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I think you want Process Explorer for that. (right-click svchost.exe, Properties, Services tab)

If Dell wanted to save battery life on their Vista notebooks, why didn't they just integrate sideshow in their laptops? It comes with the OS and has a lot of plugins to choose from.

I know it's not a full blown OS, but outside of web surfing it does most of the functions of this system with even less power usage because of it's smaller screen.

They may be updating the Sysinternals tools (after changing the EULA's on them all), but what about Protection Manager? That looked like a great product (and one we were planning to buy), but was conveniently buried the second Microsoft acquired Winternals & Sysinternals.

Protection Manager was launched in March 2006, and removed from the market by Microsoft in November that same year. It was the first thing I looked for when Microsoft acquired Winternals and while I wasn't surprised to see it removed, I've been waiting ever since in the hope that it would be re-launched. That has never happened, and my belief now is that Microsoft deliberately buried it, thinking it would hurt Vista sales.

Protection Manager was a program that gave system administrators a simple and effective way to whitelist the applications that could be run on their network. The idea was that you ran it for a few weeks to generate a baseline list of allowed applications, then turned on protection, after which non authorised programs would be stopped until approved by an administrator. It also allowed you to run individual applications with admin rights, making the management of legacy software far simpler.

Most of the literature regarding the program has gone now, but this is a handy guide:
http://www.inuit.se/?page=130

A few choice quotes from MS:
"the decision was made to withdrawal Winternals Recovery Manager, Defrag Manager and Protection Manager in their current form from the market effective November 17th 2006"

Q. What is the future of Protection Manager?
A. Winternals Protection Manager has been withdrawn from the product line. Many Protection Manager usage scenarios are addressed by the new User Account Control feature of Windows Vista."
source: http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/wifaq.mspx

Personally, I don't see that UAC offerse half the features Protection Manager did, and we have no desire to move over to Vista anyway. To me, it looks like Microsoft removed from the market a program that would have been genuinely useful to many of their customers, once again putting sales & marketing ahead of security and their customers.

All I see is that some marketing drone gained access to post under msdn.microsoft.com. Few Key Insights from that "article":

• Democratizing Lifecycle Management
• Inspiring delight
• Riding the wave
• The next pillar, Enabling emerging trends.

So, it seems to be the latest trend. Well, for VS2010 and .NET 4.0 at least we know for sure we'll get all the details in a month at PDC.

From there description here,
The Virtual Desktop implementation doesn't seem much more useful than the one in their PowerToys for XP.

Unlike other virtual desktop utilities that implement their desktops by showing the windows that are active on a desktop and hiding the rest, Sysinternals Desktops uses a Windows desktop object for each desktop. Application windows are bound to a desktop object when they are created, so Windows maintains the connection between windows and desktops and knows which ones to show when you switch a desktop. That making Sysinternals Desktops very lightweight and free from bugs that the other approach is prone to where their view of active windows becomes inconsistent with the visible windows.

I'm glad to hear that it is supposed to be more lightweight. That wasn't something I felt with the virtual workspace implementation for PowerToys. However, at least under GNOME, I haven't experienced the described inconsistency. Has that been an issue for anyone else here, perhaps in KDE or Mac OS X? Or in GNOME?

However, if you've used the PowerToys one, you might be wondering: can I now move a window between virtual desktops? And you might be thinking, from the description above, that the answer is no.

Desktops reliance on Windows desktop objects means that it cannot provide some of the functionality of other virtual desktop utilities, however. For example, Windows doesn't provide a way to move a window from one desktop object to another, and because a separate Explorer process must run on each desktop to provide a taskbar and start menu, most tray applications are only visible on the first desktop. Further, there is no way to delete a desktop object, so Desktops does not provide a way to close a desktop, because that would result in orphaned windows and processes. The recommended way to exit Desktops is therefore to logoff.

So, you cannot move windows between workspaces; you need to run an explorer process for each workspace; and you have to log off to close desktops.

I wonder how having a separate explorer process for each desktop impacts performance, if at all, seeing as they claim it is a more lightweight approach.

Anyway, without those features, then, like the PowerToys one, it cannot easily fit into my usual workflow, which I miss while at work (Windows XP).

The original reported problem of Windows only reporting 3 GB of RAM is probably related to one of the many problems described in this Microsoft article: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

It doesn't mention Vista specifically, but it does list different physical address space limitation for the various editions of other Windows versions. Among others, XP is mentioned as being limited to 4 GB of physical address space, and I'd guess the cause of that would be its not being licensed for more than that. By similar reasoning, it wouldn't surprise me if most editions of Vista have the same limitation. I guess that's what you get for using evilware.

Fail! The desktop editions of Windows XP and Vista will ignore any RAM found above 4GB (that's the RAM displaced by your video card and other memory mapped devices) even with PAE enabled for compatibility reasons.

PAE from a hardware point of view allows up to 64GB of physical RAM.

check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_vista.

Notice how only the server editions have numbers > 4GB and guess what, that "physical memory" is both RAM and memory mapped devices.

Fail! MSDN Instructions for enabling PAE

OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?

Those OCR algorithms are manually tweaked for a specific CAPTCHA algorithm, in the case of Gmail a tightly spaced letter sequence with spatial distortion. Neural networks have been better than humans in recognizing individual letters for a while (see http://research.microsoft.com/~kumarc/ ); the hardest part is separating the letter glyphs so that the neural network knows where to look, which is the purpose of the clutter in old Hotmail captchas and the tight spacing in both Gmail and recent Hotmail captchas.

With normal 'connected' handwriting, separation is obviously pretty tough. Moreover, the handwriting of many persons cannot be deciphered unambiguously on the basis of letter shapes alone. The reader needs to know the context, which becomes painfully obvious if the handwriting is in a different language. Remember the time when medical prescriptions were handwritten? I would say that reading sloppy handwriting is much harder than deciphering a Captcha. If only a computer could generate sloppy handwriting automatically...

after reading this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254649/ i mean small memory dump (64 kb), minidump... is just the filename windows gives it

my apologies

Ya, I believe that Microsoft knows about this one.

Check out ASIRRA: http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/

It's a better user experience as well - I'd much rather tell the server where all the cats are instead of trying to parse out barely recognizable characters.

I guess I'm one of the few people who uses windbg to do this then?

Try it out, it's amazingly useful for debugging BSODs.

So when are you going to upload your multigigabyte dump file to MS? More over beyond the minimal dumps, Windows won't handle dumps over 2GB by default anyway.

"Complete memory dumps are not available on computers that have 2 or more gigabytes of RAM"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274598/

More information on recommended sizes for Windows page file wrt memory dumps:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254649/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307973/

So when are you going to upload your multigigabyte dump file to MS? More over beyond the minimal dumps, Windows won't handle dumps over 2GB by default anyway.

"Complete memory dumps are not available on computers that have 2 or more gigabytes of RAM"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274598/

More information on recommended sizes for Windows page file wrt memory dumps:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254649/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307973/

So when are you going to upload your multigigabyte dump file to MS? More over beyond the minimal dumps, Windows won't handle dumps over 2GB by default anyway.

"Complete memory dumps are not available on computers that have 2 or more gigabytes of RAM"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/274598/

More information on recommended sizes for Windows page file wrt memory dumps:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/254649/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307973/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197379 never had a problem.

http://www.microsoft.com/interop/principles/osspatentpledge.mspx

Any protocol they opened for developers, you can write OSS for without fear of patent reprisal.

Again, this is what the EU demanded in their ruling. Microsoft must comply or they face fines, and the possibility of not being able to sell software in the EU.

You forgot the link

an HTML version of the Blue Screen Of Death.

Yes, they do have one, here it is

The problem with everything being done in VBA is that it's proprietary and Microsoft are choosing to switch off its "universal" availability in favour of VSTA/VSTO and removed it from the most recent version (on Mac) so that it "cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros". Anti-competitive lock-in to force business to use Windows? Nah, not MS.

The problem with everything being done in VBA is that it's proprietary and Microsoft are choosing to switch off its "universal" availability in favour of VSTA/VSTO and removed it from the most recent version (on Mac) so that it "cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros". Anti-competitive lock-in to force business to use Windows? Nah, not MS.

The problem with everything being done in VBA is that it's proprietary and Microsoft are choosing to switch off its "universal" availability in favour of VSTA/VSTO and removed it from the most recent version (on Mac) so that it "cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros". Anti-competitive lock-in to force business to use Windows? Nah, not MS.

Right, and when the data moved past 1,048,576 rows the whole thing crashed and took the market with it. Little known fact: the .com crash in 2000 was actually caused by exceeding the earlier limit of 65536 rows.

I've put my order in for a G1 and I'll be writing applications for that platform from now on. I spent far too long at the mercy of another iron fisted company to want to go back to that kind of situation.

I've never used an exchange deployment of more than two servers, but isn't that what Edge Transport Servers/Gateways are for?

I mean, I can understand why you'd use fewer exchange servers than you probably should for budgeting reasons or some such, but I'd imagine the federal gov't has more than enough money to implement MS Best Practices.

Even if you were running the best/fastest/greatest/ZOMGLinux mail server out there, if you built it to handle a quota that is getting exceeded, it will fail, given enough excess.

Ruby On Rails has prevented this, by default, for almost a year...

Nice boast, but I'll see your Ruby on Rails for almost a year and raise you a .NET viewstate for five and a half years. Go Microsoft!

I know this story is several days out of date, but as someone who has worked on producing some of these documents, I thought I'd point out that the documents are, in fact, on MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc216517.aspx

(note I didn't _have_ to turn it off for any reason,
you would if you left it on for extended periods :-)

I use Vista at home, it works (even though I had to buy more RAM), and its ok. The control panel applets are all over the place, and the networking dialogs are dumbed down to the point where a command-line is necessary. But the biggest issue for me is explorer and the disk-accessing "features".

Speedboost seems to thrash my disk all the time, as does the defragger (possibly because speedboost is continually reorganising things), and the search indexes when it wants to, not when its supposed to. Opening a file in explorer to view can take a very long time - it might have soemthing to do with its desire to thumbnail everything, but it can be dire.

File copies even with SP1 take a lot longer than they used to. And don't get me started on the WMI corruption on a clean install - I only noticed when I installed SQL server and received a truly gobbledigook error message about compiling some MOF package. Compiling? on an install? Its all truly too complicated to work reliably.

That's the problem, I had similar issues where the scheduler would crash when trying to add an entry. (and have you seen the number of scheduled tasks the OS put in there by default?!)

I think MS is on a downwards slope now, previous OS releases were always installed and upgraded, but not this one. Vista is a turning point for the company.

So are you saying Open Specifications http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc203350.aspx dont count? That link has content on 1.Windows Protocols 2.Microsoft Office Protocols 3.Microsoft Office File Formats 4.SharePoint Products and Technologies Protocols 5.Exchange Server Protocols 6. Microsoft SQL Server Protocols 7.Microsoft Computer Languages

Try http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/Locales.mspx
Also see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/win2k/setup/localsupport.mspx

Lists Thai as one of the locales natively supported by 2000. I'd never heard of the Thai Starter Pack.

Either MS really poorly implemented it as you suggest, or you didn't implement it. I don't know, I wouldn't know Thai from Japanese.

Deskbar, Taskbar toolbar, Panel - call them what you want. Yes Gnome organizes them differently and calls them by different names. I'm not so impressed with adding search capabilities to a panel/toolbar/deskbar as I am with the capability being there. Nobody really even started doing indexed searching until a few years ago because it took too much processer time. As such I don't really give points to Gnome for adding the applet. We've had search capability in Windows since 95 even if they weren't as snappy, and I'm sure Gnome has had this since inception.

Hey I respect your opinion, it's been a fun debate and I realize that you've spent a lot more years on Gnome than I have; but I still see what I would consider core OS functionality - specifically in the areas of accessibility, graphics control, and driver sharing (specifically in the area of sound cards) just coming along in many areas that MS had implemented, crudely or not, as early as 1995.

Try http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/faqs/Locales.mspx
Also see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/win2k/setup/localsupport.mspx

Lists Thai as one of the locales natively supported by 2000. I'd never heard of the Thai Starter Pack.

Either MS really poorly implemented it as you suggest, or you didn't implement it. I don't know, I wouldn't know Thai from Japanese.

Deskbar, Taskbar toolbar, Panel - call them what you want. Yes Gnome organizes them differently and calls them by different names. I'm not so impressed with adding search capabilities to a panel/toolbar/deskbar as I am with the capability being there. Nobody really even started doing indexed searching until a few years ago because it took too much processer time. As such I don't really give points to Gnome for adding the applet. We've had search capability in Windows since 95 even if they weren't as snappy, and I'm sure Gnome has had this since inception.

Hey I respect your opinion, it's been a fun debate and I realize that you've spent a lot more years on Gnome than I have; but I still see what I would consider core OS functionality - specifically in the areas of accessibility, graphics control, and driver sharing (specifically in the area of sound cards) just coming along in many areas that MS had implemented, crudely or not, as early as 1995.

This reminds me of Microsoft's Competition:

http://www.microsoft.com/nz/imaginecup09/about.aspx

In 2009, the Imagine Cup challenges the world's most talented students to "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today."

I find the goal a bit too broad for a challenging competition, there are also a few requirements, some of which I find a bit odd:

• Use of a Mobile device
• Implementation or consumption of a XML Web Service
• .NET Framework 2.0 or later;
• Visual Studio family (Express, Standard, Professional, or Team System) for development

The interop docs *are* on MSDN :)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197979.aspx

Google is your friend...

Shared Source Licensing Programs:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/default.mspx

Yes, it takes some initiative on your part including looking.

The best non-FOSS documentation I have used lately is Oracles.

Example for the 10G starting directory

Aside from the actual WORKING search functionality (which gives you a list in of "books" in which the search term occured with numbers of hits first, so that you can go to the relevant "book" when the search term is something ambiguous like "format" instead a long list of maybe or maybe not relevant links).

I never found the right thing on MSDN unless I stumble upon it via a Google search, Oracle usually gives the Description of a feature, some overview where it is uses and some examples with each feature. So once you are on the HTML page of the particular feature you are interested in you basically can get all the Information from that single page. Take for example a direct comparison between the commands to format a number into a string.

to_char (Oracle) found in about 20 seconds on the web page itself either by browsing by function or searching.

After two minutes I managed to get here in MSDN trying to find the command to format numbers in SQL Server, but haven't found the exact command yet, only an overview about "string functions" but the right one doesn't seem to be in this category.

I even know the command is "format".. something, but I cant browse there directly, since I don't know in what CATEGORY in those open/closable subdirectories they put it in.

The quickly scrollable and searchable HTML indexes of Oracle's online help are much easier to manage.

I actually think the documentation is very good. For example the WSPP documentation is amazing. http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/intellectualproperty/protocols/wspp/wspp.mspx What more do these people want?

Another Universal rule:

Functional Programming >>> {The Rest} >>> Object Oriented Programming

What do you define as "the rest." I'll accept functional programming is this great thing for some reason many people (including me) never adopted. But I think object oriented programming is greater than procedural programming in most cases. C is nice when you need it. Then again C# lets me call a DLL I wrote in C, or lets me turn off garbage collection. They even wrote an OS in it.

I don't think C# s the end all to everything. However, I think .NET was done right in many way. I also think F# is the next step in that "done right" thing. I think .NET is just the herald of something better, probably not from Microsoft. But that successor will also have a better successor.

Like the text input in this image. I just want to select all of the text by pressing ctrl-a. Usually I do this when I want to start over typing in the box without moving my hand to the mouse.

First of all, stating that "Windows has had" something since Win98 doesn't mean that there were third-party applications available for it, or you wouldn't have bothered comparing Gnome to Win 98 with the phrase "It is nice to see more features that Windows had 10 years ago." Gnome also had third-party clients for most of these things years ago. They just weren't part of the standard desktop. You can adjust your score back down to 20-30% again. ;)

You also fail to understand the difference between the Gnome Deskbar and a taskbar. (Gnome doesn't call them taskbars: it has "panels.") The Deskbar is similar to Vista's Instant Search, but does a lot more than desktop search by default. Gnome has also had this for a while. It just added some new features like updating Twitter and using recommended searches from Yahoo!.

Regarding localization, I Googled and provided a Microsoft link stating what their retail languages were. I assumed it was accurate. Based on your and another poster's response, I guess I chose the wrong page and that there are many more, but I stand by my original assertion that Thai is still not supported by MS. Based on their release of the "Thai Starter Pack," which had about seven words translated, I would also guess that the translations they do have are not as complete as you think they are. All I can say is that MS must do a better job of localization there in Europe than they do here in Asia. It really stinks here.

Anyway, I'm pretty much done with this thread, so you can flame away without worry of a rebuttal from me.

Windows XP3 offers retail installs for Chinese Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish [1] (that's eight), while Gnome offers forty-five languages.

Your link is to an announcement for an early release of SP3 for WinXP, and it is often the case for SPs that every supported language is not initially available. But I'm guessing you knew that and were simply being disingenuous, so lest someone take your post at face value or not bother to check your link, here's the List of languages supported in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. Note that this article only lists the languages installed by default. There is support for other languages such as "complex script and right-to-left languages (Including Thai)".

There are plenty of valid criticisms of various editions of MS Windows - no need for this drivel.

- T

Not really when Microsoft are themselves selling Parallels as part of one of their products

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/ProfessionalSubscription.aspx

But, that was fixed ages ago :

Note that the number of required characters changes from 17,145 to 18,770 with the installation of SP1.

(from KB276304)

Those wacky MS KB pages, always good for a laugh... (unless you're actually trying to fix something with them of course).

• 2.1. Stay in Touch
  This is about voice / video and the new IM client in Gnome. Has Windows had integrated AOL or Yahoo! Chat since Win98? No? Does it now? I didn't think so.
• 2.2. Track Your Time Better
  Did Windows 98 have an integrated time-tracker? No?
• 2.3. Ekiga 3.0
  Has Windows had an integrated Voice / Video / Text SIP client since Win98? Hmmm ....
• 2.4. File Management
  Complex Asian characters in Win98? Tabbed file browser? Tab completion in the file browser?
• 2.5. Do More With Deskbar
  Calculator, Google search, Yahoo suggestions, Twitter updates, and indexed search from a key press? Not even to this day.
• 2.6. New Screen Resolution Controls
  Windows has had this one for a while.
• 2.7. New Sound Theme Support
  Windows, annoyingly, has had this one since like Win95. I think it says a lot about Microsoft's priorities.
• 2.8. Better Digital TV
  I'd be really surprised if Win98 had DVB capability.
• 2.9. Extra Pretty
  Desktop backgrounds. Again, Windows has had numerous wallpapers for years, but it says something about what they think is important when they still haven't gotten window management to work correctly.

Two out of nine. 22%. Not quite 95%, eh? I give you a D+.

Let's talk about localization. Windows XP3 offers retail installs for Chinese Simplified, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish [1] (that's eight), while Gnome offers forty-five languages.

Hmmm. And on what grounds would they sue ? Even if you publish completely imaginary 'benchmarks', that would still fall under the 1st amendment (assuming you are in the US).

I dunno, every EULA states you violate their virginity or something by benchmarking.

This is a company that sued Mike Rowe Soft. http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/19/offbeat.mike.rowe.soft.ap/index.html
Why wouldn't they start a lawsuit against me before public opinion changed their minds?

I'm not rich enough to afford a team of lawyers (let alone one lawyer) to defend my reproducible test results, so no, I won't test their EULA against my right to bitch or praise.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/29/microsoft_vista_eula_analysis/
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/02/1751222
http://download.microsoft.com/documents/useterms/Windows%20Vista_Ultimate_English_36d0fe99-75e4-4875-8153-889cf5105718.pdf

Enjoy,

Not only did this ship with XP, as others have noted, but you couldn't remove it.

Well, actually you can, but you have to fiddle with some obscure (and hidden) inf file in order to do so.

As i'm a really nice guy, i found a ms kb about it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/223182

Talk about informative (nudge, nudge)...

"As a result, our approach with Windows 7 is to build off the same core architecture as Windows Vista so the investments you and our partners have made in Windows Vista will continue to pay off with Windows 7. Our goal is to ensure the migration process from Windows Vista to Windows 7 is straightforward." -- Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Corporation
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/letter.mspx

See KB276304

How would Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! feel about this?

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/code/OWA/index.html

MS seems to believe OWA is still there and supports Firefox.