hougtimo

I have just purchased a second hand "ASUS A8V DELUXE WIRELESS MOTHERBOARD" for £42. It seems like ti is a pretty high end mobo, and looks to have a lot of features, including wireless LAN. Does anybody else here have experience with the's mobos? Are they good? Does it have drivers for XP64? Also, I am still looking at a CPU for it, I will probably go for something like a 939sempron @2.2GHz. Is it worth spending the extra money on an athlon 64? is there much of a difference between the sempron and athlon? Thanks HougTimo

Hi, I have just bought a 939 socket motherboard (still have CPU to get) and I am wandering whether to put XP or XP64 on it. What are the advantages / disadvantages of the 64-bit OS? and what is driver support like? Do all the features work properly in it? Thanks HougTimo

For my benchmark tests, i used Passmark's Performance Test 6. Wh ile the XP Pro tests came out at just above average for my hardware, the MCE tests showed a marked increase in numerous tests. The most impressive was hard disk access speed which went up by almost a 10th! I will run some more perfmon benchmark tests and give you the result soon. p.s about boot up time ... XP Pro did seem slightly quicker than MCE, but I have no hard evidence either way HougTimo

Right for those of you who can't / don't understand. I made two unattended disks, both with all current hotfixes installed. The configuration of these two installs are exactly the same. The services I had enabled were: DHCP Client Event Log Plug and Play Remote Procedure Call Task Scheduler Themes Windows Audio WZC Workstation Everything was configured exactly the same. Same hard disk, same steps taken in the install procedure. Now it is a FACT that MCE does out perform PRO on my setup. I did not come here to deliberately post bul***** around the place. This is the result of extensive tests and benchmark tests run on my system. I cane to find out why this is this way and all you seem to do is tell me i am bulls***ting because it is not an experience you have encountered. So, please accept what I'm saying, ask me to do things, if you can prove that MCE does not perform as well as Pro, tell me how I can find out! Don't just accuse me of lying before you have looked deeper into my system, and how I was running it. HougTimo

No, I'm sorry but there is a HUGE difference between the two. I made two identical installs, same hard disk, same amount of services, same page file, same stuff enabled. Pro runs well, but MCE is so much better and stabler too.

Well it seems that the drivers were being copied, even though it said they couldnt be. So I just had to generate a boot.ini file myself by booting to my other windows installation halfway through the installation, making the boot.ini then rebooting to my mce setup. All works now! Thanks HougTimo

Hi, Now, from what I have read, I am led to belive that XP MCE is simply XP Pro with an added component. If this is the case, why is it so much better (performance wise) than a standard XP Pro? Don't get me wrong, XP Pro performs fine on my machine, but MCE runs so much better and stabler and also uses a lot less resources. I did read somewhere that MCE uses an updated kernel...could this be it? Thanks HougTimo

Hi, I am trying to install MCE to my computer. Its giving me a very hard time. I am trying to install it to my 300GB Sata hdd. Now I have a floppy disk with the correct drivers on, and also I integrated them into the setup files using nLite. I also took some s*** out of my XP installation with nLite too. Now, when I try to install, i press f6 and specify the drivers for the hard drive etc... it recognises it and formats it and then starts to copy files. It then moans it cant copy the sata driver files across. However, the rest of the files will copy perfectly. Then when it reboots i get the message "NTLDR not found or missing etc..." and proceeds to blue screen. The same thing happens when I try to use the drivers that are integrated with nLite. I can't work out why it's doing this. Anybody here have any ideas? HougTimo

Hmmm... Have your tried a repair installation of IE6? That may work. Or a complete re-install of IE6. If not, you might want to scan for viruses / malware etc... Let us know if these work

Windows generally wont boot on a different chipset / cpu than the one it was installed on.

Sorted it. It appears it was because i have the unattended install set to disable the pagefile. I had then been getting fed up of the error Photoshop throws up about no page file, and been re enabling the page file. I disabled the page file again, and once again, its lightning

Yes mine is still a lot quicker than XP, and it has never ever frozen on me. I can have photoshop, autocad, nlite running, while copying files and extracting from a 22GB RAR file and still have the PC working pretty quick and being able to play music with no interruptions. It just doesnt seem as responsive as it was when i first installed it.

I used to use XP on this machine...but the slow-down was horrifically worse, and it was not quick at all. even after a very extensive tweaking. 2k3 is better, and i'm sticking to what works.

Hi, I have an issue (not really a problem) with Windows 2003. I use it as my main OS on one of my machines. Now when I install it it's lightning, perfect OS. It stays that way for about a month or two, then I notice a gradual slowdown in performance. It is still very quick, but it just doesn't seem as responsive. I defrag regularly, use CCleaner and Tuneup Utilities regularly, and clean the registry myself. Also it is completely virus / malware free. Also, I don't install / uninstall apps all the time. I have a list of the ones I use and stick to them. The installation is also nLited and I only have about 13 processes running using about 54mb RAM after startup. It isn't just one installation that has done this, everytime I have re-installed it, it seems to do this. The Apps I use are: Adobe Photoshop / Imageready AutoCAD 2006 Sketchup (infosoft) nLite Notepad2 Microsoft Office 2003 Openoffice 2.0.2 Audacity WAV to MP3 Free Converter WMP10 The machine specs are: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67Ghz OC'd to 1.97Ghz) 1GB DDR 400 (PC3200) Dual Channel RAM 300GB Maxtor S-ATA HDD (through PCi adapter) 80GB Hitachi IDE HDD ATI Radeon 9550 (128mb DDR) GPU So it is a fairly high-spec machine. Everything is running nice n cool too, CPU peaking at around 34'C. I have checked and double checked everything, but can't find out what it is. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. EDIT :: Just realised, I do have The Sims installed, but I rarely use it and no processes related to it are running, woulod uninstalling that help? EDIT 2 :: All drives are formatted NTFS and the NTFS settings in the registry have all been tweaked according to my needs. EDIT 3 :: The exact OS I'm using is : Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition SP1. Would a different version of 2k3 be better (such as web edition, i hear that is fairly light) and would upgrading to R2 be reccomended? Thanks HougTimo

Hi, I have an unattended windows installation. In this I have a CMD file that runs from winnt.sif (GuiRunOnce). Now it works perfectly, but it shows the user what it is doing. What i want is it still to show the CMD window, but have no text displayed within it. Is this possibke, and if it is, how would I go about doing it? thanks HougTimo

I am a big fan of 2K3. I does indeed run MUCH better than XP (load of turd, is XP). It runs much faster than XP + 2K put together on my Athlon XP machine. I have not noticed it using any more ram than XP (after bootup, it uses around 65mb), but I don't mind how much it uses, because Iam not short on RA (1gb) and it manages it much better than XP. So the memory is always optimised for the applications i am useing. (yes, I know XP and every other OS out there does this too, but 2K3 handles it all perfectly. 100000+ times better than XP.) Sure it comes bundled with all the XP crap + more (server stuff), but thats why nLite was invented!. I have a very usale 2K3 ISO at 65mb, and it runs beautifully. This is an excellent tool, and I intend to give it a go! HougTimo

This is my private site you might want to check out. it has some info about me and stuff. I am mostly interested in feedback on the design / graphics on the site. Thanks HougTimo

Yeah, just checksum and replace the original files in the i386 dir and cabs

You what!? If you want to change the bootscreen it has nothing to do with the filesystem or ntfs.sys.... Its the kernel you want to be looking at O_o

Hi, Had a few minutes spare, so I decided to create something in PS. It was originally for my laptop, but I thought I'd share. It's intended for laptops / notebooks. Bootscreen nJoy HougTimo

You must also edit the kernel files in the 'drivers.cab' archive...or just disableing WFP with nLite should work.

I would choose the person that saved my life. 1) the old lady is about to die anyway, putting her in a car wouldnt help 2)LOYALTY! 3)Can do without her ta.

Or how about ghosting your current setup...that would save all of your programs too. Also, how badly is the CD scratched? Does it still read it ok? If it doesnt have you tried cleaning it with a semi-abrasive compound? Toothpaste normally works quite well.

I think you mean: The answer to your question: Copy all of the files out of the Photosuite directory in Program Files, and any other system files relating to the program. Next extract all of the related registry keys in a reg file, save it in the same directory as the files. Then create a Batch / advanced INF Installer to copy the files back to their original locations and merge the registry keys....then your set to go! HougTimo

Hi, I have a modified logonui, on XP pro, and I would like to have it on my xp home machine too. is it possible to use the same file from pro, or do i have to redo the file with the logonui fro Home? Thanks HougTimo