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Don't remember if XP Home enforces seperate directories

It does but file permissions options are normally hidden.

Also, pr0n belongs in a separate account with an encrypted $home directory on external harddrives encased in a printer which, when not in use, goes into an airtight box buried in a hole under the waterfall in the backyard. Shit! now I have to find a new hiding place.

Try to run something that uses 100% CPU and then try to do anything else while that happens. What a great scheduler...

Works fine here. In basic concept, Windows' scheduler (priority values) isn't so different from the Linux scheduler (nice values). Obviously any system starts to bog when it has a high Load Average (Linux) or CPU Queue Length (Windows).

Also, try to fill up your RAM. Kind of hard, isn't it? Windows doesn't seem to think you have as much RAM as you do and starts to swap far too early to be considered useful. This is why people complain about Firefox using $x amount of RAM; Windows starts to swap way too early and causes slowdowns all around.

This comment shows an almost total lack of understanding of the Windows memory model. See any of the Inside Windows or Windows Internals books by Russinovich and Solomon for definitive reference; for a shorter slam-bang course, have a look at this Understanding Virtual Memory article. Pay close attention to the concept of the backing store. I took a quick look at an XP system with 2GB of RAM: 92% of memory in use. And a Vista system with 1GB RAM: 100% memory in use.

Try to delete a file that's in use (something you can do in any Unix-like system). File in use? Whoops, can't do that.

Agreed; this sucks. You can mitigate somewhat with utilities like MoveFile or Process Explorer, but again, I agree. Tracking down the process that locked your file, or scheduling a reboot for the rename or delete operation, is a little too baroque for my taste!

Also, Windows has jack shit support for more filesystems than their own FAT and NTFS families (both of which get fragmented; modern filesystems prevent that on the fly). Sure, you can get more support via plugins (I believe there are two different ways to make a filesystem plugin for Windows: kernel and shell), but that isn't as reliable as having native support for them.

You've noted that plugins exist. Which is how most new filesystem support for Linux originally evolved - either you had to manually compile it into the kernel (until Linus decided to just do that for you) or run a FUSE FS. MS doesn't build {otherFS} support into any Windows 'distro', but that's the only step missing. If you want {otherFS} support in Windows, you find or write it, then install that to your system. With IFS builtin, this can be just as reliable as native. In fact, NTFS/FAT are loaded via IFS. So if your {otherFS} via IFS is less reliable, that's on the {otherFS} coders, not MS.

Please note that Bootvis.exe is not a tool that will improve boot/resume performance for end users. Contrary to some published reports, Bootvis.exe cannot reduce or alter a system's boot or resume performance. The boot optimization routines invoked by Bootvis.exe are built into Windows XP. These routines run automatically at pre-determined times as part of the normal operation of the operating system.

If you are an end-user seeking to resolve issues for boot/resume performance on your PC, we recommend that you contact the vendor from whom you purchased the PC. For information from Microsoft on specific issues, you can search Knowledge Base for Windows XP product issues related to "resume time." Knowledge Base is a free information service available at: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=fh;%5Bln%5D;kbh owto

You can also post questions to the Microsoft Windows XP Newsgroups at: http://www.microsoft.com/communities

If you are a software developer or system designer seeking assistance for using Bootvis.exe in your development efforts, please work with your usual Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) contacts for developer support. To get developer support if you do not already have a contact, please see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/support/

The Bootvis.exe tool is no longer available from this site.

Read this before installing:
http://www.tweakhound.com/xp/security/page_1.htm
Note that the average survival time for a fresh, unpatched, Windows installation is under 10 minutes, which is less than it takes to patch it via Windows Update. And you can't download the patches from MacOSX before starting the install, you can only patch from the already installed (and activated) system. So you need an external firewall to protect you during the initial Windows Update. (Not a bad idea to have one, anyway.)

Dual booting is a software solution wherein two or more operating systems available for booting a computer. The selection is made early in the systems bootup by having the user choose from options presented by GRUB, Lilo, XOSL, BootMagic, or a host of other SOFTWARE solutions.
What the OP was looking for was a hardware solution to the problem. With a purely hardware solution, there is no danger of one operating system stepping on another. Indeed, neither operating system would be able to see the partitions of the other.
Such a hardware solution exists today: http://www.tweakhound.com/reviews/drives/trios2/
-Briber

SP2 has some important security enhancements. That said, it's not secure by default. To improve the security quite a bit, take a look here;

1. Securing Windows XP

The guide has lots of practical advice and is almost complete (I could add 2-3 more pages). I'd consider it a minimum base configuration for all Windows XP systems out there -- even helps quite a bit with NT-style pre-XP versions of Windows.

(If you don't need it, consider passing it along to those who do.)

Add a good external audit tool such as Nessus to the list, and XP becomes pretty darn secure.

Keep in mind that unless you automate these steps for larger installations, each machine will take about 2 hours to secure and bring up what is common under different flavors of *nix. Consider that by not doing these steps you could get exploited and spend 2+ hours cleaning up and recovering -- if at all possible!

Actually XP Lite is a different product, although that would have been a good name. Or maybe XP Trial or XP-SX.

Some of the things covered here are correct. Ping times suck (800-1000ms), upload sucks, downloads rock. BUT, there is FAP More info can be found at the Broadband Reports Sat. Forum and a guide for tweaking your network is at tweakhound An example of a statstics someone is getting today, 2004-01-26 07:15:03 EST: 1726 / 32 Your download speed : 1726359 bps, or 1726 kbps. A 210.7 KB/sec transfer rate. Your upload speed : 32325 bps, or 32 kbps. Your upstream result was very slow! .. not good Seems like broadband .. above the 1mbit barrier!

Screenshot.

My god. That's some terrible shit right there.
It's a snapshot of eighties cheesy metal.

And what is that Metallica doing there?

"Two of these things are not like the other...la la la la laaaa."

Duval was interviewed today at Tweakhound.com about this new release and other MandrakeSoft projects:
http://www.tweakhound.com/mdk9/articles/mdk9_1inte rview.htm


What do you see as Mandrake's advantage over other Linux distributions?

Firstly Mandrake is certainly one of the most innovative Linux distribution. It also offers unique features such as supermount or the dynamic-device desktop. The hardware support is also one of the best available on the Linux distribution market so far. Internationalization is also a key-point because only 40% of our users speak English.

Worth a read!

ROTFL Mac Rant ... I understand you people are one mass inferiority complex but despite your whining insistence to the contrary, you are not more knowledgeable about computers than PC users. Some of you obviously don't even know what a (wink) is. In fact I would say that most are to scared or lazy to try XP or Linux. Why is it most of you have started your letters with, "I have been using computers for X numbers of years" like that makes you an expert? I know a number of people that can run circles around you and I on a computer that are under 16 years old....

Click here.