Why do you still use Windows XP?

"BillW50" wrote in :

I don't know how WXP handles that but in W9X there's Wininit.ini,
which can be manually raided to see what it's up to. Usually rename
of some added file, to replace an in-use file. I think some of the
better installers (Wise, NSIS) keep a readable record of this too.

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]


Good, looks like same method then. The file is usually empty. See if
Wininit.bak is also there, that sometimes gives details of the last task the
Wininit thing had to do. The main thing is, if you check right before reboot,
when some install requires it, that's when Wininit usually has the details.
You can then find the temporary-named file, and the name of whatever it's
meant to replace.

"BillW50" wrote in :

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 think I tried W98 with no swap once. It seemed ok. (I had 512MB at the
time). Since going to 1GB I decided to let it have swap on a 256MB RAM disk.
I don't think I noticed any difference either, but that's partly why I
reverted to letting it beleive it had a normal swap. it was easier, so that
way I gained convenience. Either way, it never uses all my RAM.

W9X doesn't complain, exactly, it just suggests on the system config page,
that it might impact performance to set any other than standard config, and
advised against. After trying a few things, I decided I had nothing to lose
in giving it what it wants. I was already getting nice speed just having swap
on RAM disk anyway.

"BillW50" wrote in :

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.



It's possibly my Kingstons were fakes. Not all that likely, but bought from a
small local shop. If they had been, the shop wouldn't have known either. I've
seen a couple of real fakes since though, they're usually more obvious,
rough-looking in some details, or with half claimed capacity, slow access, or
worse.

I find that cheap SD cards are a bad bet, but cheap CF cards often score
high. Best for top nothc in both is Transcend, at least, last time I bought.
Sandisk on eBay is impossible, fakes that make a minefield more mine than
field. Hopefully Transcend won't suffer the same fate. Maybe not though, I
think they were more open about their detailed documentation, so fakers can't
so easily rely on buyer's ignorance of details. (I wish ALL parts were so
openly spec'd as those things were!) Anyway, Transcend were the only CF cards
I ever found that reliably gave me performance like UDMA mode 5. And at a
modest price that made Sandisk look very disappointing, even greedy.

"BillW50" wrote in :

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.


I'd forgotten about that switch. And never knew that it could be ignored
either. As I preferred CF cards on ATA adapters, I stopped thinking about
switch based protection, but I like your write-enable line suggestion. So
long as it is an inviolable thing, purely hardware based, it's good
protection. Some Flash memory (EEPROM) used a higher voltage to allow
programming of data. If these new types are the same, that voltage's line
might be a good one to interrupt, as well as any signals-based line.

In ,
Lostgallifreyan wrote:
"BillW50" wrote in :

I don't know how WXP handles that but in W9X there's Wininit.ini,
which can be manually raided to see what it's up to. Usually rename
of some added file, to replace an in-use file. I think some of the
better installers (Wise, NSIS) keep a readable record of this too.

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]


Good, looks like same method then. The file is usually empty. See if
Wininit.bak is also there, that sometimes gives details of the last
task the Wininit thing had to do. The main thing is, if you check
right before reboot, when some install requires it, that's when
Wininit usually has the details. You can then find the
temporary-named file, and the name of whatever it's meant to replace.

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.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - OE-QuoteFix v1.19.2
Centrino Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz - 2GB - Windows XP SP3

"BillW50" wrote in :

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.


If that fan draws air in from venting on the far end, it helps all. Just
pulling hot air across a large external surface can help. That's another idea
I had for mine, to dispel it around the sealed case, just to increase contact
with the lid and floor. No room in there though, it's VERY compact. Any fan
that would fit, would whine like a gnat.

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.


That's somethign I have considered too, having read of it being done for some
other ITX board. THing is, I don't know if I can. The C3 can't be overclocked
without nasty bodging with silver paint amongst the fine pins, and when it's
an embedded IC like on my boards, even that is impossible without several
GRAND's worth of exotic solder reflow gear! Either that or pot luck and dirty
methods that leave me better off chancing early demise of an intact board.

The HLT instruction cooling native to W98 in idle state is good too. Just as
good as underclocking could ever be. If I wanted full bore out of it for
anything, HTL or underclock would have to go, so I'm back to getting proper
dissipation anyway.

Speed difference may not always matter, but in some things, irregular demands
need that extra overhead. They might not call on it constantly, but if it's
not there, the system chugs and chokes like that ball-in-a-pipe analogy I
mentioned the other day..

I know that people will often say (they have, many times) that this is
because my system is bad, and that there is always a better way. Not so.
Buffers are buffers, and have a reason to be. If this thing could have been
as smooth as those guys believed it should be, the software and hardware
coders would have hardlty bothers with the complexities of buffer management.
CPU demands are so rarely 'average' or 'normal' in a multitasking machine.
I'll keep mine fast and use a fan if I have to.

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 might get one. Better than my cheap meat-skewer thermometers... I remember
when RS wanted £170 for one! I guess that changed since I last looked.

"BillW50" wrote in :

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 wouldn't miss the webcam or the WiFi. Can live without those. Otherwise,
the machines seem ok. I looked on eBay earlier, put a couple on the watch
list after getting outbid on a tentative early snipe at a cheap one that had
6 nimutes left when I first saw it.

That battery loss thing might get annoying, but it depends how much it is.
Having 12 KWh of lead acid storage in high grade sealed batteries, I think
I'd not notice so long as it was connected to that when possible.

One thing I'd like is those point-of-sale type displays. They seem clean,
sharp, very sparing in their use of materials, so light, but strong, and with
minimal surrounds so they're small compared to the amount of picture they can
show. Thing is, while they are all over shops and high streets now, finding
any cheap on eBay is impossible here. I guess they're still too new to result
in a flooded surplus market. But I really like them, they have standard
connectors on them like ITX boards. They'd be an ideal match for them.

An EEE machine might work for me, but those screens look very small. I'd
prefer 1024x768 if I can get it the way I want it.

"BillW50" wrote in :

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.


Very possible. Maybe only used when something explicitly uses it rather than
letting the OS do it in whatever way it wants to in newer systems.

"BillW50" wrote 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 missed this earlier (just saw it scroll by with an Xnews 9999 flag on it).

One time I deliberately tested some trojan. I let it infect a W98 machine (I
never run anything else beyond testing something that needs it). The effect
was creepy, unsettling, I saw it flood from one little *.EML file or
something, to about 25 files some in Windows, some in System, all renamed to
try to look like sysfiles or temp files. I was using my registry lock at the
time, so I decided to see if cutting any bad references from System.ini for
shell, and any startup shortcuts, were enough to stop it spreading, after
reboot nuked the current registry with a copy of the clean one. It did. I had
a weird few minutes trying to see if I could tell all of the bad files from
the good. I was never entirely sure, despite most of the bad all having the
same file size! But a check with Netstat /a showed no strange business, so it
was either inert, or dead. I re-Ghosted to be sure, once it got boring to
look at.

At which point I decided that so long as I was vigilant, the cure might be
worse than the infection. I'd heard of people really getting stung during
efforts to clean up an infection, even with AV help. That plus my experience
set me thinkign very differently about prevention. This was over 7 years ago.
If I'd got infected since, I might have rethunk this, but it never happened.

"BillW50" wrote in :

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.


I decided to risk this one:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ASUS-Eee-P...-/120874428274
I have no idea yet if this will cause elation or regret, but it will at
least get me some much needed mobility.

I hope I can get some cheaper than that, so I can get backups if I decide
on them long term.

Maybe I will, if the world swoons and falls into the arms of ARM CPU's.