May need to check that out next time I get a call from a Vista user, thanks for the tip.
I tend to use an elevated command prompt at work all the time to launch escalated privilege stuff across the domain, but haven't experimented too much with Vista. I'm aware that true admin is supposed to be separate and distinct from a member of the admins group, which seems a bit counterintuitive, but haven't had sufficient motivation to experiment with Vista significantly.
"The cancel or allow bullshit comes up, in general, because some crappy program is trying to do something which really does require elevation."
Disclaimer - Limited use if Vista here, supporting 3rd parties. Hence disabling UAC isn't really an option.
Have you tried viewing the devices in Device Manager (I was doing this to see whether a wireless card was being detected on a laptop)? This elicits not one but TWO UAC prompts. And this is without actually making a change to any of the config - just to view what's connected. Not a third party app, but a core MS tool.
If MS wanted some sanity, device manager would be launched read-only without prompting, and you'd only be prompted if you wanted to make changes to the machine's config. There's no reason that I can think of that any user (and in particular any user with the new admin-lite credentials Vista introduced) shouldn't be able to read the properties of their hardware.
Another UI pain that I've encountered on a couple of occasions is the redesign of the networking control panels. Don't get me started on configuring static IP addresses on the bl00dy thing. Christ, it was easier to drop to command prompt and use netsh than find where they'd hidden the properties.
I'm aware that people who just use the machine are probably able to go months without seeing a UAC prompt. For me (who is normally asked to fix things when it all goes wrong) the whole thing is an unmitigated irritation.
I did a stint at a UK Telecoms firm a few years ago, in the Debt Recovery department. The Debt Recovery manager asked me, in all seriousness, to sort a number of accounts by their average balance.
Not variance from average, not by actual balance, but by the aggregated measure itself. Sheesh.
There was also one of my colleagues who was also asked to produce a mean of performance ratings. Simple enough if you have an actual numeric value. Less easy then the input values are text descriptors with no numeric value.
His response was to ask what the average of "Orange", "Blancmange" and "Tennis court" was.
But there are other reasons to update the game engine than to tweak the graphics - compatibility.
While I've got some fairly old games running quite happily via Dosbox or virtualisation, there's a few of the early 3D PC games that does not like Windows XP on modern hardware but that requires 3d acceleration. Virtualisation doesn't cut it as it doesn't expose sufficient hardware resources (and there's probably a case to be made that it shouldn't, as this may compromise the integrity of the sandbox).
While I am aware that Half-Life was ported to Steam, I seem to remember that the original was not compatible at all with XP. I didn't experiment with it much though, so it could be that some enterprising souls found a way to work around this.
There's one of the classic RPGs that I wanted to give a trial to - it's either Planescape or Fallout, I can't remember which. One of them is supposed to be incompatible with XP. It is probably something that can be worked around, but I haven't taken much time to find out how yet.
Thief 2 also seems to be unstable at best (at least on my desktop - GeForce 8 + AMD64x2). My laptop (P4 + Radeon 9200) plays it quite happily though, so I can still get my fix of taffing.
"why are all CPU's heterosexual males anyway? They always mate with female sockets."
Intel 775s have the pins on the mainboard. The processors have flat electrical contacts.
(As a UK citizen) is that Amazon usually charges less than the game shops. It might be different in the US, but over here a game that will go in the shops for £35 or £40 (approximately $70 - $80) will usually be on sale at Amazon for £25 ($50).
Even factoring in the delivery charge, it's still likely to be cheaper than retail.
I've not been into a game shop in years. Just never darken their doors. I use Amazon for the games I want at close to release date, and computer fairs for older stuff.
My experience is that games shops are buoyed up by console players, as the PC range is (1) extremely limited (2) unavailable for trade-in and (3) overpriced. Of course, it might be totally different across the pond.
about the effects of eutrophiciation (sp? too lazy to check the hivemind).
I'd expect that any nitrates thus generated would pretty quickly end up dumped into rivers in pretty short order.
I'm pretty sure that the drainage systems are intended to capture and process waste which may help, but there's still a fair amount of runoff into rivers, verges, &c.
May help fertilising the grass verges at the sides of motorways I guess.
Ouch, nasty. Having dealt with the UK frontline support a couple of times (and having found them less than clueful), I feel your pain.
Here is the link to the relevant page of Robin D H Walker's website, where may be found the post-install process, including the serial number.
If you have a removable drive / recovery cd that you take for antivirus / diagnostic tools, it's worth dropping the url link to the post-installation site in a directory so it remains with you.
Additional disclaimer - I am neither Robin Walker nor affiliated with NTL/Virgin - I just happen to live in a Virgin cabled area and have set up a number of machines on behalf of end-users.
have been getting further and further from their simple roots. These days the Windows installer (not required - bear with me a bit) loads a number of naffware apps onto the client pc.
They also have been obfuscating the link to the online registration page. It used to be a plain-text file, then a url, now it's buried in the guts of the flash installer package they add.
Fair enough, you can get the link from Robin D H Walker's page but if you're there stuck behind a machine that's only capable of communicating with the registration server and can't remember the link it's damn frustrating.
Disclaimer - I've been asked to set up NTL / Virgin accounts a few times, and with every release of their software it's been more difficult to get to the registration page, with the point and drool mentality being kicked up every time. I even believe they started asking you for an engineer number when setting up an account at one stage, though I may be wrong.
I've just done the same search. Two sponsored links at the top; ten hits; two sponsored links to the right.
Then there's all the 'cached' links - similar pages - the ten "Gooooooooooooogle" links at the bottom; Web/images/maps/news/shopping at the top of the page; the definition for AVG; and all the links at the bottom.
After writing to file and grepping for href I've found 105 href tags, and for only ten search results. The sheer profligacy of web links is alarming, and only serves to illustrate how misapplied AVG's behaviour actually is.
(Anyone know what Google's take on this is? I bet they're also getting hammered by the sheer number of their links).
I believe for XP home there is an issue with the number of processor sockets supported - I believe single *processor* only is supported. I believe this is what the GP poster was referring to.
However as parent poster rightly points out, single processors with multiple cores are fully supported.
One point I found annoying with an XP Home machine recently - no GPEdit.msc therefore you don't appear to be able to get updates from a WSUS machine. Happy to be corrected if anyone knows a way around this though.
Although I've not come across this problem myself, I've seen it referred to on forums. I've read that the solution is in Thunderbird's Tools -> Options, and in there is an option to allow antivirus scanners to quarantine individual messages.
As I said, haven't tried it - so your mileage may vary. I'm sure a search for "Thunderbird AV Quarantine Individual" should get the relevant articles.
I've had a different experience with their kit.
Eight years with a BEFSR41 (which I sold to a friend last November, and is still going strong) which I only passed on because I wanted additional ports.
I've now got a BEFSR81 which is a nice bit of kit. Only six months, but it's happily working on. Well worth the £35 I paid for it. Only disadvantage to me is that they're quite hard to get hold of in the UK, and they don't support Gigabit ethernet (I therefore keep a cat6e xover cable for big transfers with the server - thankfully this is fairly rare now).
I've also had a WAP54G which is OK for a couple of years now. Again, quite happy with its capabilities.
For home use, I'm fairly happy with the Linksys kit. Seems stable and I've recommended them to a few people without having them bite me in the a$$. By contrast, the couple of no-name brand routers I've picked up from fairs (because I've been pushed for time) seem to be a lot more prone to wonkiness.
SP3 sets a system restore point before installing.
I know this as I trialled the beta version on my games machine - and it bluescreened due to a wonky driver (I believe the chipset driver for my mainboard).
Booted to safemode and rolled back. Easiest recovery in ages.
I'm interested to know what caused the hassle with the laptop to the extent that it took you two days to recover.
But all in all, sensible advice. Backups are a good thing (tm).
Next time you format, partition your drive so that you keep your Documents structure on a separate partition to your OS. Map the My Documents shortcut to a directory on the separate partition.
Almost all recent games save their save information to a directory in the My Documents target (IIRC one of the criteria for Games for Windows is that game saves are redirected into My Documents -> My Games) so the saves go straight to the segregated partition.
On subsequent formats, simply nuke the OS partition, reinstall, and then point the My Documents shortcut to the Documents partition. Simple.
I nearly fell foul of something similar a year or so ago. I bought a copy of Gareth Marenghi's Darkplace from Amazon, and on inserting it into my Win2k3 box the machine bluescreened - twice in a row.
Turns out that they were trying to apply a dodgy copy-protection driver onto the machine, which apparently wasn't 100% compatible with 2k3.
Of course, soon as I noticed that I disabled autorun (which is something I'd just forgotten to do since the last rebuild) and ripped the content.
Again, intrusive copy-protection measures make honest users into copyright infringers.
>> whenever you look at the top listings of torrents being hosted on say TPB, I can see TV shows, Movies, Games and Music. No Linux.
... but this has the inherent assumption that torrent files for Linux would be hosted on TPB - which isn't necessarily the case.
Certainly if I wanted a linux distribution I'd be more inclined to visit the site of the distributor (e.g. the OpenSuse site) rather than trust to the beneficience of TPB...
Remember that Intel had the Pentium Pro architectire in 1996, which allowed multiprocessor machinery on the desktop. Intel sat on their hands with this technology for years, assuming in their arrogance that home users didn't want it badly enough.
It's purely down to AMD that multicore architecture has become mainstream. It's fair to say that software isn't wholly taking advantage of this at the moment, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
I say thanks to AMD for at least being able to push the envelope and prevent Intel from getting too complacent.
Slashdot Mirror
May need to check that out next time I get a call from a Vista user, thanks for the tip. I tend to use an elevated command prompt at work all the time to launch escalated privilege stuff across the domain, but haven't experimented too much with Vista. I'm aware that true admin is supposed to be separate and distinct from a member of the admins group, which seems a bit counterintuitive, but haven't had sufficient motivation to experiment with Vista significantly.
"The cancel or allow bullshit comes up, in general, because some crappy program is trying to do something which really does require elevation."
Disclaimer - Limited use if Vista here, supporting 3rd parties. Hence disabling UAC isn't really an option.
Have you tried viewing the devices in Device Manager (I was doing this to see whether a wireless card was being detected on a laptop)? This elicits not one but TWO UAC prompts. And this is without actually making a change to any of the config - just to view what's connected. Not a third party app, but a core MS tool.
If MS wanted some sanity, device manager would be launched read-only without prompting, and you'd only be prompted if you wanted to make changes to the machine's config. There's no reason that I can think of that any user (and in particular any user with the new admin-lite credentials Vista introduced) shouldn't be able to read the properties of their hardware.
Another UI pain that I've encountered on a couple of occasions is the redesign of the networking control panels. Don't get me started on configuring static IP addresses on the bl00dy thing. Christ, it was easier to drop to command prompt and use netsh than find where they'd hidden the properties.
I'm aware that people who just use the machine are probably able to go months without seeing a UAC prompt. For me (who is normally asked to fix things when it all goes wrong) the whole thing is an unmitigated irritation.
Just my £0.02.
Doesn't surprise me at all.
I did a stint at a UK Telecoms firm a few years ago, in the Debt Recovery department. The Debt Recovery manager asked me, in all seriousness, to sort a number of accounts by their average balance.
Not variance from average, not by actual balance, but by the aggregated measure itself. Sheesh.
There was also one of my colleagues who was also asked to produce a mean of performance ratings. Simple enough if you have an actual numeric value. Less easy then the input values are text descriptors with no numeric value.
His response was to ask what the average of "Orange", "Blancmange" and "Tennis court" was.
Appropriately enough, captcha = rabble.
But there are other reasons to update the game engine than to tweak the graphics - compatibility.
While I've got some fairly old games running quite happily via Dosbox or virtualisation, there's a few of the early 3D PC games that does not like Windows XP on modern hardware but that requires 3d acceleration. Virtualisation doesn't cut it as it doesn't expose sufficient hardware resources (and there's probably a case to be made that it shouldn't, as this may compromise the integrity of the sandbox).
While I am aware that Half-Life was ported to Steam, I seem to remember that the original was not compatible at all with XP. I didn't experiment with it much though, so it could be that some enterprising souls found a way to work around this.
There's one of the classic RPGs that I wanted to give a trial to - it's either Planescape or Fallout, I can't remember which. One of them is supposed to be incompatible with XP. It is probably something that can be worked around, but I haven't taken much time to find out how yet.
Thief 2 also seems to be unstable at best (at least on my desktop - GeForce 8 + AMD64x2). My laptop (P4 + Radeon 9200) plays it quite happily though, so I can still get my fix of taffing.
It's a joke in base 16.5
"why are all CPU's heterosexual males anyway? They always mate with female sockets." Intel 775s have the pins on the mainboard. The processors have flat electrical contacts.
"my BIOS splash reminds me daily"
Holy christ, you're a Windows 9x user!
(As a UK citizen) is that Amazon usually charges less than the game shops. It might be different in the US, but over here a game that will go in the shops for £35 or £40 (approximately $70 - $80) will usually be on sale at Amazon for £25 ($50).
Even factoring in the delivery charge, it's still likely to be cheaper than retail.
I've not been into a game shop in years. Just never darken their doors. I use Amazon for the games I want at close to release date, and computer fairs for older stuff.
My experience is that games shops are buoyed up by console players, as the PC range is (1) extremely limited (2) unavailable for trade-in and (3) overpriced. Of course, it might be totally different across the pond.
"We all fly all over the planet several times a year for business and pleasure"
I'm on the no-fly list, you insensitive clod!
about the effects of eutrophiciation (sp? too lazy to check the hivemind).
I'd expect that any nitrates thus generated would pretty quickly end up dumped into rivers in pretty short order.
I'm pretty sure that the drainage systems are intended to capture and process waste which may help, but there's still a fair amount of runoff into rivers, verges, &c.
May help fertilising the grass verges at the sides of motorways I guess.
Ouch, nasty. Having dealt with the UK frontline support a couple of times (and having found them less than clueful), I feel your pain.
Here is the link to the relevant page of Robin D H Walker's website, where may be found the post-install process, including the serial number.
If you have a removable drive / recovery cd that you take for antivirus / diagnostic tools, it's worth dropping the url link to the post-installation site in a directory so it remains with you.
Additional disclaimer - I am neither Robin Walker nor affiliated with NTL/Virgin - I just happen to live in a Virgin cabled area and have set up a number of machines on behalf of end-users.
F_T
have been getting further and further from their simple roots. These days the Windows installer (not required - bear with me a bit) loads a number of naffware apps onto the client pc.
They also have been obfuscating the link to the online registration page. It used to be a plain-text file, then a url, now it's buried in the guts of the flash installer package they add.
Fair enough, you can get the link from Robin D H Walker's page but if you're there stuck behind a machine that's only capable of communicating with the registration server and can't remember the link it's damn frustrating.
Disclaimer - I've been asked to set up NTL / Virgin accounts a few times, and with every release of their software it's been more difficult to get to the registration page, with the point and drool mentality being kicked up every time. I even believe they started asking you for an engineer number when setting up an account at one stage, though I may be wrong.
I've just done the same search. Two sponsored links at the top; ten hits; two sponsored links to the right.
Then there's all the 'cached' links - similar pages - the ten "Gooooooooooooogle" links at the bottom; Web/images/maps/news/shopping at the top of the page; the definition for AVG; and all the links at the bottom.
After writing to file and grepping for href I've found 105 href tags, and for only ten search results. The sheer profligacy of web links is alarming, and only serves to illustrate how misapplied AVG's behaviour actually is.
(Anyone know what Google's take on this is? I bet they're also getting hammered by the sheer number of their links).
F_T
I went to HotelTangoTangoPapa://SierraLimaAlphaSierraHotelDeltaOscarTango.DeltaOscarTango.OscarRomeoGolf/ and got phished, you insensitive clod!
F_T
I live in one of the UK towns where the talking CCTV cameras have been installed. My first experience of them being used was on Saturday evening.
There was an unholy bellowing like a dyslexic dalek from halfway up the clock tower. For the life of me I have no idea what was being said, or who at.
1/10 FAIL.
F_T
Didn't I see that in between deaths on Call of Duty 2? ;-)
That looks spot on. Thanks very much for the heads-up, it's really appreciated.
F_T
I believe for XP home there is an issue with the number of processor sockets supported - I believe single *processor* only is supported. I believe this is what the GP poster was referring to.
However as parent poster rightly points out, single processors with multiple cores are fully supported.
One point I found annoying with an XP Home machine recently - no GPEdit.msc therefore you don't appear to be able to get updates from a WSUS machine. Happy to be corrected if anyone knows a way around this though.
F_T
Although I've not come across this problem myself, I've seen it referred to on forums. I've read that the solution is in Thunderbird's Tools -> Options, and in there is an option to allow antivirus scanners to quarantine individual messages.
As I said, haven't tried it - so your mileage may vary. I'm sure a search for "Thunderbird AV Quarantine Individual" should get the relevant articles.
Hope this helps,
F_T
I've had a different experience with their kit. Eight years with a BEFSR41 (which I sold to a friend last November, and is still going strong) which I only passed on because I wanted additional ports. I've now got a BEFSR81 which is a nice bit of kit. Only six months, but it's happily working on. Well worth the £35 I paid for it. Only disadvantage to me is that they're quite hard to get hold of in the UK, and they don't support Gigabit ethernet (I therefore keep a cat6e xover cable for big transfers with the server - thankfully this is fairly rare now). I've also had a WAP54G which is OK for a couple of years now. Again, quite happy with its capabilities. For home use, I'm fairly happy with the Linksys kit. Seems stable and I've recommended them to a few people without having them bite me in the a$$. By contrast, the couple of no-name brand routers I've picked up from fairs (because I've been pushed for time) seem to be a lot more prone to wonkiness.
SP3 sets a system restore point before installing.
I know this as I trialled the beta version on my games machine - and it bluescreened due to a wonky driver (I believe the chipset driver for my mainboard).
Booted to safemode and rolled back. Easiest recovery in ages.
I'm interested to know what caused the hassle with the laptop to the extent that it took you two days to recover.
But all in all, sensible advice. Backups are a good thing (tm).
F_T
Next time you format, partition your drive so that you keep your Documents structure on a separate partition to your OS. Map the My Documents shortcut to a directory on the separate partition.
Almost all recent games save their save information to a directory in the My Documents target (IIRC one of the criteria for Games for Windows is that game saves are redirected into My Documents -> My Games) so the saves go straight to the segregated partition.
On subsequent formats, simply nuke the OS partition, reinstall, and then point the My Documents shortcut to the Documents partition. Simple.
I nearly fell foul of something similar a year or so ago. I bought a copy of Gareth Marenghi's Darkplace from Amazon, and on inserting it into my Win2k3 box the machine bluescreened - twice in a row.
Turns out that they were trying to apply a dodgy copy-protection driver onto the machine, which apparently wasn't 100% compatible with 2k3.
Of course, soon as I noticed that I disabled autorun (which is something I'd just forgotten to do since the last rebuild) and ripped the content.
Again, intrusive copy-protection measures make honest users into copyright infringers.
F_T
>> whenever you look at the top listings of torrents being hosted on say TPB, I can see TV shows, Movies, Games and Music. No Linux.
... but this has the inherent assumption that torrent files for Linux would be hosted on TPB - which isn't necessarily the case.
Certainly if I wanted a linux distribution I'd be more inclined to visit the site of the distributor (e.g. the OpenSuse site) rather than trust to the beneficience of TPB...
Remember that Intel had the Pentium Pro architectire in 1996, which allowed multiprocessor machinery on the desktop. Intel sat on their hands with this technology for years, assuming in their arrogance that home users didn't want it badly enough.
It's purely down to AMD that multicore architecture has become mainstream. It's fair to say that software isn't wholly taking advantage of this at the moment, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
I say thanks to AMD for at least being able to push the envelope and prevent Intel from getting too complacent.