Nomen

This is a long shot, but... I'm trying to prevent my win-2k domain server from making Krazy-a** dns requests such as: _ldap._tcp.Default-First-Site-Name._sites.dc._msdcs.(my_domain) _ldap._tcp.Default-First-Site-Name._sites.gc._msdcs.(server_name) _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.(my_domain) _ldap._tcp.gc._msdcs.(server_name) I don't know where "Default-First-Site-Name" comes from but I might have seen it in the registry somewhere. There might have been a couple more, I put them in the HOSTS file and I plan on putting the above in there tomorrow, but I'm wondering how I can stop the machine from trying to perform DNS queries on those things. I've pointed this 2K server at my router as the DNS server and I'm logging these requests so that's how I know what they are. The DNS sub-system on this 2K server is really messed up but it doesn't matter, the machine does what it's supposed to do, it's hosting an exchange server and the PC's that need it can connect to it. I just want it to stop making these Krazy DNS queries.

A few days ago I installed "Simple DNS Plus" on a win-7 PC that is not always running. I had changed the third DNS server setting on the Win-NT4 server PC (the subject of the thread) to the LAN IP address of this win-7 PC. Trying to capture the DNS request being made every 8 hours. I was lucky today - here's what the Simple DNS logs captured: 11:12:24 Listening for DNS requests via UDP/TCP at 127.0.0.1 port 53 11:12:24 Listening for DNS requests via UDP/TCP at 192.168.2.137 port 53 11:12:24 Listening for DNS requests via UDP/TCP at ::1 port 53 11:25:26 Request from 192.168.2.130 for A-record for 192.168.2.1 11:25:26 Sending reply to 192.168.2.130 about A-record for 192.168.2.1: 11:25:26 -> Answer: A-record for 192.168.2.1 = 192.168.2.1 Hmmm. The NT server (at 2.130) is making a DNS request for the host 192.168.2.1. So, 192.168.2.1 is my LAN router. It's also the gateway IP in I guess all TCP settings for all devices on the LAN, including this win-NT box. Somewhat odd that something on the NT box is making a DNS request for an IPv4 IP, and the OS is actually going through the motions and making an external DNS request, not for a host-name but for an IPv4 address. Now I don't know, in the DNS world, whether or not making a DNS request for an IP address (especially a private / un-routable IP like 192.168.x.x) is kosher, but it seems that this request is failing for both the primary and secondary DNS servers and hence it's falling to the 3'rd server (which used to be 4.2.2.2 but is now the local PC running Simple DNS). It doesn't seem legit to be doing this, presumably the OS is supposed to just return the IP address as the result and not make a fool of itself by going out to make a (bogus?) request? As to what program or service on the NT4 box is making the request, I have a no idea what it could be. I do have something called "About Time 4.8" (an NTP time checker/setter) running on the box, but it's also running on another NT4 box and both of them are using 192.168.2.1 for the NTP time server, and both are set to do an NTP time check every hour (not every 8 hours). The Post.Office SMTP software is the only other service that's running (that I know of) that has a reason to do DNS queries, but I can't associate anything in it's logs with these queries for 192.168.2.1 every 8 hours. Perhaps as a start I can put this into HOSTS file: 192.168.2.1 192.168.2.1 and see if this actually prevents the NT box from doing DNS lookups on that LAN IP. But as to why it's doing that, any clues as to how I can figure that out?

There was something called the "Creators Update" that was released in early 2018 that added an address bar to regedit so that you could directly type or paste in a registry location to jump to. I have no idea for what versions of Windows this Creator's Update was for, but I'm wondering if this update is available for win-7, or if not, if the relavent exe/dll files are available somewhere and can be dropped into a win-7 installation to enable this feature.

I've got an NT4 server system on my network that runs an SMTP server. I have my router log in-bound and out-bound traffic to/from the machine and also restrict it's access to the internet beyond a few necessary ports. So in the logs I'll see traffic on port 53 (DNS) and 25 (SMTP). The machine's TCP settings have 3 DNS IP addresses, 2 of which are my ISP's DNS servers and the third is 4.2.2.2 (a generic server that I've used for years as a DNS backup and also for pings to test for IP connectivity). I happened to be looking at the logs recently and noticed that the NT server does make port 53 DNS requests to the first DNS server IP entry when it's sending an out-bound email, but curiously, exactly every 8 hours to the second, it makes what I'm assuming is a port-53 DNS request to each of the 3 DNS servers. Does NT have a DNS checking scheme, where it just checks for DNS server connectivity on a schedule? I'm thinking of setting up a DNS server (simpledns) on a win-7 PC on the network and point the NT4's third DNS IP setting to the win-7 PC just to be able to capture this request and see what the machine is trying to lookup. Unless there's a way I can do it on the machine itself.

What about installing Win-10 on PC's with OEM keys built into the motherboard firmware? I assume they'll always activate now and in the future?

This is a laptop running windows 7 ultimate. The desktop is extended to an external monitor. In the power plan settings, when plugged in, the "put the computer to sleep" option is set to never. In advanced power settings, under power buttons and lid, the lid close action when plugged in is set to hibernate (on battery it is set to sleep, but it is always on ac power). Yet, when I close the lid, windows tranfers all open windows to the still-powered external monitor. It does not shut down or sleep or hibernate. Can anyone explain this?

I've come across comments like Powershell has to be V2 for these commands to work - how do you get the powershell version? I've also come across that in Control Pane, - Progams and Features - Turn Windows Features on or off, that SMB is supposed to show up in the list, but again I don't see it. What about enabling all versions of SMB? How is that done? I will mess with the various file-sharing settings and see what happens...

I'm looking at pages like this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/file-server/troubleshoot/detect-enable-and-disable-smbv1-v2-v3?tabs=server How to detect, enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows And I'm seeing instructions like this: Powershell: Get-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName SMB1Protocol And I get errors like this: get-WindowsOptionalFeature : The term 'get-WindowsOptionalFeature' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. (...) (BTW, does it matter if there is use of mixed case (uppler and lower case letters) in these commands?) I come across this thread: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/35330530-0488-4ddc-8544-6f95cec51abc/getwindowsfeature-missing?forum=win10itprogeneral which is primarily about "get windowsfeature" but does mention "get windowsoptionalfeature" and it talks about the function working one day then not working the next day, and also mentioning that it might only be available on windows servers (but Windows 7 is not a server OS but these commands must have worked on win-7 at one time in the past???) Does anyone know a way to enable SMB on windows 7 and/or Windows 10? I don't care what SMB version as long as I can share a folder with an iPhone connected via wifi to the same local LAN.

I seem to recall that win-7 has some sort of validation that runs as a service, and if you disable it you will get a message on your desktop along the lines of "your copy of windows may not be genuine" or something like that. Does Win-10 have the same thing? Also, I'm very familliar with XP and how it's validation was tied to a bunch of different hardware fingerprints and you needed 5 or 6 "votes" for it to continue to think that it's a valid install otherwise it would need to re-validate itself. There was even a program (xpinfo.exe) that would tell you which hardware elements were contributing (or not) to this vote scheme. I'm not sure if Win-7 works the same way in this regard as XP does, and likewise no idea how win-10 operates in this regard. If win-10 does the same thing as XP, is there software available that will show me the validation status based on hardware fingerprint?

I don't understand the relationship between the motherboard RAM architecture or RAM sub-system and the M.2 interface. The HP computer in question has (1) NVMe 2242 and (1) NVMe 2280. The smaller one is used by the installed wifi/BT card. I assume I can install an SSD in the larger one? I read somewhere that M.2 SATA is not supported.

I'm pretty sure its a S01-pF1013w. The HP service app on it said that the 1 year HP warranty expired just a couple months ago. This thing looks brand new, not sure where these come from, maybe leased? For what it has, I think the $170 I paid for it ($125 USD) is a steal. Came with a new mouse and keyboard. 1 TB internal hard drive, 4 gb ram, 4 USB-3 ports in front (which for some reason HP doesn't refer to as USB 3 but as "SuperSpeed USB Type-A"). Yes, I see that it will be limited to 32 gb ram (2 x 16 gb) but I'm not planning to go beyond 8 gb. Just wanted to make sure Win-10 home wasn't limited to 4 gb. I see that 4 gb DDR-4 ram is somewhat hard to find (locally). Having 2 sticks of 4 gb would be faster than a single stick of 8 - yes? Dual Channel?

OK, after some searching I've found directly from M$ that the "physical" ram limits for Win-10 home is 128 gb vs 2 TB for Pro. I don't know how it's even possible to generally have more than what, 64 gb of installed ram in your "average" desktop computer. So basically there is no real distinction in terms of max installed ram when you're looking at Home vs Pro. This is a big difference compared to Win-7. M$ created more low-budget versions of Win-7. Win-7 "Starter" was limited to 2 gb and was only x86. Win-7 home basic (x64) was limited to 8 gb and Home premium (x64) was limited to 16 gb.

The point is that when you buy new or refurbished hardware, it's already going to have win-10 "installed" on it, and there won't be any media disk for you to use to "install it yourself". So the only thing you can do is to go through the motions when you take it out of the box and turn it on. It's going to ask for any info it can to identify a pre-existing microsoft account. Your only option is to give it a phone number that you've never given to M$ before. And I'll ask again, does win-10 home have any set ram limits? How exactly is win-10 home handicapped vs some other flavor of win-10?

I've picked up an HP Slim Desktop Celeron G5900 as a refurbed unit. It has 4gb and Windows-10 home 64 bit. I was wondering if there are any RAM limits for W-10 home (ie maybe it's limited to 4 gb?) otherwise I was thinking of throwing another 4 gb ram into it (I'm guessing it would help performance?). I'm somewhat new to win-10, but I see if I'm going to migrate some PC's from 7 to 10 I'm going to have to dig into this a bit. One of the things I'm not liking is when you go through the initial power-on phase of a system with pre-installed win-10 is that it wants you to have a microsoft account (instead of a local account) and there doesn't seem to be a way to bypass that. Beyond that, has anyone come up with a single "god-mode" or "power-user" package that will make all the mods that you'll eventually stumble on doing over time as you hammer and mold a stock/retail win-10 installtion into something more useful for a power user? Like taking ownership of the /etc folder so you can control the hosts file? Turning off all crap services, uninstalling all the stuff you won't use (or will refuse to use on principle) like office 360, onedrive, etc?

Roytam came up with Retrozilla - yes? I've been using that for a while now on my win-98 systems (which do not log into any websites). I usually have to set the View Style to None to make a site useful to view, but it works for what I do on those systems. Regarding chrome - I've stayed clear of chrome on any other PC I have (which are win-7) because of my "perception" (which could be wrong?) that chrome is tied in too heavily to google (in terms of backdoor, telemetry, etc). Is my perception correct? I would feel comfortable using a "chromium" based browser if it was as disconnected from Google as Firefox is (or can be) from Mozilla. Are there links to download packages / installers for the top candidates mentioned here (360 Chrome and DC Browser) or do I have to figure out how to actually get my hands on them?

I know it's lame to just jump in here and ask, I know that a lot of work has gone into exploring, modifying, creating these browsers, but I just don't have time to come up to speed and understand it all. A computer I built for a relative on hardware that's about 10 years old is running XP but the browser is holding him back and the choice is to either find a browser that works or somehow put windows 7 on the PC. So I'd like to try what-ever is the most turn-key solution to giving an XP system the most reliable, compatible and secure (malware-free) browser. So can someone point me to which-ever browser project fits that bill?

I figure I'd ask this here, as FF2 is still pretty functional for me for the sites I go to on my Win-98 systems but nowhere else are you going to get FF2 support or interest. There's a website I hit that always give me the error "n.bind is not a function" and references a particular .js file. There's a setting in about:config (layout.css.report.errors) that I've changed from True to False but that changed nothing. Some suggestions I've found say to disable it through the Web Developer toolbar, but I have no such toolbar installed nor do I see "web developer" under the tools drop-down. Is there anything I can add to about:config to disable error console popups? Bonus question: Because of some mods I've done in my hosts file, I frequently get the "Security error: Domain Name Mismatch" error window. Is there any way to disable that?

I extracted the files advapi32.dll (98 kb vs original 605 kb), advapibase.dll and ntext.dll from George's mediafire link. My version of winrar must be incompatible with the .7z file in question, I had to download and install a trial version of winzip to extract the files. I placed those 3 files in my c:\windows\system32 folder. I did this by booting the PC into DOS (I have XP running on a FAT32 drive in this PC, the boot menu gives me the choice to boot into DOS or XP). Otherwise XP was interfering with me changing advapi32.dll while XP was running. I made a backup copy of advapi32.dll first. With the changes, XP started fine, no indications of anything wrong. I checked and advapi32.dll was not replaced by a version from the dllcache. I thought I might have to register advapibase.dll but my attempt to do that resulted in a DLLRegisterServer entry point not found message. But XP was up and running, so if this is an important system DLL then it seems to be working. I ran the TWS offline installation file, and son of a gun it worked! The application installed the newer version of TWS with no issues. Now, would it run? Yes! So thank you George for the info about One-Core-Api. And also thank you Gerwin, I had a look at the github project you posted and was trying to decide which one to try first.

The install file in question (Interactive Brokers TWS offline installer for 32 bit Version 981.3m) does in fact run on Windows 7 (32 bit) so I don't know if this is a 32/64 bit issue or not. And - my full name is Nomen Nescio.

I'm trying to install an application on an XP-SP3 (32 bit) that claims to be compiled for windows-x86. I am currently running a previous version of this application. I am trying to run the offline installation package for it. I am getting this error: The procedure entry point RegGetValueA could not be located in the dynamic link library ADVAPI32.DLL. Some web-searches I've done might be indicating that that function is only available when running XP 64 bit? Anyways, I have version 5.1.2600.6987 (12/17/2015). Any chance that there is a more recent version that might have this function? There is KernelEx for XP isin't there? Might it help with this?

There's a difference between "supporting windows 7" and being "compatible with windows 7". You would think that to avoid customer confusion and to avail yourself to every possible sales opportunity you would add Windows 7 (and even XP) to your COMPATIBILITY list. Perhaps, having been pre-formatted as FAT32, they have some sort of arrangement with microsoft that stipulates that they can't have Win-7 on the compatibility list if MSFT doesn't want to see it there.

I was looking through the website of a local computer/electronics store and going through their selection of USB thumb drives. I needed to buy a couple, didn't have to be larger than 8 gb or be USB 3 but you can't find anything less than 16 or even 32 gb these days and apparently even finding USB-2 is not possible at this particular store. I settled on this: Kingston DataTraveler Kyson, 32GB USB 3.2 Gen 1 I assumed it would "just work" when plugged into any old-school USB 2 port, but still I wanted to find some tech specs saying that. On Kingston's own website, they say this: Compatible with Windows® 10, 8.1, 8, Mac OS (v.10.10.x +), Linux (v. 2.6.x +), Chrome OS™ Hmmm. Why only Windows 8/10 ? What sort of magic does this drive have that it's not even compatible with Win-7? It doesn't even explicitly say "compatible with USB 2" port - is that such a big deal to say? I bought a couple. About $10 each. I've tried one. Plugged it into my Win-98 PC (pretty close to a 20-year-old socket-478 P4 Soyo motherboard) and Win-98 recognizes the drive just fine. Scandisk, chkdsk, no problem. They report the drive is FAT-32 formatted, 16kb size allocation units. I'm assuming that Windows 7 will also see this drive and be fine with it. So why does Kingston leave out Win-7 on the OS compatibility list? They go out of their way to say "10, 8.1, 8" - why not instead just say "Windows (all versions)" ? Now I will say that on the package, on the back, is a small chart, showing the various OS classes on one axis and USB-2 and USB 3 on the other axis, with checkmarks filled in showing yes, every listed OS is compatible with both USB-2 and USB-3. But even on the Windows line, they again list Windows 10, 8.1, 8. Plenty of room to add a 7 on that line. Strange. Maybe they think people would equate seeing win-7 with product age or technological inferiority?

Thanks! Github is always a confusing place for me to navigate. But yes, I found what you are talking about here: https://github.com/nalexandru/api-ms-win-core-path-HACK/releases/tag/0.3.1 And yes, placing the dll in system32 did the trick. I guess this would also be needed for 64-bit Win-7? The program I'm running is also based on python. For more on this issue, see the following: https://vigilance.fr/vulnerability/Python-executing-DLL-code-via-Windows-7-api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0-dll-31456 https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/561c59777c8426fde0ef48b57cf02eddaeb2a5b8 (that's where I see reference to the KB's) https://www.smartftp.com/en-us/support/kb/2695

This is Win-7, 32 bit. I'm trying to run a program and I get this error: "The program can't start because api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll is missing from your computer." I see lots of similar issues for that particular dll and pretty much zero resolution for it. Seems to be specific problem for win-7, possibly that file originated with windows 8? I've gone down a few rabbit holes looking for a solution, and one path points to windows6.1-kb2533623-x86.msu as a possible solution. The only place I was able to find it was the wayback machine. I ran it, but it said it didn't apply to my system (?). That KB is possibly superceded by kb2758857. I have obtained a version of that one, I haven't run it yet. Another rabbit hole indicated that vc_redist.x86.exe (Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable) might fix the problem, but I ran that, and the problem remains. Does anyone running Win8 or higher have that file? (api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll) I'm just wondering for what versions of windoze can that file be found on, and why not for win-7. And if anyone has any answers for what kb2533623 / kb2758857 were for?

I'd like to think we were all living a little vicariously through John the last few years. The photo's of him holding a rifle in the jungle, who could argue with that?