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Apparently they are not.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308259

AutoRuns by Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell is the ultimate tool for finding all of those startup applications and processes.

I don't think there is anything much that gets past AutoRuns.

The only thing is - it many items that are essential to the normal running of Windows and it can be quite hard to work out exactly what is essential and what is not. Give it a try though.

Ever since Ubuntu Edgy much of the low hanging fruit in speeding up the Ubuntu boot has already been taken. Looking at the bootcharts for my system since then shows remarkably little time when the CPU is idle once the base kernel has finished loading. This means that running anything more in parallel simply won't net me anything (in fact scheduler overhead and disk thrashing may in theory make things slower).

For example, there is an improvement in the time it takes for the clock to appear from "Ubuntu Dapper Flight 3 Default kernel" to "Ubuntu Feisty Herd 5 generic kernel". The Ubuntu folks worked hard to try an eliminate sleeps from their initscripts and when a sleep was unavoidable they would run other parts of the startup process in parallel. They also made changes to Xorg to prevent it (re)reading so much stuff on launch. There was also the introduction of the readahead script which tries to arrange for as much of the boot time reading to be done in one big chunk. Throughput is higher when the disk is only reading and can utilise it's readahead. An attempt is also made to try and request files in the order in which they are laid out on disk (to minimise disk seeks which hurt performance). In Feisty a move was made to using dash instead of bash for scripts because it was smaller and executes scripts faster.

The only things that seem to win me any gain over the default Ubuntu Feisty install are turning off initscripts for services I absolutely won't use (e.g. ipv4 autoconfig via avahi) and reducing the number of restricted binary driver modules being probed (I have long noticed that the only benefit that recompiling the kernel gives to boot speed is that you can simply leave out features not on your computer making the initial kernel startup where it probes for things you might not have (like which software RAID is faster) a shade faster). It is also worth noting that Ubuntu starts X quite early and continues loading services afterwards which means the gain from disabling one of these "after X" services (like CUPS) isn't so noticeable (but might mean your desktop actually starts responding to clicks a bit sooner).

Profiling the boot to try and improve the readahead takes a long time to run - the profile run seems to take three times as long as a regular boot. It could be argued that you will never gain back the extra time you waited on the profile run...

I suspect reducing the boot further will start to need more complicated procedures, perhaps reordering modprobe.conf and reducing the amount of needless reading of files. Eventually you end up having to do the same tricks as Windows/OSX - e.g. working out where the fastest part of the disk is and copying every file needed to boot there, bringing up the network cardafter the desktop has started, periodically defraging bits of the disk, prelinking...

With regards to the look of OpenOffice.org Impress presentations, they do tend to look quite bad with the default templates. (Maybe including some good-looking ones would be a nice thing to do for the future.)

However, you can download PowerPoint templates from Microsoft's site or even the program itself if you have it (even templates designed for PowerPoint 2007 if you use the Microsoft Office 2007 file format converter to convert to the older format) and import them into OpenOffice.org, then save them as templates. It's a little more work, but it works, and you get good-looking presentations. Of course, some people think it's icky to use stuff from MS, but it works. :)

One other thing I like about Impress is that you can export your presentation to a variety of formats, including PowerPoint, Flash, and PDF. That last one is the best for me--it even captures your slide transitions and everything. Put Adobe Reader (or FoxIt Reader--it works too) in Full Screen mode and nobody will know the difference. Plus you don't have to worry about having PowerPoint or Impress on your target computer, just a sufficiently recent version of Adobe Reader (version 6.0 worked for me, earlier ones might too). Or to virtually guarantee compatibility, download FoxIt Reader and place the executable on your flash drive or whatever (no need to install)--and then there's even less to worry about, at least if you're on Windows. But if you were thinking about using PowerPoint in the first place, you probably are. :)

I exported my Impress presentation as PDF the other week for a class and it worked great. Nobody knew the difference, although I'm sure some technically inclined people were curious when they saw me starting a PDF reader. (Not that I really needed to, since I'm lucky enough that my school actually includes OpenOffice.org standard on lab computers. But I just couldn't resist.)

With regards to the look of OpenOffice.org Impress presentations, they do tend to look quite bad with the default templates. (Maybe including some good-looking ones would be a nice thing to do for the future.)

However, you can download PowerPoint templates from Microsoft's site or even the program itself if you have it (even templates designed for PowerPoint 2007 if you use the Microsoft Office 2007 file format converter to convert to the older format) and import them into OpenOffice.org, then save them as templates. It's a little more work, but it works, and you get good-looking presentations. Of course, some people think it's icky to use stuff from MS, but it works. :)

One other thing I like about Impress is that you can export your presentation to a variety of formats, including PowerPoint, Flash, and PDF. That last one is the best for me--it even captures your slide transitions and everything. Put Adobe Reader (or FoxIt Reader--it works too) in Full Screen mode and nobody will know the difference. Plus you don't have to worry about having PowerPoint or Impress on your target computer, just a sufficiently recent version of Adobe Reader (version 6.0 worked for me, earlier ones might too). Or to virtually guarantee compatibility, download FoxIt Reader and place the executable on your flash drive or whatever (no need to install)--and then there's even less to worry about, at least if you're on Windows. But if you were thinking about using PowerPoint in the first place, you probably are. :)

I exported my Impress presentation as PDF the other week for a class and it worked great. Nobody knew the difference, although I'm sure some technically inclined people were curious when they saw me starting a PDF reader. (Not that I really needed to, since I'm lucky enough that my school actually includes OpenOffice.org standard on lab computers. But I just couldn't resist.)

At least as far as clip art is concerned, Microsoft's clip art gallery is searchable online.

Or you can use a standalone app to search it and insert clip art into your document.

So learn to use a proper CLI and solve your problem.

Alternatively, popular GUI's (Windows most of all) allow you to control virtually everything with the keyboard.

And for those who really passionately hate the mouse, or can't use it for some other reason, there's something called MouseKeys that you can turn on to move the pointer with the keyboard.

Yeah, well there are patents. And ISO terms.

But compare that to term's of M$ Windows Media Services and accompanying DRM cruft. And as you might have guessed M$ will not give you patent indemnification too.

Thanks to patents, hardly anything can be called "free"...

I don't know if research OSs are an interest area to you, but I have to say that, a language nerd myself, Microsoft Research's Singularity is incredibly interesting, tying together a lot of newer ways of doing things at a lower level than is usually considered. There's a couple of research projects which are also based on language-safety, Coyotos (I think?) also comes to mind.

I have to say, though, more on-topic, that this article proves more than anything that the "major" OSs are all converging now. I honestly don't see major OS changes happening to any of them from here on; this is part of the reason that people don't see a huge change in Vista. There isn't a big change, but there's not a big change in Linux or OS X or whatever, either.

I wonder if it's time to consider these systems "good enough", or if something else needs to be done? I don't know if in practical terms the "better" research OSs will ever see real-world use, which is a real shame, but they might see their chance opening when it becomes apparent that we have pretty much exhausted the possibilities for the existing versions, and people still need a product to sell year-by-year. But this is much more likely to lead to a focus away from the OS and into other areas, rather than the other way around.

If you use Win32, you can use InterlockedIncrement( &counter );

tcpdump (nix), ethereal/wireshark (nix+win), netstat (nix), iptraf (nix), htop (nix), lsof (nix), antivirus
adaware, psybot, process explorer autoruns TCPview RootKitRevealer (windows -- Sysinternals) http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/defa ult.mspx/, etc ...
if your computer isn't supposed to do anything and it's opening connections to ports 6667 (irc), 25 (smtp), 20 & 21 (ftp) then
it would be a good assumption that your pc has been zombified
there are people over here who have more experience in this area and they will comment :D

I don't know much about the techniques underlying Forza 2, but I went over and talked to the guys who worked on Forza 1, and we compared our approaches. At least for the first game, what they are actually using is recorded trajectories on different track segments which are then spliced together at the junctions of segments, so as to create similar-looking behaviours on unseen tracks. The problem here is of course that the new tracks are constrained to being constructed out of the same segments as the driver has already been tested on - there is no generalization. The track designers for Forza simply had to live with this constraint.

We have ourselves gotten player modelling working fine with evolutionary neural networks, which can generalize, but the Forza team didn't consider these techniques reliable and fast enough in time for the release of the original game. Maybe things have changed with Forza 2.

There is some information on the Forza AI on http://research.microsoft.com/mlp/forza/, and our approach to modelling is described in http://julian.togelius.com/Togelius2006Making.pdf.

Note that all this is about modelling behaviour, not about creating new behaviour from scratch; there are some papers on this on my website as well.

Dunno how Simpson Garfinkle feels about Plan 9. But the author of Plan 9 did write the preface to The UNIX Haters Handbook. You can read Dennis Ritchie's remarks here.

When the Commission began its antitrust investigation in 1999 Microsoft held between 35 percent and 40 percent market share. By 2004 it rose to around 60 percent and now it stands at between 70 percent and 75 percent.

Does this ring as a stall tactic to anyone else? Last article that I have seen is that MS owes: 281 million euro's .

Now MS makes about 10 to 12 billion in a quarter. This is something likes a months of pay for Microsoft. How much money have they made from their customers in the EU; while going from 35% to 70-75%? Not a bad payoff for being a monopoly.

Any thoughts?

Win2K is the last one to support POSIX: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;308259

You probably mean CreateProcess(), a Win32 API.

I think what you're really arguing is for work/task loops built up by message passing. These work queues can either be a different threads, or processes, and spend most of their time looping through the queue, instead of being created&destroyed per "user".

On Windows a critical section is a 'lightweight synchronisation object' - ie it is only available within a process so only applies to threads. If you want to synchronise betwen processes you need a kernel object whether that's a semaphore, event or a mutex. I know Solaris has 'local mutexes' which I assume are the same kind of thing.

Locking a critical section is almost a no-op because its in-process only, whereas locking a mutex takes quite a bit of time relatively speaking. (ah numbers: 9800 cpu cycles for a mutex, 112 for a critical section without any contention occurring.)

Locking overhead can introduce very significant overhead, when used obviously. We had a server app that spent more time locking and switching than it did performing useful work! I wouldn't be surprised if more people start coding up threads unnecessarily now we're in the world of multiple cores and find that their apps go slower and become more unreliable.

There was a rumor back in January that MS was going to buy Vivendi games, who own Blizzard, but it was only a rumor. There is no mention of the acquisition on Blizzard's or Vivendi's corporate pages. Multiple articles that reported the acquisition have been deleted from various news outlets. It was in fact a hoax. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Feb0 3/02-03HoaxWebsitePR.mspx

So what is it? YAMIHDE [Yet Another Microsoft In-House Database Engine]?

I could have sworn that I read a few years ago that they were ditching the existing registry engine, and were going with a new engine for Longhorn/Vista.

So what is it? YAMIHDE [Yet Another Microsoft In-House Database Engine]?

I could have sworn that I read a few years ago that they were ditching the existing registry engine, and were going with a new engine for Longhorn/Vista.

The BCD store is implemented as a registry hive, kept in either EFI or \Boot\Bcd. It's not mounted most of the time though; the boot loader mounts it long enough to read it and bcdedit mounts it just long enough to make an edit.

On the topic of one byte corruption of binary databases, what about the filesystem database? How many FSes could break boot with a single corrupted byte, e.g. in a filename record?

Like I said, you can mount any registry hive on a running Windows system, including the %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Boot\Bcd hive. bcdedit.exe does exactly that. A windows-based rescue disc can just as easily mount the hive for editing. It will make editing boot config from a different operating system's rescue disc a lot harder, though. More about bcdedit.exe and the BCD hive

To mount a registry hive manually from regedit, select either HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key or HKEY_USERS and select File->Load Hive. Note that you can also save and restore any key as a hive by selecting "Registry Hive Files" as the file type during export or import. See also reg.exe's load, unload, save and restore functions.

I really think that transactional file support is cool. I try and make sure any software I design works on multiple operating systems though. Now I know code that specifically uses DTS won't work on other operating systems. However, I write in .NET, which means the specifics of how a feature works doesn't matter. For example, I know Mono implements the FileSystemWatcher class using a completely different mechanism than Microsoft does.

Anyway, what I am asking is if anybody knows if the Linux Kernel and/or popular file systems have support for this. How about Mac?

If the AppleTV allows you to install QuickTime plugins, you should be all set for video format support between Perian and Flip4Mac.

The registry is a single root hierarchical database with registry hive files mounted at the second level (below \REGISTRY\MACHINE and \REGISTRY\USER for the computer's config and user config, respectively). The registry engine is implemented in kernel mode as an executive subsystem (inside ntoskrnl.exe), where it is known as the Configuration Manager. Registry hives use a transaction journal (like many filesystems do) to avoid corruption during a power failure or crash. Standard system hives are located in %SYSTEMROOT%\System32\Config and include SAM for local user accounts, SECURITY for various secrets held by the computer, SYSTEM for core system configuration early during boot, and SOFTWARE that stores all other config associated with the computer in the registry. Every user profile has its own registry hive for user-specific configuration. Everything above is still the same in Vista as it was in NT 3.1.

There are two database engines that have been known as Microsoft "Jet", known as Jet Red and Jet Blue. Jet Red is also known as the Access database engine. It is a fairly featureful SQL database. Jet Blue is now officially the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), and has been a system component since Windows 2000, backing WMI data, Active Directory, Exchange, and others. It is an ISAM database and is optimized for large sparse tables and also supports a transaction journal. Both are 100% user-mode and were not a part of the initial release of Windows NT. Microsoft has said that Jet Red is depreciated, and that future versions of the Access database engine will be integrated with Access and not have a public interface. Jet Blue's interface is well documented and will continue to see use for some time to come. Both being user-mode, dependent on Win32 and the wrong type of database (relational vs hierarchical), the Jet engines would not be suitable replacements for the registry.

SQL Server is a high-end SQL database engine. It was rumored that WinFS would use SQL Server Express and that Microsoft eventually plans to move some of the services that use Jet Blue to SQL Server (such as Active Directory). In any case, SQL Server is an even less possible replacement for the registry.

Microsoft has not gotten rid of the Registry in Vista. In fact, the new boot manager uses a registry hive to store boot configuration, replacing the old boot.ini.

WPF has nothing to do with it.

WPF applications are D3D scenes, yes. But they get rendered to flat surfaces (and additionally, there's AFAIK no way to get at the underlying D3D primitves; WPF is D3D accelerated, but all the D3Dness is abstracted away).

GDI applications similarly get rendered (in software, no GDI hardware acceleration with WDDM) to surfaces.

But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm not talking about the stuff within each window (though even if I were, your comment about WPF makes no sense, because most windows are GDI windows, not WPF).

DWM creates a hundred-odd triangles for each window, and uses the aforementioned surfaces to texture each windows. But there's no programmatic access to those triangles or the surfaces or textures. The D3D scene that represents "the desktop" (and all the windows within it) is inaccessible.

Or to turn it on its head: which API call do I make to get a IDirect3DVertexBuffer9 and IDirect3DTexture9 for an arbitrary window on the desktop? If I can get to the D3D scenes, I can get to them, right? How?

references:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b970 17b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/PRI034_WH06.ppt slide 24
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3f e47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05005_WinHEC05 .ppt slides 7, 9
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/04/Aer o/default.aspx

WPF has nothing to do with it.

WPF applications are D3D scenes, yes. But they get rendered to flat surfaces (and additionally, there's AFAIK no way to get at the underlying D3D primitves; WPF is D3D accelerated, but all the D3Dness is abstracted away).

GDI applications similarly get rendered (in software, no GDI hardware acceleration with WDDM) to surfaces.

But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm not talking about the stuff within each window (though even if I were, your comment about WPF makes no sense, because most windows are GDI windows, not WPF).

DWM creates a hundred-odd triangles for each window, and uses the aforementioned surfaces to texture each windows. But there's no programmatic access to those triangles or the surfaces or textures. The D3D scene that represents "the desktop" (and all the windows within it) is inaccessible.

Or to turn it on its head: which API call do I make to get a IDirect3DVertexBuffer9 and IDirect3DTexture9 for an arbitrary window on the desktop? If I can get to the D3D scenes, I can get to them, right? How?

references:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b970 17b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/PRI034_WH06.ppt slide 24
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3f e47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05005_WinHEC05 .ppt slides 7, 9
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/04/Aer o/default.aspx

WPF has nothing to do with it.

WPF applications are D3D scenes, yes. But they get rendered to flat surfaces (and additionally, there's AFAIK no way to get at the underlying D3D primitves; WPF is D3D accelerated, but all the D3Dness is abstracted away).

GDI applications similarly get rendered (in software, no GDI hardware acceleration with WDDM) to surfaces.

But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm not talking about the stuff within each window (though even if I were, your comment about WPF makes no sense, because most windows are GDI windows, not WPF).

DWM creates a hundred-odd triangles for each window, and uses the aforementioned surfaces to texture each windows. But there's no programmatic access to those triangles or the surfaces or textures. The D3D scene that represents "the desktop" (and all the windows within it) is inaccessible.

Or to turn it on its head: which API call do I make to get a IDirect3DVertexBuffer9 and IDirect3DTexture9 for an arbitrary window on the desktop? If I can get to the D3D scenes, I can get to them, right? How?

references:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/9/5b970 17b-e28a-4bae-ba48-174cf47d23cd/PRI034_WH06.ppt slide 24
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/8/f/98f3f e47-dfc3-4e74-92a3-088782200fe7/TWPR05005_WinHEC05 .ppt slides 7, 9
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/04/Aer o/default.aspx

I just noticed today that Russinovich's utilities are available in a single-file download: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Util ities/SysinternalsSuite.mspx

Do you have any experience with FlagShip? Apparently it can translate legacy xBase code to C++.

Since Microsoft is killing FoxPro, everyone using it will need to transition to something else. What is the best way to make the transition?

In the Shared Source Initiative there are licenses which are Just windows related. I am not sure they have stated which SSI license they will be using. Refer this link for all the different SSI licenses.
There is a good article about whether SSI is open source or not at this link. I am not sure if any of the license underneath SSI is classified as open source or not.

Parent is wrong. The Shared Source license linked to there ONLY applies to those with Windows Source Code access. The licenses you really want to look at are http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/li censingbasics/sharedsourcelicenses.mspx - which in two of the three flavours allow modification and redistribution for both commercial and non-commercial use. The Ms-Pl is like a BSD license - essentially "do whatever, we don't care. We also grant you royalty free non-exclusive perpetual rights to each and every patent or copyright covered by this code". The Ms-Cl has some GPL aspects in that if you use any of this type of code, any file it is used in is automatically forced to abide by this license - including the source distribution clause (so you must redistribute your modifications). The Ms-RL basically is "don't. Leave it. Read it all you like but don't even TRY changing it".

There are bizarre secondary permutations of the first two licenses in that you can use the Ms-LCl or Ms-LPl to limit use of the code for Windows based apps only, but I've never seen anything from MS - or anyone else - that uses this license. Windows source code is another kettle of fish with the vicious license parent mentioned.

I have written huge DBMS applications both native 100% FoxPro (and Foxbase before that) and with SQL backends for 20 years. I get blazingly fast performance even with tables with over a billion records and over a TB in size.

The most impressive part of your claim is that you fit a billion rows and a TB of data into a table that only supports 1 billion rows and 2GB of data. Congratulations! I bow to your superior ability to exceed the boundaries of software design.

Unless, of course, you were referring to database (not FoxPro) tables that size, in which case I fail to see how FoxPro's (lack of) performance even enters into the equation. Are you really claiming that FoxPro's database library bindings are faster than other languages'?

According to the bottom of just one function of the KTM reference:

"Requires Ktmw32.dll."

Why would a kernel add-on require a .dll, exactly? Did I miss some Windows fundamental about it's kernel? And if it's not really a result of a kernel enhancement, is this yet another potentially useful technology specificly excluded from earlier versions of Windows entirely for business purposes instead of technological limitations?

--Not only do I not need that "eye candy" I hate it, I want my gui to look serious, not like a toy.--

I have actually seen that the Vista gui can be turned on to look like Windows 2000 just like XP is also capable of.

Reason to upgrade, I can't think of one except Direct X 10.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsv ista/features/details/directx.mspx

sure, the patent covenant that Novell has accepted on behalf of their customers and opensuse developers (do they even have the legal right to make a deal on their behalf?) puts additional restrictions on redistribution and makes distinctions between uses and source of the code(commercial vs. hobbyist) and also grants additional rights to some developers which they cannot pass on, in violation of GPL v2 Section 6 (in my opinion). The question is, do you accept the terms and conditions of the ms community commitment by being a Novell/SUSE user/developer/customer?

That was the first question that came to mind for me, too.

The relevant part of the actual announcement on Microsoft's site reads "To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007."

Shared Source is not Open Source.

That was the first question that came to mind for me, too.

The relevant part of the actual announcement on Microsoft's site reads "To reiterate, today we are announcing that we are not planning on releasing a VFP 10 and will be releasing the completed Sedna work on CodePlex at no charge. The components written as part of Sedna will be placed in the community for further enhancement as part of our shared source initiative. You can expect to see the Sedna code on CodePlex sometime before the end of summer 2007."

Shared Source is not Open Source.

Meanwhile, Microsoft releases a new version of Visual Studio with JScript support and a library that makes AJAX programming dead simple.

Microsoft has zero interest in killing AJAX, JScript, or the web.

The article made a big deal about how Win32 and GDI are obsolete in Vista, and all the cool apps use WPF on the .NET Framework 3, and this makes them vector-based, so they're DPI-independent and magnify cleanly.

I use Vista every day at work, and I have never seen such an app. All the built-in Windows apps look just the same as they did in XP (with the notable exceptions of Minesweeper and Solitaire, which still appear blocky under the Magnifier).

Does Vista even come with any WPF applications?

And is the .NET Framework really the native API for this? Not a great way to encourage existing applications to be ported to WPF, as "managed code" does not play well with compiled languages like C++ (they can't even marshal bool properly, for heaven's sake).

This is one feature I really like. I remember using NVTools to make all my windows in XP 75% transparent so I could "multitask" my screen real estate.

Real operating systems have virtual desktops so you don't have to layer everything 3 windows deep. Vista doesn't even have a power tool to do it.

I was talking about the user's password when I mentioned a "good" key.

Here's a page from Microsoft that does some calculations on how hard it is to brute force a good key:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/ articles/itproviewpoint091004.mspx

and the followup article about using passphrases:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/ articles/itproviewpoint100504.mspx

Not lifetime-of-the-universe lengths of time, but any security-conscious individual can certainly make their hidden password long enough so that they'll be long dead before anyone short of the NSA can crack it.

I was talking about the user's password when I mentioned a "good" key.

Here's a page from Microsoft that does some calculations on how hard it is to brute force a good key:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/ articles/itproviewpoint091004.mspx

and the followup article about using passphrases:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/ articles/itproviewpoint100504.mspx

Not lifetime-of-the-universe lengths of time, but any security-conscious individual can certainly make their hidden password long enough so that they'll be long dead before anyone short of the NSA can crack it.

I'm not sure about Linux projects, but Microsoft regularly (always?) adds an "Acknowledgements" section to the security bulletins. An example: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin /MS07-014.mspx

* Disable UAC immediately. It's MORE annoying than you think. It really does do crap like "You just double clicked this program. Execute it? [ Allow ] [ Cancel ]" That's right, no joking, it's a worthless piece of crap that's more annoying than Clippy! All it does is train people to click "allow" for everything, which is absolutely terrible for security.

Visual FoxPro 9 http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vfoxpro/default.a spx is available (with--ugh--wrappers for .NET), and http://www.hentzenwerke.com/ publishes many books on the Fox.

You're not mistaken. My mistake, thanks.

Transfer files and setting using a network
Start Windows Easy Transfer on the computer from which you wish to migrate settings and files by browsing to the removable media or network drive containing the wizard files, and then double clicking migwiz.exe.
If you have any programs open, you will be prompted to close them. You can opt to save your work in each program, and then close them individually, or you can click Close All in Windows Easy Transfer to close all running programs at once. Click Next.
Determine the transfer method to use. Click Through a network.
Note Both computers must support the transfer method you choose. For example, both computers must be connected to the same network.
Click Connect directly via network to begin the transfer. Alternately, click Save to network location if you want to store the files and settings in a file to be loaded later. If you choose to store the data in a network location, you will be prompted to provide the path.
Click Everything - all user accounts, files, and program settings (recommended) to transfer all files and settings. You can also choose to determine exactly which files should be migrated by clicking either Only my user account, files, and program settings, or Custom.
Review the list of files and settings to be transferred, and then click Start to begin the transfer. Click Customize if you want to add or remove files or settings.

It is easy to Upgrade Windows Vista, Just Follow these Steps: HERE. If your hardware doesn't support that configuration, try This Procedure. Otherwise, Just Switch. http://distrowatch.com/

The only thing that I'm annoyed with is the "Documents and Settings" directory that is allocated on the OS partition, and I really would like to have the option of reallocating that beast to a different partition.