allen2

You'll need the CD or the files at some point in time and if you bought a pc without a legal XP license the only way is to buy one. Or you might change to a free linux distrib or another free OS.

I think you are the speaking about wildcards dns. That's the only way i know to do something like that.

If you already set visual effects to best performance and optimized for programs in perfs settings then it should be alright. There some tweaks here and there to improve globaly the system but nothing else come to my mind that might improve the gui.

Did you tried to tweak 2003 (like disabling theme, new start menu and all performance options) before benchmarking ?

I just hope software makers will improve their products before releasing them and don't forget older platform like microsoft tried to do with Windows Fundamental for legacy pc.

If you go this way, i'll say how open source developers are paid ? Not everything revolve around money in this world.

As Tripredacus already said, try procmon (from sysinternals). I suppose you can launch your prog later by pointing in winpeshl.ini to cmd.exe and launch the gui after procmon. Usualy those errors come from an application trying to write where it doesn't have the rights or can't (with the winpe CD ).

Are you doing this with admins rights ?

Did you tried with lastest mplayer (it improve a little and multicore support is better handled)?

The thing is simple, i hate poorly optimized applications and photoshop is a good example: Althought it is certainly one the best photo editing software out there, i think adobe dev did a very bad work (speed/perf/memory) on it. Some opensource tools are sometimes faster (on the same operation) but sometimes a lot less easy to use. For example, and old photoshop ( i don't remember the version) wouldn't run without a pagefile without even loading a picture!!! I'm pretty sure that you have a very good (hardware) computer, but there are people out there who would buy a pc and keep it 10 years without upgrading it. What is good in a new version of an application if it doesn't improve in terms of functionality/speed/performance ?

That would be possible if you get all explorer.exe dependencies. You might also need to add part of Internet explorer. To begin, i'll use dependency walker. Then you'll need to register the needed 2000 dll/exe/ocx with regsvr32 so reg entries would be up to date. If it is not enought you'll have to export registry parts from a working 2000 and replace them in 2003. You'll be pretty busy. I personally don't see the point getting the old explorer but i can understand you need it for some reasons. As aside note, i'm pretty sure the 2003/2000 eula wouldn't allow this kind of things but for studying purposes why not.

Here is the sample.

You're mixing the increase of memory and the 64 bit OS change. I'm just saying that with the same amount of memory (say 3GB), Microsoft X86 and X64 OS will perform the same or the x86 will be a little better. An interesting test would be : - install win7 x86 and x64 on two hard drives (same make/model) - then on each one create 2 ram drives with the MS native driver. - then copy a big file or/and multiple small files between the ram drives. If MS developers optimized their code, you should gain at least 33% with the 64bit win7 but i am not sure of the results.

Just adding something to jaclaz Easy way: You could try to convert the partition (instead of restoring it) with a third party tool like partition magic or acronis disk director or.....

If you were getting twice perf with x64 Os, it would be great but i never saw a real world application (i voluntary took out of the contest the link provided by Coffeefiends as it is a comparison between CS4 and CS5 on a MAC OSX leopard) performing twice faster in its x64 version.

From what i heard, led blacklight extends the monitor life and in most case reduce the size, the weight and the power comsuption. From the specs, other than that, there is not much difference between the two (except for the rendering of the black color but i'm not sure you'll see a difference in real world uses).

So because you want to run an x64 OS you need twice more ram. Doesn't that bother you ?

@ Coffeefiend: I linked to this benchmark on purpose: - As you can see with 2GB, x86 is first in most test (except winrar and cinebench which are probably heavily x64 optimized). So the 2GB aren't dealt correctly by the x64 OS as it is slowing down applications. - With more ram, better hardware, x64 works better. That's a hardware selling argument. Also, i am not sure if Win 7 x86 would handle the 4GB ram like XP was: reducing it to 3.7Gb in the best case. My point was that software must adapt to hardware and not the other way. @cluberti: I agree on Adobe, theese kitties are cpu/memory hungry like tigers. As for supportability and performance, it is possible to optimize for both by recompiling your code before runing it like Linux from scratch method. Of course with piracy, developers on MS platforms can't go this way. For the chicken/egg, it is strange to think that open source software were x64 optimized faster than the others. Perhaps you're right saying it's clouding my judgement ; i simply can't tell either way.

Most benchmarks (for example this one )out there show that x86 OS are not behind x64 OS in all tests.

I don't agree with you at all cluberti: any serious application developer must optimize his code taking a full advantage of the platform the application will run on. The general purpose of Intel and Microsoft is to make you think that only a better hardware will perform faster but that's totally wrong. For example multi-core and 64 bits are out for years and most windows applications aren't optimized for them. Also with all pre-made "solution", Microsoft kill developers creativity: why creating a new algorithm when Microsoft already made one and if it isn't optimized, the application user has to buy a faster hardware. Sometimes, it is like the developper tried to solve a 2nd degree equation without the formula but trying every possible roots.

I don't completly agree with you: the itanium isn't supported by XP x86. Also if you install win 3.11 on dual core or better you won't get all the benefits of the dual core architecture. Ok then, find me a motherboard that uses an Itanium CPU that has XP support... Here it is : a HP Zx2000 http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=fr&prodNameId=82076&prodTypeId=12454&prodSeriesId=82074&swEnvOID=1026&taskId=135&swLang=13 And as for the price you can find one there : http://cgi.ebay.fr/HP-ZX2000-Itanium-2-900MHz-4GB-36GB-DVD-A7844-84002-/300333964940?cmd=ViewItem&pt=COMP_EN_Workstations&hash=item45ed4c9e8c It isn't exactly cheap but some designers or modelers might need this kind of power (instead of buying silicon graphic workstations).

I'd say a netapp (as those are the best out there) but it isn't really cheap and it highly profesional. The thing is netapp is providing a great support (the best out there): If something fail, they send a tech with parts before you know it. So if you need an entreprise with best features and reliability, it might be good choice. On the side, you could find a Windows NAS built by one of the big actors like DELL and HP. Depending on the money you want to spend and features you need, there might exist a lot of possible choices.

You just need to to do something like this: SET CDROM=NONE IF EXIST "D:\OEM\RunOnce\Auto Setup.bat" set CDROM=D: IF EXIST "E:\OEM\RunOnce\Auto Setup.bat" set CDROM=E: IF EXIST "F:\OEM\RunOnce\Auto Setup.bat" set CDROM=F: IF EXIST "G:\OEM\RunOnce\Auto Setup.bat" set CDROM=G: ... IF EXIST "Z:\OEM\RunOnce\Auto Setup.bat" set CDROM=Z: IF "%CDROM%"=="NONE" goto NOCD START "" /WAIT "%CDROM%\OEM\RunOnce\Auto Setup.bat" goto end :NOCD Echo No CDROM unit found :END

Try to slipstream the driver like described there: http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/36/SESSID=9c54e3da3deb341d44b013d358c68bd8/.

Here it is: ShellExtGuide7_customcommands.zip I'm currently using an old Visual C++ 6 compiler (for this kind of job) which is more than enough because i don't use it too much but i prefer mingw that i use more often for console applications.