bizzybody

Is there a way to make an HP PhotoSmart C6200 or other C6200 series printers work in Windows 11?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/nvme-for-windows-2003-server/files/ It includes both x64 and x86 drivers. The x86 driver will install in 32 bit XP but then won't start because it says the driver is corrupt or missing. The x86 driver apparently works in Windows 2000 and Server 2003 but for XP only 64 bit is working. I'd like to be able to plug PCIe x4 NVME drives in adapters into an older (not UEFI) PC running 32 bit XP.

I'm thinking the Asrock X570 Extreme 4 might fit the bill. https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X570 Extreme4/index.asp Take a close look at the PCIe x1 slots. They appear to be open ended. But the specifications don't mention that nor has any review I've seen on the board. The manual has nothing about that. If they are open ended than that would make this a board I'd want to get since it can take x2 or x4 cards in those slots.

The little 14" laptop has one slot, originally with 2 gig. I must have upgraded someone's low power laptop to 8 gig sometime, that's the only reason I'd have a 4 gig DDR3L SODIMM just sitting around. I found KPS Pico to make NTDEV's Tiny10 go ahead and work. Is seems to be decently speedy on the poor little thing. It's going to spend its life running a BINGO display so it doesn't have to be super fast. I did have Chrome OS Flex on it but there's no way to pin a link to an HTML file on its desktop or taskbar (or whatever Google calls it) and the way it does window resizing and scroll bars is flat out hateful. The scroll bars *don't exist until you mouse over the window edge*. They pop inwards with an animation then you click and drag. There's only the "thumb", no arrows to click on so scrolling is only click and drag. To resize you move the cursor to just *outside* the window edge then a bar pops out to click and drag instead of simply having the cursor change to the double headed arrow everyone already knows. While that OS would be very lightweight on power (it claimed it would run that laptop for 9 hours) it wouldn't have been easy to show a guy who doesn't use a computer and shares a cellphone with his wife how to open the HTML file. With Windows 10 I can just put a shortcut on the desktop "Doubleclick this then hit the Fn key and F11." I could change the F keys to default to be F keys and use the Fn key for their media etc functions. Then it would be "Doubleclick this then hit F11." As for a tiny Win10, it's easy to make a multi-oem DVD. I did it for XP and 7, thanks to all the people who figured it out. So why not combine multi-oem with a major debloating?

I'm asking if there's a ready to use tiny Windows 10 x64 Home build *that uses OEM activation*. So yes, you got it wrong.

I have an old Dell laptop with 32 gig EMMC storage. It had the RTM build of Windows 10 x64 Home in S mode and not enough space to update. So I tried Chrome OS Flex, which worked but where this laptop is going won't have WiFi so that's out. I put x64 on it and it's made from Windows 10 Enterprise The laptop had 2 gig RAM and I just happened to have a 4 gig DDR3L that was otherwise useless. So with 4 gig RAM the thing is slightly less useless than when it was new. All it's going to be doing is showing this bingo display on a flatscreen TV. http://wildgoosechase.net/technology/bingo-display

I have an Asrock B450 (not B450M) Pro4 with a Ryzen 5 3600. 32gig DDR4. PCIe slot #1 seems to have conked out on it. A USB 3.0 card in it quit working, stopped the boot process cold as long as the SATA power connector was attached. The USB 3.0 card works in other PCIe x1 slots and in another computer. A 4 port SATA RAID card quit working after I put it into that slot, didn't work in another PC either. So I'm not trying anything else in that slot. The B450 Pro4 has some issues (without one bad slot) where installing a PCIe SSD into M.2 slot one disables the second PCIe x16 slot, which is only connected as x4. All the other slots are just x1 size. Doesn't work for installing x2 or x4 or x8 cards. Another thing is the board has just one USB-C port on the back and no Type-E connectors for front USB-C ports. Currently I have a USB 3.0 card (two external, one header) and a card with one Type-E and a header in x1 slots 3 and 5. I contacted a lot of PCIe card manufacturers, with no luck, asking why nobody makes a PCIe x1 card with Type-E, just x2 or longer, when they all make x1 cards with a USB-C external port. If USB-C works on x1 there's no reason to not make a x1 with Type-E! Could be repeatedly prodding all the bears worked. A couple of months ago someone sent me a link to what was then the one and only source for that sort of USB card, now they're everywhere. It just took someone going first, then the rest would copy. So I'm wanting a better motherboard (but definitely not a mini board for this 7 slot Corsair case) where I can have my WD Black 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD *and* use all the slots, and be able to plug in more than one x16 GPU and a bunch of x1 cards. It also needs at least one Type-E connector. If I need to upgrade the CPU to support more PCIe lanes I can do that, but would like to stick to 65W TDP, absolutely not an APU with built in video. I have a GTX 1050. The only way I'd go with an APU is if it had better hardware HEVC encoding ability than the GTX 1050, which they don't (yet), and AMD's lags behind nVidia's. It does NOT need to have more than one M.2 connector. Every board I've looked up with two of those, even if using the first one disables nothing, the second one always does, usually some of the SATA ports. I have four internal 1TB drives (two soon to get replaced with 2TB) in addition to the 1TB boot SSD. I also have a DVD burner and a BD-RE, so that's at least 6 SATA ports required just for my stuff. I also work on other computers so more SATA ports are useful for doing things like rescuing / backing up files. I'd rather not have support for RGB lights, water pumps, onboard video and other things I don't need. It's too bad there isn't a nice and big board that still has one PCI slot because I have two really nice PCI sound cards.

Thanks. Will try it on my XP system tomorrow. I ran it on my WD Black NVME SSD to see what it'd do. It doesn't switch to gigabytes per second, it just keeps going with megabytes. 30,000 megabytes per second and higher...

I'm looking for an older version of the ATTO drive benchmark that will work in XP. The latest version and some older ones I found on sites claiming XP compatibility - don't actually work in XP. They'll run but after selecting the drive, clicking the button to do the test just makes a beep, it doesn't run the test. ISTR using ATTO with XP years ago but that download is either long gone or somewhere on one of these hard drives or flash drives... somewhere...

I've been trying to get a Fresco Logic FL1100 PCIe x1 USB 3 card working properly with XP. The card is an Inateck KT5001/KTU3FR-5O2I. Five ports on the back plus an internal header for two front ports. The upper two ports on the back and the internal header connect to a Fresco Logic hub chip, which is internally connected to one port of the FL1100 chip. This is the only card I could verify uses a Fresco Logic hub ship with a Fresco Logic controller chip. There are two driver sets available, one release in 2016 (and older releases) for all Windows, and ones released in 2019 for windows 7 and for Windows 8 and up. In XP with the 2016 drivers the card works exactly as wrongly with some USB 3 devices as another card I have with a Renases controller and GLC hub. On the bottom three ports, connected directly to the controller, some 3.0 devices it will only detect as USB 2.0 but they work correctly on the upper two ports and the internal ports. (The Renases+GLC card did that in Windows 10, which is why I replaced it with the Inateck.) With a USB 3.1 Gen 2 flash drive (verified to be *very fast* both read and write on my Win 10 systems) it will only recognize it as USB 2.0 in the bottom three ports and may recognize it as USB 2.0 in the other ports, or sometimes it will just ignore that it's plugged in. I should try the Renesas+GLC card in the XP box but given how it failed to work properly in Windows 10, with the Microsoft drivers or the drivers from the chip manufacturers, I have very low hopes of it working correctly at all with any variety of USB 3.0 device in XP. Does anyone know of a PCIe x1 USB 3.0 card that in XP will recognize all USB 3.0 devices as USB 3.0, and at least run 3.x faster ones as normal 3.0 instead of failing back to 2.0?

Since older versions of WSUS Offline can't download for Windows 8.0 (not that anyone who has 8.0 should do anything but immediately update to 8.1), 7, Vista, XP, or 2000, thanks in part to Microsoft moving or removing many of the files and changes to wsusscn2.cab, is there any way to download complete update packages for each of them? I do still encounter old systems with those old Windows versions, and once in a while I setup a box with XP when there's something I need to do that absolutely will not work with anything newer. Examples, modding a hard drive to work with an Xbox 360 or removing a password off a hard drive. I had to make an XP box just for those last week. As new releases of WSUS Offline dropped older Windows and Office versions, I redid the previous one to only have updates for what was dropped, then had the newest version for the newer Windows and Office. But over time there have been some further updates to older Microsoft Office and Windows, which the old versions of WSUS Offline can't download. Time to resurrect Autopatcher's original form, and have it an all-inclusive Legacy package?

Mostly when I build a new PC or do a major upgrade, or when there's an all new Windows version. I have in the past migrated a Windows install to completely different computers but that pretty much ended with XP. In the 1990's I migrated a Windows 95a install to five completely different PCs. I'd have all the drivers for the new (or new to me) hardware, then in Device Manager I'd uninstall everything it would allow, then shut down. Move the hard drive to the new computer and boot up. Then install the new drivers and it was good to go. It was also far far easier to migrate 9x to a new hard drive. Basically it involved moving the swap file to the root then copying and pasting all the drive contents except for the swap file and a couple of others in the drive root. Swap the new drive in place of the old, boot up and all would work. But that 95a transplant series came to a halt when by crazy coincidence it got one character corrupted in the Registry that caused the weirdest behavior I have ever seen in any version of Windows. In Explorer I could single left click on three folders or files, one after another and it would crash Explorer. This was made especially annoying because the corruption somehow happened the instant I changed the default Critical Stop error sound to a breaking glass effect. No Registry tools I tried could fix the error. Regedit would not allow the corrupted entry to be deleted. Doing the command prompt Registry export and re-import to purge unused information would fail. I even reinstalled Windows over itself, which in 95 would bulldoze over many problems by replacing them with the default files, leaving most installed software working. But not that one, the corrupted entry happened to be one that an install over itself didn't over write. (Doing this with Win98 was mostly futile because it preserved much more than 95 when installing over itself.) So I found a 3rd party file manager that allowed for copying off all the files I didn't want to lose so I could do a clean install.

Windows 10 builds after 1607 no longer support older methods of driver signing, just the latest that was introduced with Windows 8. What happens is that when the driver installer is run, Windows allows it to go through the motions but silently blocks copying the files and making changes to the Registry. If you extract the driver and attempt to install through Device Manager, you'll get an unable to find file "error". So on an old computer, especially a laptop, what you do is do a clean install of 1607 and get all the drivers installed. Then make an image backup. Your next stop is updating to 1903 or 1909. Why? Because 2004 and 20H2 won't update 1803 or earlier. The installer will flat out lie and say all is well, go through the whole setup, then fail with a bogus "error" about PC Settings or something, then roll back. A bit of searching online revealed the issue was requiring 1903 or later, which the 2004 and newer setups should have been programmed to detect and tell the user at the beginning. After you get 1903 or 1909 (I recommend 1909) installed, make another image backup. Now try installing 20H2, with internet access so it can download needed updates during install. If by now it's still not working on some computers it probably will never work on them. If 20H2 doesn't work, try 2004, then 20H2 again. I had to wait quite a while before it would update 2004 on my Dell laptop. Got 20H2 on it? Make another image backup. These image backups will save you hours the next time you need to do a clean install. Keep the 1607 image in case you need to install some more hardware that newer builds won't allow the drivers to install. The main issue seems to be with older video drivers, especially for discreet GPUs in laptops.

What do I need to do to make a live bootable Windows 7 Pro x64 USB stick so I can run gatherosstate.exe ? Why? To save all the time installing Windows 7 Pro x64 just to run that executable once, copy the generated file off the computer then wipe it and install Win 10.

Oh but you can have FAT32 on drives smaller than 512 meg, if you know the secret switch commands. I was working at a computer shop when Windows 95 OSR2 was released. When we'd get enough parts leftover from upgrades I'd put together the best box I could, using whatever was handy for a hard drive large enough to hold a Windows install. I'd use the trick to force FDISK to set it up for FAT32 then do the install. FDISK /FPRMT Then when someone came in looking for a decent yet cheap computer, I could show them one ready to go, at X price. Would just have to order a bigger hard drive to get it ready. When the bigger drive would come in I just had to copy Windows over. Made it easier to move a lot of older but still useful hardware. With any version of Windows 95 it was super simple to hook up another drive and copy everything without needing any 3rd party drive copying software. I remember the main thing was changing the swap file location to the root of C: so everything except that could be selected. Format and Sys the new drive. Copy everything in the root director over first, except the swap file and command.com. Then select everything else and copy it over. Pretty sure that's how it went. I used to have a step by step guide I'd send to people asking what the best drive copying sofware was. Answer: Windows Explorer!

Years ago, back in the ancient days of Windows 95a, I had an install I'd moved through at least four completely different PCs, with numerous incremental hardware upgrades in between. Never a problem. I'd delete everything it would allow to be deleted from Device Manager, then shut down and move the drive to the new system. (I'd also figured out how easy it is to move Windows 95 and all installed programs to a different drive without any fancy 3rd party programs.) After getting Windows settled in its new home with all the device drivers installed, I'd do a Registry export and re-import to ensure all the cruft was gone. (If only that could be done with XP and later!) I had a PC with an AMD 5x86, wire modded to run at 4x 40Mhz. Solid as a rock, and running perfectly fine on 5 volts after replacing a 33Mhz 486SX. It also had a 1x Mitsumi CD-ROM, the type where the whole mechanism slid out and had a lift up clamshell lid. (Surprisingly it could read CD-R despite being made years before CD-R existed.) It had been quite a while on that box without any problems. I decided I wanted to change the Critical Stop sound to a breaking glass effect. Right after I changed that is when the crashing started. I could not do *anything* in Explorer. After clicking three things in a row in Explorer *CRASH*. Click to open a folder, click a subfolder, click a file *CRASH*. Click on three drives in a row *CRASH*. It was like a Waltz "One, Two, Three *CRASH* One, Two, Three *CRASH*". It only affected using Explorer when attempting to do anything to manage files. I could surf the web, do e-mail, everything else was fine, except for changing Windows Sounds, since that also involved accessing Explorer to find a different sound file, thus that would make it crash too. I became immensely annoyed with that sound effect after hearing it a large number of times. I forget what all I tried to fix it. I do remember trying to export the valid data from the Registry but that failed. That helped me track down the problem. One corrupted character in one key in the Registry. Why it manifested in that perfectly repeatable, totally not random way to make it crash, I've no idea. It wouldn't allow me to delete that Registry key because it was corrupted and unreadable. I dug around the web to find some way of saving things and found the final version of Norton Commander for Windows. Apparently it was abandoned, unreleased, and not quite finished. But I was able to use it to copy everything I wanted to save to another partition so I could "Nuke and Pave" C: and do a fresh install of Windows. That's long been a problem with Windows and corrupted files, folders etc. It fiercely protects them like a mother bear protects her cubs - when what it should do is delete the bad things, or at least allow the user to delete them. Scandisk should terminate corrupted data with extreme prejudice. Before Unlocker (which hasn't been updated in ages yet still works in Win 10 1809) the only recourse I could find for a corrupted file or folder that would make Windows insist on doing a full scandisk *every boot* then complaining about the corruption (and failing to fix it) was to copy important files, then reformat the drive and do a clean install. Even with Unlocker, if that couldn't forcibly delete the bad file or folder, Nuke and Pave.

I just tried installing FreeDOS 1.2 Lite from a 512 meg USB drive onto a WYSE S30. Result? Failure. It boots and launches the setup. First is says there's no fixed disk, then is says drive D: is not partitioned. So I have it partition and reboot. Repeats this exactly the same. The BIOS *does* prevent some critical access to the IDE when booted from USB or when attempting to boot an OS from the IDE, except when using an OS and BIOS updater from USB or an OS from the IDE that came from WYSE. The workaround at the bottom of this page will have to be implemented in FreeDOS in order to install it from USB. http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/s10/Linux.shtml Edit: I found an "MS-DOS 7.1" boot floppy image and *this one* had no problems booting the S30 with a USB floppy drive, wiping the DOM and creating a fresh partition with FDISK, then rebooting and using format c: /s NOW it's booted to a DOS prompt from the DOM. So I'll try FreeDOS again...... Nope. Same as before. Screen full of No Fixed disks present, followed by a prompt to repartition D:, but it cannot touch it.

And it doesn't work. It blocks MS-DOS from booting from IDE. I have an old FreeDOS image someone made for these thin clients, it boots, but everything is in French.

Clonedisk x64's RAW image worked. Since there doesn't appear to be any up to date QEMU front ends for Windows, I used the old QEMU Manager 7.0 that comes with an older version of QEMU. I was able to install DOS to the RAW image then use Clonedisk to write it back to the Apacer DOM. Now I just need to configure the autoexect.bat and config.sys files, plug it into the S30 and see if it'll work.

OK, used Clonedisk to make an image. Glory be, a Windows utility that actually uses a GUI. Point, click, done. The way Xerox intended... Got QEMU for Windows x64 downloaded and installed. Will work on this some more tomorrow. Two reasons for fiddling with DOS on these old WYSE Sx0 thin clients. Main one is to have a tiny box for running the old DOS control software for a PLM2000 benchtop CNC milling machine. That will need the USB to work, I have the Panasonic universal USB drivers for DOS. All it needs to run the mill is one RS232C port, which the WYSE Sx0 series has. USB will only be for loading G-Code files. USB keyboard support is in BIOS, other than the serial port these are Legacy Free. Secondary is setting one up as a tiny retrogame machine. The ethernet should work since it's a common Realtek chip for which there are DOS drivers. The sound is the iffy bit. Only VIA released AC97 DOS drivers. If their drivers and the chip WYSE used both were made strictly to the AC97 standard, the drivers may work with it. If that works, hello wee little DOOM machine. With up to 512meg DDR1 RAM and DOM's available from 64 meg to 8 gig, and the System On Chip faster than most 90's PCs, it should do well - if the sound will work. I don't think the SOC does MMX but what DOS software uses that? They're powerful enough to run normal Win 9x through XP but the swap file would soon destroy the DOM's chips. Would have to fit in some more durable type of storage. Going to be some fun digging 25~30+ years ago DOS knowledge out of my head to setup the startup stuff. I used to have the perfect setup memorized. I hope after all this the thin client has a sane memory map that will allow room for loading as much as possible high, and for XMS or EMS emulation to provide space for large G-Code files. I tried an old laptop but laptop memory maps post 1994 are a fragmented mess with nowhere large enough for an EMS window. Simply cannot setup any DOS on them for doing stuff like running games that use a DOS extender.

I need to make a full image of a 64 megabyte IDE Disk On Module and have it work with DOSbox or some other DOS or PC emulator that can run DOS. I also need to be able to write the image back to the DOM so it can boot the thin client it's normally installed in. All I need to do to the DOM or an image of it is run FORMAT /S with the DOS that will be run from it. Then I can copy everything else to the DOM from within Windows, plug it back into the thin client and finish setting up everything from there. I tried an uncompressed, full sector image with Macrium Reflect. DOSbox won't use that, can't get CHS info from the image. If WYSE hadn't been so 'clever' with their BIOS I could simply make a bootable USB from Windows and boot the thin client from it and install DOS. But noooo, they had to put in a roadblock. It can be worked around, this guy did it with a linux kernel patch. Should be possible to write a little DOS program to do the same hack, but I'm not a programmer. http://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/s10/Linux.shtml

I've made sure there's nothing on it I need to save and have used EaseUS to delete the partition and create a new, supposedly optimized for SSD, NTFS partition with no unallocated space before or after. Write performance is absolutely horrible, was before. It gets a short initial burst of 13 MB/sec then drops to ZERO for a while, then jumps up and down between zero to 3~4 MB/sec. I've also tried using AOMEI, no difference. Using EaseUS on an 8gig Lexar (the model with the e-paper bargraph) I was able to get 10+ MB/sec write speeds. Using Windows own formatting it cut the write speeds to 6 MB/sec or less. With the 64gig it doesn't seem to make any difference in write speed. Could be that Lexar just makes some real crap USB drives.

The people in charge of the Web Archive made the (IMHO rather stupid) decision that the mere presence of a robots.txt file should prevent their archiving spider from downloading anything else in the directory containing the robots.txt file, or anything in all paths below it. Nevermind that in many cases a robots.txt contains explicit permission for archiving - which many of the archived robots.txt files in the Web Archive do. What they should have done was code their spider to *read* the robots.txt files to see if they contained permission for archiving.

I can copy everything off that I don't have elsewhere (if there's anything like that) and reformat it or whatever is needed to have it as NTFS and working with XP and later. Has to be NTFS so I can put big files on it like videos and large disk images.

Now with more data on it, my XP laptop is corrupting whatever its getting corrupted. I took it to my friend's computer to get it hit again. Brought it home, plugged it into my Win 7 laptop, needs scanned (I didn't) but it can still read it. So can 10. Plugged it into my XP, used dsfo. Plugged it into 10, scan and fix. Plug back into my XP then back into 10. Corrupted. Good, for certain values of good. Scanned and fixed again. (If there's 'no errors' then why should it need scanned and repaired?) Then used an elevated command prompt to pull the good file with dsfo. Hopefully these will tell you something, and what needs done to make the stick work again with XP. dsfok.zip