System Restore saves incremental snapshots of the system files to subdirectories in the SystemVolumeInformation folder on your hard disk. It doesn't do the whole drive, and usually has a limited number of snapshots which you can use. Most of these time machine style progtams take snapshots of the entire drive and back it up to a separate partition or drive. They usually give you more control over what can be restored and what times you can restore from. Usually you can also run restores by booting a CD or from another partition.
Under Windows XP, System Restore also depends on you being able to boot the operating system to run. If you can't at least get into Safe Mode, you can't use it at all (except to manually pull files from the snapshot directories in recovery console). Vista and Windows 7 fix this so you can run it when booting from the Windows install disc.
But I agree with you, in his case System Restore probably would have fixed the issue. If he was running Vista he could also run a Startup Repair from the Windows disc and it would most likely have fixed the problem as well.
Why is it that we could run Microsoft Word on such low specs back then (pre-1995), but not today? Why have programs grown so bloated.
Because back then hardware was much more costly and people didn't upgrade it as much. Even a megabyte or two of RAM was an expensive purchase and virtual memory couldn't be used as easily either because disk space was limited too. Software vendors would have to make their products work on as wide a range of systems as possible or else people just wouldn't buy them. Now that hardware is much cheaper it's not as big a deal for someone to go and buy a new piece of hardware or even a whole new computer just to run a piece of sotware.
Granny is going to be equally at home on any OS. This is especially true if she's just using the machine as a web terminal.
The problem is that people don't who use a computer for web browser often do more than just use the web browser. They also check e-mail. They probably save and organize their files. They probably edit some documents and do printing. There's probably some games on there they play.
They probably have some sort of workflow figured out for performing most of their computer tasks. Old people are set in their ways and don't like to change things that are working well for them. Granny knows when she's seeing a different "screen", the smallest things that you or I would never notice will totally be a dealbreaker for them.
Yes... the only question is... Why didn't Microsoft disable running DOS apps by default?
I think Microsoft wasn't concerned because DOS applications are all contained in a virtual machine. The hardware is emulated by the VDM or VXD's. If anything goes wrong NTVDM.EXE terminates like any other user process. Ideally it should be as safe to run and I'm sure Microsoft wanted to make running legacy DOS apps as seamless as possible to the end user.
One more reason not to keep your files in "My Documents". That part is easily guessed; "2009 Income Tax Returns" would be easy to guess as well.
It is sometimes better when your files are stored in a standard location like the documents folder. It's so frusterating when you attempt to backup or transfer someone's documents and they're not in the documents folder. A lot of tools (like Windows Search) also assume that's where your documents will be. XP System Restore treats almost anything outside of the documents folder as fair game and might even replace them from a snapshot when you use a restore point.
Guessing the contents of the documents folder is not as easy as you think. Everyone has their own organization and naming scheme.
Does XP have a protected mode? That's the version of Windows most people use IINM. Is this a ploy to get people to upgrade from XP?
It's not a ploy to force upgrade, it is simply a limitation of XP's decade old design. Implementing Protected Mode in XP would require massive changes to the operating system. Not only would they have to implement core things like Mandatory Integrity Control and User Interface Privilege Isolation, but they would have to update all of the system libraries and applications to support the new security model. Even if they did do it all, there's no guarantee that they can just bolt it over all of the existing XP installations without problems.
Has yet to decide whether to repair it? Hmmm... Ok, they're trying to decide when to. How about doing what every other browser company does and give us the patch NOW?
There are no attacks in the wild right now. Once the patch is released, people will reverse engineer it and create attacks. Out of cycle also creates headaches for enterprise because it is unplanned and they will have to test and deploy it separately.
A major difference is that IE is integrated deeper with the operating system, which means that flaws in IE can go deeper and have more serious effects
Internet Explorer is just an application and a set of libraries. They are included in the OS and reused in many places, but they cannot do more than any other user application. If iexplore.exe crashes it doesn't mean it will affect explorer.exe just because they both use mshtml.dll.
But the core problem lies in the fact that applications aren't normally started in an isolated sandbox with controlled access to the surroundings but with the access of the logged in user. So an user with full privileges will always get all apps having full privileges too, which they normally doesn't need.
Vista and newer Windows versions implement application integrity levels which run applications in a lower privilege level than the logged in user. When a user runs Internet Explorer (with Protected Mode) it actually runs under a very low integrity level which does not allow writing to user files. It is restricted to writing to special versions of folders like Cookies and Favorites, and must use broker processes to do anything that requires elevated access.
In the corporate environment a surprising numer of internal web based applications are dependent on IE. Fixing the software may require buying new versions and licenses, or even having to hire developers. Many departments will drag out the life of software as long as they possibly can before they have to spend money. Since the web applications are only used internally (and accessed only by their workstations), they can get away with having IT keep the older software on their images (for free).
For example, one of the companies I did contract work for just finished fixing some of their internal applications so that they no longer require the Microsoft VM to run properly. For them, it was much easier to keep the MSJVM installed on all of their workstations than to find and remove the J++ specific code in their web apps. The MSJVM has been depreciated for over a decade, but if Microsoft hadn't ended MSJVM support in June, they probably would have left it all alone.
Even worse, those kinds of applications are probably the ones you need the most!
I also first learned DirectX through Visual Basic.
The SDK provided a set of type libraries which made it much easier to work with the DirectX API under the VB IDE. (There is an OpenGL TypeLib for VB now). The documentation was also really good and even included Visual Basic specific examples.
As much as all the posters here complain about DirectX 6 (and Visual Basic) being inferior, it made it quite easy to jump in and start using DirectX as a novice programmer. That's the kind of thing that probably helped DirectX overtake OpenGL in popularity.
The one button mouse was a great design...under the MacOS contextual menus are not as important as in Windows. You rarely need them. Everything you need to do is usually located under the menu bar. Before the Contextual Menu Extension was added to the OS, contextual menus were opened in most apps by holding the mouse button down on an item for a few seconds. Under modern OS versions you simply hold down the CONTROL key and click. The CONTROL key on Mac keyboards is larger and most seasoned Mac users are very efficient with the CONTROL-click combo. The second button was never really an issue.
At one point I had to use a 1 button apple optical mouse on my Windows machine and that was very frusterating! You don't even notice how often you use contextual menus for in Windows until you can't right click! The context menu key under Windows brings up the menu for the control which has focus, not the item underneath the mouse pointer (like the CONTROL key does in MacOS). That means you need to use TAB to highlight the control before you can use button on the keyboard to open it's menu. Trivial operations like right clicking a group of taskbar icons to close them or bring a window to the foreground becomes incredibly tedious.
Another issue is that people to this day have trouble navigating just two buttons on Windows. When apple introduced their system any extra complexity would have been chaos!
The IE guys are going to have to fix any problems in how it plays nice with Windows anyway, and if the development process is so broken that they can't even keep O/S-breaking regressions out of the builds, there's a problem.
The problem is that IE is tightly coupled with several other Windows components. This means it can break many other apps which can depend on it, or also can break itself if it depends on something which is not available.
For example, when IE7 came out people were extracting the installer package and installing the individual components inside to bypass the WGA check. If they didn't install the XMLLite component before the IE application installation, it would break several applications including Explorer. It could be fixed if the user booted to Safe Mode and installed the XMLLite package or DLL afterwards, but many users probably didn't know that.
This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft wants to avoid...people breaking the system because they don't have the proper dependencies installed or some other factor with their configuration. It's much easier to roll it all together into a release canidate where they can be sure it includes everything it needs.
I can give you a list of things it doesn't have, and likely never will, that other messengers do. Towards the top of the list is interoperability.
Windows Live Messenger can interoperate with people who use Yahoo! Messenger.
Can Windows Live do either crypto or history at all?
Messenger has had the option to store conversation history since at least version 7. It stores them in XML format in the folder where Messenger saves your downloads.
As for crypto, I remember the option in one of the betas of Live Messenger that I had, but I cannot remember if the option is available anymore on the current versions. IIRC there are also third party plugins for messenger which will will do crypto.
How do they make a profit on Windows Live Messenger? I'm curious what the business model there is.
On the mac you can hold down the control key or right click to get a contextual menu. Try it, you might like it.
I think what the parent is talking about are accelerators. Menu captions in Windows can include an an ampersand which indicates the accelerator key to be used. The letters appears with an underline underneath them (under XP and higher you may need to press ALT first to display the menu accelerators depending on the user settings). They be accessed when ALT & accelerator key is pressed.
So, for example to display the File menu's conetent, you can press ALT & F and then to select the "New" option once the File menu is open, you can then press ALT & N.
In classic MacOS there was a tool provided by Connectix (perhaps Speed Doubler?) which provided this functionality, but I have not seen it duplicated on OS X.
Any OS with a paltry 60% of the server market (look for it, its in there).
From the article:
"Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it.... We have some work to do."
I just don't think that statistic is accurate...
So every server is running either Linux or Windows? No one uses a variant of UNIX or BSD on their servers? They don't run anything else but Linux or Windows? Seriously??
Very few of those do so _automatically_. For almost all such systems, you have to manually select password protected screen locking.
Most of the large companies I've worked with push this option as part of Group Policy to all their machines, and disable the ability to turn it off or change the timeout period.
According to the wikipedia entry for Windows services, a Windows service is essentially the same thing as a daemon is on *NIX machines. Daemons are not device drivers -- they're user space programs.
Try and look through HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services in the registry and see what's listed under there. You'll find plenty of entries which reference.sys files in their ImagePath. services.msc only lets you configure a small subset of the items in the registry key above, which are equivellent to *NIX daemons. Under older NT you had a Device control panel which let you work with the devices just like services, this was replaced by Device Manager in newer Windows. If you use a tool like ServiWin you can see all of the items.
Well, guess what? Nothing happens. It is because of the kernel/driver model. OS X doesn't give a heck if the device is not plugged in, it just caches the symbols/plist files coming with the driver to a file. So, if you have a Eye TV driver but you don't have Eye TV, that extension will sit there, forever, ignored by the OS _until_ you plug the device having same USB signature. I think you were expecting some stuff outside/System/Extensions , some registry like files, some hidden files... No man, it is just.kext and HFS+ "bundle bit" magic with clever use of directory watching. I think you were expecting some stuff outside/System/Extensions , some registry like files, some hidden files... No man, it is just.kext and HFS+ "bundle bit" magic with clever use of directory watching.
This is exactly what Windows does too. The SYS file will sit in %WinDir%\system32\drivers and will be dynamically loaded when the device is plugged in. If you never plug the device in again it will never load the device driver again and the SYS file will just sit there too.
I have also installed some webcam and graphic adapter drivers in OS X which do install extra crap besides the KEXT. Every time you reboot OS X their startup application launches and brings up error dialogs or can even crash altogether when the device is not present. OS X is not immune to crappy drivers packages.
Also, when Lotus Notes crashes (which we know it *never* does) I don't have to restart my computer to coax it into working again.
To get past the "error opening window" after a crash, open Task Manager and end ntaskldr.exe and ntmulti.exe. There is also the KillNotes tool which can kill off all the processes that use the Notes DLL automatically.
Updated signature files for the Microsoft Anti-Virus programs for MS-DOS and Windows are available from the Symantec/Central Point BBS or the Symantec/Central Point forum on CompuServe. The updated signature list for MS-DOS Anti-Virus is called DOSAV.EXE, dated 9/27/95. The updated signature list for Windows Anti-Virus is called WINAV.EXE, dated 8/31/95.
The Symantec/Central Point BBS number is (541) 984-5366.
To reach the Symantec/Central Point forum on CompuServe, type GO SYMDOS or SYMWIN at any CompuServe prompt.
Could you clarify this a bit? You could boot Win95 to the DOS 7 prompt, type win and get into Windows, and then exit Windows - and be dumped to a command prompt.
Win9x booted real mode DOS initially and then loaded KRNL386.EXE to run full 32-bit protected mode Windows (similar to XP where NTLDR loads initially and sets up the basic environment before passing control to NTOSKRNL.EXE). Once loaded into protected mode the real mode DOS environment is essentially discarded. A really good Technet doc describing how it works can be found here.
"Yeah but you needed to run this and that before installing it," my roommate said.
He was probably talking about smartdrv.exe, which is the DOS disk cache driver. It is not included by default on the Windows 9x made DOS boot disks and can cause the initial file copy process to take hours instead of minutes when not installed.
You'd install IE4 on your Windows 95 box, and it'd rape your system with active desktop.
In the IE4 install wizard there is an option (with pictures) where you can choose to install Active Desktop or not. In fact that IE installer was the only way to get Active Desktop on Win95, other versions of the IE installer would not install it.
If Notepad were not bundled with Windows OEMs would be out there right now picking a text editor to include with the computers they ship. Pretty much all of them are better than Notepad and suddenly there would be a point of competition for computer vendors with consumers giving their money to whatever company gives them the best experience.
If OEMs have the freedom to choose which Notepad to ship with Windows they'll pick the one that offers them the best deal. Whatever the consumer ends up with will be added to the list of crapware we already have to uninstall every time you buy a new Dell or other OEM system. I'd rather have a less functional bundled MS notepad by default than some other crapware app that paid the OEM to distribute it.
was excited to try IE8. About 20 minutes after install and use I wasn't excited anymore. When I open a new tab my whole system slows down until its finished loading. I haven't looked at the CPU usage but i'd assume its pegging it for the render engine. Just a thought.
It's most likely an addon which is causing your issue. You can run IE with no addons under Accessories->System Tools and confirm if that is the cause.
IE 8 handles each tab esentially as a sepatate IE process and some addons have real problems with it. IE addons for antivirus/antispyware especially - I think SpyBot's IE protection even had problems.
Slashdot Mirror
System Restore saves incremental snapshots of the system files to subdirectories in the SystemVolumeInformation folder on your hard disk. It doesn't do the whole drive, and usually has a limited number of snapshots which you can use. Most of these time machine style progtams take snapshots of the entire drive and back it up to a separate partition or drive. They usually give you more control over what can be restored and what times you can restore from. Usually you can also run restores by booting a CD or from another partition.
Under Windows XP, System Restore also depends on you being able to boot the operating system to run. If you can't at least get into Safe Mode, you can't use it at all (except to manually pull files from the snapshot directories in recovery console). Vista and Windows 7 fix this so you can run it when booting from the Windows install disc.
But I agree with you, in his case System Restore probably would have fixed the issue. If he was running Vista he could also run a Startup Repair from the Windows disc and it would most likely have fixed the problem as well.
Because back then hardware was much more costly and people didn't upgrade it as much. Even a megabyte or two of RAM was an expensive purchase and virtual memory couldn't be used as easily either because disk space was limited too. Software vendors would have to make their products work on as wide a range of systems as possible or else people just wouldn't buy them. Now that hardware is much cheaper it's not as big a deal for someone to go and buy a new piece of hardware or even a whole new computer just to run a piece of sotware.
The problem is that people don't who use a computer for web browser often do more than just use the web browser. They also check e-mail. They probably save and organize their files. They probably edit some documents and do printing. There's probably some games on there they play.
They probably have some sort of workflow figured out for performing most of their computer tasks. Old people are set in their ways and don't like to change things that are working well for them. Granny knows when she's seeing a different "screen", the smallest things that you or I would never notice will totally be a dealbreaker for them.
I think Microsoft wasn't concerned because DOS applications are all contained in a virtual machine. The hardware is emulated by the VDM or VXD's. If anything goes wrong NTVDM.EXE terminates like any other user process. Ideally it should be as safe to run and I'm sure Microsoft wanted to make running legacy DOS apps as seamless as possible to the end user.
DooM Legacy is a build of the Doom engine for Windows which adds updated features like TCP/IP network play.
It is sometimes better when your files are stored in a standard location like the documents folder. It's so frusterating when you attempt to backup or transfer someone's documents and they're not in the documents folder. A lot of tools (like Windows Search) also assume that's where your documents will be. XP System Restore treats almost anything outside of the documents folder as fair game and might even replace them from a snapshot when you use a restore point.
Guessing the contents of the documents folder is not as easy as you think. Everyone has their own organization and naming scheme.
It's not a ploy to force upgrade, it is simply a limitation of XP's decade old design. Implementing Protected Mode in XP would require massive changes to the operating system. Not only would they have to implement core things like Mandatory Integrity Control and User Interface Privilege Isolation, but they would have to update all of the system libraries and applications to support the new security model. Even if they did do it all, there's no guarantee that they can just bolt it over all of the existing XP installations without problems.
There are no attacks in the wild right now. Once the patch is released, people will reverse engineer it and create attacks. Out of cycle also creates headaches for enterprise because it is unplanned and they will have to test and deploy it separately.
Internet Explorer is just an application and a set of libraries. They are included in the OS and reused in many places, but they cannot do more than any other user application. If iexplore.exe crashes it doesn't mean it will affect explorer.exe just because they both use mshtml.dll.
Vista and newer Windows versions implement application integrity levels which run applications in a lower privilege level than the logged in user. When a user runs Internet Explorer (with Protected Mode) it actually runs under a very low integrity level which does not allow writing to user files. It is restricted to writing to special versions of folders like Cookies and Favorites, and must use broker processes to do anything that requires elevated access.
In the corporate environment a surprising numer of internal web based applications are dependent on IE. Fixing the software may require buying new versions and licenses, or even having to hire developers. Many departments will drag out the life of software as long as they possibly can before they have to spend money. Since the web applications are only used internally (and accessed only by their workstations), they can get away with having IT keep the older software on their images (for free).
For example, one of the companies I did contract work for just finished fixing some of their internal applications so that they no longer require the Microsoft VM to run properly. For them, it was much easier to keep the MSJVM installed on all of their workstations than to find and remove the J++ specific code in their web apps. The MSJVM has been depreciated for over a decade, but if Microsoft hadn't ended MSJVM support in June, they probably would have left it all alone.
Even worse, those kinds of applications are probably the ones you need the most!
I also first learned DirectX through Visual Basic.
The SDK provided a set of type libraries which made it much easier to work with the DirectX API under the VB IDE. (There is an OpenGL TypeLib for VB now). The documentation was also really good and even included Visual Basic specific examples.
As much as all the posters here complain about DirectX 6 (and Visual Basic) being inferior, it made it quite easy to jump in and start using DirectX as a novice programmer. That's the kind of thing that probably helped DirectX overtake OpenGL in popularity.
The one button mouse was a great design...under the MacOS contextual menus are not as important as in Windows. You rarely need them. Everything you need to do is usually located under the menu bar. Before the Contextual Menu Extension was added to the OS, contextual menus were opened in most apps by holding the mouse button down on an item for a few seconds. Under modern OS versions you simply hold down the CONTROL key and click. The CONTROL key on Mac keyboards is larger and most seasoned Mac users are very efficient with the CONTROL-click combo. The second button was never really an issue.
At one point I had to use a 1 button apple optical mouse on my Windows machine and that was very frusterating! You don't even notice how often you use contextual menus for in Windows until you can't right click! The context menu key under Windows brings up the menu for the control which has focus, not the item underneath the mouse pointer (like the CONTROL key does in MacOS). That means you need to use TAB to highlight the control before you can use button on the keyboard to open it's menu. Trivial operations like right clicking a group of taskbar icons to close them or bring a window to the foreground becomes incredibly tedious.
Another issue is that people to this day have trouble navigating just two buttons on Windows. When apple introduced their system any extra complexity would have been chaos!
The IE guys are going to have to fix any problems in how it plays nice with Windows anyway, and if the development process is so broken that they can't even keep O/S-breaking regressions out of the builds, there's a problem.
The problem is that IE is tightly coupled with several other Windows components. This means it can break many other apps which can depend on it, or also can break itself if it depends on something which is not available.
For example, when IE7 came out people were extracting the installer package and installing the individual components inside to bypass the WGA check. If they didn't install the XMLLite component before the IE application installation, it would break several applications including Explorer. It could be fixed if the user booted to Safe Mode and installed the XMLLite package or DLL afterwards, but many users probably didn't know that.
This is exactly the kind of thing Microsoft wants to avoid...people breaking the system because they don't have the proper dependencies installed or some other factor with their configuration. It's much easier to roll it all together into a release canidate where they can be sure it includes everything it needs.
I can give you a list of things it doesn't have, and likely never will, that other messengers do. Towards the top of the list is interoperability.
Windows Live Messenger can interoperate with people who use Yahoo! Messenger.
Can Windows Live do either crypto or history at all?
Messenger has had the option to store conversation history since at least version 7. It stores them in XML format in the folder where Messenger saves your downloads.
As for crypto, I remember the option in one of the betas of Live Messenger that I had, but I cannot remember if the option is available anymore on the current versions. IIRC there are also third party plugins for messenger which will will do crypto.
How do they make a profit on Windows Live Messenger? I'm curious what the business model there is.
The bottom of Live Messenger displays ads.
On the mac you can hold down the control key or right click to get a contextual menu. Try it, you might like it.
I think what the parent is talking about are accelerators. Menu captions in Windows can include an an ampersand which indicates the accelerator key to be used. The letters appears with an underline underneath them (under XP and higher you may need to press ALT first to display the menu accelerators depending on the user settings). They be accessed when ALT & accelerator key is pressed.
So, for example to display the File menu's conetent, you can press ALT & F and then to select the "New" option once the File menu is open, you can then press ALT & N.
In classic MacOS there was a tool provided by Connectix (perhaps Speed Doubler?) which provided this functionality, but I have not seen it duplicated on OS X.
Any OS with a paltry 60% of the server market (look for it, its in there).
From the article:
"Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux," he said. "How are we doing? Forty is less than 60, so I don't like it. ... We have some work to do."
I just don't think that statistic is accurate...
So every server is running either Linux or Windows? No one uses a variant of UNIX or BSD on their servers? They don't run anything else but Linux or Windows? Seriously??
Very few of those do so _automatically_. For almost all such systems, you have to manually select password protected screen locking.
Most of the large companies I've worked with push this option as part of Group Policy to all their machines, and disable the ability to turn it off or change the timeout period.
According to the wikipedia entry for Windows services, a Windows service is essentially the same thing as a daemon is on *NIX machines. Daemons are not device drivers -- they're user space programs.
Try and look through HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services in the registry and see what's listed under there. You'll find plenty of entries which reference .sys files in their ImagePath. services.msc only lets you configure a small subset of the items in the registry key above, which are equivellent to *NIX daemons. Under older NT you had a Device control panel which let you work with the devices just like services, this was replaced by Device Manager in newer Windows. If you use a tool like ServiWin you can see all of the items.
Well, guess what? Nothing happens. It is because of the kernel/driver model. OS X doesn't give a heck if the device is not plugged in, it just caches the symbols/plist files coming with the driver to a file. So, if you have a Eye TV driver but you don't have Eye TV, that extension will sit there, forever, ignored by the OS _until_ you plug the device having same USB signature. I think you were expecting some stuff outside /System/Extensions , some registry like files, some hidden files... No man, it is just .kext and HFS+ "bundle bit" magic with clever use of directory watching. I think you were expecting some stuff outside /System/Extensions , some registry like files, some hidden files... No man, it is just .kext and HFS+ "bundle bit" magic with clever use of directory watching.
This is exactly what Windows does too. The SYS file will sit in %WinDir%\system32\drivers and will be dynamically loaded when the device is plugged in. If you never plug the device in again it will never load the device driver again and the SYS file will just sit there too.
I have also installed some webcam and graphic adapter drivers in OS X which do install extra crap besides the KEXT. Every time you reboot OS X their startup application launches and brings up error dialogs or can even crash altogether when the device is not present. OS X is not immune to crappy drivers packages.
Also, when Lotus Notes crashes (which we know it *never* does) I don't have to restart my computer to coax it into working again.
To get past the "error opening window" after a crash, open Task Manager and end ntaskldr.exe and ntmulti.exe. There is also the KillNotes tool which can kill off all the processes that use the Notes DLL automatically.
Well according to this article:
Updated signature files for the Microsoft Anti-Virus programs for MS-DOS and Windows are available from the Symantec/Central Point BBS or the Symantec/Central Point forum on CompuServe. The updated signature list for MS-DOS Anti-Virus is called DOSAV.EXE, dated 9/27/95. The updated signature list for Windows Anti-Virus is called WINAV.EXE, dated 8/31/95.
The Symantec/Central Point BBS number is (541) 984-5366.
To reach the Symantec/Central Point forum on CompuServe, type GO SYMDOS or SYMWIN at any CompuServe prompt.
Could you clarify this a bit? You could boot Win95 to the DOS 7 prompt, type win and get into Windows, and then exit Windows - and be dumped to a command prompt.
Win9x booted real mode DOS initially and then loaded KRNL386.EXE to run full 32-bit protected mode Windows (similar to XP where NTLDR loads initially and sets up the basic environment before passing control to NTOSKRNL.EXE). Once loaded into protected mode the real mode DOS environment is essentially discarded. A really good Technet doc describing how it works can be found here.
"Yeah but you needed to run this and that before installing it," my roommate said.
He was probably talking about smartdrv.exe, which is the DOS disk cache driver. It is not included by default on the Windows 9x made DOS boot disks and can cause the initial file copy process to take hours instead of minutes when not installed.
You've got to remember, IE was initially (and still is) just an extention of Explorer
Actually before IE4 IE was always an entirely separate browser product. You could install it into Windows 3.1 and NT 3.5, which did not have Explorer.
You'd install IE4 on your Windows 95 box, and it'd rape your system with active desktop.
In the IE4 install wizard there is an option (with pictures) where you can choose to install Active Desktop or not. In fact that IE installer was the only way to get Active Desktop on Win95, other versions of the IE installer would not install it.
If Notepad were not bundled with Windows OEMs would be out there right now picking a text editor to include with the computers they ship. Pretty much all of them are better than Notepad and suddenly there would be a point of competition for computer vendors with consumers giving their money to whatever company gives them the best experience.
If OEMs have the freedom to choose which Notepad to ship with Windows they'll pick the one that offers them the best deal. Whatever the consumer ends up with will be added to the list of crapware we already have to uninstall every time you buy a new Dell or other OEM system. I'd rather have a less functional bundled MS notepad by default than some other crapware app that paid the OEM to distribute it.
was excited to try IE8. About 20 minutes after install and use I wasn't excited anymore. When I open a new tab my whole system slows down until its finished loading. I haven't looked at the CPU usage but i'd assume its pegging it for the render engine. Just a thought.
It's most likely an addon which is causing your issue. You can run IE with no addons under Accessories->System Tools and confirm if that is the cause.
IE 8 handles each tab esentially as a sepatate IE process and some addons have real problems with it. IE addons for antivirus/antispyware especially - I think SpyBot's IE protection even had problems.