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Yeah, Opera pretty much gave us desktop users the middle finger. They don't want us any more and don't care. They just reskinned Chrome and pushed it out the door. I'm still on 12 but that won't last forever as standards change. I don't know what I'm going to do. Chrome sucks, Firefox is a hog, IE not in this lifetime. Ugh.

I try to the get the entire downloads and not some weblink installer. Managed to have Opera 12 on hand whew!
Turned off fraud protection, stuck Opera in my routers firewall and continue on. 17 for having less is twice the size of 12.

Was just a huge coincidence that the very first thing I did was to Google something who's first hit blocked my access :}

"Because of continued abuse from users with the browser you are currently using, I'm disallowing that browser from WindowsBBS.com."

Damn lucky as well, first history link I hit looking for it :} http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsBBS.html
Figures it's a Windows MVP's site http://www.helpwithwindows.com/

I don't know what to do about a different bowser myself, IE isn't even in the running,

Yeah, Opera pretty much gave us desktop users the middle finger. They don't want us any more and don't care. They just reskinned Chrome and pushed it out the door. I'm still on 12 but that won't last forever as standards change. I don't know what I'm going to do. Chrome sucks, Firefox is a hog, IE not in this lifetime. Ugh.

I try to the get the entire downloads and not some weblink installer. Managed to have Opera 12 on hand whew!
Turned off fraud protection, stuck Opera in my routers firewall and continue on. 17 for having less is twice the size of 12.

Was just a huge coincidence that the very first thing I did was to Google something who's first hit blocked my access :}

"Because of continued abuse from users with the browser you are currently using, I'm disallowing that browser from WindowsBBS.com."

Damn lucky as well, first history link I hit looking for it :} http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsBBS.html
Figures it's a Windows MVP's site http://www.helpwithwindows.com/

I don't know what to do about a different bowser myself, IE isn't even in the running,

Wow, it took me all of 30 seconds to find evidence that you're a lazy raging retard who shouldn't be trusted with a calculator, let alone a general purpose computing device. I know that's a long name for the link, but I really felt it needed to be said.

Thanks that very helpful. I found a howto which links to an install of SP2 and I tried that file directly. But it does the same thing as my brothers file. It fails with a message saying the system has less than 4 mb free. I will try the full slipstreaming thing. Thanks.

A big source of headaches for me, when setting up the computer for a similar situation, is the Windows key. Disable it here: http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/tune-151.html

You mean, you know of a way to transfer all your files and settings from one Windows machine to another running non-identical hardware as a one step process using a single cable?

Do tell...

Sure, it's called the File and Settings Transfer Wizard. You can use a crossover cable, a serial cable, two computers plugged into a switch, burn the files to CD/DVD, basically any standard storage method you can think of will work.

Hasn't Microsoft announced that Vista will be available for business users in November?

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsVista/vista- availability.html

from link:

In a press conference call last Tuesday, Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division co-president Jim Allchin announced that Windows Vista will be available to business in November 2006 and broad consumer availability in January 2007.

I'm sure Microsoft really hates losing a non-paying customer.

Yes, they would. In fact they would hate it so much they are willing to give huge discounts to people who have a pirated copy. Some research suggests that "22% of PCs in the US use a copy of Windows that is not genuine." That's in the US alone. I've been to Vietnam. I'm not entirely there is a single legitimate copy in the whole country. IOW, outside the US the illegitimacy rate is most likely higher. But let's assume it's the same. If MS has 90% market share and 22% of those are pirated, and MS lost those 22%, they would then only have ~70% market share. That means a lot of people have OS X or Linux or something else. That will start software companies noticing. And a huge step down in that direction in such a short time, suddenly people (defined as share holders, 3rd party developers, consumers and businesses) will start to see that Microsoft isn't all that special, just like when Firefox dropped IE's market share below 90% in such a short amount of time.

In fact, notice when Firefox ate MS's lunch in the browser world that suddenly MS had a new browser to show everyone. That's a freaking browser. You can do that quickly. An OS, as Vista has shown, takes a much longer time. It'll be a downward spiral. When MS starts to lose market share it will do so quickly, and Microsoft knows that. That's why they give discounts for pirated copies. That's why they won't disable the entire OS, just some unneeded functionality.

Does MS care about non-paying customers? Yes, a whole lot. They maintain they're position by being so widespread, not because of their merits as the best OS developers. If they lose that market dominance, they will suddenly be "just another software company."

There is absolutely no reason to believe that market share is the cause of low security.

It's certainly not the cause of "low security", but it definitely makes Windows a target. This argument has been rehashed here and everywhere else a thousand times. The popularity of Windows makes it a target for more hackers. This says nothing about Microsoft's code quality, nor does it say anything about the quality of other OS's code bases. I'm just saying that it makes sense that the most used operating system would also be the most attacked. More attacks yield more results.

Shitty programmers with little or no Q/A, and a huge festering code base which is continually patched together with duck tape to keep it going

Why isn't this drivel modded as flamebait? Microsoft's coders are really any shittier than anybody else's coders, or at least I've seen no evidence of this. No Q/A? You have to be kidding me. If you have even a shallow knowledge of Microsoft's engineering practices you would know that their Q/A is probably the most intensive that any software company has on the planet, and it's getting more intensive every day.

Want an example? The ASP.NET team had 505,000 test scenarios for ASP.NET 2.0 that it had to pass 100% before they would lock it down as RTM.

along with a refusal to force 3rd party vendors to release software which runs properly (IE doesn't require local admin to run) causes security holes

Indeed, 3rd party software, and even Microsoft's own software (try developing an ASP.NET application with VS.NET 2k3 without admin privs), often fails to run correctly as non-admin. Microsoft has made a lot of changes to improve this, but 3rd party support is still lagging. Why? Because Windows is used by basically everybody, and if a patch or new version of Windows suddenly broke 75% of the applications out there nobody would upgrade.

This problem is an extremely difficult one to solve, and a lot of it has to do with Microsoft's failure to produce specs and guidelines from the start that let ISVs know what they needed to do to make sure software ran as non-admin. Microsoft's solutions in Vista are a huge step in the right direction.

Windows doesn't have *bad* security, Windows has no security.

Baloney. The Windows security model is a solid one. Aside from the applications that don't like installing or running as non-admin (mostly ASP.NET development, really), I run Windows as non-admin 100% of the time. The security model in Windows is actually more extensive than the security model in most flavors of Unix, including Linux. (At least out of the box.) Regardless, Windows gets a bad rap for security not because of design of Windows is bad, but because there have been lots of high profile, highly damaging exploits for Windows over the years. With a few glaring exceptions, such as the WMF exploit, Microsoft has always had patches available for weeks if not months before the bastards out there released their worms or viruses.

Transparency between versions? How does that cause poor security?

As I explained earlier, Microsoft can't just break everybody's applications, even if they're insecure. That's not the way it works when you have 90% of the computer using world running your software.

It's called slipstreaming. http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsXP/winxp-sp2 -bootcd.html