John Bigboote

Something like this HOW-TO Build a 6-Headed Workstation, perhaps? It's a bit experimental, and the person doing this one took things to the absolute limit. But with USB keyboards and rats, you can get 6 "heads" onto a single PC, without any vmware/virtualisation nonsense. Yours in Red Lectroid Domination, John Bigbooté

It's possible you may need to update your copy of Nero, but the more likely explanation is that your DVD media isn't good enough to burn at 16X. Yes, you can download firmware patches that let you override the media write power table profiles, but I STRONGLY DON'T RECOMMEND this, no matter how many times you hear a "friend" having done it. DVD-/+R is pretty fragile stuff, really. I've done media surface scans on marginal brands of media as well as high quality Taiyo Yuden stuff, and doing a proper burn is essential if you wish to actually read data from your DVDs a few months or a year from now. You'd be amazed at how high the error rates are with marginal brands of DVD media, especially when burned at maximum speed. The higher the error rate, the slower the media will readback, and the shorter its expected lifespan. You may wish to avoid burning faster than the rate at which the burner switches to a zoned/multi-speed strategy, as there are glitch points at each speed-step. (You can find this demonstrated in error-rate scans for yourself, and on most testing sites.) The format's error correction strategy "conceals" these glitch-points from the user, though they often cause speed reductions around those areas. Why burn slightly damaged media at the start just to shave a couple of minutes? You only burn once, but you (hope to) read many, many times. Glitched reads can lead to skipping/stuttering movie playback, slower than necessary program load times, or even premature media readback failures. Pioneer DVR-108-109s can burn at 6X without using zoned speed switching, I don't know about the newer models. Non-Pioneer drives tend to lag in the maximum "safe" speeds by a tick, though I'm sure most are up to 6X at least by now. I think some manufacturers call this Zoned CAV (Z-CAV). Yours in Red Lectroid Domination, John Bigbooté

Actually, you guys missed the point a bit. There are LOTS of reasons to underclock a processor, and many of them are not stupid AT ALL. To wit: Generate less heat, which in turn allows you to use lower fan RPMs or even dispense with a fan altogether! This not only reduces power consumption, but also noise. It also reduces the number of moving parts which can cause system failure. I remember running a small network server for a friend's family - it was a Frankenbox performing low-end NAT and firewalling functions. It was one of the last of the true Cyrix clone CPUs before VIA bought the carcass. It was designed to run at 166MHz, but when its fan broke down, I unscrewed the fan motor assembly from the heat sink block, cleaned it out with high pressure air canister, and underclocked it to 133Mhz or so. It ran within its temperature margins without a fan! Modern CPUs are so ridiculously overpowered (speed-wise), there are alot of "low heat" models which can probably run without active cooling when underclocked. The Durons, Semprons, Pentium-Ms, and even some generations of P4s run pretty cool for their computational power. When sufficiently underclocked, they may not need any active cooling at all! Try not snigger too loudly when you hear someone asking a question like this, because chances are they're onto something you just haven't properly considered. Yours in Red Lectroid Domination, John Bigbooté

Just as a follow-up to this post. Moving the AVG install in the RunOnceEx.cmd up to the first position (just renumbering the item) seems to have fixed the problem with the AVG install failing due to a "PENDING UPDATE" conflict. Both the buggy KB update and AVG were correctly installed after this change. Note: this does nothing for the "auto-update" definitions issue which seems to be still unresolved at this point. Yours in Red Lectroid Domination, John Bigbooté

I have been refining my unattended Windows XP SP2 + Hotfix rollups thanks to TommyP's excellent HFSLIP tool and the efforts of all of the tireless MSFN Unattended Windows junkies here. I've run into an odd problem trying to get AVG-Free to install from a fired RunOnceEx command. The error log: Now, my RunOnceEx.cmd setup script: I've never seen this sort of error before... the log shows the RARSFX is being fully decompressed in the C:\WINDOWS\TEMP area, so running it from CD-ROM isn't the problem. I've also eliminated corruption by typing the same effective install command from the command line - it works flawlessly. I imagine the "broken" KB update which can't integrate is possibly trying to queue up a file modification on the same file... I'm about to try to re-queue another install event (RunOnceEx queueing another RunOnceEx - ick)... Or perhaps I can move this install to a T-12 time thing? Any suggestions would be welcome. Yours in Red Lectroid Domination, John Bigbooté