Tripredacus

Sometimes it is not the case of actually trying to sell an item at an enlarged price on Ebay, but to increased the perceived value of an item. Even though Ebay has been around for so long, and many people use it to determine the value of things, most people still use it wrong. For determining value on an item you must still take an average of a range period of sold listings. This is done by the smart people but many still go about and look at listing prices to determine value. You can see this in click-bait articles (even from actual news sources) when they say "you won't believe how much this thing you own is worth" and show a VHS tape for $1,000 or something. Or that case of Amazon price matching algorithm gone wrong that resulted in common items with prices more than new car on them. The result of this is you end up with items that are over priced in the secondary market. And it is possible to sell on Ebay or other online sites at prices that do not follow the market because the cost of using those services are low enough that you can just let stock sit there for months. That is not something you can get away with in the primary or IRL market because if you are running a business, you can't stay in business unless you make money. So in the secondary market you end up with 3 tiers: - unknown value, low value/high demand, low perceived value/unknown demand (rare items with unknown market) - market value - overinflated value/place holder/value manipulation There are cases where the value manipulation takes over and sets a new market value, but it isn't done when one guy buys a printer at double MSRP. When using Ebay value calculations on sold items, you can eliminate these from the pool if there is only 1 or a low percentage if you want and if that one or two outrageous sales does not match the rest of the average price, because if it is included it would increase the average value where it isn't warranted. Plus there is the consideration that on completed listings that you cannot tell if the item was actually sold. You can see that Ebay or the seller marked it sold, meaning some buttons were pressed. But you cannot know if the item was paid for, or the result of the transaction, if the buyer left good feedback. If it was a legitimate purchase, or if the feedback was good but then the money refunded or item returned later, if an item was actually shipped, if there was a partial payment/refund, or any other type of outcome on a completed payment. It is all fairly complicated, but the easiest is to just stay away from things that appear to be more expensive than there is reason for it to be that way.

This is a case of Windows being dumb. It thinks those folders are in use, or protected, while booted, even though they are not the actual folders it is using. One of my computers has my old XP hard drive in it and the same thing happens. I just leave it be. Storage is cheap and I don't need to worry about the space that is being taken up on that drive. You may even still be able to open some of the programs on the old drive without reinstalling. Try it out. Some programs won't. For example, some versions of Office from another drive won't open. If you wanted to remove those folders, disconnect your SSD, then boot your computer using a WinPE drive. Then you can format the drive no problem. I would first see if your computer can boot with just the SSD connected, just to make sure your OS isn't using the old drive for anything.

I think the problem is that the commercial sites like gog.com have games designed for modern systems. They will take old games and make them playable on your Windows 10! Because of that, I do not know what is entailed with getting those games to work on a Windows 9x system. For some of them, on Steam also, I can't believe that the original game is changed in any way to allow for use on a modern system. I have heard that some have DosBox to run them in, but that will be on a case-by-case basis.

I usually resort to making it so that the OS installs the driver when it boots. Of course, this wouldn't apply to a mass-storage driver.

Hmm they had removed the developer tools at one point? Phew I'm glad I've been putting off updating then.

Welcome to the MSFN!

Some files can be marked with the H flag and not also the S flag.

I still use Vista occasionally for refurbs and see this issue. While it seems there are specific KBs to fix this in 7, I never had heard about any similar fixes for Vista. I'm sure that a fix exists for it, but that the userbase still doing Vista installs is comparatively low.

Oh yes, thanks for reminding me. If you have set up a software mirror from within Windows using Device Manager, that can turn out even worse. In that case, you should still do a full backup before hand, with the idea that you'll be restoring data. And if it survives, you'll have less headache and at least you'll have a backup of everything.

Because of the risk of data loss. I've seen scenarios where the volume becomes corrupted, changed to RAW, doesn't appear anymore, array broken, Windows using the wrong driver in the new OS, the RAID software not working with the new OS and/or driver, etc. It is not impossible, but you can't know what the outcome is before-hand. So many variables in play. The safe way is to make a full backup of the array to another disk set. The easiest is if you are using a controller card and your OS is not on it. Then you simply remove the card from the board, then do the upgrade (or change the OS entirely). After the new OS is set, then you put the card back in and install the driver and software and it should be just fine. This is the safest example I can think of, because if you remove the card from the system (but leave the disks connected to SATA but not power) you shouldn't have any problems since no changes were done with the array at all. Even in this case, it is best to make a backup of the data, in case something happens, then you can just copy it back to a fresh array.

SVG Viewer is pretty much deprecated. If you are still using an application that uses (functional) SVGs, you might have problems in Windows 7. By now, at least Firefox can use some of the SVG functions (drawing, fill and motion) but does not support others such as gradient... which I think that functionality came directly from IE's gradient function anyways. That just covers the basics. If you are not using any advanced SVG that do things such as linking or any full SVG applications, you can get away with not using it anymore. When doing an in-place upgrade, make sure you can find the drivers you need ahead of time for the new OS. The important ones are chipset, video, audio and lan. You should download these before doing the upgrade, and also perhaps put them on a CD or USB drive. If you have a RAID array, it is advised that you do NOT do an in-place upgrade.

This is already happening. Not just with schools. Many people have reported that putting multiple Windows 10 systems on their network is saturating their available bandwidth. And like a lot of things with Windows 10, the settings to change to prevent this from happening often does not work or change the situation.

I find most of my games locally at thrift or flea markets. Online can be a problem because the shipping can really add up. If Ebay is not your thing, there are some alternatives like other classified sites. I do not know one for Denmark. I know there is Priceminister.com for France, where I go to look for things sometimes. If you are talking about download only games, I'm not sure. I don't deal with those really.

Welcome to the MSFN!

It will be a wait-and-see type thing I suppose. I don't do any work within Windows 10 using .cmd files. I only use those in WinPE. My work within the OS uses the ComSpec environment variable to pass commands to be run using cmd.exe.

Let's hope their choice of changing 'cmd' to run Powershell prompt doesn't screw with anyone's scripts or programs that call CMD to perform specific things, such as installing programs. On this new build, is the ComSpec environment variable changed as well?

You can see it in the properties of the device in Device Manager.

Ok well there are some caveats. It may depend on what edition you are using. For example, Retail (which allows for transfer to new hardware) may be more forgiving than System Builder edition which doesn't. Also I do not consider a motherboard to be a minor upgrade. A person should expect to have to reactivate Windows if you change the motherboard. For my own personal experience, I've only had to reactivate a Windows 7 system after changing a motherboard. Not for anything else like video cards, disk drives or network cards. Fortunately, for Windows 7, it is fairly easy to reactivate. Ensuring internet access is present, most of the time you can just run slmgr.vbs -ato. And nowadays, the phone activation is better than it once was, where the Activation number will give you an option to text you a link where you can go to a website to do the number groups if need be. Way easier than talking to someone on the phone!

Windows 7 does not use the votes like XP. It does have a file integrity checklist that it uses instead. Too many or wrong files not matching expected checksums will trigger notification mode. Fortunately, unlike XP, Windows 7 will not lock you out of the OS if activation breaks. Some thing just don't work like Personalization. There are 2 main methods for checking out details of Windows 7 activation. From elevated cmd, you can run slmgr.vbs -dlv which will show some information in a pop-up window. This command also works up to current versions of Windows 10. For Vista and 7, there is a tool from MS called MGADiag that you can get more detailed information, including a list of files that do not match the checksums. This program is not meant to be used on Windows 8 and above (the results it generated on those OSes are not helpful for troubleshooting an activation issue).

We have a dedicated XP x64 section right here: http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/104-windows-xp-64-bit-edition/

You may want to post the Hardware ID of the video device from Device Manager.

I know that email from the server itself still works, but in the past there had been reports of it not working for PMs, but did for reports. I can just say that Email of reports worked, as of this morning.

No politics talking here, be it US or otherwise. Only exception is something that is specifically technology related. There are plenty of other places to talk about world politics.

One of the things he points out, the short window of time a company has to change their software to be compatible... sticks out to me a bit. Microsoft has a problem with showing information to the correct people. Or perhaps attempting to make other people do this work for them. There are two examples I can think of. 1. Software Compatibility: A policy requirement was introduced in Windows 8 where an OEM was not allowed to install a program that did not fully uninstall. The requirements for clean uninstall was that no files (temporary or otherwise) or registry keys should remain after choosing to uninstall the program from Programs & Features. The first issue here is that this isn't the job of a company selling computers to do. The idea is nice, but it really looks like Microsoft was trying to offload software quality discipline to other parties. Let us take an example. Say we would like to build a computer with a RAID array. Well technically the RAID software is not allowed to be installed because it doesn't uninstall properly. But as you can probably expect, no one had followed this rule because then no one would have sold any computers in the past few years! 2. OEM-facilitated downgrade rights eligibility: To put it simply, starting with Windows 8, a System Builder was no longer able to do a Downgrade on behalf of the end user/customer. The information relating to this was not on a website that a System Builder could access. Not on the public OEM/SBLicensing site, not in the OPK (it didn't exist) but on a site only for Direct OEMs. I ran into this on technet a lot, System Builders trying to get help doing a downgrade from 8 or 10 to 7. And then you can say that they aren't able to do it that way (disclaimer: knowing how shops are IRL, things happen. It is a different story to ask about such things on an official Microsoft forum tho) you can't point them to the info they need because they don't have access to it. So then you end up being "a troll on the internet." Anyways, those are two situations I can think of where Microsoft did not communicate properly or to the correct people about the things they were changing and what their users or customers needed to know. In example #1, I do not think that any communication ever went out to software or driver developers relating to the 100% uninstall thing. Maybe it is buried in a MSDN document somewhere.

In previous versions, you could use the Color panel to set selections for the Explorer window. That could be run with: control color but in Windows 10 it only opens the color mixer and those color settings only change the Start Menu and does not seem to effect Explorer selected items. EDIT: I think it might be possible to change this color in the registry under HKCU\Control Panel\Colors. I was able to change the highlight text, which you can see if you were to rename a file. None of the keys under Colors appears to reflect that tho. Because the default color is blue, the 3 numbers in the key value, the 3rd number represents blue. If you want to see if you find a 3 part color value in the registry and see if it is the color you are looking for, you can use mspaint's Edit Colors panel to input those values and see a preview.