H
Harry Vaderchi
File Manager? That is a vision I now wish I could wash off.
type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.
type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.
H
Harry Vaderchi
Ah, when I said Search, I was avoiding typing g**gle; and I omitted a
space - try here
http://www.brydon.net/winfile/
H
Harry Vaderchi
[re winfile]
No, my fault for not being clear.
Did you look at the link I posted? It claims to be updated version that
*is* LFN aware.
I
Iceman
In this group Industrial One wrote in message
Rather a troll-y question, really, but I'll try.
When I buy a new computer, probably a laptop.
Absolutely not. It will stay on my old desktop PC and I will continue to use
it for home work, etc.
It won't be all that problematic. At least not for my needs.
Rather a troll-y question, really, but I'll try.
When I buy a new computer, probably a laptop.
Absolutely not. It will stay on my old desktop PC and I will continue to use
it for home work, etc.
It won't be all that problematic. At least not for my needs.
B
BillW50
In
I have used lots of AV over the past 15 years or so. And I only use
Avast today because it is very good about not flagging false positives.
IDK, maybe flagging like one per two years or so. Which is near perfect
in my book.
Almost never do I pick up a virus or a trojan. But once in a blue moon I
do. Last time was on February 7th of this year. I pick them up so rare,
that it was a bit of a shock. And this one was a trojan and it had a
plan to infect the system on reboot. And I reboot like once every two
weeks or so (so I don't know where I picked it up at). And when I
rebooted on the 7th, Avast loads first and when the trojan tried to
install, Avast caught it and nuked it.
I dunno about people running without an AV. As I have been running
Windows since '93 and I have never been infected yet (and I have over a
dozen computers here). Although at least twice during this time, I would
have been infected without an AV.
Lostgallifreyan said:
I have used lots of AV over the past 15 years or so. And I only use
Avast today because it is very good about not flagging false positives.
IDK, maybe flagging like one per two years or so. Which is near perfect
in my book.
Almost never do I pick up a virus or a trojan. But once in a blue moon I
do. Last time was on February 7th of this year. I pick them up so rare,
that it was a bit of a shock. And this one was a trojan and it had a
plan to infect the system on reboot. And I reboot like once every two
weeks or so (so I don't know where I picked it up at). And when I
rebooted on the 7th, Avast loads first and when the trojan tried to
install, Avast caught it and nuked it.
I dunno about people running without an AV. As I have been running
Windows since '93 and I have never been infected yet (and I have over a
dozen computers here). Although at least twice during this time, I would
have been infected without an AV.
B
BillW50
In
I have no problem with non-compliant browsers. As I believe in freedom.
And compliances are for dictators and commies. And I am all for people
trying to find better ways to do something. Sometimes they work and
sometimes they don't.
And I still have machines with both FF2 and IE6 on them. And I can tell
you that IE6 still today renders webpages far better than FF2 does.
98 said:
I have no problem with non-compliant browsers. As I believe in freedom.
And compliances are for dictators and commies. And I am all for people
trying to find better ways to do something. Sometimes they work and
sometimes they don't.
And I still have machines with both FF2 and IE6 on them. And I can tell
you that IE6 still today renders webpages far better than FF2 does.
B
BillW50
In
So? Some claim old people are outdated too. And who was that democratic
politician again who said something like people over 60 have outlived
their usefulness to society and should get out of the way and die?
Ant said:
So? Some claim old people are outdated too. And who was that democratic
politician again who said something like people over 60 have outlived
their usefulness to society and should get out of the way and die?
P
(PeteCresswell)
Per BillW50:
Wasn't that part of the back story in Stanley Kubrick's
"Clockwork Orange" movie?
Wasn't that part of the back story in Stanley Kubrick's
"Clockwork Orange" movie?
B
BillW50
In
Yes indeed.
Well... I dunno. I do both. Restoring from clean backups takes time for
one. And some malware doesn't give you any signs that your computer is
even infected. So without an AV, you wouldn't really know if you were
infected or not.
One idea I really like is Windows Embedded. There are other software
that does something similar. But what basically happens is that all
writes are redirected to somewhere else (like to RAM or to another
drive). So nothing on your boot/system drive is changed at all. Windows
thinks it is writing there and things are written and re-read with the
updated information, although...
When you power off (you don't even have to do a proper shutdown either).
And when you boot up later, none of the changes stuck and you are back
to day 1 all over again. So any updates, malware, or whatever are
totally gone. To me, if you are not going to run an AV, this is the real
way to go.
I don't know of anything like this for Windows 9x though. As Windows
Embedded I think is XP only version. Windows SteadyState works only with
XP and Vista (and slows your computer down I heard), but also restores
your computer back to day 1.
And keeping virus signatures up-to-date is very easy nowadays. As they
happen all in the background and all you need to do is to turn the
computer on and the rest is taken care of.
Lostgallifreyan said:
Yes indeed.
Well... I dunno. I do both. Restoring from clean backups takes time for
one. And some malware doesn't give you any signs that your computer is
even infected. So without an AV, you wouldn't really know if you were
infected or not.
One idea I really like is Windows Embedded. There are other software
that does something similar. But what basically happens is that all
writes are redirected to somewhere else (like to RAM or to another
drive). So nothing on your boot/system drive is changed at all. Windows
thinks it is writing there and things are written and re-read with the
updated information, although...
When you power off (you don't even have to do a proper shutdown either).
And when you boot up later, none of the changes stuck and you are back
to day 1 all over again. So any updates, malware, or whatever are
totally gone. To me, if you are not going to run an AV, this is the real
way to go.
I don't know of anything like this for Windows 9x though. As Windows
Embedded I think is XP only version. Windows SteadyState works only with
XP and Vista (and slows your computer down I heard), but also restores
your computer back to day 1.
And keeping virus signatures up-to-date is very easy nowadays. As they
happen all in the background and all you need to do is to turn the
computer on and the rest is taken care of.
B
BillW50
In
Could have been, I haven't seen that one in ages. But this guy was on
national TV saying this stuff just about 4 years ago. It doesn't
surprise me that a few would feel this way. But what does surprise me is
actually saying something like this publicly. I seem to recall it was
either during those National Healthcare discussions or during the 2008
campaign.
(PeteCresswell) said:
Could have been, I haven't seen that one in ages. But this guy was on
national TV saying this stuff just about 4 years ago. It doesn't
surprise me that a few would feel this way. But what does surprise me is
actually saying something like this publicly. I seem to recall it was
either during those National Healthcare discussions or during the 2008
campaign.
B
BillW50
In
Yes true nowadays. But there was a time when IE6 was the most used
browser and whether compliant or not, it was still widely supported.
Although recently its use has fallen to below 1% and it is now deemed as
good as dead by most.
Bill said:
Yes true nowadays. But there was a time when IE6 was the most used
browser and whether compliant or not, it was still widely supported.
Although recently its use has fallen to below 1% and it is now deemed as
good as dead by most.
B
BillW50
In
Saving all writes to RAM, the default is 512MB. Which I don't recall if
you can make larger or not. At any point in time you can say I want to
save everything so far and turn this feature off. And it will dump
everything and commit (write) everything to the drive. All is well up to
this point and if you want to toggle it back on you can. But it doesn't
count unless you reboot at this point. Or you can continue and it still
won't count until you reboot (it is acting just like regular Windows at
this point). As it remembers how you have it set before rebooting.
Buffering, caching, or whatever you want to call it for 512MB isn't a
lot of room. Having a swapfile on this protected partition won't last
long and you will fill up 512MB very fast. So use swap on another
partition or just turn it off. And the least amount of writing really
helps out of lot. As you have to do something when this space starts
running low. I can run about 18 hours with some browsing and email and
newsgroups, so it isn't that bad before filling up with some light duty
tasks.
The RAM option I don't recall if you can save it or not. But there is a
buffering, caching, or whatever you want to call it to another partition
option. Same idea with a twist. You don't have to worry about filling up
the RAM. And if I remember right, it can continue after reboot after
reboot. And no changes are committed to the protected drive unless you
tell it so. Once you do, you are stuck until you reboot once again (just
like the RAM option). Meaning once you tell it to commit you are stuck
there until a reboot. And like the RAM option, if you want this
protection turned on again, you have to tell it before a reboot.
Otherwise it acts just like regular Windows in this state.
J. P. Gilliver (John) said:
Saving all writes to RAM, the default is 512MB. Which I don't recall if
you can make larger or not. At any point in time you can say I want to
save everything so far and turn this feature off. And it will dump
everything and commit (write) everything to the drive. All is well up to
this point and if you want to toggle it back on you can. But it doesn't
count unless you reboot at this point. Or you can continue and it still
won't count until you reboot (it is acting just like regular Windows at
this point). As it remembers how you have it set before rebooting.
Buffering, caching, or whatever you want to call it for 512MB isn't a
lot of room. Having a swapfile on this protected partition won't last
long and you will fill up 512MB very fast. So use swap on another
partition or just turn it off. And the least amount of writing really
helps out of lot. As you have to do something when this space starts
running low. I can run about 18 hours with some browsing and email and
newsgroups, so it isn't that bad before filling up with some light duty
tasks.
The RAM option I don't recall if you can save it or not. But there is a
buffering, caching, or whatever you want to call it to another partition
option. Same idea with a twist. You don't have to worry about filling up
the RAM. And if I remember right, it can continue after reboot after
reboot. And no changes are committed to the protected drive unless you
tell it so. Once you do, you are stuck until you reboot once again (just
like the RAM option). Meaning once you tell it to commit you are stuck
there until a reboot. And like the RAM option, if you want this
protection turned on again, you have to tell it before a reboot.
Otherwise it acts just like regular Windows in this state.
Z
Zaphod Beeblebrox
I'd be very careful doing that - there are many documented instances of
the file system getting corrupted that way under XP Embedded with EWF
running. Rare, I grant you, but not worth the risk in my opinion.
B
BillW50
In
How? The system drive is in read only mode and all changes are in RAM
(which you don't want anyway). I can see if you are using another
partition to hold all of the writes that would be a problem. But not if
it is stored in RAM.
Zaphod said:
How? The system drive is in read only mode and all changes are in RAM
(which you don't want anyway). I can see if you are using another
partition to hold all of the writes that would be a problem. But not if
it is stored in RAM.
Z
Zaphod Beeblebrox
I don't know the technical details, but EWF doesn't place the drive in
read-only mode, EWF is just a system-level driver that redirects writes
to RAM instead of disk, and it has been known to fail on power loss in
such a way that the drive gets corrupted. Look in the history of
microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded for a number of related posts, and
I suspect MS web forums have some also.
--
Zaphod
Arthur: All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's
something big and sinister going on in the world.
Slartibartfast: No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the
universe gets that.
B
BillW50
In
Hi Zaphod! Are you sure this is the right newsgroup?
microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded
As there are only 15 posts in the last 9 months and most of those are
spam. Also with EWF enabled, it should work very much like a Live OS.
Zaphod said:
Hi Zaphod! Are you sure this is the right newsgroup?
microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded
As there are only 15 posts in the last 9 months and most of those are
spam. Also with EWF enabled, it should work very much like a Live OS.
Z
Zaphod Beeblebrox
Yes, that's the right group, but when MS dropped them it died pretty
quickly. You'll have to look well back in the past to see the posts
I'm talking about. Or look in the web forums, I suspect you'll find
similar posts there, but I've not used them so I can't say for sure.
But rest assured, as much as you'd like to think it works like a live
CD, the difference is there - live CDs run on actual Read-Only media
where it is not possible to write to the media, but EWF does not - it
is a system-level driver that redirects writes to memory, and it can
and does fail under the correct circumstances.
30 seconds searching in Google Groups turned up this post and others:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded/brow
se_thread/thread/304b4d42890bd5aa/1c600bfbdd395133?
hl=en&lnk=gst&q=ewf+corrupt#1c600bfbdd395133
--
Zaphod
Arthur: All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's
something big and sinister going on in the world.
Slartibartfast: No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the
universe gets that.
B
BillW50
In
Okay, I thought there were recent discussions about it.
Well I never tried it, but I see nothing stopping Embedded from running
from a DVD read only, a ROM, or almost anything else as read only.
See this is what I am talking about. They have other partitions/drives
that are not under the write protection with the EWF enabled (generally
it is only the system partition). And in these cases, all bets are off
as those other drives are still being written too.
Zaphod said:
Okay, I thought there were recent discussions about it.
Well I never tried it, but I see nothing stopping Embedded from running
from a DVD read only, a ROM, or almost anything else as read only.
See this is what I am talking about. They have other partitions/drives
that are not under the write protection with the EWF enabled (generally
it is only the system partition). And in these cases, all bets are off
as those other drives are still being written too.
B
BillW50
In
I just checked this XP Pro machine and it does have a Wininit.ini file.
And I peeked in it and all it has is this one line:
[rename]
I've placed the swap in RAMDisk and also used no swap under 2000/XP. And
frankly, I don't see any difference in performance or anything. And when
XP at least gets down to about 200MB of free RAM, trouble starts. Having
more RAM free doesn't have any problems.
The only thing about W2K is that it complains about having no swap file
(or even not large enough), while XP doesn't care. And if W2K has 512MB
or larger swap file (on a machine with 2GB of RAM anyway), W2K stops
bugging you about the swapfile. I have no idea what happens on a W9x
machine. As I never tried it there.
I have heard lots of stories about SD and flash drives failing. I never
had one fail yet and some are really old (12+ years I would think). One
guy I know has failures as short as two weeks. Although he constantly
writes to them and uses the dirt cheap ones. All of mine I don't think I
have more than a thousand writes on any of them.
SD cards also have a write protect switch and some USB flash drives does
too. Although I noticed that SD cards when used with some (maybe all)
USB card readers ignores the switch setting. And I never investigated
why this happens. I would suspect though, that line isn't wired on those
card readers.
Oh ok. Those EeePCs uses the keyboard as one giant heatsink for the CPU
and Northbridge. They mainly did this is save weight by eliminating a
heatsink. The Celeron 900MHz is also clocked down to 633MHz. And I have
never seen the CPU go over 140 degrees F ever. And the fan is on the
other side of the motherboard and doesn't help much on the CPU and
Northbridge side. The fan side has the RAM, SSD, and WiFi card and that
is all. And the fan speed is controlled by the CPU temperature, go
figure.
So underclocking will help lots in regards to temperature. So that is an
idea. And frankly I can toggle the speed between 900MHz and 633MHz and
there isn't much of a performance difference. Even if you have the CPU
maxed out for hours.
As for measuring temperatures, I use one of those IR temp probes. You
are supposed to calibrate it on the each surface you are measuring (they
can measure air too). I never did that since testing against other
thermometers, I don't think it is off more than a degree or two without
the calibration. They cost like $25 and under.
I don't think they are really that fragile. I have seen youtube videos
of people abusing them and they are really tough even while running. The
only worry I have is the screen. The 7 inch ones are really protected
from the sides. Although the screens will still break if someone sits on
one. The only other weak spot would be the common problem of the DC
jack. One good sideways pull just might screw that up, but otherwise
should be fine.
W98 drivers? It uses Intel 915GM chipset and I believe Intel has W98
drivers for them. Same for the video. The audio I think is realtek or
something and I am not sure about drivers for them. The WiFi and the
webcam might be the hardest to get running under W98. I should try this
someday. ;-)
I should add that I have high CPU usage from DPC (interrupts) while
running XP. I believe I tracked it down to the WiFi driver. While I am
still doing more tests on this to make sure. And I haven't seen this
problem with Windows 2000 yet. But I am using a different WiFi driver
there, so maybe that is why (and that driver should work fine under XP
too). It also appears that when you do a fresh XP install, no problem.
It only seems to appear after a restore from a backup. And this doesn't
make any sense to me and why I need to test this out more.
Another deal breaker might be something that I think affects all Celeron
M machines. That is when powered down, they still draw power from the
battery. Enough to drain a full battery after a week or two. The
temporary fix is to remove the battery and reinsert after a few seconds.
As I believe this stops the drain.
Lostgallifreyan said:
I just checked this XP Pro machine and it does have a Wininit.ini file.
And I peeked in it and all it has is this one line:
[rename]
I've placed the swap in RAMDisk and also used no swap under 2000/XP. And
frankly, I don't see any difference in performance or anything. And when
XP at least gets down to about 200MB of free RAM, trouble starts. Having
more RAM free doesn't have any problems.
The only thing about W2K is that it complains about having no swap file
(or even not large enough), while XP doesn't care. And if W2K has 512MB
or larger swap file (on a machine with 2GB of RAM anyway), W2K stops
bugging you about the swapfile. I have no idea what happens on a W9x
machine. As I never tried it there.
I definitely read about this, and I wish I could remember where, to
cite it.
logger based on Sparkfun's Logomatic. That uses an SD card. I saw it
fail because I was deleting logs when extracting them to hard disk. I
soon learned to keep them there till the SD card filled up. This
forces wear leveling by the simple method of causing each bit to be
written once each time the card is emptied and refilled. The failed
SD cards were both good quality Kingston cards that had worked well
for years in a case where files had sat on them a long time,
accumulating until I caned off the lot wanting more space. They
failed fairly fast once I started habitually clearing them early,
inplying that frequent writes to one region was the cause of failure.
I never lost a CF card when using it that way, which seems to confirm
what I read about those. (I lost one during a power failure on an
adapter during a careless test though).
I have heard lots of stories about SD and flash drives failing. I never
had one fail yet and some are really old (12+ years I would think). One
guy I know has failures as short as two weeks. Although he constantly
writes to them and uses the dirt cheap ones. All of mine I don't think I
have more than a thousand writes on any of them.
That should do it.
for my 1U ITX once I do more work with it.
SD cards also have a write protect switch and some USB flash drives does
too. Although I noticed that SD cards when used with some (maybe all)
USB card readers ignores the switch setting. And I never investigated
why this happens. I would suspect though, that line isn't wired on those
card readers.
CPU. I think my thermal coupling is ok, but even so there's
apparently over ten degrees C difference between case back and CPU
thermistor. Which might by lying for all I know, but it does feel hot
after a while. Even a small amount of forced air makes a huge
difference, but that's exactly what I want to avoid.
put a 40mm fan deliberately aimed along the vanes I put on the back,
first forming a cover to compel ducting along the vanes. I think it
might work, and be damn near silent. I considered a heat pipe but
that won't do much better than what I already have even if it wasn't
more awkward and expensive. I can get the heat out to the case, it
just won't radiate fast enough.
Oh ok. Those EeePCs uses the keyboard as one giant heatsink for the CPU
and Northbridge. They mainly did this is save weight by eliminating a
heatsink. The Celeron 900MHz is also clocked down to 633MHz. And I have
never seen the CPU go over 140 degrees F ever. And the fan is on the
other side of the motherboard and doesn't help much on the CPU and
Northbridge side. The fan side has the RAM, SSD, and WiFi card and that
is all. And the fan speed is controlled by the CPU temperature, go
figure.
So underclocking will help lots in regards to temperature. So that is an
idea. And frankly I can toggle the speed between 900MHz and 633MHz and
there isn't much of a performance difference. Even if you have the CPU
maxed out for hours.
As for measuring temperatures, I use one of those IR temp probes. You
are supposed to calibrate it on the each surface you are measuring (they
can measure air too). I never did that since testing against other
thermometers, I don't think it is off more than a degree or two without
the calibration. They cost like $25 and under.
I considered it.
expensive and fragile though. But I might do it anyway just for the
portability. Especially if they aren't as useless as a hamstrung
racehorse of running W98 SE. (I have no idea how well their hardware
is supported by W9X drivers...)
I will definitely look up the Asus machines again though, on the
strength of your suggestion. Ever since I quit writing software on a
Psion Workabout, I miss that kind of portability. But those things
are about as luxurious as a Pythoneque Yorkshireman's shoebox, so
Asus machines might be worth it if I can afford a couple (I never
want just one, once backup looks like being vital).
I don't think they are really that fragile. I have seen youtube videos
of people abusing them and they are really tough even while running. The
only worry I have is the screen. The 7 inch ones are really protected
from the sides. Although the screens will still break if someone sits on
one. The only other weak spot would be the common problem of the DC
jack. One good sideways pull just might screw that up, but otherwise
should be fine.
W98 drivers? It uses Intel 915GM chipset and I believe Intel has W98
drivers for them. Same for the video. The audio I think is realtek or
something and I am not sure about drivers for them. The WiFi and the
webcam might be the hardest to get running under W98. I should try this
someday. ;-)
I should add that I have high CPU usage from DPC (interrupts) while
running XP. I believe I tracked it down to the WiFi driver. While I am
still doing more tests on this to make sure. And I haven't seen this
problem with Windows 2000 yet. But I am using a different WiFi driver
there, so maybe that is why (and that driver should work fine under XP
too). It also appears that when you do a fresh XP install, no problem.
It only seems to appear after a restore from a backup. And this doesn't
make any sense to me and why I need to test this out more.
Another deal breaker might be something that I think affects all Celeron
M machines. That is when powered down, they still draw power from the
battery. Enough to drain a full battery after a week or two. The
temporary fix is to remove the battery and reinsert after a few seconds.
As I believe this stops the drain.
B
BillW50
In
No Wininit.bak file here and Wininit.ini was created and modified on:
1/4/2010 3:11:16PM
And that date seems like when this XP was installed on this machine. So
it doesn't show any signs of use under XP. Maybe it gets used for legacy
Windows applications. I think the oldest Windows stuff I still run is MS
Office 2000. And maybe that isn't old enough.
Lostgallifreyan said:
No Wininit.bak file here and Wininit.ini was created and modified on:
1/4/2010 3:11:16PM
And that date seems like when this XP was installed on this machine. So
it doesn't show any signs of use under XP. Maybe it gets used for legacy
Windows applications. I think the oldest Windows stuff I still run is MS
Office 2000. And maybe that isn't old enough.