atomizer

you mean like a WAP gateway? there are several. i'll link to a few if this is what you're after.

MHz, don't mean to be a pest, but i'm sure you realize that the source for CMenuExtender is available. is there something in the license that would prevent you from modifying and redistributing it perhaps?

OC'ing can be perfectly safe >IF< you don't go too far and know what you're doing. obviously, the further you go, the greater the risk. as far as components wearing out sooner, that's not an issue as long as you're careful. do you care if your system lasts 14.5 years verses 15 years when you're going to be replacing components anyway in 5 years? why it can be perfectly safe: your favorite CPU company tests their chips to see if they'll run at the advertised speed. if it doesn't, what do they do? trash them? no -- let's say a P4 2 GHz chip only clocks at 1.98 GHz. the solution is to sell it as a 1.8 GHz (or whatever) chip. so now you have a chip that is perfectly capable of running at 1.95 GHz. why not use it? the margin of safty is no less than a chip that clocks at 2.01 GHz and is sold as a 2 GHz chip. however, i can't even pretend to know the in's and out's of OC'ing. there's an awful lot more to it and a lot of studying to do if you want to be safe and not fry stuff. i'm not at all sure just how knowledgable some of well known "experts" are in OC'ing. for instance, there's a ton of guides out for OC'ing my chip, an AMD 64 3200+. i read several of them from well known authors, and then i found an articly by some off-the-street dude with a personal home page who proclaimed that they didn't know what they were doing. he went into great detail explaining exactly why the time and tested methods employed by the experts was wrong. he also pointed out that many of the experts shared similar results, all of which provided a minimal increase in horse power. then he explained his method and published the results. he out did them all by a very significant margin while maintaining a very stable machine.

or... turn your monitor upside down sorry, couldn't resist

dunno where, but somewhere in this forum there's a bunch of reg tweaks and other "enhancements" for WMP. try searching for: registry WMP 10 tweaks

MHz - ah, i see. so where does the shell ext. come from (so i can go and nag them)

i posted in this thread before, but i have more to add... "which is the most user friendly OS" almost seems like a loaded question. the blatantly obvious answer seems like it should be "windows", but... if you install a vanilla copy of windows without knowing a good deal about security, JS, activeX, registry editing, configuration file editing, networking, services, etc., etc., you're NOT going to have a secure system at all. without a secure system you invite spyware, adware, viruses, trojans, etc.. so, how long will it remain "user friendly"? out-of-the-box windows is, IMO, a joke. *nix (like mandrake, suse, ubuntu, etc.), on the other hand, is far more secure than windows. although i've not spent very much time with linux, i found it to be fairly user friendly without having to dig into its core and since, to me, "user friendly" means that i shouldn't have to tweak it to death to get it to work well, my vote goes to linux. that having being said, i like windows BUT, although i'm not even remotely close to "expert" status, i do know my way around windows fairly well; well enough that i know i don't need to be using IE, OE, activeX, windows update, messenger, error reporting, yada yada yada. as a result of my limited experience i run a heavily tweaked, heavily nLite'd version of XP Pro that meets 95% of my needs and is very stable doing so, and will continue to do so for several years without reinstalling! then again, since i bumped into nLite, i'm lucky if i can resist the urge to reinstall -- it's just so much **** fun!

As mentioned a couple of posts back. Just file and folder handling. That is the limitation of it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> is that a limitation by choice, or another reason? i ask because i've inserted a few frequently used apps into the menu and it would be great to launch them anywhere, at anytime

good thread. i'm also sick of the adobe reader bLOAt. i stopped using it a while back and, instead, switched to the Foxit PDF reader. very small. very fast. free. this is one of the... correction: this is the ONLY "nagware" piece of software in my arsenal (it displays a small, unobtrusive button linking to a Foxit version that allows editing of PDF's.

don't blame ya. you'll keep a lot of other functionality that isn't internet related by keeping the core. plus, you could still use a 3rd party IE shell, like maxathon, if you wanted to.

i think the FF/Opera debate comes down to only a few key points. they are both good browsers. they are both FAR more secure than IE could ever dream of being. they are both highly configurable. if it's speed, quality and out-of-the-box ease of use you desire, then i would have to lean towards Opera. the very short time i've spent with it left me impressed. if you are of a "minimalist" type and want to add only the components you want, and you desire configurability out the ying-yang and don't mind getting your hands dirty doing it, then i'd lean toward FF. personally, i love getting my hands dirty. not every one does however.

matt - what were you using?

i have cable. and yeah, my post above refers to rendering times. Opera loads faster - no doubt. with some tweaking i could probably get it to pop up about instantly. as far as rendering time, i haven't seen a noticible difference yet.

free? MP3Tag off topic - check out MP3Gain as well

for those wanting to test how fast "this" browser renders a page verses "that" browser, i found this site. in order to get relevant results, i'd recommend doing at least 5+ runs with each browser (clearing cache each time), using the same site and average the results. should probably use a test site that is close to you (fewer hops) and if you get radically different results with the same browser, using the same site, then try a different site.

rip - oh, you had IE selected in the compatibility options - hehe. i don't have nLite installed right now, but you'll find the IE options in the "components" section i think. with IE selected (and NOT the core) it removes a few files and access to IE (no shortcuts, can't run "iexplore.exe", etc.), but IE is still there and functioning -- you can open an explorer window and key in an internet address and it will display the page. also, you still have access to "internet options" in the control panel. then, to UNhide the "local" computer zone in internet options, i use this script (something tells me you can use gpedit.msc to do the same thing though). just stick it in notepad and save it with a VBS extension. this way i can configure security for stuff running locally... Dim sReg, SH, Ret, iVal, sType, s s = "Click YES to make IE Local Zone settings visible" s = s & " in IE. Click NO to hide them." Ret = MsgBox(s, 36) Set SH = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") If (Ret = 6) Then iVal = 1 Else iVal = 33 End If sReg = "Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\" sReg = sReg & "Internet Settings\Zones\0\Flags" SH.RegWrite "HKLM\" & sReg, iVal, "REG_DWORD" SH.RegWrite "HKCU\" & sReg, iVal, "REG_DWORD" Set SH = Nothing If (Ret = 6) Then s = "The Local Zone should now be visible in IE" s = s & " security window as My Computer." MsgBox s, 64 Else s = "Local Zone settings have been hidden." MsgBox s, 64 End if

Zxian - can you combine all the toolbars with Opera like screen 1? i don't have the Google Lite toolbar combined, though i could, but i just tried moving buttons in Opera to the top toolbar where "file/edit/etc" is and couldn't do it. anyone know of an AdBlock equilivant for Opera?

Zxian - ah, now i see. sometimes i'm a little retarded. no, i don't know of a way to relocate the tab bar higher up among the toolbars. lower, yes (at the bottom of the window). not higher though. wouldn't doubt if it can easily be done though. oh, and i'm loading FF withOUT prefetching (disabled with nLite) -- about 2 seconds cold, 1.3 warm. i UPX compressed all its exe's and dll's even without doing that, loading was at about 3 sec cold and 1.5-2 warm. and yeah, Tab Mix Plus rocks! i got rid of 2 other extensions because of it (FLST and Disable Targets for Download - or whatever it's called). down to 14, of which all the essential ones are in my sig.

rip - you have 2 choices; 1) get rid of some IE files, but keep the core, or 2) get rid of all of it... sort of. if you remove IE and the core (both individually selectable within the nLite UI), it's still not completely gone. it takes some reg and dll hacking to finish the job. i just did an nLite build with the IE core removed and it went pretty well.

i wouldn't say they don't care. it's simply a financially motivated decision as to whether or not their game should be built with support for an old OS. i would guess that decision is affected by things like: 1) how much extra work would it take to support 98? 2) if we get it to run well on 98, how does the NT user suffer? 3) how many people still use 98? quite simply, they care about making money, like any business. if they determine that support for 98 doesn't make good financial sense, then they have little motivation to implement it. although i can see your point, it's not at all fair to blame "them" because they don't cater to "your" OS. look at the *nix community, which is growing day by day. few game companies choose to support that platform probably because it's just not profitable... yet. even the developer of the most popular online FPS in history, Valve (Half-Life/HL2/CS/CS:S), doesn't do a Linux client.

i use nLite to get rid of IE before the install. have you tried it? if so, i'd like to hear your opnion on both nLite and XPLite. thanks

yeah, i mean rendering as in how long it takes FF/Opera to load a page. by loading, i mean how long it takes the application to load, in which case Opera is a bit faster (less than 1 sec -vs- about 1.2 seconds for FF). i don't get the timeout errors though and it takes about 1-2 seconds to render the page in FF. if it takes longer it's almost always due to peoples avatars (off-site content) that FF has to retrieve from a 3rd party server. still, the contents of the page are always loaded in a second or two. BTW, someone else linked to the "Tab Mix Plus" extension for FF and i just installed and configured it a little while ago. WOW! LOVE IT!

rip - i didn't really word my last post right; i meant to refer to the machine your dad/sis are using. all of those problems may have been due to IE, but i don't know. maybe some of them were due to AIM, which you yourself suspected. maybe try loading another multi-protocol IM (like miranda or whatever) on that box and see if that helps.

rip, you mean faster loading, or rendering... or both?