TravisO

There is an easy way to check servers remotely.... install the MS BSA (Baseline Security Analyzer) found at: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/...s/mbsahome.mspx It's MS's security scanner than checks many security things in addition to listing any missing patches. It takes a couple minutes per server, but it works great.

As a fellow .Net coder, I have to say great little app, I love to make simple little utilities too. I'm posting to let you know the feature I'd most like to see is the ability you already mention, to only grab updates I don't have, or better yet (an easier to code) is a dropdown that will "only get updates after SPx). One example why is there are XP cds with integrated SP1 or SP2 (or slipstreamed for the power users here) so they only need the updates that came after that point. Of course the next feature would be to have a drop down choose which OS they want, ex: Win 2000, Win 2003, Vista. From the looks of it it looks like you hardcoded all the updates into the app, if I'm correct then you'd need to update your app every month. You know there is an XML file you can download from MS to get the list of updates.

Most cameras made in the past 4yrs don't need a driver, the computer mounts them as with a generic USB storage device (this gives them compatibility to any OS that has USB support). IMHO any camera that can't be mounted this way, isn't worth buying. I have come across the problem of the USB device not showing up a few times, and it's because the drive letter that the camera (or system?) wants is currently used, and for some bizarre reason XP (2003 will probably do it too) won't simply check the next letter. Go into your Disk Manager (right click My Computer, choose Manage). From there you should see everything connected to your computer and if you see the camera you can right click it and manually assign it a drive letter.

Perhaps, but I haven't seen it and it looks like nobody else that has posted here has either. Ok I've seen the picture of the guy but not the comparison shot.I use to be a die-hard Unreal fan, unfortunately I'm sick of spending a small fortune on my PC keeping it gamer friendly and haven't upgraded since 2001 (ok I upgraded 512ram to 768ram but only because my wife and I use user switching in XP). A good video card alone costs as much as a gaming console, and then you still have to worry about CPU, RAM, HD and Mobo upgrades. I'd love to play Unreal 2007, but I don't have any plans to upgrade my PC (XP1700) unless Vista forces me to. I'm a console gamer now

The best depends on what you want to do with screen captures but for the power user and the purist here's the best solution: Get Purrint, takes only 100k of ram! It intercepts the PrtScn key, when you press it a window pops up, give you a thumbnail and lets you choose to: Copy to Clipboard, Print or Save to File (GIF, JPG, PNG). If you need to customize the screengrab use an image editing tool, like Photoshop or the free Paint.Net. And in case you didn't know, holding ALT+PrtScn only captures the program window, instead of the whole screen.

As I stated above, I got a new HD and decided to re-install XP from scratch and still had instability issues (no more error, wouldn't crash as often). So I don't have the same Windows (or FireFox) "profile". Well I found a work around, and my favorite FF extension to date: SessionSaver No matter what your tabs are saved: FF can crash, you can close FF, you can log-out, your PC can crash or you have a power outage. A tab doesn't die unless you close it. I use this at home where FF is semi-stable, and I use it at work where FF is fully stable. If I want to do a task that needs a lot of ram (Photoshop, Gaming, etc) I can just close FF without losing what I was doing.

Click Options > Preferences and you'll have to figure the rest out for yourself. There's not to change in WinAmp IMHO, but a few settings I like to set are: General Preferences -> Show Winamp In: [ ] Taskbar [X] System Tray Why? At first I use to dislike System Tray apps, but I've decided any app I run 24/7 (P2P apps, music players) I'd rather it not take up valueable system tray space. The other setting I choose is changing the default white-ish icon to the 5th icon, the flat black one. Finally, I use to be a huge fan of the MMD3 skin, but because it's so big (I'm not at 1600x1200 yet), slows down WinAmp load time, and eats a ton of ram, I just prefer the simplicity and speed of the default modern skin. Also IMHO WinAmp doesn't fully replace WMP, I prefer WMP for video, and basic audio (MIDI, Wav, etc) but I leave all MP3/OGG/AAC/etc audio formats to WinAmp. I've tried to use WinAmp to play WMV videos and such but honestly, it doesn't do as good a job as WinAmp.

There doesn't seem to be any tools to control WMP over a network, looks like you should switch to WinAmp if you want to have this type of functionality.

You have to say which OS and music player you are using (Windows, Linux, OS10? Winamp? MS Media Player? iTunes?) I see Winamp has many choices: http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?...59&show=reviews http://www.flippet.org/wawi/ http://projects.halo8.net/?codeName=halo8wwwinamp iTunes too: http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/13/how-to-...ny-web-browser/

In order to give you the right answer, you have to ask the right question. My point is, you should NOT be manually setting the pagefile. Let Windows determine the size of the pagefile for itself. There is no advantage to setting a larger pagefile, it doesn't store data for future use, it's not like a browser cache where bigger is better. Also your CPU setup has NOTHING to do with pagefile, you could have 4 dual core cpus it your pagefile settings wouldn't change. No more than your choice in car tires affect how quickly your windows can open Finally, setting a large pagefile can be a bad thing. Such large files can rarely be writen contiguously on the drive, so the pagefile will be split all over the drive. The more you use that file, the worse it gets, this is called file fragmentation and will cause your drive to read and write slower.

My Vote: Dell I'm a build-my-own kind of guy, but I previously worked at a company where we deployed 300 brand new DELL XP Machines (we Ghosted our XP on the machines). As far as desktops go, Dells are great for the business environment. I sat on those PCs for about 2years and had virtually no problems. We also had 2 racks of Dell servers, about 16 units, the only problem we ever had was 1 raid drive failed after 3 weeks, but our gold support got us a new drive in less than 24hrs. Their laptops are up for discussion, everybody in IT used a Latitude laptop (it was retired sometime in early 2004) and they were crap, especially mine. But from what I heard, the model line was a lemon and it's why they retired. I have a couple friends that use the newer laptops and don't have any problems. When it comes to business deployment Dell has taken the time not to just build & sell PCs, but actually think over the most efficient way to design the case. You can take dell cases, pop them open, and work on PCs faster than other box designs. Back in the 1990s IBM tried to improve case access but their screw-less models were easy to open but impossible to close. Dell perfected what IBM started, and took the designs inside the case layout too. I haven't touched an IBM desktop made in the past 5yrs so I can't vouch for them.

I only need to do diff comparisons on code I write, and Visual Source Safe has one integrated so I don't use any 3rd party diff tools. But a quick Google search seems to point to "Compare It!" http://www.grigsoft.com/wincmp.htm

I can only give you half the answer... Well you can use a program like HoeKey which allows you to map Winkey combinations to virtually anything in windows. Including performing functions within an application. You can probably map it to take focus on any area you want, but you'll need to find out the message code to do so. There might be applications that let you sniff out app messages, but your smartest bet is to contact the support and ask them what message you need to have the control take focus. It's an awesome app too, appears to be written in Assembly and uses a mere 128k of ram! I use it as an easy way to pause WinAmp quickly, since people often walk up to me at work.

Actually I found out how to remove bloat from Virtual PC images, you can find the tutorial at: http://thespoke.net/blogs/travisowens/arch...hard_disks.aspx ----------------------- While Virtual PC can resize a hard disk image larger as needed, it won't shrink it back down if large files are deleted. Because of this your hard disk image can easily grow out of control. After looking through some Microsoft documentation and web chats I found out how to shrink files in VPC2004 (I use SP1, which might be required). This is NOT an issue with swap files and such, here's the official way to shrink a VPC size... Step 1: flush your temp files, found in: C:\Windows\Temp\ C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp\ C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\ Step 2: Boot up the OS, run defrag on the HD and make sure you enable the setting to "put everything at the beginning of the drive" Step 3: In your VPC session menu choose "CD" > "Capture ISO Image" and choose "Virtual Disk Precompactor.iso" which you can find in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual PC\Virtual Machine Additions\" Step 4: You should have a new drive available, if not, reboot your OS session Step 5: Once you double click the ISO mounted as a drive, it will prompt you to compact your HD image. At this point it will only "prepare" the image for compacting. This can take awhile! Step 6: Shutdown your OS Step 7: In VPC choose "Settings" for your image in question, and go to the "Hard Disk 1" section and on the right side you can use the "Virtual Hard Disk Wizard" button. Step 8: Choose to edit an image and find your target image and choose to "Compact" it. This can take awhile too! Done! If you scroll to the bottom of my first source you can reade of some extra tricks to shrink the drive even further but I found this easy method to be very effective and give back the majority of the wasted space. Sources: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...2Fwct032304.asp http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...b;EN-US;Q833138

I guess I should submit this as a bug to Firefox but just to let you guys know... I got a new HD for xmas, I installed it and duped my old HD, had problems, ultimately I had to re-install XP fresh on the new HD and re-installed every application fresh. So here's the wierd part, I'm having almost the same exact problem, an a freshly formatted drive on the same PC. But instead of getting the same error, FireFox dies silently, and just as often as Firefox would crash before. No other app is unstable on my PC, and I'm an avid Photoshop user, IE, Winamp, Trillian. Obviously is had to be hardware related but considering nothing else in unstable I'm still going to blame Firefox 1.5

Firstly, most virus software will already protect you. This flaw was discovered on Nov 8th and I see that Symantec added this on Nov 11th. Chances are every virus app has this protection by now, it has been like 6 weeks. Second, you should always use %windir% not \Windows\ because not everybody's Windows installation is located there. The proper way to protect yourself is.. regsvr32 -u %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll PLEASE NOTE: doing so will break your Microsoft Picture Viewer, but you can always undo it by typing: regsvr32 %windir%\system32\shimgvw.dll As stated above you should filter these sites, you can do so locally by editing your %windir%\System32\Drivers\Etc\Hosts file and adding this to the end of your list: !! DO NOT VISIT THESE SITES !! 127.0.0.1 toolbarbiz.biz 127.0.0.1 toolbarsite.biz 127.0.0.1 toolbartraff.biz 127.0.0.1 toolbarurl.biz 127.0.0.1 buytoolbar.biz 127.0.0.1 buytraff.biz 127.0.0.1 iframebiz.biz 127.0.0.1 iframecash.biz 127.0.0.1 iframesite.biz 127.0.0.1 iframetraff.biz 127.0.0.1 iframeurl.biz

You'll never have a real answer to "why it's called Vista" because the name was made up by marketing people, not the technical people. Personally I just prefer the normal naming scheme. Microsoft uses an internal name (because at first they don't know how long it will take to finish a product). Then eventually it's named after the year it comes out. As far as I'm concerned I'm not waiting for Longhorn or Vista, I'm waiting for Windows 2006 (or 2007). And for those who hate the whole year thing, here's why it's better. While you may know exactly when WinME, Word 6.0 and WinXP came out, does your mother? I'd rather have a year stuck on a product so that way the average PC user knows their Word 1999 is very out of date. Where as somebody using Word 6.0 won't realize it's very very old (which can be a bad thing, arguably).

I should point out that if you just want to seed torrents, you won't see any difference between this being a 2003 server box vs an XP box.

I'm a .Net developer and all my new stuff is in .Net 2.0 only, so downgrading is not an option, although considering the bloat .Net 2.0 contains, and even beside that, all new stuff written in .Net in general will be 2.0 because it's faster and uses a little bit less ram. Downgrading WMP is definetly an option.

Using the profile manager to delete my profile and create a new one didn't work.

Wow, some of those figures are insane. Who would think a download the size of ~15megs would chew up 100 to 280 megs. Well after using these figures then I have almost 200megs to span across all the updates. PS: Thanks for the help, but it's forum bloat to quote large posts (Sorry, pet peeve of mine)

Quick Answer: absolutely not! Long Answer: Drivers are a very special piece of software that translates the way your OS talks to a modem to a language that your modem can understand. In order to provide a more crash-proof OS, MS had to totally change the way drivers worked starting in Win2000. So Win2000 and newer drivers absolutely DO NOT work in 9x. And when you download a driver pack that supports 95,98,ME,2000,XP etc, they are including multiple drivers and installing a specific driver according to which OS you have.

Get a grib guys, you don't want DX10 on older OSs (even if you could figure out how to force it) because: #1 you can't properly support the games that would require it anyway #2 it's NOT faster than previous DXs. DX10 is being created to pave the way for Vista and to add support for a totally new type of DX. One of the DX developers even said it might run DX9 (and older) games slower, but of course they're try to optimize it as much as they can.

Do you need 2, I'm sure you don't. Which one do you remove? We're not psychic, we can't tell just by looking at a name when they're EXACTLY THE SAME! I wouldn't hold your breathe for an answer on that either My suggestion, normally with a list, newest is lower on the list, so I'm guessing the 2nd one is the dupe, but it's still a pot shot for many reasons I won't go into now.

If you want the dirty truth why WinME exists.... MS had two development groups working on a new OS: a team working on the Win9x kernel and a team working on a brand new from scratch NT kernel. Without a doubt Win2000 is superior in every way to the 9x kernel, but it came down to money, not technology. Business users needed a Network Operating System (NOS), which what NT kernel provides, but 9x does not (it's a hack guys, like it or not). While the right thing to do was to only release Win2000 and let WinME never see the light of day, MS realized that home users aren't going to pay $200-$300 for an OS, but businesses will. So they released WinME for home users, and Win2000 for business users. This way they could cater to both crowd, the $99 people and the $199-$299 people. If MS released a "home" version of 2000, they would have to charge $99-$129 and lose sales because some business would purchase that version because it's all they really needed. But to defend MS, 2000 cost A LOT of money to make, so to keep the books good, they had to do this. I'm just glad that only 2yrs later MS let the 9x kernel pass away. PS: I'm not here to entertain flames, the 9x zealots can hate this post if they want, but it's the truth. Mind you, I do run 98 on some boxes, intentionally.