newsposter

http://www.registrytweaker.net and any number of others. Google is your friend...

why would you assume that an OS load obtained from anyone except the original maker (MSFT, etc) is both legit and not pre-loaded with spyware, etc?

additionally, any OS that is running as a 'guest' under VMWare need to have the VMWare-specific divers loaded. Sometimes those drivers just speed things up, sometimes they are needed to enable things like mouse and kbd work.

gee, interesting question. Never saw that one before, nice concept.......... Search is your friend.

did you say that you nlited an ISO over and over again? bad bad bad you ALWAYS start with a 'fresh' source.

very cool, perfect timing...... so the 14 MSFT hotfixes you have listed on your web site are installable with this latest version, even 929399 which is apparently only available as a .msu file? and as always, thanks!

additionally, try running in virtualbox 1.5.4, you'll likely get different response/performance from that VM, might even be better than the free MSFT product.

why not use a commercial internet service like faxaway.com? $10- a year and I get a dedicated phone # as well as a yearly allowance of several hundred pages of send/receive fax. Incoming faxes are delivered to me as email, outbound faxes get sent as email.

remember that SP3 RCxx 'releases' have a 180 day 'time bomb' in them. You don't want to install it on any system that you intend to keep running for more than 180 days and you sure as hell don't want to integrate it into an ISO you're going to want to use in the future.

www.mydigitaldiscount.com has consistently low prices and great service!

ok, so all of this (very) impressive work is focusing on an ASUS mobo. What about an Intel mobo with ICH9R??

well, a 'power search' on newegg for dvi motherboards brings back more than 20 hits. Even more than that on tigerdirect.

I believe that this might do it... http://prnwatch.com/pviewer.html

Considering that Intel is having ramp-up problems with their own 45nm process (related to some of the weird properties of Hafnium and nano-scale lithography) either prices are going to stay up (yield problems) or volume product releases (AMD killers) will be delayed. IBM on the other hand has signed up just about 'everyone else' for it's own 45/32nm processes (fab9 I think, maybe fab11) which includes AMD and most of the Seven Tigers. IBM has been fabbing their 5Gz (!!!!) production Power6/6+ chips in 65nm for a while now, will be moving to 45nm in 2-3 weeks, and have their own 32nm on the roadmap for 3q 2007, both ahead of Intel. If AMD can once again get their head out on new CPUs, IBMs process will be pretty useful to them. Of more interest than raw CPU bit-banging is the efficiency of mobo chipsets (Intel ICH9/MCH9 is wonderful in this respect, the projected numbers for ICH10/MCH10 are better) as well as where ATi and NV are going with their R700/G9xx GPUs, expec with on-card multi-GPU layouts. Nvidia already has low-volume workstation-focused cards (Quadro FX series) that pull 25% as much power as their 'consumer' grade counterparts. ATi is close behind with their new-generation 3850/3750 boards as well as some of their FireGL boards. Either company could put a pair of their best GPUs on a single PCIe board with 512Mb GDDR and easily fit within a 100 watt power budget, still 1/2 of what a loaded 8800 series card burns through. 100 watts seems to be the upper limit for passive (no-fan) cooling on a PCIe card. This would effectivly kill SLI/Crossfire but what the heck, anyone remember socket 939? I just scrapped AMD CPUs for a goodly handful of E6850s, I don't care a whit whose logo is on the chips. But if I were looking to future-proof something I'd look at the essential enabling tech behind CPU and mobo chipset roadmaps and make some kind of judgement as to maturity and availability.

don't assume that your point is the only one to be made, I don't........

'future-proof' is a myth. The only thing that lets you get close is a more or less constant outflow of money. So saving money and building 'good enough' and putting money back into the bank for the next time is one approach.

nirsoft.net has loads of free (!!!) password recovery tools.

Or, future-proofing can be thought of as buying as cheaply as you can because no matter what you do, the whole thing will be obsolete in 12-15 months anyway. Soooo, buy a good case, power supply, hard drives, optical drives, keyboard, and mouse. Those can be recycled through multiple generations of hardware. Treat everything else as disposable. Even monitors get to be disposable. I bought a 24" Acer STN flat screen last week for way less than I spent for a 17" TN Phillps three years ago. Unless you are going for overclocker bragging rights, there isn't a lot of real-world performance difference between a thoughtfully built 'cheap' rig and a 'future-proof' rig.

Remember that if at any time you want to run a monitor in 'real' HDTV resolution, you're probably going to need a graphics card that has on-board hardware codecs as well as enough horsepower and memory to run full-color 1920x1200 at 30+ fps. Dual-channel DVI (and not just dual connectors, but real dual-channel DVI) as well as HDMI are important.

8800GT cards are big, very big. make sure that your case is deep enough and that the mobo you choose is going to let you install the card w/o losing access to anything 'important'. If you're really serious about keeping this system for a while, you are going to want a graphics card that does DX10.1 and OpenGL 2.1. You might also want to read the graphics cards 'roundups' on extremetech, xbitlabs, and toms hardware.

multiple cores doesn't guarantee multitasking. Not just the OS, but the individual apps need to be coded for multitasking. Even Photoshop CS3 does better with two fast cores (E6850??) than a quad core.

and play around with removals. I use an SP2 distro, add WMP11 (and all fixes via Boooggy), remove a ton of XP cruft, throw in the current RVM update pack, toss in 40+ addons, and then **all** of the BtS DriverPacks and my CD image comes in at a hair under 680 Mb.

yes, leave your processor type at default and let the XP installer do it's job of selecting the correct HAL for the job.

think of svchost.exe as a 'shell' that quite literally hosts the essential services running on the OS. It's why you don't explicitly see processes for things like automatic updates, DCOM, BITS, print spooler, dns/dhcp and about 30 others. So yes, if you have a long-running process it will seem as though svchost.exe is to blame, but it's really the 'hosted' services it manages that are the problem. You need OS level debugging/management tools (www.sysinternls.com and prio.exe from prnwatch.com) to look at which of the 'hosted' services are really using the most system resources. If in fact the update/download/patch process seem to be the problem, you still have to look further ID the root cause. Things like a trashed registry (software inventory and PnP inventory) can cause slow update process as the data needs to be collected, sent to MSFT, and recommended update info sent back to you. And you can see that there are loads of system calls to be made as well as network traffic to and from the nearest MSFT Update servers. Remember that Task Manager is hardly a decent diagnostic tool. It presents just enough info for users to key in on the wrong things.

does the tcp/ip netbios helper service have to be running or just installed? And as I think more on this, a duh moment comes up, etc, etc. A properly built DHCP zone will have all of the netbios infomation prconfigured. If you're using static IP addys and no WINS server, you need the TCP/IP NetBios helper in place so that Explorer can connect. Just because RDP and simple tcp/ip service work doesn't mean that NetBios stuff will.