuring this RAM "usage"? You guys also forget that if you've got a pagefile, then inactive RAM will be swapped to the disk.

Server seems to be up again. I've put a mirror on my site as well - [url="http://www.zxian.org/jcarle/WUD20060813.zip"]Link to WUD 2.2[/url].

Yes, delete ALL of them. If after a reboot, they're still yellow, then you need to redownload and install your chipset drivers from Dell.

Unplug your printer and any other USB devices you have (except a mouse/keyboard). Go to Device Manager and uninstall all devices listed under Universal Serial Bus controllers. Restart your computer. Try reinstalling your printer as per all the instructions. Just be warned - you might need to reinstall all your USB devices after this. Every USB device will reinstall the drivers for itself if they are still present on the system, but otherwise, you'll need

Does it really matter who did it first? Just because Henry Ford made the first publicly available car, does that mean that Fords are the best today? Come on people! I honestly don't care who came up with what first. If there's a feature in both OSes, all that really matters in the end is which one does it better. When I say that I think <insert feature here> works better, it might not be better for you. Both sides have copied features from the other. Why really cares? All that gets you in the end is bragging rights... not necessarily customers.

[quote name='Tarun' post='546346' date='Aug 11 2006, 03:55 PM']Does WUD detect already installed updates? Also, what information does it transfer?[/quote] Nope - WUD just downloads the updates at the moment. It doesn't install them for you, but it just gives you an easy way to download all the updates you need. It doesn't send out any information - it just requests the update files from the Microsoft servers.

Did you forget to see that the 2.4GHz E6600 still beat out the 3.0GHz FX-62 in several tests? Where's the 600MHz there? Clock speed doesn't mean anything when you're comparing different chips. The whole AMD naming convention should have made that apparent... Oh... and AM2 was a whole lot of hype... but not much else. The benchmarks so far are definately not as spectacular as Conroe has been and is.

Great work jcarle. The new update list and ability to download to separate folders is great. Just one thing I noticed while I was downloading Service Pack 2 using your application - it seems as though the file is being downloaded into memory, and then written to disk once the whole file has been downloaded. This means that WUD ends up using about 250-300MB of RAM at this point... perhaps something that slightly older systems can't handle. Is it possible to stream the file to disk as it's being downloaded? Also - WUD's CPU usage while downloading the updates is quite high on my system - 80-95% on average while downloading at 700kbps. Is this normal?

Portable Clamwin can be a standalone virus scanner, but I don't know of any security suites (i.e. AV, firewall, anti-spyware) that are completely portable.