XP Pro Crashs

[CoffeeFiend]

a "text file" is generally considered a 7-bit-per-byte "binary" file

That was generally true in the 70's.

We've been using ANSI (8 bits) for many, MANY years (20 perhaps), and unicode for quite some time even, which can take up to 32 bits per char depending on the encoding, and varies in length.

Edit: and no, 7 bit mode transfers like ftp changes NOTHING to this. That's not "text" anyways, that's ASCII, and it's done for the extra bit of parity. That's totally irrelevant when talking about text files. A text file is NOT 7 bit (restricted to ASCII), by any modern definition. It was true in the 70's, and it most definitely isn't the case nowadays (it's just too bloody limited/restrictive). Even 8 bit ANSI isn't quite cutting it anymore for a LOT of things, hence unicode, where a single character from another code page can take up to 4 bytes (again, depending on encoding and code page). They even had to update text parsers to account for variable length characters...

Don't believe me? Fine. Open notepad, type this: ~!@#$%^&*()_+ in it (13 chars total). File > save as > any name, pick unicode. Go see the size, yep, 28 bytes for 13 chars (2 bytes for the big endian byte order mark, then 26 bytes left for the 13 chars used -- using 16 bit words for each of these fairly common chars, as it's UTF-16 encoded. Had we picked "strange" characters, it would be even bigger).

You're simply plain wrong here, whether you're willing to admit it or not.

I certainly wouldn't call memory dumps "mostly useless" either.

Edited June 26, 2008 by crahak

[Volatus]

a "text file" is generally considered a 7-bit-per-byte "binary" file

That was generally true in the 70's.

Hopefully the last offtopic remark on this... but good ol' (and I mean OL') FTP, email, newsgroups, all those ancient technologies still differentiate between "text" (7 bit) and "binary" (8 bit) modes. (edit: I think both email and newsgroups are still strictly 7-bit-based anyway) Honestly, I have no clue why (does someone expect to plug in their old Tandy 8086 computer and get on Yahoo email, or something?), but it still holds true. So there is still, unfortunately, a difference... even though everything is still transmitted and stored in 8 bit format anyway. *shrug*

edit edit: I think the 8th bit (since processors have always worked in multiples of 8 anyway) was used as a very basic error checking mechanism by flipping the last bit one way or the other, then the other end would check that the "check bit" of each byte makes sense to the data, then discard it. Hence why we still need to encode our email attachments - actually, the client does it for us, transparently, but it's still in the source as 7-bit keyboard-typable data.

Edited June 26, 2008 by Volatus

[dinnmuzz]

Hi,

I have finally run the ram test that was mentioned above,it took about 25 mins, went thru, passed OK no errors.

1. Should I let it go on and on,,

2, Where to from here, confused by reading comment about above dumps.

Thanks

[cluberti]

they're mostly useless anyway. Why bother?

Well, useless to you maybe.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Hi,

I have finally run the ram test that was mentioned above,it took about 25 mins, went thru, passed OK no errors.

1. Should I let it go on and on,,

2, Where to from here, confused by reading comment about above dumps.

Thanks

25 minutes in memtest is pretty good! No errors after that long and you can be pretty sure theres no prob with you ram..

As for the dump Cuberti is an expert at reading those and just use 7zip to compress the hell outta it.