LLXX

I've been reading about these controversial issues for the last while... I don't know what exactly is with the prefetch thing, but I just did the same procedure above on my laptop (which I haven't done much tweaking with), and it reduced the startup time from 15 to 4 seconds. Quite a big difference, and definitely a positive one too. Maybe it just depends on your hardware configuration... As for the remark about using the task manager, I don't really care whether it's accurate or not, just as long as it's showing relatively correct results. If a process A has allocated more than process B, then it will show A with a higher RAM usage as B; that's all I need to know, and whether or not these figures are connected with reality is not the issue as long as it is relatively correct. Maybe all of you are not that sensitive to system performance but I like mine to be the most optimised possible. I can tell the difference between a 0.05 and a 0.01-second response time, the latter feels instantaneous while the former is already sluggish by my definition (my CPU is at 4.17GHz, so in 0.05 seconds it's already executed 208 million clock cycles!), and the 0.1 to 1-second response times of a default Windows XP install on my machine feel absolutely eternal.

Wow. His chance of making a $10 profit just dropped to 0%...

Not really a full SQL, but a database that is accessed in much the same way.

Open a command prompt, CD to where your files are, and do "DIR *.fmb >> filename.txt" which will give you a column'ed, sorted list of files. Excel can import fixed-width records. Do the same thing but use *.fmx instead to get all the other files.

56K is the raw speed, and is a theoretical maximum. With transmission overhead included the best you can get on a very high-quality line is ~50K. Noise and other disturbance will lower the speed drastically.

My laptop has a loose power connector. I should open it up and solder it back in place sometime... I didn't know there would be a whole site for the sale of these things If just the connectors were broken (or more likely, just dislodged from the mobo) it's an easy repair.

It must be a very bad design if two supposedly identical power connectors can't be connected at the same time, if they were just physically joined together that shouldn't be a problem but in this case it seems not to be so

There was a thread in the news section a while ago about a free online virus database. Check there.

Exactly. I have Nero 6.6.0.3 and it works perfectly fine.

Why did you upgrade to v1.6 if everything was fine with 1.4? Unnecessary upgrades. One of the common sources of problems.

Don't expect it to come anywhere near the speed of real hardware though...

404! As for unpacking MSIs, try Qwerty-MSI.

I wouldn't want to anyway, that's where the infamous WMF vulnerability came from and why 98/98SE wasn't affected.

It was never intended to run on the 9x family of OSs.

They don't sell WinME anymore. PM me if you're desperate.

Stop spreading myths. I can already see one major hole in your reasoning. Then tell me why those numbers under RAM Usage next to the svchost.exe's are not zero, nor does the CPU column for them remain at zero. If that were the case, I would expect to see absolutely NO difference in performance and memory usage between having minimal services running and having all of them running. Common sense, and empirical testing, shows otherwise - I had a pic showing nearly all the services in the service control manager running, and a pic of the taskmgr as well. I can't find it at the moment but the commit charge was something like 150M and the number of processes in the mid 20s. After going down to minimal services, commit charge is down in the low 60M after a reboot, and the number of processes below 15. Looking at RAM usage statistics in the task manager also shows much reduced numbers.The "error reporting" service does not need to be running nor present. M$ just wants to know more about what's in the machines of unwary customers, and IMHO that sort of information should remain private. Why did M$ install so many services? Because everyone has his/her own needs for the system, and M$ wanted XP to be general-purpose and having be suitable for many uses. Not everyone needs every service, but I'm sure at least someone needs a specific service. Regarding disabling RPC, that's obviously not a good idea, and this is why tuning services should be something done carefully and with attention to detail. The Task Scheduler does handle the prefetch, but you do NOT need it to be prefetching every single time it's booted. A few days ago I decided to disable the prefetcher completely (via a registry key) and delete everything in the Prefetch directory to see what effect on boot times it would have. Big surprise - startup dropped from the previous 10 seconds down to ~5. Enabled it again to see what would happen, and the boot time dropped again, this time only 3 seconds. Disabled it and cleared the prefetch, and rebooted. The 3-second boot stayed, and subsequently remained. Seeing how far I could go, I tried BootVis optimiser. Now I have a system that boots in approximately 1 second (the moving bit of the load bar doesn't even make it halfway across on the boot screen), prefetch still disabled. My theory is that once the layout of the boot files has been established, the prefetcher only slows down the boot by attempting to find a better place for them, even though they've already been placed optimally after the first three boots or so. Sorry for showing off my ultra-optimised system, but it just has to be done... this is just after a boot with nothing else running http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/428/serviceswv1.png

Keyboards don't need additional drivers, Windows already comes with them.

Open a command prompt, CD to where the files are, and do a DIR command. You can write DIR >> filename.txt to write the output to a file, and I'm quite sure Excel can import fixed-column-width records.

NTFS is not faster and poses several more annoyances. Its two main advantages are support for permissions and large file sizes. Disadvantages include limited compatibility with other OSs and more complex structure which complicates recovery efforts.

Could you provide a screenshot of that??The first thing that came to mind was Win32.Hidrag virus.

You can block it at the router or external firewall.

Since you're going to be running this from a booted DVD you can't use *any* Windows-based programming environment. Maybe a Win3.11-based loader and EXE like Win9x setup used would work, but I'd recommend just making a simple DOS app.

All you need is FDISK... ...and read the PM I sent you.

The first thing you should do is restore an uncorrupted version from the install CD using extract command.

Explain in more detail?