[vLite v1.2 Final - RapidCatched]

We love you nuhi! <3

[XP Bluetooth Stack]

Edit: found the problem.

It had nothing to do with nLite. The problem was that the radio, when used with the Toshiba drivers, was not being recognized by XP as being a Bluetooth radio for the purposes of the in-built stack. I edited the XP Bluetooth driver INFs to add support for my radio. XP now treats the radio as a Bluetooth radio and the in-built stack works.

[XP Bluetooth Stack]

I have a laptop with an in-built Bluetooth radio. Using nLite, I have never been able to get XP's Bluetooth stack to work. When I install the drivers for the Bluetooth radio, nothing happens - the stack does not start, and there is no Bluetooth icon in Control Panel.

I have tried with various versions of nLite and with both SP2 and SP3, keeping the Bluetooth, Infrared and Ports components. I have tried integrating the Bluetooth drivers (taken from the Toshiba BT stack), but that did not work either. The Bluetooth files are definitely all still on the ISO.

Is there something that I am missing?

Edit: The Bluetooth control panel applet is in /system32/ but won't load. Is there anything (an error log or something) that I can check to see what is going wrong?

[Device drivers and power states]

My notebook has a few devices that I never use, and as such I haven't bothered to install the drivers for any of them. Will this prevent Windows from setting the power state of the devices to D3, that is, is it necessary for a driver to be installed for ACPI to function?

[OS wars....to owners of Vista]

There is something seriously wrong with the development approach of an OS when an installation of the OS itself can take up to 13 GB of hard drive space. That, to me, bespeaks bloat and lazy development on the philosophy that memory and hard drive space is cheap.

Maybe you should tell us what you've done to use 13GB of storage for Vista? Because a brand new 100% default install of Ultimate takes ~4gb. That's with all the media, backgrounds, fonts, language MUI's and other nonsense that it comes with.

Err have you tried that yourself? I find it very hard to believe as my Ultimate install with everything cut out by Vlite takes ~4 GB without the pagefile or hibernation file. A quick Google shows that other people with Ultimate are reporting sizes of 8->12 GB.

[Reduce Vista Footprint]

To be honest, i don't think vista is worth it anymore if people start to rip it up from its bundled services, don't bother to get vista if your computer can't support it.

For me, i went as far as getting an Alienware Area-51 ALX with my copy of Vista Ultimate, at least now i know im set for another 3-5 years.

Not everyone needs 50 services running at once to provide unnecessary functions, or functions that are not going to be used. There is simply no reason to consume resources with unused elements. There are plenty of reasons to get Vista even if new features are disabled: Aero, a re-written TCP/IP stack, WDM and DX10, and so on.

By the way, I don't think anyone will be impressed by your purchase of a riced Dell

[start>run?]

That's one of the wonderful Vista features, a search and run box in one. It's awesome.

Are you sure? Try entering a local or network path; it does not work. It is only a search form.

[OS wars....to owners of Vista]

well i do have a problem with the whole "bloated" arguements against vista

technically everything can be changed in windows

but vista basic is not nearly as bloated, plus you have vlite to remove whatever you wish, then thing is many replace it with 3rd party apps many of which install lots of registry entries, force startup by default, force auto update and who knows what else its sending, i prefer not to use any 3rd party apps if i can help it.

Do you think that we are not capable of discerning the difference between memory used by the OS and memory used by third-party applications? It is absolutely unambiguous: Vista uses a great deal more memory than XP, and a great deal more memory than perhaps it should. It is true that it is possible to reduce the memory requirement somewhat, by disabling unnecessary services and drivers, but to make any significant reduction will require a great deal of dedicated hacking by nuhi, and an OS does not qualify as 'lean' if it requires a third-party developer to spend hundreds or thousands of hours manually discovering what can be ripped out, in order to make it lean.

There is something seriously wrong with the development approach of an OS when an installation of the OS itself can take up to 13 GB of hard drive space. That, to me, bespeaks bloat and lazy development on the philosophy that memory and hard drive space is cheap.

[OS wars....to owners of Vista]

Vista:

-huge memory footprint

-requires great gobs of hard drive space, and everything seems to be an exercise in just how bloated an app can be for a given function

-OS that in many respects is designed to keep the user safe from himself

-annoying ui designed to obfuscate basic system tasks, or require clicking through 5-6 menus to get at what was 1-2 in XP

-counterintuitive re-organisation of things such as the networking centre, which is really only a novelty

-ubiquitous search functions for users who, after having finished downloading a trojan, realise that they forgot that this time they randomly decided to put it in systemroot, and need to quickly get to wherever the hell they put it to infect their computers again(is it so hard to simply organise files, which would render search largely redundant?)

-Layer upon layer of DRM

-offers nothing that is immediate to the (non-retarded) user compared with XP

+aero is ok

+resources/performance app is a useful condensation of what previously required the commandline or a few third-party applications

+rebuilding of the audio subsystem should prove useful once wavert/exclusive mode applications emerge

My general impression is that it is designed to be an OS for idiots and for DRM support. Whatever networking/enterprise improvements have been made are not obvious, and probably have no practical benefit for desktop users.

Linux

My experience is limited to several months with FC3, and I am considering again installing some distro. IMO the benefits of linux tend to flow from the fact that it can be customised to any extent desired. It can be made lean, pretty, secure, fast, whatever. The major downsides, and which will probably mean that I don't bother heading back, is that for the desktop user there isn't often a great need to customise to that degree; i f***ing hate dependencies; and the FOSS experience is invariably a case of how close applications can be to their commercial equivalents - there are always caveats, bugs, problems to be sorted through, and functionality is generally only some per cent of what the commercial equivalent offers. Two examples - GIMP and OOo. Neither is the better of its commercial rival, and both are always spoken of in terms of, to be frank, the partial extent to which the usefulness of photoshop and MS office has been achieved, or how much of the basic functionality has been duplicated.

My desktop/file server is rapidly becoming obsolete in HW terms, so I might get rid of XP on it and use instead some linux distro.

[VLite suggestion ... small BUT critical ...]

Almost certainly not.

[Infrared Problem]

Nevermind - I think the offending component was Ports (COM and LPT). I left it in and now infrared works.

[Infrared Problem]

With nLite 1.2.1 and 1.3 beta, I am having problems getting infrared working properly. I have not removed infrared, but for some reason my infrared port won't work properly, and I get the error message

Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged. (Code 19).

Is there some other component that infrared depends upon that I might have removed?

[Components]

;# Applications #

Accessibility Options

Briefcase

ClipBook Viewer

Defragmenter

Games

Internet Games

NT Backup

Paint

Pinball

Screensavers

Wordpad

;# Drivers #

Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)

Display Adapters

Display Adapters (old)

Ethernet (LAN)

IBM PS/2 TrackPoint

IBM Thinkpad

ISDN

Logitech WingMan

Microsoft SideWinder

Modems

MultiFunctional

Portable Audio

Scanners

Serial Pen Tablet

Sony Jog Dial

Sound Controllers

Tape drives

Toshiba DVD decoder card

Wireless Ethernet (WLAN)

;# Hardware Support #

AGP filters

ALI 1535 SMBus Host Controller

ALI IDE Controller

ATM Support

Brother Devices

CMD PCI IDE Controller

CPU AMD

CPU Transmeta Crusoe

Floppy Support

Gravis Digital GamePort

Intel PCI IDE Controller

Iomega Zip drive

Joystick Support

Multi-port serial adapters

Ports (COM and LPT)

Smart Cards

Sony Memory Stick

Toshiba PCI IDE Controller

USB Audio support

USB Ethernet

USB Video Capture devices

VIA PCI IDE Controller

Windows CE USB Host

;# Multimedia #

Acm Core Codecs

ActiveX for streaming video

AOL ART Image Format Support

DirectX diagnostic tool

Images and Backgrounds

Intel Indeo codecs

Luna desktop theme

Media Center

MIDI audio support

Mouse Cursors

Movie Maker

Music Samples

Old CDPlayer and Sound Recorder

Speech Support

Tablet PC

Windows Media Player

Windows Media Player 6.4

Windows Sounds

;# Network #

Active Directory service

Client for Netware Networks

Communication tools

Comtrol Test Terminal Program

Connection Manager

Dial-up and VPN support

FrontPage Extensions

H323 MSP

Internet Connection Wizard

Internet Information Services (IIS)

IP Conferencing

MAC Bridge

MSMail and MAPI

MSN Explorer

Netmeeting

Network Monitor Driver and Tools

Network Setup Wizard

NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS Protocol

Peer-to-Peer

Synchronization Manager

TAPI Application Support

TCP/IP Version 6

Vector Graphics Rendering (VML)

Web Folders

Windows Messenger

;# Operating System Options #

.NET Framework

16-bit support

Administrator VB scripts

Application compatibility patch

Auditing Resource Dlls

Blaster/Nachi removal tool

Certificate Management

Color Schemes

Desktop Cleanup Wizard

Disk and Profile Quota

Disk Cleanup

Document Templates

DR Watson

Extensible Storage Engine (Esent97)

FAT to NTFS converter

File and Settings Wizard

Help and Support

Logon Notifications

Manual Install and Upgrade

MS Agent

Out of Box Experience (OOBE)

Private Character Editor

Remote Installation Services (RIS)

Save Dump Utility

Search Assistant

Security Center

Service Pack Messages

Shell Media Handler

Tour

User account pictures

Visual Basic Scripting support

Web View

;# Services #

Alerter

Application Layer Gateway

Automatic Updates

Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)

Beep Driver

COM+

DHCP Client

Distributed Link Tracking Client

Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC)

DNS Client

Error Reporting

Fax Service

HTTP SSL

IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service

Indexing Service

Internet Authentication (IAS)

IPSEC Policy Agent

Message Queuing (MSMQ)

Messenger

Network DDE

Network Location Awareness (NLA)

Network Provisioning

Performance Logs and Alerts

Protected Storage

QoS RSVP

Quality of Service (QoS)

Remote Registry

Removable Storage

Secondary Logon

Service Advertising Protocol

SNMP

System Event Notification (SENS)

System Monitor

System Restore Service

Task Scheduler

TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper

Terminal Services

Uninterruptible Power Supply

Universal Plug and Play Device Host

Volume Shadow Copy

WebClient

Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)

;# Directories #

DOCS

SUPPORT

VALUEADD

;# Compatibility #

[nLite 1.3 beta - Santa's confession]

Thank-you!

[Office symbols issue]

The font that the equation editor requires is removed by the 'remove extra fonts' option. From memory, at least one of the necessary fonts is "MT Extra". When I had the same problem, I had a lot of difficulty finding out exactly which fonts were required and then finding somewhere that I could download them from. The easiest solution is probably to reinstall.

[nLite for Vista - Taming the Beast]

we love you nuhi

[is peer to peer legal ?]

You cant be talking about bittorrent I have or not one I know has ever en counted a fake file on bittorrent. It works in a completely different way to kazza etc.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Spoofed files are rampant on the networks Kazaa uses because Kazaa only hashes the first 256kB of files, in order to speed things up. Kazaa is thus vulnerable to spoofing where the first 256kB of any given spoofed MP3 was identical to the proper MP3, and the following data is, at best, scrambled MP3 frames.

BT hashes the full file, and collision attacks on SHA1 require something like 2^69 hash operations. The files can't be spoofed, but they may still be "fake", in the sense that the file is not what the torrent or filename indicates it to be.