newsposter

This is coming up enabled and I'd like to have it disabled. .ini attached Last_Session.ini

Opera for everything.

And don't forget AMD Socket F/1207 for Opterons.....

open 'yer eyes a bit, the download links are on the upper left of the web page........

Yes, two years ago dual cores were pointless until the support components got upgraded to handle the increaded potential throughput. Quad cores are in exactly the same position now. Current releases of Intel and AMD Quads are technology demonstrators for those who want bragging rights. Wait a generation or three. No sense paying AMD and Intel back too early for their R&D. You can go ahead and spend the money, but until chipsets in particular catch up to the need for more efficient cache and main ram interfacing, it's better to go dual-dual instead of single quad. The dual-dual mobos are well established and well known. As always, in a year or so, tech will catch up.

in the case of MINO, there is a point where the spending of $$ crosses the 'stupidity line'. Either Intel or AMD drop prices about every 20 weeks and looking at their product roadmaps, that will probably continue into 2008. You've got to look at the system as a whole. Fast disk, fast memory, fast video, and a mobo with fast, fat pipes that let all of that run at speed and feed the cores as quickly as possible. There is a lot to be said for AMDs HT1000/2000 pipes coupled with DDR2/800 ram. OTOH, Intels new P35 chipsets and DDR/1066 ram promise to be very quick, but there aren't many real-world tests available right now. Remember that while it's easy to build a system where the cores are in constant wait states it's hard to build a system that can feed the cores as fast as they can eat data. disk: PATA 133 or SATA 3Gb, no real world difference if the drive hardware is otherwise identical. 16 Mb on-disk cache, min 7200, pref 10k rpm drives, a raid set no more complex than Raid10, and a good hardware controller with a fast CPU and lots of cache will help pull the data on and off drives quickly. memory: ECC but not buffered ECC. Microsoft is saying that in their opinion (yah, right) many/most desktop crashes are caused by non-parity ram which means most all that we've got installed. While not a 'performance' item, ECC ram will help with system stability and help you to not lose 'time' due to system crashes. more memory: The fastest memory you can afford. ECC/DDR2/800 for AMD on an HT2000 mobo or ECC/DDR2/1066 for an Intel P35 mobo. Buy a brand name but not a brand names 'value' or low-ball line. mobo: Something with a decent chipset that supports that fast ECC ram and a fast path to your disk controller. This will take some research as there are as many permutations of chipsets from Nvidia, ATI, Intel, ViA, and the minor leagues as there are end-users. Do not underestimate the importance of a good mobo/chipset combination, ALL OF YOUR SYSTEM DATA will pump through that chipset. Consider passive heatsinks on both the northbridge adn southbridge chips. Don't cry over 'missing' PS/2, com, and lpt ports. You can get by quite easily without them. Insist on at least 6, preferably 8 USB 2 ports. Firewire as you need it. video: Fast PCIe-16. Get a fast chipset that uses DDR2 for video ram and has at least a 256 bit internal video ram path. Do the math on the difference between frame rates and decide for yourself if a 5% 'improvement' in frame rates is worth a 30% (or more) increase in price. Pay attention to the cooling on your video card. Some makers overclock chipsets and ram and the resulting fan noise will drive you nuts. SLI costs lots of money for low-percentage improvements (if any). power supply: At least 600 watts from a name brand like PC Power and Cooling. Avoid fancy LED and neon case lights, they'll make more heat and take watts away from your disk drives and cpu. Ahhhhh, CPUs. Why is this the last item? Because in the greater scheme of things, your CPU/cores are probably the least important piece of the system. Intel and AMD cores are so fast, and so close to each other in terms of potential performance, that you need to 'engineer' the rest of the system first, then drop in the chips. As mentioned earlier, CPUs/cores will be in wait states more often than not so your efforts and $$ need to go into the supporting components before the processors. Do make sure that you get CPUs with at least 1Mb of on-chip cache. The AMDs can vary between 512 Kb and 2 MB, Intel puts 4 Mb on only a small percentage of their dual cores and those go for a hefty premuim price. Single vs dual vs quad cores. There are clear advantages for dual cores. Quad cores don't have the support needed to run them at full speed (yet). There are some server-class mobos, mostly from Tyan and SuperMicro that will run dual core/dual socket (4 cores) processors to good advantage. These are not $100 mobos, more in the $250 range and higher. Remember that MSFT licenses their desktop OSs for up to 4 cores but some licenses are for 2 cores only. And have a look at your applications and games software and make sure it can run on multiple cores. Having multiple cores running under an OS does not guarantee that your apps/games are able to. I run a lot of Photoshop work with 14meg pix raw images that convert to 128Mb tiff files in 5 layers and do real-time wire frame texturing (say on the order of 128,000 polygons in multiple colors) for CAD. My Photoshop and CATIA licenses are for 8 cores. The kind of data demands those applications place on a system has taught me how to build a nice fast system for about $1000-. If you want a none-faster system that is pretty much your price point. For about $500 you might be able to get close to 75% of that performance though. Much depends on the price/performance of the video card, a little research will tell you that the vid cards are quickly becoming the most expensive single component in a system build. Due to price/megahertz comparisons, it's way too easy to decide on Intel CPUs and just throw something together. But keep an open mind and buy the fast system components first and only then look at CPU prices.

not quite true... The Kentsfield CPUs are more of a 'because we can' product from Intel. Fine to great on CPU-intensive tasks that are SMP-friendly and fit wholly into the on-chip cache (L2). But with the same or slower memory bandwidth between those 4 cores and the main system ram (as compared to the E series duals), the cores on a Quad are spending a lot of time in wait state for data and instructions. I'd save a few hundred bucks on the CPU, buy a pair of E6600s, and find a good dual cpu mobo (giving you quad cores in two chips) if you want/need that kind of potential performance and/or bragging rights.

How about an option to remove or wholly disable Link Layer Topology Discovery??

Nuhi, Scott, please check this reg key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\AllowMultipleTSSessions The value needs to be 1

www.driverpacks.net

Rick, I've seen people delete dbghelp.dll thinking that it's part of an imaging program, "Windows Image Helper". In reality, dbghelp.dll is an essential part of the runtime debugger. Most, if not all executeables will load but fail to start if this system DLL is missing or has been deleted. Lots of information on dbghelp.dll on msft and msdn. There are also as many versions of dbghelp.dll as there are kinds of SDK releases. The msft debugging engine in XP and Server OS is an unholy mess and pretty much always has been. Were I you, I'd have a close look at the source that I'm trying to nlite from just to make sure that the original, RTM, or SP1/SP2 version of dbghelp.dll is there. You might have to go back to the original distro disks to make sure of an unmodified source. If this isn't your problem (a deleted or modified dbghelp.dll in your pre-nlite source), then you might well have with a physical corruption problem with your pre-nlite source image, be it an ISO or a 'real' CD/DVD.

http://www.billybowlegs.com/

heeeeeey, I wonder if this can be applied to Server 2003 to help enable more XP-like cosmetics.....

OpenOffice does a very good job with PDFs on top of completely replacing MS Office........

???

sysinternals.com page defrag And yes, a 'freshly installed' system will have reg fragmentation. Lots of it.

So address the disputed points instead of pretending to be all guru-ish...... I daresay that I've probably implemented far more petabytes of storage than you using a far wider variety of technologies.

As of now, the **only** thing you get from SATA vs IDE/PATA is narrower cables inside of your PC. If you have more than one drive, you'll actually have MORE SATA cables than PATA which may well negate any cooling advantage of the smaller SATA cables. In addition to the raw speed calculations, PATA just happens to be MORE reliable than SATA. Why? Because IDE/PATA implements error correction in the hardware/chipset independantly of the CPU and OS. Remember that the whole rationale for SATA is that it's supposed to be cheaper than PATA. As such, one of the 'cheaper' things is that error correction occurs in the device driver, OS, and CPU. SATA running at 3 Gbit/sec is nominally no faster than PATA running at 133 MBYTE/sec. Do the maths. And then look up the 'cheaper' side of SATA and compare it to what PATA does in hardware. No contest.

You can control all of that stuff and more with the MS mouse driver software and/or TweakUI (also from msft)

Another thing to look at (hard) when stripping down XP is what your end result will be for the effort invested. Bragging rights and education/learning about how MSFT does things and new ways of doing them is always valuable. Always. But after two and a half years of doing this I'm still not convinced. Other than the 'fun factor', the hugely valuable education factor, and the sheer convienence of all of the pre-loads and reg tweaks, I don't believe that I've gained much beyond what I usually get with a careful mangling of services startup settings. My .iso is about 1.3 Gb and it's 50% stripped/modded/AddOn & driver laden XP and the other 50% is my standard applications mix and recovery tools. I'm happy with that result. Other people aren't happy until they can get an XP install/recovery environment on to a 150 Mb mini-CD. Nice thing is that everyone gets to play. However (and these are sure to be unpopular opinions): Fitting everything on a CD-R? In these days of near-universal DVD boot drives on machines, the old rationale of stripping XP to 'enable' the pre-loading of lots of applications and still fit the thing on to a 700Mb CD-R are gone. Security? Other than setting some services to manual or disabled, pre-loading all of the MSFT patches, and pre-loading some anti-virus, what else is there that isn't more properly handled with some basic network-level security. Remember that it is security in layers, not a single brick wall that takes care of problems. reload/install times? On a P4-2.8 and 512 Mb ram my combo RvM (30+ addons), nlite, & BtS DVD can be booted and installed in less than 20 minutes including a full NTFS reformat of hdd0. Dual core and more ram does not speed that up. Things that I manually install after that take another 30 mins. Some people claim to go from bare-metal to fully working machine in 15 minutes but their definition of fully-working is for their purposes, not mine. Boot times? Is a reduction of 2-5 seconds on a cold boot worth weeks of test/install/vmware time? System performance? System performance these days is gated almost wholly by the sustained transfer rates of your disk drives and how those drives connect to your system. After boot time, a stripped down XP isn't that much 'snappier' than stock. With reasonably modern video, you don't gain more than a single-digit handful of 'fps' for gaming. Things like seti and folding gain nothing from a stripped down XP; if that kind of performance is what you need you are better off with a linux distro anyway. Remember that there is a bare minimum config for XP below which you lose networking, themes, support for anything but totally-generic hardware, high-performance video/audio (games, multimedia), and other stuff. Jeremy (among dozens of others) has done a lot of good work in that area over the past 3 years. Have a good look around for the various Last Session.ini files people have posted. The key to XP iso building/hacking is to set your expectations appropriately and test the hell out of it in a VMWare/VirtualPC environment before trying to 'go live'. You'll probably spend 3-4 hours on each test iteration and with a lot of tweaks/removals/addons, expect dozens of test iterations.

How about a run-once that will copy i386 from the cd to the hdd and set the appropriate install and souurce path reg keys?

you guys need to look up the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator, or MAME at www.mame.net

did you download a fresh sp2 installer from MSFT?

I ran a quick test this morning, no surprises. The resulting ISO works just fine in VMWare Workstation as well as on real hardware. No surprises is good. Thanks!!!!!

look at things like media monkey and the JRiver Media Center and their lists of suppored players for non-apple players. I personally like the Sandisk and IRiver players.