azagahl

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Sounds great! I 'd like to try it out, but have a few (naive?) questions first: -Since .NET 3 installer also includes .NET 2 installer, does your add-on have duplicates of .NET 2 (wasted space)? -Can this be integrated w/o problems? AFAIK .NET 2 can only be installed from first login, not earlier e.g. from SVCPACK.INI. Attempting to do this would result in bugs. -What does "Remove .NET Framework with Nlite" mean? Are you referring to OS's, other than XP SP2, that contain .NET already? Thanks!

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>azagahl, this is not the part of the forum where we review software products. Really?? So you are retracting your posted opinions that the product is "reliable" and that people are "quite happy" with it? Or would you like to share with us additional opinions on the product?

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Who makes this? I couldn't find out much about it. It sounds good but I am afraid to try it if its not from a reliable source.

>AVG Anti-Virus system, you will get a reliable tool Reliable software does NOT contain secret time bombs! What happens to all of the viruses stored in your Virus Vault when your AntiVirus suddenly shuts off?? If the Virus Vault stops working, are the viruses released into the wild?? Or are they left there for you to stumble on later? How you feel if this happens while you are on vacation???

I suggest using ClamWin. I will NOT use AVG. Having secret time bombs in your software is simply unacceptable!!

>WinZip, one of the best pieces of utility software ever made for Windows *YAWN* I've been using free TUGZip, IZArc, and 7zip for years now.

>i would like the best setting meaning the highest/pushed to the limit IMHO, the best way to use UMBPCI is to not use it at all. I believe it slows down memory (e.g. by a factor of 10); to check this you could try verifying the slowdown with the timing app that comes with UMBPCI. UMBPCI can't access certain memory blocks (e.g. B000-B7FF) at all. If you install EMM386 on top of UMBPCI, I think you can access them; but what is the point of UMBPCI then? UMBPCI also can lead to incompatibility problems such as crashes, floppy disk errors, and sound driver incompatibility. (And I've witnessed all three of these.) There are workaround programs bundled with UMBPCI which may or may not work. Note that having a certain Motherboard is not a guarantee if things working. With UMBPCI, you will have to tweak some Windows files to keep Windows from ralphing. UMBPCI also has poor granularity when using upper memory - a very large 0x4000 bytes IIRC; EMM386 has four times the granularity. The poor granularity increases the odds of being unable to access certain parts of memory. FastVid is OK. But I found Zeno to be a better video speedup tool (I don't recall why; I think it needed less memory). There are a couple of Zeno tools modified by different authors and with confusing version numbers. Avoid the highest version; ZENO174.exe is the right one to use.

>Nvidia FX5200/5500/5600/5700/5800/5900 I have GeForce FX5900 Ultra and it works with 98 SE. I use AGP 8x, I believe.

I think the fundamental theorem of algebra says any N-degree polynomial (N > 0) can be factored using N roots. Finding them is hard though... For 3rd/4th degree equations, there are exact algebraic solutions. look at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ for Quartic Equations or Cubic equations. Otherwise, I don't think there is a good method in general. For polynomials with degree 5 and above, you can also get exact solutions but they depend on nasty functions and polynomial transformations. Newton's method is easy and fast and is probably the best bet here, however it doesn't work very well for complex roots or coefficients. E.g. for x*x+1 = 0, Newton's method will probably oscillate or diverge stupidly because there is no real root. The above site is a great resource for this stuff. Here is another method, with its own limitations; I think it uses both first and second derivatives: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/HouseholdersMethod.html There are actually buttloads of these, which shows how hard this problem is: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Root-FindingAlgorithm.html For odd-degree equations (e.g. quintic) with real coefficients, they go toward negative infinity on one side, and positive infinity on the other. In this case you can just start far out on both sides and use a binary search to find a zero. This isn't very fast, but is very easy method to implement. If you use this plus the quartic (degree 4) formula you can easily solve any quintic (degree 5) equation. This is because, when you manage to find a root, you can factor (x - root) out of the polynomial (it should divide with no remainder) to reduce its degree by 1. Hope this helps.

#1 was solved with using a better VGA cable; and I kinda of expected #2. Overall I'm happy with the monitors. >But as far as #3 goes, I've NEVER seen that before. Weird! It might be a lack of a punched out hole in the aperature grill. The brand new CRT I tried a couple of years ago (a ViewSonic one) had at least 5 dead pixels in a small group. I noticed another problem - if I have a bright white square on a black background, for example, I can see a dim halo around it. I don't think it's an optical illusion. Possibly just ghosting.

Yay! I got a couple of free 22" monitors from work (we are "upgrading" to LCD's). They are 5 years old but look good. The only complaints I have are 1. Both monitors had this same problem that got really bad at high res, or with a high refresh rate. There were ugly horizontal ripples to the right of any text. The ripples alternated between normal and inverse images. I bought a new, thicker VGA cord and it fixed this completely 2. I noticed there are a couple of faint black horizontal lines. This has something to do with the aperture grill I think. It's quite normal. 3. One CRT monitor I tried had a dead pixel (I didn't check the other one). It's small due to the highest allowed resolution being so high (2048x1536 I think). I'm not sure if this is missing phosphours. It could be an occlusion I suppose, but it looks square to me. BTW, one time I bought a very expensive CRT monitor and it had MANY dead pixels. Oh well...

Is there any place left that still makes or sells good CRT monitors? I don't care if they weigh a lot. Lately, every LCD I've tried, including very expensive ones, have dead pixels that drive me crazy. I do not want a dot in front of my face for hours at a time. A lot of LCD's also have native resolutions I don't care for.

>IE6 causes problems when large amounts of files are copied, moved, or deleted. Yep, you have to use 5.5 BROWSEUI.DLL and BROWSELC.DLL to avoid this. Also, it's a good idea to unregister the bad 6.0 DLL's, and register the 5.5 DLL's (with regsvr32 /u and regsvr32). I believe you can use the 6.0 DLL's in IEXPLORE.EXE's folder so that it uses the 6.0 DLL's, while the rest of the system uses 5.5 DLL's. Last time I checked (long time ago), the newest 5.5 DLL's come from an IE 6.0 SP1 Millenium Edition security patch.

FWIW, I've used SB Live! Value (CT4830) as well as other SB Live! cards: SB0060 and SB0100. I'm not sure what product names corespond to these part names. These are all PCI cards and work natively under DOS, and they all work about the same. Unfortunately, the drivers require EMM386 which isn't compatible with some games (e.g. Ultima 8). Furthermore, SB Live! Value works really badly with Tyrian 2000 (no sound effects or crashing) even after applying the SB Live patch to Tyrian 2000. Windows doesn't help solve these problems. I think SB0200 (Live! 5.1?) and later won't work under DOS.

Isn't Core 2 EE still 32-bit? What will you do when your new game needs more than 2 GB to run? Also 64-bit apps are typically 30% more efficient than 32-bit versions.

No big deal. All you need is a simple Firewall will protect you. From the web page you linked to: "To help protect from network-based attempts to exploit this vulnerability, use a personal firewall, such as the Internet Connection Firewall, which is included with Windows XP and with Windows Server 2003."

"A copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005" Why is he using a copy of an OS? It's no wonder he's getting "pirate" warnings. My suggestion is to use a genuine OS.

> I recommend the CAB format. The compression is actually superior to 7zip's LZMA as pointed out above This is rarely true. 7z is typically about 10% more compact than CAB LZX:21. > I'm rather cautious around executable files, especially huge ones since they take a long time to virusscan A 100 KB installer stub plus a 300 MB compressed block of data takes no longer to scan than a 300 MB compressed archive file. > I unpack most installers manually anyway, to minimize the risk of getting anything infectious. You are too scared to run an executable, but have no qualms about dumping someone's DLL's all over your operating system?? If you want this to be easy for newbies, then make an installer. An NSIS installation executable is the best choice IMHO. Note that NSIS supports 7z compression. And if the user wants, they can still extract the contents using some tools like TUGZip / IZArc.

>7.17Gb If the final release of Vista gets much larger, you will need an HD-DVD drive to install it. BTW, nano Windows could become even smaller with a rebuilt vmm32.vxd. But without ESDI-506.PDR or SMARTDRV.EXE it is going to be slow. Personally, I would use the Via IDE Miniport drivers to avoid problems with PATA disks > 137 GB. (I have a Via motherboard).

Changing your MAC address periodically is an easy security tactic that helps thwart spyware. It's similar to how having a dynamic IP address helps thwart targeted attacks by hackers.

>>Quoting: "Here is a tip.. Steer clear of this software: UMBPCI, QDMA, and QCDROM." >Is there tiny chance that the problems you experience in that, might just be software conflicts between those softwares and macromedia No, I was booting in pure DOS mode with a vanilla 98 installation. UMBPCI can work properly on my PC if I turning bus mastering off. The other solutions that the author suggested (enabling double buffering, or loading high from a ram disk) did not help. UMBPCI does save a lot of memory, but unfortunately does not provide EMS, which is needed by my SBLive! drivers (SBEINIT.COM). I will try QDMA/QCDROM/QHIMEM with bus mastering turned off. I'm not very hopeful, though.

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