The regedit tool provided by Microsoft allows you to mount and edit registry hives stored in any file. So you can either boot the system from a bootable CD or DVD containing a Windows PE environment and run regedit from there or you can put the drive into another Windows system and run regedit.
Then all you need to do is select File->Load Hive and load the registry hive you want from the drive, make your changes and then select File->Unload Hive. It really isn't much harder then editing a text-based config file once you understand how the registry is organized.
I am able to run realMyst just fine on my desktop which is running 64-bit Vista Ultimate. You should be able to get it to run by setting the executable to run in Windows XP compatibility mode. It should work on Windows 7 as well.
If I remember correctly realMyst used an early version of SecuROM and it was the publisher (UbiSoft) who insisted on using it. The developer - Cyan Worlds released an official patch which removed the SecuROM checks just a few weeks after it was released.
Aren't Xbox 360 consoles sold at a loss and subsidized by game sales? If so then one would think that Microsoft would prefer people to buy a used console rather than a new one if given the choice.
In the past, I have also successfully used a PC running XP Professional to put a wireless adapter in soft-ap mode and bridge it with a wired ethernet connection. I used this to allow my Nintendo DS to connect to the Internet because at the time I did not have a wireless access point and it worked fairly well.
If I remember correctly I had to use a specific set of drivers for the wifi card that supported soft-ap mode and then it was a simple matter of selecting both network connections and telling Windows to bridge them.
I actually have a system using that same motherboard. The BIOS on this board does have a tendency to run the CPU fan at full speed after rebooting. Even when it does work, it does not do a very good job at adjusting fan speeds based on the CPU temperature.
In my experience it is best not to rely on the BIOS control on these boards and instead use a software solution to adjust the fan speeds.
Under Windows you can use the Abit uGuru software to automatically adjust fan speeds based on temperature thresholds you specify which works quite well (at least under XP and Vista, haven't tested it on Windows 7 yet.) You can also use SpeedFan, but I prefer the Abit utility since it appears to react to temperature changes a bit faster.
I haven't run Linux on this board but you may be able to find a Linux application that is also capable of adjusting fan speeds.
PalmOS 5 had/has full support for WiFi. They even have released a WiFi card that can plug into the SD slot of many Palm OS 5 devices. I have personally used a Tungsten T3 with the WiFi card for a number of years and it works quite well, especially for doing stuff over SSH or quickly checking email.
There were also a couple of PalmOS 5 devices that had built-in WiFi notably the Tungsten TX and the LifeDrive.
The Pre functions just fine without a cell signal or WiFI. Apps continue to run just fine because most of them consist of HTML and JavaScript files combined with a SQLite database that is stored locally in Flash memory.
Some apps are more useful than others (The web browser and YouTube applications are not very useful without some form of Internet connection because they don't cache anything) but apps like Calendar, Tasks, Memos, Photos, Music, SplashID, and Classic work just fine.
Even the email app will function without a network connection (you can't send or receive new messages but you can read messages that have already been downloaded.)
It is actually quite easy to adjust the DPI setting in Windows at least on XP and newer (it may work on Windows 2000 as well, don't have a system to test with at the moment.)
In Vista the easiest way to do it is to right-click on an empty space on the desktop, select Personalize and then select Adjust font size (DPI) from the list of Tasks on the left size of the Personalize window.
On XP open the Display Properties dialog box either by right-clicking on an empty space on the desktop and selecting Properties or going to the Control Panel and selecting Display. On the Settings tab click the Advanced button and go to the General tab. The DPI settings should appear and allow you to change it to whatever you want.
Actually Palm has a history of providing unencrypted ROM images for their devices and explaining how to create your own ROM dumps from a device especially to registered developers. There are also numeroustools designed to allow people to customize these ROM images and install them on their devices some of which are supported by the device manufactures.
I doubt releasing the root image for the Pre was unintentional and I highly doubt Palm will do anything to discourage people customizing the root image and adding their own applications.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a series of games not a single game. The first game in the Crystal Chronicles series was released for the Gamecube and was capable of using the Gameboy Advance as a secondary screen and controller. Other games in the series have been released for both the DS and the Wii and are totally different in both story and gameplay.
I believe the original poster was referring to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers which was first announced for the Wii back in 2005. More information can be found here.
Are you running a 32-bit version of Vista or a 64-bit version? If you are running a 32-bit version it is quite likely that only 2.8 - 3 GB of your RAM is actually usable. As a result your system could very well have been running out of RAM.
On 32-bit systems the remaining RAM is unusable because the address space is taken up by devices such as sound cards, video cards, USB controllers, disk controllers, etc.
The 64-bit versions are not subject to the 32-bit addressing limits and can address all 4 GB of RAM.
Ah, but which battery did they replace? The Prius uses a small Lead-acid battery for the gas engine in addition to the big main NiMH battery pack used for the electric motor.
Depending on the environment, the Lead-acid battery can need regular replacement. The NiMH battery should not need replacing unless it was defective.
It is true that the brief description of the update as displayed within Microsoft Update does not mention the plugin. However, to be fair the full release notes for.NET 3.5 do mention that.NET WPF applications are now supported within Firefox. They even mention that a plug-in for Firefox is included.
Most of the USB flash drives that I have encountered that show up as a CDROM drive and a mass storage drive actually have firmware that lies to the OS and report themselves as an external CD-ROM and removable storage device connected via a USB hub. Because Windows thinks it is a real CD-ROM drive it executes the autorun just like it would for a normal CD. A normal USB mass storage device can't do this.
I have never used Vista Home Basic but I know for a fact that Vista Home Premium does indeed include a telnet client. It is not installed by default but it can be installed of of the installation DVD by selecting it in the Turn Windows Features on or off panel.
Vista Home Premium certainly does not require the user to have administrative privileges to watch a DVD (or any other video for that matter.) You were probably using a player that was written with the (bad) assumption that the user would have administrative rights. Older versions of PowerDVD and WinDVD are especially bad about this. Try using something like VLC or Windows Media Player instead.
It is true that Vista Home Basic and Home Premium cannot join a domain but how many home users actually need to have their own personal systems joined to a corporate domain? Especially since systems can still access some domain resources even if they aren't joined to a domain as long as proper credentials are provided. If you really need to be able to join a system to a domain then you should consider using Vista Business or if you need to join a domain and Windows Media Center then perhaps Vista Ultimate.
Hardware acceleration is off because the OS cannot guarantee the protected path, so in Vista, your CPU is used for sound and your expensive HW accelerating sound card is sitting there being a DAC.
You are correct in that hardware acceleration is not supported on most sound cards under Vista but it has nothing to do with DRM or protected media path. Hardware acceleration is not support with many cards because of the additional features in the Vista/Windows 7 audio subsystem including support for custom speaker configurations and per application volume controls (instead of a single global volume control).
When WinSXS decided it would take up 10GB of hard drive space of copies of absolutely every DLL, several times, instead of fixing underlying problems. This IS an issue for those of us who don't have hard drive space flowing out our ears.
You do realize that the WinSXS folder contains mostly links and very few actual files right? If you are measuring the size with Windows Explorer then you are not seeing the true size of the folder. See This article.
If your WinSXS folder is really 10GB then something is seariously wrong with your system.
Windows Fundamentals (based on XP Embedded) is included in included in my Volume License Agreement from Microsoft. Our agreement is fairly basis so I suspect it is included in most (if not all) volume license agreements that include Client operating systems (Vista and XP).
I currently have it installed on several older PCs (late Pentium II's and early Pentium IIIs) with impressive results. It performs much faster than even Windows 2000 on the same hardware. Those PCs are currently being used by students in an open lab.
Things that don't, for example, interface directly with the kernel shouldn't have problems running. If they do, that's a huge architectural flaw that MS should fix instead of trying to get all of their developers (who, one could argue, are their most important customers) to update their code.
Microsoft already does a ton of compatibility testing and Vista has compatibility shims that only there to provide backward compatibility with old applications. Some of these shims can even redirect reads and writes to the proper folders if an application has folder paths hard coded in them. See Application Compatibility and UAC.
I have found that a lot of applications that are broken in Vista are broken precisely because they DO insist on accessing the kernel directly even though they shouldn't. DRM and copy protection schemes (such as starforce or GameGuard) used in games are one of the worst offenders but I have seen simular things with some (poorly written) video capture software.
The tool bar button to move to the parent folder in Explorer has been removed, but not the keyboard navigation controls. All you need to do is press the backspace key to move up the the parent of the folder you are currently looking at.
I can see how this could be annoying to some, but I personally always use the keyboard controls even in XP because I find it to be more efficient than reaching for the mouse.
Actually FFXI does support HD resolutions, just not on the PS2. The PS2 port is limited to 480i, but the XBOX 360 port runs at 720p and the PC port can run at almost any resolution your graphics card can support (I currently run it at 1920x1200 on my 24" LCD at home.)
I believe the problem is not that IE8 is embedded into the underlying OS, instead the reason for the reboot is probably so the IE common browser controls can be updated. Many applications use these controls because it is easier than developing your own HTML rendering engine from scratch. A reboot ensures that these controls can be updated without crashing any applications that may be currently using them. This also avoids the problem of replacing files that are currently in use under Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
The regedit tool provided by Microsoft allows you to mount and edit registry hives stored in any file. So you can either boot the system from a bootable CD or DVD containing a Windows PE environment and run regedit from there or you can put the drive into another Windows system and run regedit.
Then all you need to do is select File->Load Hive and load the registry hive you want from the drive, make your changes and then select File->Unload Hive. It really isn't much harder then editing a text-based config file once you understand how the registry is organized.
I am able to run realMyst just fine on my desktop which is running 64-bit Vista Ultimate. You should be able to get it to run by setting the executable to run in Windows XP compatibility mode. It should work on Windows 7 as well.
If I remember correctly realMyst used an early version of SecuROM and it was the publisher (UbiSoft) who insisted on using it. The developer - Cyan Worlds released an official patch which removed the SecuROM checks just a few weeks after it was released.
Aren't Xbox 360 consoles sold at a loss and subsidized by game sales? If so then one would think that Microsoft would prefer people to buy a used console rather than a new one if given the choice.
In the past, I have also successfully used a PC running XP Professional to put a wireless adapter in soft-ap mode and bridge it with a wired ethernet connection. I used this to allow my Nintendo DS to connect to the Internet because at the time I did not have a wireless access point and it worked fairly well.
If I remember correctly I had to use a specific set of drivers for the wifi card that supported soft-ap mode and then it was a simple matter of selecting both network connections and telling Windows to bridge them.
I actually have a system using that same motherboard. The BIOS on this board does have a tendency to run the CPU fan at full speed after rebooting. Even when it does work, it does not do a very good job at adjusting fan speeds based on the CPU temperature.
In my experience it is best not to rely on the BIOS control on these boards and instead use a software solution to adjust the fan speeds.
Under Windows you can use the Abit uGuru software to automatically adjust fan speeds based on temperature thresholds you specify which works quite well (at least under XP and Vista, haven't tested it on Windows 7 yet.) You can also use SpeedFan, but I prefer the Abit utility since it appears to react to temperature changes a bit faster.
I haven't run Linux on this board but you may be able to find a Linux application that is also capable of adjusting fan speeds.
PalmOS 5 had/has full support for WiFi. They even have released a WiFi card that can plug into the SD slot of many Palm OS 5 devices. I have personally used a Tungsten T3 with the WiFi card for a number of years and it works quite well, especially for doing stuff over SSH or quickly checking email.
There were also a couple of PalmOS 5 devices that had built-in WiFi notably the Tungsten TX and the LifeDrive.
The Pre functions just fine without a cell signal or WiFI. Apps continue to run just fine because most of them consist of HTML and JavaScript files combined with a SQLite database that is stored locally in Flash memory.
Some apps are more useful than others (The web browser and YouTube applications are not very useful without some form of Internet connection because they don't cache anything) but apps like Calendar, Tasks, Memos, Photos, Music, SplashID, and Classic work just fine.
Even the email app will function without a network connection (you can't send or receive new messages but you can read messages that have already been downloaded.)
It is actually quite easy to adjust the DPI setting in Windows at least on XP and newer (it may work on Windows 2000 as well, don't have a system to test with at the moment.)
In Vista the easiest way to do it is to right-click on an empty space on the desktop, select Personalize and then select Adjust font size (DPI) from the list of Tasks on the left size of the Personalize window.
On XP open the Display Properties dialog box either by right-clicking on an empty space on the desktop and selecting Properties or going to the Control Panel and selecting Display. On the Settings tab click the Advanced button and go to the General tab. The DPI settings should appear and allow you to change it to whatever you want.
Actually Palm has a history of providing unencrypted ROM images for their devices and explaining how to create your own ROM dumps from a device especially to registered developers. There are also numerous tools designed to allow people to customize these ROM images and install them on their devices some of which are supported by the device manufactures.
I doubt releasing the root image for the Pre was unintentional and I highly doubt Palm will do anything to discourage people customizing the root image and adding their own applications.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles is a series of games not a single game. The first game in the Crystal Chronicles series was released for the Gamecube and was capable of using the Gameboy Advance as a secondary screen and controller. Other games in the series have been released for both the DS and the Wii and are totally different in both story and gameplay.
I believe the original poster was referring to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers which was first announced for the Wii back in 2005. More information can be found here.
Are you running a 32-bit version of Vista or a 64-bit version? If you are running a 32-bit version it is quite likely that only 2.8 - 3 GB of your RAM is actually usable. As a result your system could very well have been running out of RAM. On 32-bit systems the remaining RAM is unusable because the address space is taken up by devices such as sound cards, video cards, USB controllers, disk controllers, etc. The 64-bit versions are not subject to the 32-bit addressing limits and can address all 4 GB of RAM.
Actually Davee has stated it will be very difficult to run pirated games using this HEN.
Ah, but which battery did they replace? The Prius uses a small Lead-acid battery for the gas engine in addition to the big main NiMH battery pack used for the electric motor.
Depending on the environment, the Lead-acid battery can need regular replacement. The NiMH battery should not need replacing unless it was defective.
You could if Firefox and Opera supported ActiveX but they don't (The Windows Update site requires an ActiveX control to function).
It is true that the brief description of the update as displayed within Microsoft Update does not mention the plugin. However, to be fair the full release notes for .NET 3.5 do mention that .NET WPF applications are now supported within Firefox. They even mention that a plug-in for Firefox is included.
Most of the USB flash drives that I have encountered that show up as a CDROM drive and a mass storage drive actually have firmware that lies to the OS and report themselves as an external CD-ROM and removable storage device connected via a USB hub. Because Windows thinks it is a real CD-ROM drive it executes the autorun just like it would for a normal CD. A normal USB mass storage device can't do this.
I have never used Vista Home Basic but I know for a fact that Vista Home Premium does indeed include a telnet client. It is not installed by default but it can be installed of of the installation DVD by selecting it in the Turn Windows Features on or off panel.
Vista Home Premium certainly does not require the user to have administrative privileges to watch a DVD (or any other video for that matter.) You were probably using a player that was written with the (bad) assumption that the user would have administrative rights. Older versions of PowerDVD and WinDVD are especially bad about this. Try using something like VLC or Windows Media Player instead.
It is true that Vista Home Basic and Home Premium cannot join a domain but how many home users actually need to have their own personal systems joined to a corporate domain? Especially since systems can still access some domain resources even if they aren't joined to a domain as long as proper credentials are provided. If you really need to be able to join a system to a domain then you should consider using Vista Business or if you need to join a domain and Windows Media Center then perhaps Vista Ultimate.
You are correct in that hardware acceleration is not supported on most sound cards under Vista but it has nothing to do with DRM or protected media path. Hardware acceleration is not support with many cards because of the additional features in the Vista/Windows 7 audio subsystem including support for custom speaker configurations and per application volume controls (instead of a single global volume control).
You do realize that the WinSXS folder contains mostly links and very few actual files right? If you are measuring the size with Windows Explorer then you are not seeing the true size of the folder. See This article.
If your WinSXS folder is really 10GB then something is seariously wrong with your system.
Windows Fundamentals (based on XP Embedded) is included in included in my Volume License Agreement from Microsoft. Our agreement is fairly basis so I suspect it is included in most (if not all) volume license agreements that include Client operating systems (Vista and XP).
I currently have it installed on several older PCs (late Pentium II's and early Pentium IIIs) with impressive results. It performs much faster than even Windows 2000 on the same hardware. Those PCs are currently being used by students in an open lab.
Microsoft already does a ton of compatibility testing and Vista has compatibility shims that only there to provide backward compatibility with old applications. Some of these shims can even redirect reads and writes to the proper folders if an application has folder paths hard coded in them. See Application Compatibility and UAC.
I have found that a lot of applications that are broken in Vista are broken precisely because they DO insist on accessing the kernel directly even though they shouldn't. DRM and copy protection schemes (such as starforce or GameGuard) used in games are one of the worst offenders but I have seen simular things with some (poorly written) video capture software.
The tool bar button to move to the parent folder in Explorer has been removed, but not the keyboard navigation controls. All you need to do is press the backspace key to move up the the parent of the folder you are currently looking at.
I can see how this could be annoying to some, but I personally always use the keyboard controls even in XP because I find it to be more efficient than reaching for the mouse.
Actually FFXI does support HD resolutions, just not on the PS2. The PS2 port is limited to 480i, but the XBOX 360 port runs at 720p and the PC port can run at almost any resolution your graphics card can support (I currently run it at 1920x1200 on my 24" LCD at home.)
I believe the problem is not that IE8 is embedded into the underlying OS, instead the reason for the reboot is probably so the IE common browser controls can be updated. Many applications use these controls because it is easier than developing your own HTML rendering engine from scratch. A reboot ensures that these controls can be updated without crashing any applications that may be currently using them. This also avoids the problem of replacing files that are currently in use under Windows.