It was at a college and it was mostly Photoshop, at which it was truly slow - I suppose because of the lack of L2 cache. It was usable, but not great; especially when compared to the PII-266/64MB RAM machine I had at the time. (Now I have 64MB just on my laptop's graphics card, four times that on my desktop's, and four times that on my desktop's system RAM. Time goes on, I suppose.) Games at the time weren't particularly CPU-hitting - a P120 can still run Quake II or Half-Life OK, even in software mode - so I can see how you'd get very good FPS with it, especially with a SLI Voodoo2.
Obviously, you're one of the people for whom the chip was perfect - in which case, Intel didn't fail completely...
Have to disagree with you, the original 266es were dog slow for real world tasks - I used one for a time, it was about the speed of a P166MMX and glacial in comparison with an equivalent-speed PII, which I owned then. None of this applied to the 'A' series, of course, which had a very small speed difference to the PIIs - in fact, were possibly even faster in some tasks because of the full-speed cache. The 333A was very popular with overclockers for the reasons you state - people got it up to 500 and beyond surprisingly easily.
The Celeron had an interesting history - they were the first chip to move to sockets, and Abit made the surprisingly cheap BP6 motherboard that alllowed you to run two Celerons of this era (PPGA socket-370) in a SMP configuration. I suspect the BP6 was many people's first impression of SMP; it's a shame Intel made it harder in the FC-PGA line.
The new installer does, however, fix some of the things that were an absolute PITA for the first-time Debian users of yore: no dselect, an actually useful keyboard configurator that doesn't rely on you knowing by heart occasionally problematic two-digit country codes (no list was provided), VESA DDC and a much more sane X configurator. It makes Debian a much more accessible distribution.
NAV is by far the worst anti-virus program out there; as you've seen, it's horrendously slow and buggy. Some of the corporate versions are apparently OK but the consumer ones all suck. Even McAfee is better than NAV, and that's not saying much.
The free-for-home-use AVG is actually surprisingly fast and the similarly free-for-home-use Avast!, while slightly slower isn't nearly as slow as Norton, has a wide feature set, doesn't get in the way too often, has a smart background auto-update feature for dialup users and works on AMD64 Windows. I use the latter.
Any Socket 939 board should be able to take an X2 after a BIOS update; AMD has, in fact, been sending out X2 engineering samples in a readily-available board, the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, which is the S939 board I own. (Very pleased with this: part of the reason for buying S939 in the first place was the future possibility of dual-core. When the prices go down...)
They don't sell well because the people PCW sell to are the average user that doesn't buy an operating system. People don't buy operating systems, full stop, they buy new machines. People that buy an OS are already in the top-percentile of the computer-using population, and they generally don't shop at PC World (I certainly don't, unless there's no alternative.) People are still using W98 because it's what came with their machine, despite the fact that Linux, Win2K or XP would give them a much better computing experience.
Hence this isn't surprising at all; no-one buys their full boxed XP either. BTW, they're still selling Mandrake, SuSE and StarOffice in Edinburgh, so I assume you're using a smaller store.
Don't use just AdAware; Spybot and MS Anti-Spyware (which runs on 2K) have assisted me much in clearing out istbar from the systems of people who're infested by it. If you know Windows enough, HijackThis can help you with manual spyware clearing.
And switch away from IE - IE on Win2K is still unsafe as hell (not all of the XPSP2 updates have been backported). You're almost certainly regularly going to a website with ISTbar exploit installer, hence the reinstallation. Firefox or Opera.
MD has the same copyright protection that DAT and CD do - a single bit that denotes 'copied'. Assuming the idiots authoring this 'CD' turn the 'copied' bit on, which some have been known to do, you can't copy it to MD digitally - the device will reject it.
This isn't foolproof - there are devices available which remove this bit from the SPDIF stream, for a start, and professional DAT and MD kit ignore it - but it again reduces the ability of the general user to be able to use the CD in a way they might actually want to, i.e. have it as MP3s for their iPod or as a MD they can take around with them.
(And frankly, considering that Sony are now selling a heavily DRM-encumbered portable audio player, I'm surprised they're even considering CD copy protection again - but then again, the BMG people seem to be running the asylum over in the music division now.)
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I will not purchase any CD with so called 'copy protection' and advise other people to follow my advice. It only encourages them. (And since I actually buy CDs I've sampled on P2P, this could lose Sony quite a bit of cash...)
Basically, that's my disinfection routine for other people's PCs. I don't get spyware infestations either, but that's because I know about Windows Update and antivirus software.
1. Run AdAware SE, updated to most recent definitions. Detect 400+ hits (my record so far).
2. Run Spybot S&D, updated to most recent definitions. Detect 100+ hits AdAware missed, and reboot.
3. Wait 30 minutes whilst Spybot scans again, and turns up a solitary bit of Gator. Go through Spybot's advanced mode settings and clear out their Run tools to dump all sorts of run-on-start crud that Compaq/Packard Bell etc. stuck on there - bloated keyboard-multimedia-button utilities et al.
4. Run HijackThis! (which isn't really an antispyware tool, just a system startup editing tool with knowledge about really obscure system startup Registry keys and IE settings) and get rid of the really obscure spyware toolbars and other run-on-startup fun that AAW and Spybot missed.
5. Go through the root, Program Files and Windows directories manually and delete the 10+ dialers and other unwanted crap that's made their way into the system, plus hosts file.
No-one ever asked for this stuff to be installed on their system (and in case you're wondering why I believe them, take a look at this). I put it down to ActiveX exploits; inevitably, the worst infected systems I see are Win9x/Me systems which haven't ever had a Windows Update run. This routine - plus installing Firefox - usually helps fix their problems, but these shouldn't have happened in the first place. I don't blame Microsoft as much as I blame the prevaling culture that it is better to make more money than it is to have ethics - thus allowing for Gator/Claria, WhenU, 180solutions, all the fake 'anti-spyware' vendors et al. It's amazing that we can allow these people to go on.
Not really true. Some CWS variants are really really hard to remove (in extreme cases, using the oxymoronically-named HackerDefender rootkit to disguise itself, plus hide and shut down CWShredder, AdAware, Spybot S&D et al when you try to install them), but everything is possible.
Basically, if CWShredder, Spybot and AdAware don't work for you, and you can't see anything on your HijackThis! log, first step is to search on the now slightly outdated CWS Chronicles and then on many of the excellentanti-spywareforums out there, all of which have encountered more variants of CWS than you could ever imagine. If you can't find someone else with the same problem, then post your HJT logs and other stuff and someone should be able to help you.
These parasites (it's not all spyware anymore) are now really, really, really out of hand - the CWS people, especially, but there's even worse people out there - and something needs to be done to stop them. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen anytime soon - since the companies that make most of these are "legitimate businesses", as opposed to idiot teenagers with Visual Basic. Shame.
It only needs to authenticate once for single player. Valve has said as much - it's product activation, not constant authentication. The activation decrypts the Steam.gcf files and thus allows you to play the game offline.
Besides, it's well known that gaming companies treat you like an inconvenience - StarForce and similar copy protections, constant authentication on multiplayer, constant "you need the CD in the drive", blocking of extremely useful (and legitimately used) tools like Nero or Alcohol 120% and so on. Valve's system, with a product key registered to your Steam account rather than to the program as such (so you can play it anywhere), is actually a lot more sensible than most protections I see, and it's not their fault Vivendi hate you (if Valve had had their way, HL2 would have been released last month with CS:Source.)
Crashing around ATA1 means you've got Plug-And-Play OS on in the BIOS. Turn it off; Windows never did need it.
My laptop, a Toshiba, called it "Device Configuration", with the right answer being "All Devices". Basically, it's whatever option causes the laptop to configure devices in the BIOS rather than leave it up to the operating system. FreeBSD hasn't been working well with the option on since about 4.7; it's probably to do with USB, which ISTR is what comes next in the boot sequence.
Have you got plug-and-play-OS turned on in your motherboard BIOS? If you do, turn it off; FreeBSD 5.x (and some later 4.x) has problems with the option, and Windows doesn't need it anymore. I didn't have to turn off ACPI that way...
(This is occasionally listed as "Device Configuration" or whatever, like on my Toshiba laptop, in which case the right answer is "All Devices".)
I was meaning sort of in a 'kill -9' way (or, as Windows puts it, 'taskkill/f'). It is possible, with any application; bet you that said warning only comes up if you don't force-kill, or forget to kill the services too. Not even ZoneAlarm can avoid a 'kill -9', unless it's abusing a device driver or something (in which case, it's horrendously coded).
The fact that any program on your system with administrator/root/whatever privileges can do anything is an excellent argument for a real, separate firewall (Linksys box, P120 running a *BSD or whatever) as your First Line Of Defense; leave the software as a backup, but don't rely on it as your only line. Nothing's perfect.
Newsflash: all personal firewalls can be turned off by other applications, if you're running as admin. Look how many e-mail trojans currently target ZoneAlarm and AV software before they ever get round to opening a port. Any smart trojan on Linux would wipe your iptables list before bothering to do anything. It's all about the admin access.
The day when Microsoft finally fix the default-as-administrator problem - a holdback from Win9x that I wish would die - will be a happy day for security watchers, a pretty day for Microsoft bashers going on about how it takes power away from the user, a sad day for more sensible Microsoft bashers, and an absolute nightmare for every idiot Windows developer that ever wrote to C:\mydirectory or insisted that it wrote to C:\mydirectory, which is why it's taking so long for Microsoft to get up enough courage to do it. Network-awareness is finally making these developers write to %appdata%\appname instead, so it should be possible soon.
Any windows user with even a hint of clue would unbind Netbios from their internet facing card.
You will be happy to know that SP2 Windows Firewall does this by default - F&PS ports are set to "Local subnet only", and a user would have to have a hint of clue to know how to change it (Microsoft have deliberately made it cumbersome - it's on a per-port basis.)
"relatively low price"? relative to what? Cheap compared to a bottle of beer at the wanky bars he hangs out in? How the hell do kids afford games that cost £40?
The reason he says "relatively low price" is because a lot of UK-based online retailers have been selling new games cheap. A lot of people got FarCry and UT2K4 for £17.99 each from retailers like (my favourite) play.com, and Amazon are currently the cheapest for Doom3 (£24.99). Games have actually been getting cheaper lately, at least on PC.
I'm waiting to see what the supermarket prices are like before I buy; there's always a chance of a misprice.
I have a Tecra M2 (Pentium-M 1.7GHz, Centrino branding, GFFX5200 Go, decentish 1024x768 screen), and it has managed four-and-a-half hours at acceptable brightness. Admittedly, this was running basically just Word, Final Draft and an offline copy of Firefox, but it's still impressive.
...except that Doom 3 frame-limits to 60fps anyway, so you won't be having any problems there.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M2, and its screen is OK for UT2K4, which can get very fast moving, so I'd assume it won't have a problem with Doom 3, apart from its somewhat underpowered GFGo 5200 forcing me to play at 640x480. It is a digital panel, though, so people with LCD problems may wish to use DVI (although strangely, only decent flat panels usually have DVI, when it would help the awful ones more.)
I think it's for the future, not for today. There's going to be some point where Microsoft eventually gets around to locking down the default install, to a point where NTFS permissions are set so that only Administrator can write anywhere other than the Windows equivalent of the home directory (the user profile) and the standard user isn't a superuser, much like a *nix system. Right now, this is going to be a major pain for every idiot that ever wrote an application that writes to its own directory rather than %appdata% like it should have done (that makes it network-aware, too), so Microsoft can't do that until Longhorn, which is going to break compatibility for a lot of these applications in the first place.
(You can do that stuff today: sensible network administrators who've set up roaming profiles have probably already done it. It's just not the default yet. It's my prediction that it will be.)
The componentisation of Windows Update is probably going to be part of this, so that a home user *not* running as a superuser (and possibly not even knowing that there *is* an Admin mode, a lot like an OS X machine) can update their system with the minimum of fuss. Nevertheless, it is strange that the services for Windows Update run permanently; a lot of Windows nowadays is designed to load stuff only when required (it's why XP boots so fast when compared with Win2K), so this goes very against the flow.
I can only assume that there is a reason that it's still the same in SP2, because there's a lot turned off (a good example is actually UPnP, which is now manual). But since when was Microsoft predictable?
They are almost certainly going to do this. The RC2 CD has a very pretty design on it which I suspect will be used for the final disc; I suspect SP2 will be given out far and wide, probably a lot like AOL CDs. They'd be stupid not to.
The new Windows Update does not need to be on permanently. It's configured from the same place as the old one, the Automatic Updates control panel, also within System. Sure, Security Center will complain at you but you can just turn that off (click on "Change the way Security Center alerts me"). The services will still be running, but no-one cares about that; they aren't doing anything. And besides, it doesn't install until you click "Install".
Also, there is a reason for simplifying the screens for users; the standard home user is way more likely to be turned off by screens with weird Q53893589-type numbers on them, no matter how important it actually is. WUv5 is a huge improvement on WUv4 usability-wise, and as you say the information is still there if you want it, which is entirely correct interface design.
As you've found, AU and BITS are actually important services. (AU probably needs to be running permanently because it might need to perform certain configuration stuff on a post-update restart; this is just a guess, mind.) Besides, I've always found that these services tutorials, excepting on really-low-end-PCs (below or equal to 128MB RAM), make absolutely no measurable difference speedwise and usually impede at least some functionality, which is why I don't put much stall by them. YMMV, but be warned.
This is Adobe's fault; the PDF Netscape plugin sucks in ways that the PDF ActiveX control does not.
Best way around it? Stop Firefox's plugin infrastructure from handling.PDF, and open PDF files in the real Acrobat Reader instead. Tools/Options/Downloads/Plug-Ins, uncheck PDF. Then when you next click on a PDF file, you'll get a box from which you can select to open directly with Acrobat or save to disk. Choose whichever you prefer.
This may well be because you are using the MesaGL software GL emulation. Try deleting everything you see that's libGL or whatever as you're told to in the README and reinstalling the driver.
There was a time when Netscape had that level of recognition; I remember it quite well. IE didn't take off until IE4, and for quite a long period of time people were still installing Netscape and ignoring IE, even on W98. The fact is, however, Netscape 4 sucked, so IE took over from that - it was fast, non-ugly, supported actual Internet standards (remember the layer tag? Even IE's CSS support is a dream compared to that waste of time), and didn't require a 10MB download every time Netscape fixed a security hole (of which there were many).
Now, IE is almost in the same position as Netscape was after Communicator's release. It's not there yet, because unlike Netscape 4 it isn't a preposterously slow slug of an application, but it's getting there; courtesy of CoolWebSearch, C2/Lop, all these silly worms and idiots who fail to use Windows Update (all of these fall into the same category).
SP2 may fix a crapload of these problems, though, especially if Microsoft actually promote it properly (because SP2, unlike SP1, will probably show up on Critical Update, it might well have a bit more penetration), and the.chm hole exploited by this particular security breach appears to have been fixed on Windows Update since April, so Microsoft still have a lifeline.
There will probably be an exodus to Firefox though, if only due to media publicity rather than actual public like of the browser. Actually, everyone I've shown Firefox and (to a lesser extent) the full Mozilla suite to like the browsers, and haven't complained about incompatible sites to me. It's gaining more recognition all the time, and is shaping out to be an excellent browser for the home user. The new theme isn't that bad, either; and it deserves to have a much greater market share than it does.
[NB: I am speaking from the UK, where most local Internet customers are on local-rate-to-dial ISPs rather than AOL, although there is some AOL penetration, using entirely standard browsers and tools with the occasional "IE supplied by Freeserve" branding. This may change people's perceptions of the Net slightly.]
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It was at a college and it was mostly Photoshop, at which it was truly slow - I suppose because of the lack of L2 cache. It was usable, but not great; especially when compared to the PII-266/64MB RAM machine I had at the time. (Now I have 64MB just on my laptop's graphics card, four times that on my desktop's, and four times that on my desktop's system RAM. Time goes on, I suppose.) Games at the time weren't particularly CPU-hitting - a P120 can still run Quake II or Half-Life OK, even in software mode - so I can see how you'd get very good FPS with it, especially with a SLI Voodoo2.
Obviously, you're one of the people for whom the chip was perfect - in which case, Intel didn't fail completely...
Have to disagree with you, the original 266es were dog slow for real world tasks - I used one for a time, it was about the speed of a P166MMX and glacial in comparison with an equivalent-speed PII, which I owned then. None of this applied to the 'A' series, of course, which had a very small speed difference to the PIIs - in fact, were possibly even faster in some tasks because of the full-speed cache. The 333A was very popular with overclockers for the reasons you state - people got it up to 500 and beyond surprisingly easily.
The Celeron had an interesting history - they were the first chip to move to sockets, and Abit made the surprisingly cheap BP6 motherboard that alllowed you to run two Celerons of this era (PPGA socket-370) in a SMP configuration. I suspect the BP6 was many people's first impression of SMP; it's a shame Intel made it harder in the FC-PGA line.
The new installer does, however, fix some of the things that were an absolute PITA for the first-time Debian users of yore: no dselect, an actually useful keyboard configurator that doesn't rely on you knowing by heart occasionally problematic two-digit country codes (no list was provided), VESA DDC and a much more sane X configurator. It makes Debian a much more accessible distribution.
NAV is by far the worst anti-virus program out there; as you've seen, it's horrendously slow and buggy. Some of the corporate versions are apparently OK but the consumer ones all suck. Even McAfee is better than NAV, and that's not saying much.
The free-for-home-use AVG is actually surprisingly fast and the similarly free-for-home-use Avast!, while slightly slower isn't nearly as slow as Norton, has a wide feature set, doesn't get in the way too often, has a smart background auto-update feature for dialup users and works on AMD64 Windows. I use the latter.
Any Socket 939 board should be able to take an X2 after a BIOS update; AMD has, in fact, been sending out X2 engineering samples in a readily-available board, the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, which is the S939 board I own. (Very pleased with this: part of the reason for buying S939 in the first place was the future possibility of dual-core. When the prices go down...)
They don't sell well because the people PCW sell to are the average user that doesn't buy an operating system. People don't buy operating systems, full stop, they buy new machines. People that buy an OS are already in the top-percentile of the computer-using population, and they generally don't shop at PC World (I certainly don't, unless there's no alternative.) People are still using W98 because it's what came with their machine, despite the fact that Linux, Win2K or XP would give them a much better computing experience.
Hence this isn't surprising at all; no-one buys their full boxed XP either. BTW, they're still selling Mandrake, SuSE and StarOffice in Edinburgh, so I assume you're using a smaller store.
Don't use just AdAware; Spybot and MS Anti-Spyware (which runs on 2K) have assisted me much in clearing out istbar from the systems of people who're infested by it. If you know Windows enough, HijackThis can help you with manual spyware clearing.
And switch away from IE - IE on Win2K is still unsafe as hell (not all of the XPSP2 updates have been backported). You're almost certainly regularly going to a website with ISTbar exploit installer, hence the reinstallation. Firefox or Opera.
MD has the same copyright protection that DAT and CD do - a single bit that denotes 'copied'. Assuming the idiots authoring this 'CD' turn the 'copied' bit on, which some have been known to do, you can't copy it to MD digitally - the device will reject it.
This isn't foolproof - there are devices available which remove this bit from the SPDIF stream, for a start, and professional DAT and MD kit ignore it - but it again reduces the ability of the general user to be able to use the CD in a way they might actually want to, i.e. have it as MP3s for their iPod or as a MD they can take around with them.
(And frankly, considering that Sony are now selling a heavily DRM-encumbered portable audio player, I'm surprised they're even considering CD copy protection again - but then again, the BMG people seem to be running the asylum over in the music division now.)
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: I will not purchase any CD with so called 'copy protection' and advise other people to follow my advice. It only encourages them. (And since I actually buy CDs I've sampled on P2P, this could lose Sony quite a bit of cash...)
Basically, that's my disinfection routine for other people's PCs. I don't get spyware infestations either, but that's because I know about Windows Update and antivirus software.
1. Run AdAware SE, updated to most recent definitions. Detect 400+ hits (my record so far).
2. Run Spybot S&D, updated to most recent definitions. Detect 100+ hits AdAware missed, and reboot.
3. Wait 30 minutes whilst Spybot scans again, and turns up a solitary bit of Gator. Go through Spybot's advanced mode settings and clear out their Run tools to dump all sorts of run-on-start crud that Compaq/Packard Bell etc. stuck on there - bloated keyboard-multimedia-button utilities et al.
4. Run HijackThis! (which isn't really an antispyware tool, just a system startup editing tool with knowledge about really obscure system startup Registry keys and IE settings) and get rid of the really obscure spyware toolbars and other run-on-startup fun that AAW and Spybot missed.
5. Go through the root, Program Files and Windows directories manually and delete the 10+ dialers and other unwanted crap that's made their way into the system, plus hosts file.
No-one ever asked for this stuff to be installed on their system (and in case you're wondering why I believe them, take a look at this). I put it down to ActiveX exploits; inevitably, the worst infected systems I see are Win9x/Me systems which haven't ever had a Windows Update run. This routine - plus installing Firefox - usually helps fix their problems, but these shouldn't have happened in the first place. I don't blame Microsoft as much as I blame the prevaling culture that it is better to make more money than it is to have ethics - thus allowing for Gator/Claria, WhenU, 180solutions, all the fake 'anti-spyware' vendors et al. It's amazing that we can allow these people to go on.
Not really true. Some CWS variants are really really hard to remove (in extreme cases, using the oxymoronically-named HackerDefender rootkit to disguise itself, plus hide and shut down CWShredder, AdAware, Spybot S&D et al when you try to install them), but everything is possible.
Basically, if CWShredder, Spybot and AdAware don't work for you, and you can't see anything on your HijackThis! log, first step is to search on the now slightly outdated CWS Chronicles and then on many of the excellent anti-spyware forums out there, all of which have encountered more variants of CWS than you could ever imagine. If you can't find someone else with the same problem, then post your HJT logs and other stuff and someone should be able to help you.
These parasites (it's not all spyware anymore) are now really, really, really out of hand - the CWS people, especially, but there's even worse people out there - and something needs to be done to stop them. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen anytime soon - since the companies that make most of these are "legitimate businesses", as opposed to idiot teenagers with Visual Basic. Shame.
It only needs to authenticate once for single player. Valve has said as much - it's product activation, not constant authentication. The activation decrypts the Steam .gcf files and thus allows you to play the game offline.
Besides, it's well known that gaming companies treat you like an inconvenience - StarForce and similar copy protections, constant authentication on multiplayer, constant "you need the CD in the drive", blocking of extremely useful (and legitimately used) tools like Nero or Alcohol 120% and so on. Valve's system, with a product key registered to your Steam account rather than to the program as such (so you can play it anywhere), is actually a lot more sensible than most protections I see, and it's not their fault Vivendi hate you (if Valve had had their way, HL2 would have been released last month with CS:Source.)
Crashing around ATA1 means you've got Plug-And-Play OS on in the BIOS. Turn it off; Windows never did need it.
My laptop, a Toshiba, called it "Device Configuration", with the right answer being "All Devices". Basically, it's whatever option causes the laptop to configure devices in the BIOS rather than leave it up to the operating system. FreeBSD hasn't been working well with the option on since about 4.7; it's probably to do with USB, which ISTR is what comes next in the boot sequence.
Have you got plug-and-play-OS turned on in your motherboard BIOS? If you do, turn it off; FreeBSD 5.x (and some later 4.x) has problems with the option, and Windows doesn't need it anymore. I didn't have to turn off ACPI that way...
(This is occasionally listed as "Device Configuration" or whatever, like on my Toshiba laptop, in which case the right answer is "All Devices".)
I was meaning sort of in a 'kill -9' way (or, as Windows puts it, 'taskkill /f'). It is possible, with any application; bet you that said warning only comes up if you don't force-kill, or forget to kill the services too. Not even ZoneAlarm can avoid a 'kill -9', unless it's abusing a device driver or something (in which case, it's horrendously coded).
The fact that any program on your system with administrator/root/whatever privileges can do anything is an excellent argument for a real, separate firewall (Linksys box, P120 running a *BSD or whatever) as your First Line Of Defense; leave the software as a backup, but don't rely on it as your only line. Nothing's perfect.
Newsflash: all personal firewalls can be turned off by other applications, if you're running as admin. Look how many e-mail trojans currently target ZoneAlarm and AV software before they ever get round to opening a port. Any smart trojan on Linux would wipe your iptables list before bothering to do anything. It's all about the admin access.
The day when Microsoft finally fix the default-as-administrator problem - a holdback from Win9x that I wish would die - will be a happy day for security watchers, a pretty day for Microsoft bashers going on about how it takes power away from the user, a sad day for more sensible Microsoft bashers, and an absolute nightmare for every idiot Windows developer that ever wrote to C:\mydirectory or insisted that it wrote to C:\mydirectory, which is why it's taking so long for Microsoft to get up enough courage to do it. Network-awareness is finally making these developers write to %appdata%\appname instead, so it should be possible soon.
I'm waiting to see what the supermarket prices are like before I buy; there's always a chance of a misprice.
I have a Tecra M2 (Pentium-M 1.7GHz, Centrino branding, GFFX5200 Go, decentish 1024x768 screen), and it has managed four-and-a-half hours at acceptable brightness. Admittedly, this was running basically just Word, Final Draft and an offline copy of Firefox, but it's still impressive.
...except that Doom 3 frame-limits to 60fps anyway, so you won't be having any problems there.
I have a Toshiba Tecra M2, and its screen is OK for UT2K4, which can get very fast moving, so I'd assume it won't have a problem with Doom 3, apart from its somewhat underpowered GFGo 5200 forcing me to play at 640x480. It is a digital panel, though, so people with LCD problems may wish to use DVI (although strangely, only decent flat panels usually have DVI, when it would help the awful ones more.)
I think it's for the future, not for today. There's going to be some point where Microsoft eventually gets around to locking down the default install, to a point where NTFS permissions are set so that only Administrator can write anywhere other than the Windows equivalent of the home directory (the user profile) and the standard user isn't a superuser, much like a *nix system. Right now, this is going to be a major pain for every idiot that ever wrote an application that writes to its own directory rather than %appdata% like it should have done (that makes it network-aware, too), so Microsoft can't do that until Longhorn, which is going to break compatibility for a lot of these applications in the first place.
(You can do that stuff today: sensible network administrators who've set up roaming profiles have probably already done it. It's just not the default yet. It's my prediction that it will be.)
The componentisation of Windows Update is probably going to be part of this, so that a home user *not* running as a superuser (and possibly not even knowing that there *is* an Admin mode, a lot like an OS X machine) can update their system with the minimum of fuss. Nevertheless, it is strange that the services for Windows Update run permanently; a lot of Windows nowadays is designed to load stuff only when required (it's why XP boots so fast when compared with Win2K), so this goes very against the flow.
I can only assume that there is a reason that it's still the same in SP2, because there's a lot turned off (a good example is actually UPnP, which is now manual). But since when was Microsoft predictable?
They are almost certainly going to do this. The RC2 CD has a very pretty design on it which I suspect will be used for the final disc; I suspect SP2 will be given out far and wide, probably a lot like AOL CDs. They'd be stupid not to.
The new Windows Update does not need to be on permanently. It's configured from the same place as the old one, the Automatic Updates control panel, also within System. Sure, Security Center will complain at you but you can just turn that off (click on "Change the way Security Center alerts me"). The services will still be running, but no-one cares about that; they aren't doing anything. And besides, it doesn't install until you click "Install".
Also, there is a reason for simplifying the screens for users; the standard home user is way more likely to be turned off by screens with weird Q53893589-type numbers on them, no matter how important it actually is. WUv5 is a huge improvement on WUv4 usability-wise, and as you say the information is still there if you want it, which is entirely correct interface design.
As you've found, AU and BITS are actually important services. (AU probably needs to be running permanently because it might need to perform certain configuration stuff on a post-update restart; this is just a guess, mind.) Besides, I've always found that these services tutorials, excepting on really-low-end-PCs (below or equal to 128MB RAM), make absolutely no measurable difference speedwise and usually impede at least some functionality, which is why I don't put much stall by them. YMMV, but be warned.
This is Adobe's fault; the PDF Netscape plugin sucks in ways that the PDF ActiveX control does not.
.PDF, and open PDF files in the real Acrobat Reader instead. Tools/Options/Downloads/Plug-Ins, uncheck PDF. Then when you next click on a PDF file, you'll get a box from which you can select to open directly with Acrobat or save to disk. Choose whichever you prefer.
Best way around it? Stop Firefox's plugin infrastructure from handling
This may well be because you are using the MesaGL software GL emulation. Try deleting everything you see that's libGL or whatever as you're told to in the README and reinstalling the driver.
There was a time when Netscape had that level of recognition; I remember it quite well. IE didn't take off until IE4, and for quite a long period of time people were still installing Netscape and ignoring IE, even on W98. The fact is, however, Netscape 4 sucked, so IE took over from that - it was fast, non-ugly, supported actual Internet standards (remember the layer tag? Even IE's CSS support is a dream compared to that waste of time), and didn't require a 10MB download every time Netscape fixed a security hole (of which there were many).
.chm hole exploited by this particular security breach appears to have been fixed on Windows Update since April, so Microsoft still have a lifeline.
Now, IE is almost in the same position as Netscape was after Communicator's release. It's not there yet, because unlike Netscape 4 it isn't a preposterously slow slug of an application, but it's getting there; courtesy of CoolWebSearch, C2/Lop, all these silly worms and idiots who fail to use Windows Update (all of these fall into the same category).
SP2 may fix a crapload of these problems, though, especially if Microsoft actually promote it properly (because SP2, unlike SP1, will probably show up on Critical Update, it might well have a bit more penetration), and the
There will probably be an exodus to Firefox though, if only due to media publicity rather than actual public like of the browser. Actually, everyone I've shown Firefox and (to a lesser extent) the full Mozilla suite to like the browsers, and haven't complained about incompatible sites to me. It's gaining more recognition all the time, and is shaping out to be an excellent browser for the home user. The new theme isn't that bad, either; and it deserves to have a much greater market share than it does.
[NB: I am speaking from the UK, where most local Internet customers are on local-rate-to-dial ISPs rather than AOL, although there is some AOL penetration, using entirely standard browsers and tools with the occasional "IE supplied by Freeserve" branding. This may change people's perceptions of the Net slightly.]