Camarade_Tux

Vista (forced to), XP, Slackware Linux, slamd64, freebsd and several in virtual machines or less often : Plan9 (yes !), Haiku (though not lately), ReactOS to check the progress.

Get a build of mplayer from there : http://esby.free.fr/CelticDruid/mirror/mplayer/ Drag-and-drop your video on mplayer.exe. How does it perform ? (don't be surprised if vista goes back to non-Aero)

Actually avi is just a container. It's not a video compression format. You can certainly find which compression format is used in the file properties (properties inside your media player, not properties as in "windows explorer" !).

Well, try nlite. http://nliteos.com (it may be an "advanced" removal)

You should have seen all the endless fights we had on long blocked or trashed threads here. On only on this forum but anywhere you went tere was always someone telling us "upgrade to XP and get a life." I was maybe not there when XP was released but I've since seen several similar threads. I simply did not take part in the trashing. I guess that people who where simply not pro XP and against 9x did not take part in the trolling. You don't usually see the point of take the time to write a balanced post in such situations. Well, Vista is not only much heavier than XP (especially since there's been so much time between XP and Vista that XP resource usage became hard to notice on curent computers) but it also cost much much more (and is more annoying [not hard] to pirate) so I guess tons of people who were following microsoft like slaves now have to think again. I'm under the impression we are having a problem that last surfaced with 9x : very bad drivers and oem software or in fact software in general. XP has been saved because it inherited the NT5.0 drivers but vista forced a rewrite. I'll give my mother laptop as an example. It is an acer which is about 8 months old. She didn't want me to modify anything, she didn't want to get away from the default configuration. However I've been forced to use it so I had to do something. First, the battery-life was baaad. Basically I thought that the new laptops with all their new power-saving technologies (anyone followed the recent linux kernel developpment ?) should get a much better autonomy. This simply wasn't the case. Battery lasted between 90 and 120 minutes. I changed two or three settings and autonomy increased by at least 30 minutes. However some of my changes were constantly overwritten by an oem software. I finally removed that from startup (5 .exes, 3 or 4 services) and made my changes. The battery now lasts at least 150 minutes with //improved// (!) performance, a 25% to 30% improvement. It took me about 3 minutes. To sum up, we had a *big* manufacturer unable to deliver proper applications and apparently knowing nothing about laptops. Then, nod32. Everybody knows nod32. It is a simple, inexpensive, efficient, lightweight antivirus scanner. At least, it used to. Version 3 which seems to be designed for vista suddenly got much slower and started to show a quite surprising behaviour. For instance, yesterday I downloaded burrrn under k-meleon and vista. It is about 1.5MB, packaged with nsis, probably old bzip2 compression. You would imagine that scanning it would be no problem and that this step would be hardly noticeable. However it took more than 20 secondes to complete (which is in fact the time it took me to disable the live scanning), frozing both kmeleon and explorer (the file was being downloaded to the desktop). bzip2 may be slow to expand but it does not take 20 secondes to extract 1.5MB ! Of course, I wouldn't state this if it were an isolated case. As for the surprising behavior, it is memory use. Not how much is being used but how it is. I'm often running process explorer in order to discover why is the hard disk so active (because it basically reduces battery life, make the laptop hotter, noisier and less responsive). Last week I saw a strange graph : it seemed that except a spike, there were no I/O accesses (procexp monitors I/O in general, not only disk I/O). The reason was in fact that the graph had been scaled and that the spike was a 400GB/s I/O, making all other accesses meaningless ! Gadgets are written as javascripts I think. Maybe with VB but still script. I never understood why, this is probably the language you don't want a program running for hours to be written in as it's inefficient, unsafe and unreliable ! Note that osx does the same. And linux too, though it uses python which is a little less bad (not better ;p). With regards to reading divx, hum, let me think. Maybe because of the 10-15% load under idle ? You needed to only have 75MHz under XP to get the same results ( http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm ) and Pentium Pro at 200Mhz when 95 OSR2 was released (I have one). I don't fully agree. When XP was released, some people (including me) complained about Luna. I still have some magazines discussing how you loved it or hated it. However I could stand the Luna theme. I preferred the Olive version to the Blue one and preferred other styles (thanks DA !). In Vista's case, I just can't stand it and I'm far from being the only one thinking this (basically all of my friends who tried vista) (and don't think I can't get used to it ; I run win/nix shells, xp's explorer, litestep, windowmaker, kde, gnome, xfce, plan9's...). And nobody can tell there are interface improvements in Vista. So I have more to reproach to Vista that I had to XP in fact.

Not all XP users called you idiots. I guess most (at least here) were rather wondering how you could stay on such an unstable OS but now that you don't have to install crap on windows (remember when we _had_ to install quicktime and realplayer [G2] ?), it is clear the OS was not unstable only a bit less tolerant to problems but that's it. In fact, most people prefering xp over 9x could as well use 2000. For example, I need an NT-based system to run some software which has existed for years but never ran correctly under 9x (ocaml). And I don't think the kernel patches here would suffice as this software could take advantage of features that are not even yet in vista. ;p By the way, Vista has a bigger problem than its speed or requirements. It's sometimes hard to find things (not simply speaking of the search function that does not find any file with 'a' in its name when you know there are but rather that depending on whether you're using Aero or not, some settings as the font smoothing one do not appear in the same place !) and some eye-candy are ridiculous (I'm not the only one stating that).

no it doesn't, 7zip is far better, and it's faster at extracting why the hell was this thread brought back up again, it's from 2003 for god's sake It's because of the thing giving "related" topics at the end of the page : it doesn't take the date into account.

You can do the translation. No. french.zip Thanks for the translation. OK, I'll check it. EDIT: There is no problem with program. I merged some lines. L67 and L68 and now only L67 and L86 and L87 are now L86. I done this change recently and I forgot to update English file. I'll just adapt your translation. Nice. Thanks. That would be great. Maybe you could PM me, to give me details about hosting. Thanks. Of course but I first needed you to decide of a subdomain name (<whatyouwant>.yaxm.org).

You can do the translation. No. french.zip There's a problem though. Multi-lines texts are not displayed correctly. It happens with several languages and at two different places. I think you should try increasing by one or two pixels the height of the corresponding lines of text. Use second mirror. Cheers I can also give you some hosting space with a subdomain. (and rapidshare guys must have been high when they decided to put kittens in their captchas...)

No french translation. What a shame.

Don't begin with C++. There are a lot of better full-fledged programming languages to start with. C is not that bad for a beginner as it's quite close to the machine and therefore teaches how programming works quite well. In this respect, asm is nice too. It's a matter of personnal preference but you should avoid Python, Perl and such dynamically typed languages until you have a real sense of the different data structures (floats, ints, chars, strings, arrays, lists, hashtables, everything). And if you have a mathematical background you should definitely take a look at the functionnal programmin languages : ocaml, f#, haskell (and lisp but bahh, I hate lisp !). You don't need to have studied mathematics to use them but when you have, you already know these languages in fact.

Which programming language depends on what you intend to do with it. Web, general-purpose, interaction with windows (not Windows), scripting. As a general introduction, AutoHotKey/AutoIt are nice. They're quite simple but forget about them for number crunching.

Yes but it seems to be in fashion to revive old threads on msfn recently so let's be fashon-victims. B)

You must be mad to compress using PAQ and others.

7zip's LZMA compression is better than WinRAR's RAR compression. However WinRAR can achieve better compression on multimedia files because it has some "filters". Some filters are developped for 7-zip too but not yet included in the official 7-zip.