atomizer

excellent point! i'm an XP user and i'm in here sticking up tor the 9x guys! just look at it as entertainment

well, if prathapml is correct, it isn't a problem. maybe some people are disabling the compressing option - i dunno.

yeah, it still needs work. it is usable in my case however. the only really annoying bug i've found (and reported a number of times) is clicking the little drop-down arrow next to the 'get new messages' button (i have several accounts and sometimes i don't to retrieve mail for all of them). every now and then, she crashes and exits. if i click on any mailbox folder first, then it doesn't happen.

heh. too late. i was wondering why, when i asked RC2 to check for updates, none were found. duh.

you are right. i stand corrected. i thought i read something somewhere that said they were specific to NTFS, but i see that's not the case at all. even *nix and Solaris is affected.

good point. i was kinda wondering about amperage myself.

remember that when you need to have read/write access to an NTFS partition from outside the OS. don't get me wrong, i use NTFS as well, but it can be a big fat PITA at times. also, NTFS is the only filesystem i'm aware of that allows the installation of 'root kits'. and as far as speed, FAT32 and NTFS are supposedly neck and neck.

you may have had a prior problem i suppose. or, like i said, i guess it could be a problem because it's an OEM installation. i dunno. search areound and see what you can see.

@sonic - don't know what you mean by the media type. i started off with a standard VLK version, but now i always use nLite. but yeah, like i said, the BAT returns OEM, the eula returns RTL and the number thingy in computer properties returns VLK. i know the latter is correct. it's not a 'cracked' version or anything - i wouldn't be posting this if it were

thanks lylo. the only thing i don't like is the iron sights - yeah, it's far more realistic, but i don't care for them. still, i'll check it out for sure!

if you 9x peoples need PDF support, check out: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php their Foxit Reader is blindingly fast and has worked for every PDF i've thrown at it so far. it's free, but the free version does display a small, unobtrusive button in the toolbar that links to a version that can also edit PDF's. no installation either - just unpack and run.

oh yeah. i agree.

i'm wondering if he didn't install a trojan without knowing it??? this is one instance where a router AND a s/w firewall AND anit-virus can be useless as far as security - a 'good' trojan can tunnel right through all of them. because of his email passwords being changed, i'm guessing that may have been the problem. keep in mind that any other personal data he had stored could've also been compromised - CC #'s, phone #'s, bills, passwords, etc.. as far as the stuff i listed, no, nothing is linked.

HAHAHA!!! yeah, that'd be the ultimate test.

oh jeeze! excuse me while pull my head out of... i edited the post. still, i wanted to make people aware of Clam, so i left that in. i never used NOD, but i know it's been around a LONG time and scores consistently well in the virus bulletin tests. you know, your tutorial along with some more general security stuff would make a good sticky.

i've been using the RC 1.5 releases for a while and i really like the changes! especially the filters on global inbox, spell as you type and the ability to detach attachments.

@m3n70r i think you're spot-on regarding the security of Opera. i believe it's better than FF. like you however, i'm WAY too hooked on FF to change. i even got a free Opera license when they were giving them away a short time ago and i still uninstalled it.

i read in their forum that the calculation figures represent the extreme upper end of what the hardware will use. they say that in the real-world, you'll never actually draw as much juice as the figures say.

good post. i will admit that you can get away with IE if you make changes to the default security options and run blocking/proxy programs along with it. i ran IE for a long time like that and had very few problems. however, to say that firefox is hype as far as security, i don't agree at all. FF is inherently more resistant to problems than IE. it doesn't support ActiveX, is FAR more resistant to malware and has tighter controls on JS. i'm sure there are a numbe of other key benifits as well. another reason i switched was having to run 2 or 3 apps along with IE to keep it under control, and yet another 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 to scan/clean my system and waste my time every few days just to be sure i was clean. also, let's not forget that IE hasn't been updated in forever. it's just patch after patch after patch. don't get me wrong, i'm not about to say "use FF or you're a dummy" because there's several other browsers that are designed with security in mind. what i would suggest, is to use anything other than IE. and if you dump IE to increase security, then it'd be foolish to keep OE since it's prone to many of the same problems IE is. and if you dump those, you may as well dump WMP since it's also vulnerable to problems because of script execution and whatever else. not to mention the privacy issues. now, if you dump all that, then there's far less of a need for windows update, no need to hog resources by running 3rd party apps in the background and far less of a need to scan your system for problems every other day (or whatever). oh, just an FYI for FF users: if you really miss the windows update website, you can go here, install their plugin and have the auto-update functionality again.

hiya bledd good tutorial! edited by atomizer because he had his mouth open before his brain started working... again i used to use AVAST for the longest time, going back to its beta days when it was still fully free. i still think it's a very good AV, but even that has become to bloated for my taste. AVG is **** good from what i hear, though i've never used it much (both have a free version BTW). personally though, i like ClamWin. ClamWin is totally free and open source. it's still in beta, but it's been running absolutely fine on my box. updates are pumped out faster than many of the commercial packages as well (there's an option to check for updates hourly). it's also an on-demand scanner only, which is exactly what i want, but i wouldn't really recommended it for novices, especially if using IE, OE, WMP, etc., as it's not going to auto-scan all the crap that stuff downloads. i nLite all that stuff out, so i don't feel the need for having an AV scanning every file that is downloaded, modified, opened, etc..

@DL WOW! THANKS for that link man!!! i figured there'd be a website like that, just didn't bother looking around yet. very good find! 392 W EDIT DL, you ever buy anything from them? it seems like they may be a good, reputable vendor. i like their ethics on their 'about us' page. i see they even have a forum too.

ello yeah, and nLite is one of 'em /end shameful promotion sequence

well, you're probably going to get an awful lot of widely varying feedback on that one here's my $.02... first, take a good at nLite (free) - you can remove a lot of 'clutter' with that, before you ever install. good for hardening your systems as well. second, get rid of IE, OE, WMP and the lame windows security center and firewall. i replace these with the following... Firefox - it's a hell of a browser and VERY HIGHLY configurable. a good alternative for the not-so-savvy may be Opera. Firefox is small and pretty bare by default and really needs some extensions to enable further functionality. that's one of the reasons i like it so much though - you make it what you want it to be. and there's a ton of super extensions available. Thunderbird - the Mozilla email client. VLC - for multimedia. i can't really give a good opinion of it yet, as i've been using MPC and the k-lite codec package. VLC is regarded very highly by a lot of people here though and, from what i've seen so far, i like it a lot. Kerio Personal Firewall - a **** good firewall. they have a free version that should be fine. in the free version, some options get disabled after a period of time, however i've found that stuff to be annoying anyway, plus, you don't need 'web filtering' with Firefox/Thunderbird anyway. if you use nLite, you'll want to check out Ryan's website as well. he builds a wonderful, all-in-one CAB file that contains almost all of the post SP2 MS hotfixes/patches.

and if you want to see its contents, just add the administrator account to its permissions. i don't know if it can do any harm if you leave the admin account there, i just do it to see what's inside the directory and then i remove it again.

i see where you anti-support for 9x guys are coming from, though i think you're going overboard (kinda like i usually do ). if i spend money to buy the latest & greatest hardware, i sure don't want the software to bottleneck it. having said that, a lot of the hardware manufactures offer downloads for specific platforms, in which case your point is at least partially moot. of course some don't. but another thing to factor in is that even if you do get the very best, latest, platform specific driver, that driver may STILL bottleneck the hardware anyway. for instance, creatives drivers, notorious for bloat and bugs, don't give you full control of the hardware. that's why i use the kxProject drivers. ATI's drivers are not as optimized as well as they could be, which is why i use the omega drivers. my "single layer" DVD burner only required a firmware upgrade from the codeguys website to make it a double layer burner. point is, there's often 3rd party drivers that enable more features and are better optimized for a particular platform. so instead of griping about how people shouldn't be using 98 (which is their choice, regardless of how much you dislike it) and how vendors should stop supporting a particular platform, yada yada yada, look around for what you want because in many/most cases better options exist. the same is true for a lot of software as well. BTW, i use XP, so that kills the "he's a 98 fanboy" arguments.