Andromeda43

In all fairness, would someone please add Vista to that poll? It's not fair, that Windows ME gets all the bad press. Spread it around a little. I built a PC in 2000 for a customer of mine and since ME was the latest and greatest OS at the time, that's what went on that PC. Just a few months ago, 8 years later, I got that PC back, in payment for installing a whole new system for my customer. It was still running just fine on Windows ME. Over the 8 years that PC has been running, I've kept it going with a new CD drive here and a floppy drive there, etc. Nothing serious. Well, after all that time, Windows ME is still running like a champ! My customer never had any problems with it and I haven't either. I've since added some more ram and a much larger wattage PSU and it's a little Screaming Demon! I cleaned and oiled the Thermaltake CPU cooler that was howling and it now runs as good as it did 8 years ago. So I'd like to change my vote, from ME to Vista. Now there's a real hog! Cheers Mates! Andromeda B)

It's an interesting topic. For years, the little mom & pop shops have been putting Copies of OS's on the computers they make. Anyone who thinks this is something new, just hasn't been around much. Heck, in some foreign countries almost NO-One buys any software at all. One of my favorite quotes is from a person in Serbia..."We don't buy Software!" But, before WGA this didn't come to the forefront. But all is not lost for the user of a bogus copy of XP (for instance). All he/she has to do is delete WGA from their computer, turn off Auto-Updates and keep right on using the OS as if nothing ever happened. The more advanced user has downloaded a new license key and replaced the old OS key with the new, active one and keeps right on computing and getting updates. It would cost M$ far more than the amount that they would ever get from the illegal users, to pay their attorneys to go after every illegal user. It's not "Cost Effective". There is a free flow of illegal software coming out of Eastern Europe, available to anyone who wants it. (every software title you could imagine) I'd guess that there's over a $M worth of illegal software downloaded every day. Gates is still a Billionaire! So what's all the fuss? B)

I'm surprised! I thought everyone working these forums would know about www.crucial.com as being the last word in RAM compatibility and availability. Many RAM retailers use that site as a Reference tool. Looking at that site and putting in your Make and model, the site says that you can install 2x1 gig sticks of DDR2, PC2-5300 ram. for a total of 2 gigs. Their price is $53.99 for the two-stick kit. That's a very reasonable price and their ram is guaranteed for life. Check it out. Good Luck, Andromeda B)

As a part of tweaking and tuning XP for top performance, I always eliminate all the fancy screen stuff. From my XPTweaks list on my website: Increasing Graphics Performance By default, Windows-XP turns on a lot of shadows, fades, slides etc to menu items. Most simply slow down their display. To turn these off selectively: Right click on the My Computer icon Select Properties Click on the Advanced tab Under Performance, click on the Settings button To turn them all off, select Adjust for best performance Turn ON: Show window contents while dragging Apply the change and close the window. Graphics performance will be enhanced. **************************************** That may or may not solve your graphics problem, but it sure can't hurt. Cheers! Andromeda B)

UAC is doing NOTHING to help you. Do as you were told and permanently DISABLE IT. You have already found out that it is causing you trouble. I do exactly what Thinkster does.....disable UAC on every Vista PC that I have to set up. If I don't, it will drive my users crazy, with all its Pop-Ups. I even have a little script to do it, on my Utilities CD....so disabling UAC takes all of one second. Then if you really want Vista to run well, shut down all the eye candy. Set all menu's and screens to "Classic". Good Luck,

For a Ghost expert, you'll have to go to the Ghost Forum. (url not given, except by PM) But from here, I'm probably as close to a Ghost expert as you're going to get. I've been using it since its release in 1997. Ghost 2003, build 793, works great for Vista and any other NTFS or FAT-32 based OS. It's the last version small enough to run from a single floppy disk. (the way Ghost was originally intended to run) But, Ghost was written to boot from a floppy disk, so give it one. Install a USB floppy disk drive ($19 to $29 from most sources). All new motherboards have the ability to boot to an A: prompt from a USB floppy drive. Then Ghost 2003 will put itself on the DVD making it bootable. Job completed! I have a floppy drive in every one of my own computers, but I've used the USB Floppy Drive on many other PC's and Ghost is quite happy using it. That's the simple answer to your problem. To work with most new mobo's, Ghost must be at version 793. Older versions will lock up when trying to seek the drives on the system. It just can't see them. I had to upgrade to ver 793 when I began using an AMD 939 mobo. Also.....Most new mobo's present a SATA drive to Ghost just like an IDE drive. NO special SATA drivers are needed. At least, that's been my own experience. Good Luck, Andromeda B)

The biggest problem we (we technicians) are finding with the newest computers running Vista is that there are NO XP drivers available for the hardware. XP without hardware drivers is dead in the water, it if will install at all. With some disabling of the UAC, setting all screens and menu's to "Classic" and a registry tweak or two, Vista can be made to look and act more like XP and not be such a pain in the Xxx. The only thing you Can't do, is make Vista take up as little space on the HD as XP. It's just HUGE.....I guess we'll have to live with that. Good Luck, Andromeda43 B)

I keep my HD squeaky clean and defragmented on a weekly basis so I'm probably not seeing the same thing you are. I just ran defrag C: /v from a command prompt, /v because I wanted to see the full report of what it found. It only ran for about five minutes and gave me a real nice status report. I normally just run defrag from a desktop icon and let it do its thing while I do something else. I enjoy watching the little red lines disappear and the white spaces get filled up with blue. Cheers Mate! Andromeda43 B)

Possibly, but for God's sake, don't move it or close it. We're doing quite nicely right here....thank you. I have both XP-Pro-SP2 and Vista Ultimate installed on my own (homebuilt) PC. (in separate HD's of course) It's no sluggard with an AMD dual core 3800+ cpu and 2 gigs of DDR2 ram and two SATA2 HD's. My reasons for preferring XP over Vista would not fit here in space or time allotted. But just a few.... for a purist, XP will run quite fast on a FAT-32 formatted HD.....Vista will NOT. I can back up my XP partition to a single DVD or six gig flash drive....NOT so with Vista. (it's way too big for that) I can add, remove, delete, change attributes or rename any file in XP, or from a DOS boot disk....NOT so with Vista. It's forever telling me I don't have permission to do something, and I'm the Administrator. Don't you know, that really gripes my Axx!!! So for me and g'zillions of other purists, Vista wets the bed! Cheers Mates! Andromeda43

I called on an old friend/customer today to find out that the New Toshiba laptop I installed for him last summer has had two hard drive replacements since then. It runs Vista Home. He was told first by a technician at Toshiba Service Center and later by another tech that there is something in Vista that's killing the Toshiba laptop hard drives. A solution to this would be nice, but mainly I'm asking all you tech's out there if you've seen or heard of this phenomenon? Any authoritative info would be appreciated. Thank You, Andromeda43 B)

Hmmmmm! I do it all the time....and with a most illogical program. The program I use to make a compressed copy of Vista Ult. and put it on a bootable DVD, is none other than Ghost 2003, run from a boot-floppy. (Use Ghost's HIGH Compression Option) It will also span multiple DVD's till the backup is complete. (doing a very thorough cleanup on your HD before doing the backup saves lots of space in the backup image file) You MUST use the floppy disk, because that's what Ghost 2003 was written to use, when making a bootable CD or DVD. Ghost will run from other media, like a CD or even a Flash Drive, but it won't make the DVD bootable, unless it's run from an A: drive. Even on new computers or laptops with NO floppy disk drive, that's really NO problem, because, You can use a USB Floppy Drive with total success. I've done it often. What OS you're backing up makes NO Difference to Ghost 2003. It backs up NTFS partitions just as easily as the older FAT-32 partitions. So, my Ghost 2003 boot floppy backs up everything from DOS to Vista Ult, with no problems. Interested? PM me for details on how to make your own Ghost 2003 boot disk. Cheers mates! Andromeda43 B)

Well, a CD-R is like a punch card. Once you punch a hole, you can't UN-Punch it. No software in the world will erase a CD-R. To assure that no-one will ever read one of your CD's, you must destroy that CD. There are commercial Shredders on sale at every Office Supply Store that will cut a CD up into little pieces. I have one and I assure you..... It works! I've shredded hundreds of CD's already. Works great for Credit Cards too. Or just take the CD out in the yard or down to the furnace and burn it up. They go quite quickly! Good Luck, Andromeda43 B)

If you do all the required preparations, like cleaning out your computer of all the junk, running chkdsk /f to assure NO errors on your hard drive (and do a defrag) and then shutting down all running programs.... the install should take less than ten minutes. After all the prep's, the install on my (fast) PC took all of six minutes. Since the install, I have experienced NO problems what-so-ever with XP. I've also seen no improvements of any kind. It was kind of a "NON-Event". Good Luck, Andromeda43

No, I can't tell you how to repair that @%#*&$ !!! But what I can suggest, is that you make a backup image of that drive when you finally get it fixed, or reinstalled, so when something else happens, you can just do a Restore of your backup image and go on like nothing ever happened. Good Luck, I hope you get it fixed. Andromeda43 B)

About a year ago, I built a brand new system just to run Vista Beta. MSI mobo, AMD dual core CPU, 2 gigs of ram, etc. When the beta version died on June 1, I reformatted the HD and installed XP-pro and migrated everything off of my old PC onto this new one, which I'm on now. Recently, I wanted to try Vista again, so I can get used to setting it up and making it more user friendly. I didn't want to mess up my XP install so here's what I did: I bought me a new SATA2, Maxtor, 160gig HD. ($69 at Staples) I cloned my old 200gig SATA2 drive to the new one. Then I disconnected the new drive, now with XP on it. I Left the old 200 gig drive in place and installed Vista right over XP. (Upgrade version) Vista didn't like my Intel 537EP modem at all. Some new drivers downloaded from MS, seemed to stop the errors the modem was allegedly causing. Now Vistas' Hardware Manager sees the modem and reports it as working, but when I try to make a dial up connection, the connection wizard says that it cannot see an internal modem. I also had to reinstall both of my Epson printers, which are now working OK. The rule of thumb says that whichever drive is connected to the first SATA port on the mobo, will be the default boot disk. I now have my XP drive on that port. If I want to boot into the Vista drive on the second port, I just tap F11 during the first few seconds of the boot and go right into my boot Menu. I pick the second HD and VOILA, I boot into Vista. I have a Ghost image of each drive stored in the second partition of the other drive, so if one drive crashes, I loose nothing. I just replace the crashed drive, restore the Ghost Image for that drive and I'm back in business in just minutes, with NO loss of data. In the ten years that I've been using Ghost, I've crashed many HD's, but I've yet to loose the first important data file. Cheers Mates! Andromeda43 B)

Just for the record, Norton's Ghost 2003, run from a boot disk (floppy or CD) will completely copy one HD to another HD with NO loss of anything. It does NOT care what the format is on the original HD. It will make an exact mirror image of the original HD to the receiving HD. An external HD of sufficient size can be used to transport the Image of one computer to another (Identical) computer. Remember, this is an identical image, not a compressed image file, so the size of the receiving HD must be large enough to hold the complete image. Cheers Mates! Andromeda43 B)

Woomera, Good Morning! From DOS to Vista there's a lot to be said for having someplace to put your 'Stuff'. (partition #2) Let me use an analogy..... You go to buy a new house and when you step inside the front door, you discover that there are no partitions in the house. Even the crapper has NO walls. Where ya gonna put your stuff? And, what about a little privacy? The good thing about that is that you can now put the walls (partitions) wherever you want them. I see a new computer like that house. I run chkdsk /f and then defrag to clean up and defragment the drive. Then I run "Partition Magic 8" from a boot CD and create a new partition. I reset C: to about double the currently used space (but never less than 20 gigs) and D: for the rest of the available drive. If there's a restore partition, I leave it alone. I tell PM8 to set the new partition to FAT-32 for ease of access, even in DOS. Now I have a place to store all my pictures, music, movies, ISO's, download files, ghost images, etc. Even huge software suites like MS Office, can be made to install there, saving a lot of space in C:. Also, a huge benefit is that when you do scans or defrag on C:, you're not dealing with those thousands of files, over and over again. I suppose that this setup is not perfect for everyone, everywhere, but "It works for me!".

For technogeeks or total masochists, NTFS is great, but for the great unwashed masses, FAT-32 is the only way to have 100% total control over every file on their HD, from as little as a DOS boot disk. I've set up my own SATA2, 200 gig, HD for Windows XP-Pro with FAT-32, working from my Windows ME Utilities floppy disk. NO Problem! XP runs just fine (probably better) on a FAT-32 partition, of any size you want. The only HD out of a dozen or more, in my house that's in NTFS mode, is the one I just installed Vista Ultimate on. Vista will refuse to load on a FAT-32 HD. Go figure! Cheers! B)

There are several (two anyway) "perpetual motion" machines now running in museums in the US. One is in Chicago at the Museum of Science and industry and the other one is in Tampa. Both 'machines' are of the pendulum type and seem to run forever without any input of energy. But the truth is that they draw their power from the earth itself (gravity) combined with the centrifugal force of the earth acting on the 'machines'. The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only converted from one form to another. In all of our current "machines" such as cars or electric motors, the input power is greater than the output work, because of energy lost as heat from 'Friction'. In order for the 'motor' in the diagram to even work, the magnets on the outer ring would have to be switched on and off to push the permanent magnets in a given direction. (an induction motor, like many used in our homes) Leaving them on all the time, they would want to pull the bar magnets toward them and then hang on to them. There would be NO rotation. I see nothing in that diagram to indicate a power gain. Just a thought B)

Andrew28, Allo and welcome! As Nitroshift aptly put it, you've told us nothing about your computer so any answer has to be in the most general terms. First off, a brand new PC (today) just out of box, runs at somewhere like 30% of maximum efficiency. As you start installing programs that all want to run in the background, that efficiency goes down even lower. The first thing you need to do is STOP those programs from running and sapping the strength of your system. The details of how to tweak and tune a modern computer for maximum efficiency is way to complicated for this forum/topic. But, you can start by going to START > Run and typing in MSCONFIG and looking at the Startup tab. You'll see a list of all the programs that are currently starting at Boot-Up. UN-Check every program that you don't absolutely need to have running all the time, every time you boot-up your system. Then click apply, OK and reboot your system. Then, get rid of the junk...... All of the latest versions of Windows come with a program in the Programs/Accessories/System Tools folder called Disk Cleanup. Run that and check the boxes next to ALL the areas that can be cleaned up. Then finish running the program. That will delete a LOT of junk off of your HD. In the same folder where you found Disk Cleanup, you'll also find Defrag. Run it to defragment your HD and make it run more efficiently. Just running those two programs once a week (at least) can greatly improve system performance. You can also, go to ADD/Remove programs in your control panel and DE-Install all the games and junk that came installed on your PC, that you never use. Demo's , Trial's and games should be the first thing to go. The neat thing is that you can do all that, which can greatly improve performance, and never have to download the first program. Good Luck, B)

Vista is just SO different from XP that many of our favorite tweaks for XP will NOT work for Vista. One that still works is (actually its three tweaks in one script) : ************************************************* Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control] "WaitToKillServiceTimeout"="1000" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management] "DisablePagingExecutive"="1" "LargeSystemCache"="1" ************************************************* I use these on every new Vista system that I set up and I've seen no downside ..... yet. Then there's one for disabling UAC.....which could be added to the one above for easier installation. For a lot less hassle, this should be done when setting up any new Vista system. ************************************************* Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "EnableLUA"=dword:00000000 ************************************************* Sorry, I can't give you the full rundown on what every tweak does and how, but I know they DO increase system performance.....that's good enough for me. You can also find several locations on the internet where "Tweaking Vista" is discussed. Good Luck and happy computing! Andromeda43 B)

Toshiba makes their Factory restore DVD's using Ghost. I do likewise every time I have to reinstall XP on a customer's PC. Ghost 2003, booted from a floppy or CD works very well on Windows XP. (any version) A fresh install of XP, with minimal software added, will fit on a single DVD using Ghost 2003 in HIGH compression mode. I won't say Ghost is FREE, but it's available to those willing to go looking for it. It never needs to be installed on a HD. Ghost.exe is a DOS program and It runs just fine from a DOS boot disk. Lonesome21, do you have a floppy drive on that PC, or just a CD/DVD drive? (which?) Curious minds want to know! B)

Yeah, I'd like the answer to that question myself. If you open your Windows Task Manager (ctrl+Alt+Del) and look at the FF usage, you'll see a combination of FF's own code + any web pages you might have loaded. With this forum loaded, my FF usage is around 50 megs. With 2 gigs of ram installed, 50 megs ain't no big deal. Having FF sitting on a SATA2 HD, don't hurt either. My FF loads just fine with the standard "www.Google.com" as my home page. If you have some massive and complicated home page, like MSNBC.com, your load time will definitely increase. So, keep your home page simple, or don't use one at all. Just like Netscape, Firefox has to load every byte of its code, from your HD, when you click the FF Icon. It also, ( I think ) loads all your favorites, saved passwords, history, etc. Windows I.E. doesn't have to do this, since much of the code it uses is already loaded by Windows. So when comparing the two, you're comparing apples to oranges (so to speak). All in all, I'm quite happy with FF and the way it runs on my PC. I'm really sorry that some folks seem to have problems with it. As a "Freebie" it's one heck of a nice program. Y'all have a great day now, and Merry Christmas Everyone! Andromeda43 B)

Windows ME was one of the first Microsoft OSes to deal with Windows Update. Which means there probably is a legitimate automatic update process on the computer somewhere. "WUAUBOOT" or "-AUMagic" will indicate Microsoft Automatic Update processes. Hi Guys! For reference, I keep a running Windows ME computer handy. I just fired it up and..... Yes ME had the Automatic Updates app in the Control Panel just like XP does. And YES you can shut it OFF, just like in XP. See the photo: MS dumped both 98 and ME some (long) time back so just shutting it off ain't gonna hurt nuttin'. You don't have to delete any files. I just upgraded a computer that I built back in 2000 with ME on it. I installed a higher wattage PSU, added more ram (512 megs) and then installed Windows XP-Pro/SP2. That 7 year old PC is now running XP as good as many new computers running Vista. Cheers Mates and wishing you all a very Merry Christmas! Andromeda43 B)

There are still tons of software titles that run just fine on Windows 98 or ME. My advise concerning a bi-directional firewall is probably an over-simplification of the matter: "Keep your PC clean of malware and you won't need a BI-Directional Firewall." Then every time you install or upgrade a program, go into MSCONFIG and make sure that the program didn't install a TSR to do automatic updates or otherwise access there web site on the internet. If you find a new TSR there, shut if OFF. Keeping a system clean, lean and mean isn't rocket science, but it does require a modicum of effort and persistence. Merry Christmas Everyone! Andromeda43 B)