UCyborg

Application should follow OS setting for displaying date and time, especially if it doesn't provide the ability to specify custom format.

My computer went to sleep yesterday and then didn't wake up, just fans were spinning, it didn't respond to reset button. Turning it off and on again, no change. I took the card out and then it started working. Guess I'm better of buying a new ethernet card. It isn't as much of an emergency as long as the phone works. There's no cable setup in this house, but sometimes I plugged the PC to my laptop, which has ethernet and wireless adapters bridged so that way I could connect the PC directly to the home network without having a NAT point in the way. The backstory is that I've apparently damaged onboard ethernet card by accidentally plugging in PS/2 keyboard while the computer was on. It's still detected by the OS, but AI NET 2 in BIOS reports funky status for pairs 4-5 (alternates between "Open" and "Failed") and 7-8 (constant "Open"). The normal status is "Normal". I don't suppose it can be fixed and even if it was taken somewhere for the repair, I imagine the cost would go way beyond the price of a new ethernet card. Oh well...

The question in the title. There are some subjects that don't pertain to any specific Windows version. Edit: just found someone made a suggestion over a decade ago. So if one has to choose, I guess Software Hangout is the most generic forum for this sort of thing, huh?

Thanks, I'll give the "backup the first sector and zero it" approach a spin. I can use dd from Linux for the task, I'm quite familiar with it. And I was going to make it complicated by looking at what bytes to change in the first sector.

When I thought this was solved...over a week ago, I got some vague error on the web page after confirming logon credentials, the push notification didn't arrive on the phone. It arrived on second try, but after confirming it on the phone, I get another vague error on the phone and this error persists. I can still get in with emergency one-time password, but it's only meant as a means to reset a forgotten password. If some action will have to be confirmed on the phone, it's going to be a problem. Absolutely nothing has changed on my device, I even restored backup of data partition from the time it worked, but all that did is that now even the push notification doesn't arrive anymore when trying to get in the normal way. Maybe because I reactivated the app some time after the backup because I wanted a different PIN that can't be changed otherwise. It still doesn't arrive when restoring the current state. I think the time has come to go somewhere else. I might have just found a suitable alternative, even better at some other aspects besides online banking.

This is quite easily reproducible. I've known about the existence of this issue on Vista for a while, though never looked into it deeply. Your screenshots make it really hard to see the problem due to whatever customizations you applied. I forgot about that DLL and the fact that even old programs that use older comctl32.dll still have skinned scrollbars and menus, so that's another clue. Bingo! LOAD_WITH_ALTERED_SEARCH_PATH flag may only be used with absolute path to the DLL, otherwise the behavior is undefined.

You're right, I didn't have the list opened so was going from my memory... It was definitely mounted in the past. I forgot to mention, if I have already booted Windows on partition 1, before I hibernate it to boot OS on partition 2, I have to give that partition a drive letter (let's assign a letter H) then run the following: mountvol H: /P Otherwise the OS on partition 2 will be upset. Has to be done once per clean boot of OS on partition 1. It's like the action done by mountvol doesn't persist across reboots. I'll have to check what mountvol reports for partition without drive letters that I have run the previous command on after reboot, right after the running the command it says: *** NOT MOUNTABLE UNTIL A VOLUME MOUNT POINT IS CREATED *** I figured I can do that to save session in one OS, then I can go try something in another OS and then be back right back where I left. And since this doesn't reset uptime timer and everything else to reload from scratch, it doesn't disrupt seeing how the OS fares with longer periods without rebooting. But when two Win NT 6.x+ OSes are involved, this little problem occurs. So first 512 bytes of partition I want to hide (I've verified that sectors are 512 bytes on my disk)?

Sure, they look a bit different. But @TECHGEEK was referring to the problem that has to do with comctl32.dll library, which happens if you call SetDefaultDllDirectories. I was wrong about the version of comctl32.dll being loaded though. Even unmodified VLC loads the correct version, so the problem is something else. Can't really say if it's the library itself or some other component. I guess the first time I noticed the problem with another program, I didn't actually check with Process Hacker and made assumption since the classic theme looking controls are common with old software that don't have a directive embedded in the manifest to load the version 6 of library (details). Older versions of the library don't support visual styles, version 6 supports both visual styles and classic look.

Besides shutting the other OS down, because if it contains Windows, it can only be unmounted with full shutdown. I looked at the list of known partition IDs provided by fdisk (not the ancient DOS fdisk, but the one you typically get with Linux distros), one of them is 0x3F 0x3C, which is/was supposedly used by PartitionMagic software to prevent Windows from touching the partition while it's being modified. However, Windows 7 and later apparently do something with the other partition, regardless if its ID is 0x3F 0x3C or whatever other unrecognized ID or even the special ID marking it as hidden. So if I hibernate Windows instance on partition 1, change partition 1's ID from Linux, boot the Windows instance on partition 2, that actually has automounting disabled, then reboot to Linux, restore partition 1's original ID and reboot to Windows instance on partition 1, that instance will notice something funny on its NTFS file system and want a reboot to run chkdsk. Windows XP seems to leave the partition alone, if it has either an unrecognized ID or special ID marking it as hidden, but newer Windows versions are menaces in that regard. So maybe I should change something else to make the partition unrecognizable, perhaps changing its magic number "NTFS " to something else. Thoughts?

They didn't do anything, it uses buttons provided by the operating system by default. Because Win7+ doesn't have the bug that Vista has.

Right, 64-bit Windows sucked on that laptop. I'm still of opinion that the whole 64-bit thing is way overrated. Sure, maybe some tasks are faster, but you gotta take into account that 64-bit code takes more space, fills CPU caches faster etc. Edit: though 64-bit OS is probably the cleanest approach to be able address more RAM. I'm just not convinced about every user application being compiled in 64-bit mode.

What the heck are you people doing on the internet that you need such overpowered machines? I can get by with a laptop with dual core 1,35 GHz APU with 2 GB of RAM, where 256 MB is taken by the GPU and another 40 MB disabled because it developed faults.

No idea, that's entirely different subject.

You shouldn't remove any byte as that will make the entire binary file useless. Just put the text cursor in front of "S" of SetDefaultDllDirectories (the hex value of 53 will get highlighted so you'll see what to change), then put the cursor in front of highlighted 53 and make it 00. Before you type it, make sure the program is in Overwrite mode, it's indicated in the status bar and can be changed by pressing Insert key. Overwrite mode is default though and the program warns you when you make any action that changes the size of the file.

I haven't researched regarding whether that API existed before that update, just the documentation says that it does. I described the workaround how to modify the vlc.exe in one of my previous posts. Any hex editor, such as HxD will do.

VLC 3.0.11 without modifications: VLC 3.0.11 with modded vlc.exe that doesn't call SetDefaultDllDirectories(LOAD_LIBRARY_SEARCH_SYSTEM32) - API was added with KB2533623 update

Old bugs inherited from the old Firefox codebase that appear to have been fixed in later official Firefox releases. All NPAPI plugins, the list is on about:plugins and about:addons pages (under Plugins on the latter).

A workaround equivalent to downgrading to older version of VLC as far as control styling and DLL hijacking exploits are concerned would be to to search vlc.exe with a hex editor for "SetDefaultDllDirectories" and replace a single letter in that word with something else, just don't insert or delete anything, only replace. At least that works if program doesn't check itself for integrity, I've yet to try it with VLC specifically, though I guess there are good chances that it works.

Vista has a bug that prevents loading comctl32.dll version 6 visual styles on common controls from being applied if application calls SetDefaultDllDirectories(LOAD_LIBRARY_SEARCH_SYSTEM32) to prevent DLL hijacking exploits, so it falls back to default version 5.82, which only supports retro UI controls without styling.

Doesn't work reliably on Linux. Maybe for 2 minutes, then pinging fails, browsers get stuck...so much for keeping a spare card. Edit: never mind, works now. Not sure what the issue was... Well, that still doesn't solve the problem that it doesn't work on Windows.

I dug out a prehistoric Ethernet card from the basement and installed it in my PC, but suitable Windows drivers don't seem to exist. The closest match is here (Windows XP 32-bit), that won't ever load on 64-bit OS. The link also contains the full device ID minus &REV_11. I also found some newer drivers here, also in 64-bit flavor, (2nd link), if you open the package, INF also references SMC EZ Card 10/100 (SMC 1255TX-1), though the ID doesn't match and it's apparently a bit different. Force installing just greets me with The device cannot start. (Code 10) message. The card is functional on 64-bit Linux Ubuntu 15.10. I haven't tried any later distros, but I suppose there are good chances that it still works. The message from the driver in dmesg referenced the card as AN983B, which lead me to the driver here, this one actually references very similar ID as my actual card, VEN and DEV parts match, but subsystem part differs. Again, the same error as with the previous driver. Also tested and it doesn't work on Windows XP x64 neither. So I suppose the only way to get this card to work on 64-bit Windows would be to study Linux driver and write a new Windows driver. Or is there another way? There's an EOL section on SMC Networks website, there's stuff for SMC1255TX-1 and SMC1255TX-2, but nothing for SMC1255TX. Guess it's really a lost relic.

SSM uses undocumented SetWindowCompositionAttribute API, the same thing Open-Shell uses for the taskbar on Windows 10, which is supposed to be equivalent to calling DwmSetWindowAttribute, but either way, it's used to set undocumented attribute on per-window basis to achieve the desired effect. Maybe it's the same builtin functionality used for Acrylic? I just use Win7 theme alone if I can't run Aero Glass, the native way, so just SecureUxTheme to unlock loading of unsigned themes, 2/3 systems that I use can run AG though, the one that doesn't runs 32-bit Win10 1809, it's been a while since BigMuscle stopped producing 32-bit builds. I don't intend to update my systems also for reasons other than Aero Glass. Either way, other software doesn't really do it like Aero Glass, some even do things that I don't really want/need, so as it is now, I don't have any interest in alternatives.

Indeed. However, that's where you're wrong: https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/K8/AMD-Athlon 64 X2 6000+ - ADV6000IAA5DO (ADV6000DOBOX).html

Back when Skype was a proper desktop application, they also had a Linux client.

The "downloads entire file into RAM" doesn't apply to Chromium and derivatives. You get the funny message if you eg. try to use Firefox to download bigger file and spoof Chrome's user agent, that says something like you can't use Chrome because it doesn't support feature we use, but you can use our app or use Chrome. I guess it does feature detection and only uses user agent to put the browser you use in that message.