maxamoto

Hi, I'm having a frustrating issue with the DP right now. In my last build I was getting the "Trying to integrate (drivername)... Success", command prompt, but after upgrading I don't anymore. I am using the latest and greatest DPs (just downloaded today), and did a removal (ran BASE with no drivers), then upgraded. I've checked out all the .sif and .txt files to make sure everything is correct, but so far no go. Very frustrating. I am using option 2, G, and no to KTD. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

Interesting post, coming from a guy that obviously has very little working knowledge of computers themselves, judging from the lack of knowledge you display in your previous posts. You opinions regarding hardware and software seem to suit your mood and rarely follow any sort of cohesive path. Furthermore, you're obviously an AMD zealot with an agenda to push, regardless of the facts you conveniently omit in your dealings with others on this board. In short, you've got a very sweaty, precarious grip on reality. As far as my standing with the board goes, I could care less. I head back to Iraq in a week without a single AMD processor in my battalion this time, so our mission effectiveness should be quite a lot higher than it was the last go round. Since you're too lazy to check, it's the United States Army. You know, the one that puts the canadians to shame regarding technological advancements and combat effectiveness. You really should see the canadian detachment cowering in Kuwait. It's a funny, funny thing. I've never seen grown men so scared in my life. No wonder your unemployment is so high. Anyway, I'm out. Off to kill more insurgents and zealots. See you in a year, smokey

There's no way to skip the initial screens, so far as I am aware of. I'm sure it will be possible in the future. As far as creating the shortcut goes, download shortcut.exe, drop it in \XPCD\$OEM$\$$\System32 (or wherever your UACD lives) and use the following syntax wherever appropriate: Shortcut.exe /f:"%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Start Menu\Microsoft Update.lnk" /a:c /t:"C:\WINDOWS\system32\rundll32.exe" /p:C:\WINDOWS\system32\muweb.dll,LaunchMUSite You might need to modify the syntax above for your environment. The first time you go to the site, the icon for that shortcut will change to what it's supposed to be, but until then it will just be a generic pale blue page-looking icon. Regards

Much appreciated, thanks!

Ok, this may be a really, really dumb question, but I haven't been able to locate anything on it anywhere in the forums (note: If I missed it, flame on!), but I was wondering what the easiest way to upgrade the driverpacks was. Normally, I download all the different driverpacks + the BASE and go through the whole process all over again. I'm sure this is a stupid way of doing it, but I'm not too sure if just doing the updated driverpack + BASE will cut it. Anyway, appreciate the info, or if necessary, the lambasting.

Uh, no, I was 'going on' about my experience with technology in some of the most extreme climates, and how the different architectures fared. I think it's important to include my personal experiences with certain technologies on the battlefield, because those are valid working conditions (for me, anyway), and if a processor / laptop can hold up in a firefight, or an IED explosion, or a RPG attack, or a mortar attack, or being thrown at someone because you just ran out of ammo... My working conditions are a bit different than yours, yes, but they are still valid, aren't they? I am still working, aren't I? And my working experience regarding technology still counts, doesn't it? We do use a vast amount of technology in the Army, and while some of it is ruggedized, some of it is not. Wouldn't you want to know which processors fared the best in day after day of scorching 150F? It was Intel. Consistent uptime? Intel. MWR (That's Morale, Welfare and Recreation)? Intel. AMD consistently led to soldiers being demoralized, because they were breaking more often than the Intels were. Let me put it to you this way: You just came back from a 4 hour patrol. People tried to blow you up. People tried to kill you. Bad, bad things may have happened, and now all you want to do is sit in your room and watch a nice, relaxing movie or play a game on your laptop and you CANT, because it's an AMD and it crapped out because of the heat, or the dust, or a combination of things. Poor morale. You might think I am 'going on' about the war, but I am telling you where I work, and how I work, and my experiences with technology, because my job is valid and so are my experiences. Personally, I could care less what you think about the war, since you're obviously not fighting it And that's as far OT as I'll allow myself to get. This has been a great discussion so far, and it's good to hear everyone sounding off about their choices. I can say in all honesty that I have learned a bit about AMD processors from some of the fanboys here, and yes, even I can open my mind a little bit and accept that in some areas, AMD is better suited for certain tasks. But under no circumstances should you ever take one to the desert

I don't need to. I've seen AMD procs dropping like flies all around me ever since they started becoming mainstream As far as your comments about a compatability war go, think VHS and Betamax. It could have been done. I wouldn't consider myself a "fanboy", more of a realist. Again, the reality is if you spend less, you get less. People usually try and boost what they consider a "good buy" by becoming near-zeralot supporters of their choice of product. Makes them seem less like the bargain shoppers they really are and more like an intelligent consumer, in their own eyes, anyway. But for those of us who have seen the technology pushed to the most extreme of limits (Kosovo, Somalia, Desert Storm, OIF, etc), there is only one clear winner.

Actually, I know quite a bit about what I'm talking about. When I'm not kicking in doors and putting 5.56 slugs in insurgents or anyone else who gets in my way, I'm running the technology backbone of my batallion. There's a good reason the Army never considered AMD to be a part of our infrastructure. AMD has a track record of using inferior material in their fabs, and their yields prove to be much less viable in terms of usable output than Intel. In other words, more of their chips are junked due to manufacturing imperfections than Intel. Also, the x86 instruction set is owned by Intel, so no matter who you buy from you're still paying Intel some sort of percentage. So tell me, if AMD is so brilliant in their design and innovation, why are they piling their "innovation" upon the framework that is the computing industry as we know it, i.e. the x86? Furthermore, Intel has been making mainstream processors for a lot longer than AMD, thus the industry advantage. Look at the failure of American car companies to reduce their manufacturing footprint in the 80's and come up with a viable compact car to sell. The Japanese had almost 2 decades on them. I can't even formulate a response to your statement, considering where you've chosen to park your run-down trailer in the reality the rest of us populate. But for sake of argument, the laptops that went to the desert with us last time were all name brands. HP, Compaq, Toshiba, Alienware, and some off-brand types like Averatec, etc. They all pretty much died. Dead. As in, stopped running. Burned out. What can I say, if you buy your clothes at Wal-Mart, you have to expect them to wear out twice as fast as if you bought high quality clothes from another retailer. That is, my friends, the reality of CPU praxis and theory.

Let me guess, youre the (insert lame attempt at humor here)? Nope, I was the guy pulling QRF (Quick Reactionary Force), kicking in doors and taking care of business. All I'm saying is what I saw. The guys who brought out laptops had a lot of problems with the AMDs. Most of them died. I never said anything about ruggedized laptops, that was a conclusion many jumped to after reading my post. I'm taking about personal laptops here. AMD is cheap junk, usually used in conjunction with cheap junky hardware. Thus the comment about AMD being Wal-Mart processors. They are, and always have been, cheap junk.

Intel 100% here. All the AMD procs that went downrange with us to Iraq 2 years ago are dead as suicide bombers now. Of course, 150 degree heat, sandstorms, vehicle fires and carbombs might have had a little to do with it =] Oddly enough, all the Army laptops run Intel, and they all still work. Anything with an AMD logo on it died a quick death. Sorry, AMD uses inferior silicon. They are the Wal-Mart of processors. Cheap junk with reduced lifespans. There's a good reason the Army won't touch them with a 10 foot cattleprod. They suck, plain and simple.

Right-o, thanks for that. Let me clarify: Does anyone know how to integrate the Windows Genuine Advantage junk manually, and if so, could you please share your experience with the rest of us who don't use 3rd party tools? Please understand, this was not a bag on the talented folks who write the fine tools on this board. I know that a lot of people use them. Personally, I perfer to do things the manual way as it's much cleaner and predictable. Sorry if anyone was offended by my comment

Is there a way to integrate WGA without using the hokey tools, i.e. manually?

Hatefulsorrow, you are the BOMB! Thanks for your help with this. I imagine you spend a lot of time just waiting for your machine to do it's thing... But seriously, thanks again =] Guess I've got some collectin' to do. Though I was hot poo with 4800 songs. That's what I get fer thinkin... And ripken204, this is the Microsoft Software Forum Network. Last I heard, Winamp was being butchered by AOL. I figured you would know that, what with that pile of shiny stars by your name and all.

Okay, this one might be a bit off the beaten path, and then again it might not. I would even settle for the quintessential "Search the !@#$ forums!" reply, because that would mean the solution has been covered already. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate the solution, and thus I am asking you, dear reader. My question is, "Is it possible to rebuild the WMP 10 library so that music is sorted by folders of artists, said folders containing the album folders, said album folders containing the actual music files?". As it stands now, I've just dumped all my songs into one big Music folder, but now the amount of songs is making many operations very, very slow and unstable. Even opening the Music folder itself can take half a minute. Basically, my desired solution is to end up with what WMP10 does OOB, i.e. sort all ripped music by artist folder, then album folder, then songs. I would even resort to using a 3rd party utility if it would accomplish my goal. Thanks in advance =]

Hmmm, well, okay. Not really that impressive. I routinely run my XP machine for weeks on end without rebooting. Uptime stats aren't that impressive, really. Just means you're not installing hotfixes.

Although scrapped, AD is still the way to go for unattended installs. Perhaps you should outline the benefits / cost savings in money and manpower to whoever handles your budgets. If anything, you can set up a single server running AD to push images to the clients and just tell them in the .sif file not to join the domain. You could set this up for under a grand =]

I have this exact same problem. It's not the machine I'm building / burning the images on, because it doesn't have any problems in any other area. It's not the machine I'm installing on (currently a Dell Inspiron 2600) because it takes a standard install with a WinXP CD. It's either cdimage that borks it, or my drive (A Sony DW-U18A), or the cheap DVD+R I'm buying. Since I'm stationed in Germany, my options for getting quality DVD+R is pretty slim. I usually end up waiting a month or so for a shipment in the mail as opposed to buying a spindle of 50 cheapass media on post and watching over half of them become coasters.

I've always bought Asus (about 15 to date), and I've never had any problems with them. Doesn't really answer any model-specific questions you had, but as far as brands go, they're second to none =]

As I've said before, the Army uses Dell exclusively. They suck. Dell, not the Army, I mean. Dell really, really, really sucks. Day in and day out they break, and Dell's support sucks even more then their shoddy, cheap plastic computers. Hate 'em. It's terrible that America's fighting backbone is at the mercy of such crappy vendors. Ah well, look at the HumVee

hmmm... i'm one of those who has been saying that windows firewall is a joke. and i will argue that outbound protection is absolutely not useless -- it depends on what you're wanting to know. however, i'm starting to reconsider my opinion on the windows firewall after reading some of these posts. what i'd like to know is if anyone has done any research on windows firewall verses other products as far as introduced latency and system resources usage? i've been using Kerio, or a flavor thereof, for a long time and i really like the control and configurability that goes along with it; block all traffic during boot, knowing what's going out, NIPS, HIPS, advanced rules, blocking all traffic with 2 clicks, viewing traffic in real time, decent logging, etc., etc.. the windows firewall, in comparison, seems very sub-par in features and configurability. still, i'd be interested in the opinions of others, especially with respect to my question above. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It does pretty much the same thing all others do, and it's integrated. System resource usage is negligible (no worse than installing a 3rd party solution) and the security is the same. All software-based firewalls do a decent job of dropping remotely-initiated connections, and if you know what you are doing, you can block outbound connections as well by setting up TCP/IP filtering on the adapter. Of course, if you're like any other home user, you'll instantly switch back to having all traffic be allowed out once you realize how hard it is to track down all the different ports you need to open just to do your day to day surfing. So, do you really trust that software-based firewall to anticipate your needs, or are you going to take the time to learn how to secure your box? With inexperienced users, no product will protect you 100%. Read my post above about firewalls letting viruses communicate with their masters just because it was named explorer.exe. File streaming is another way to slip past most software-based solutions. You can have your opinions, but unless you really, really know how to lock yourself down, Windows Firewall is just perfect for you. Anything else is chosen based on personal taste (you like the interface, less popups than the competitors, etc) and not on merit. See my post above on setting up an OpenBSD firewall if you are truly concerned with what goes out your network card. And I'm out.

It also lets anything Microsoft wants to communicate from your computer to the outside world go by without even reporting it back to the user. I do not consider it a firewall but more like a "third party blocker". It lacks most of the things a true firewall must have. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> *sigh*... I remember the days when we could slip right past every single software-based firewall on the market just by renaming a virus to explorer.exe. I'm pretty certain most of them will still fall for that one. Good thing XP has System File Checker. Unless you turned it off. You didn't turn it off just so you could load pretty eye candy, did you? If you know how to sniff packets on your subnet, you'll quickly discover that a correctly configured XP firewall does indeed keep everything to itself. Your paranoia has no scientific basis and your statement is inaccurate.

Lemme guess, because it's included in the OS which means you don't have to waste your time downloading and setting up something else, that just so happens to be better? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> While you're trolling around, maybe you'd care to tell us what's better about the 'something else' you're referring to? Windows firewall is just like every other software-based firewall on the market today. It has it's ups and downs. Listening to people rant about how skilled they are because they use kerio or ZoneAlarm makes me sick. If you want to impress your friends, get an old PII 300 or equivalent with 256MB of PC133 and a 1Gb hard drive, head over to Google and learn how to set up a dedicated multi-homed OpenBSD firewall. Chicks dig them, your little script kiddie friends will ooh and ahh and you'll gain instant popularity and acclaim (not really, but **** they're cool). And then you really can say you have the BEST firewall. Is it software or hardware? You decide =] For the record, OpenBSD has only had a single remotely exploitable flaw in the default install in over 8 years. One. No Linux solution can claim that bragging right, and it puts to shame all contenders.

Searching Secunia, I found this: "http://secunia.com/search/?search=opera" Found: 173 Secunia Security Advisories, displaying 1-25 Anyway, they may all be patched, but the did exist at one time and I am sure there are a slew more waiting to be found. I'm sure of it, especially if 96% of the world used Opera. Opera is garbage. Slow to load, unstable as heck. Always has, always will be. Same with Mozilla, who like to change the name of their browser every now and then so they can say cr@p like "Mozilla is the most secure!" or "Firefox is the most secure!", until it isn't the most secure and then they change the name. If IE is such garbage, how come I haven't had it crash in forever, and I can't even remember the last time I got a piece of malware or spyware? Phishing and pharming are DNS and social engineering tricks, so they don't count. Hmm... Maybe I just know how to configure IE

The best manufacturer hands down is... ME =] But, when I ship off to Iraq in a few months I'll be taking my Alienware, thank you very much. FWIW, the Army uses Dell, and they are the biggest pieces of cr@p I've ever worked on, with the exception of E-machines and Macs. Yes, Macs.

And speaking of screensavers, here's a Really Cool set of OpenGL screensavers for free. Just unzip and put them in -you guessed it- $OEM$\$$\System32. Enjoy!