Search results

Further to Merc's post, note that many OEM systems do not have a product key at all. For the majors like Lenovo and Acer, if you don't want to or can't do the re-image thing, you simply install from normal Windows 8 OEM media. It will pick up the BIOS code and does not ask you for a product key...

I think it works the other way around, Mark. :eek: Shall I ask her?

Slow file copy is a Win 7 bug, Chewy. The horrible slow Win 7 file copies are a thing of the past with Win 8, which is truly excellent in this regard. Worth upgrading to? If you are running XP or Vista, sure, Win 8 + Classic Shell is an upgrade in all respects. If you are on Win 7, please...

Files and folders is what it's all about. That's what I start people on, and (with some exceptions for fair-dinkum dummies who have difficulty figuring out any technology more complicated than a corkscrew) that's what I require people to lean. With a little one-on-one work, 80%+ of punters are...

Also, Classic Shell is vastly, repeat vastly more responsive to what YOU want. The options it gives you are fantastic! Classic Shell is Windows the way it always should have been. And you know what the best part is? It's that your idea of how Windows should look and act and my idea of how...

Hmmm .... It actually worked pretty much as expected on Windows 95, 98, and 2000. Windows XP borked the interface and out of the box was useless, but by setting preferences you could fix it and it worked fine after that. Primitive but perfectly usable. Not a patch on Everything or various other...

I agree with Dave. Well, OK, I'd quibble about a couple of (relatively minor) Windows 8 only "features" which do not afflict Windows 7 - there is some weirdness with dialogue boxes that even Classic Shell can't entirely iron out, for example, and a few other things which aren't occurring to me...

Yes. God yes! Incredible. Truly appalling "design" skills reflective of a company so far out of touch with its users and their wants that it is strongly rumoured to be hiring bright young astronomy graduates with a view to tasking them with a major project to renew the company: their challenge...

The same way as any other software works, Lunar. "Cloud" software is just ordinary software that phones home once in a while to make sure that you have paid the rental. Photoshop CC, for example, is the same product as Photoshop CS6 but it phones home every few months and you can't buy it, only...

What lenses do you have now, Dave?

While I'm at it, I'll muse on my other gear. The 1D IV is a no-brainer. It is the best possible camera for bird work regardless of price (allowing that there may or may not be a superior something in the Nikon world, but that's not something I'd consider given my investment in lenses) and there...

My 400D was better than the 5D II. My 20Ds were much better. The 7D isn't even in the same postcode. The 5D III system is apparently pretty similar in practice to the 1D III and IV systems, which is to say really, really good. Pretty pricy unit, but worth it I suspect. But in the end, I just...

My Tokina 35/2.8 macro was knocked off a while back and I practically never used it as a macro anyway (simply as a 35mm general-use prime), so I replaced it with a Canon 35/1.4, at vast expense. I don't seem to use it much. Once in a while for low-light things, yes, but portrait type stuff I...

Pentium G630 is a perfectly decent little chip. I have one in my desktop system - Pentium G630 CPU, 8GB DDR3, 1 x 2GB Samsung boot drive, 1 x 3GB and 2 x 4GB Seagate data drives. Works very nicely. I have a spare i5 chip at the office which would plug straight in, but I can't see any good reason...

You must be doing something wrong. Gigabyte boards just work.

Just install from the install DVD. It's vastly easier, trouble-free in all cases except those where there is a genuine hardware problem (and here you want the install to fail so that you can become aware of the issue and deal with it), and a lot quicker unless you do vast numbers of installs and...

I have had one crook motherboard in the last three years. Might be more than three years actually. One. OK, I don't sell so many systems these days and will retire completely soon but that's still quite impressive. I am selling MSI at present but also do Gigabyte from time to time.

Over in another place, in response to this post: ... and rather to my surprise, I amassed 17 upvotes and not a single downvote for this thing below: Tim 11 says "If the combination of MS and Nokia can produce the kind of handsets and tablets that enterprises want and have them seamlessly...

Good decision, Bozo.

Just ignore Tea. Well, she's not too far off the truth, but ignore here anyway. (That's what I do.) Bozo, I generally find that there is very little point in spending any noticable amount of time on a dud motherboard. Modern boards either work properly or they don't. If it ain't right, nothing...

I've used EditPlus for many years and as a programmers text editor it is very, very hard to fault. I only discovered Metapad a few months ago and for small tasks it's almost perfect. I use them side-by-side now.

^ Yes. However Bit Defender wraps that same scan engine and definition pack up in a much slower, clumsier, less friendly package. I tried Bit Defender a while back and rated it about "C+" or "B-"; good enough to use if it's already there and paid for, but not good enough to sell and recommend as...

The right what. Tea?

Balmer has a record of presiding over massive disasters. Blind Freddie could have doubled Microsoft's profit given the start Balmer had, and left the company in a strong position instead of facing oblivion within the decade, which is what we see now. Balmer learned nothing from the Vista...

Is that thread typical of the usual standard of discussion and debate at Ars? If so, maybe we better all head over to Tom's, or about.com - 'coz they just might be better and couldn't get much worse.

^ Nasty.

"Lenovo to ship all new PCs with Start Menu replacement: Old-school launcher included because YOU DEMANDED IT" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/22/lenovo_pokki_preinstalled/ But there might be other things at work here. Read it, then report back to class in 500 words or less.

Bullguard is truly excellent. Very low resource use (even on things like (e.g.) Pentium 4 3000, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD it is bearable); reasonable pricing; the best retailer/OEM scheme that goes on providing benefits long after you sold the software; prompt, very efficient interactive on-line help...

Correct! The article claims that their "study" shows that people vote like sheep and comments with up-votes get more up-votes, while posts with down-votes gather more down-votes. Be that as it may (and frankly, who the hell cares?) all by itself, without prompting or conspiracy or (so far as I...

And we are surprised about this? :lol: I'd have thought an intelligent comment on anything having anything at all to do with Yahoo would be like a well-tailored three piece suit on the surf beach.

Look a bit more carefully mate, bearing the subject of the article in mind. Notice anything odd about the votes?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/09/online_forum_comment_study/ ^ This Register article is pretty boring, but read it anyway. When you get to the end, click to look at the comments. (Don't bother reading them unless you feel like it, just look them over.) Effin' hilarious! Be sure to log in...

Dave, I agree: Classic Shell improves the UI massively. It doesn't (and can't) fix a host of other UI issues that I haven't talked about - I'm particularly thinking of the ugly and incredibly confusing mish-mash assortment of views and commands in Explorer here - but yes, Win 8 (or for that...

The mind-boggling stupidity which resulted in the Windows 8 disaster is obvious from the result. What is less obvious to the casual eye is the cause of that stupidity. We sit here watching the world's biggest slow-motion corporate train wreck from a safe distance and mumbling things like...

Yep, Oz emergency number has always been 000. Well, always ever since they changed it over from the old rub two sticks together to light a signal fire. I assumed that the picture was American (it's a redistributable licence one from Wikimedia Commons) but maybe it's from the UK. I don't...

One of these.

Hey, neat! Good one Tea. I'm going to see if they work on my phone. I bet you they work just fine.

Useful info. Thankyou. Of course the in practice, real-world entrances of the three systems onto the mainstream market were much closer together than than these dates would suggest. I'd have to look up old invoices to get the exact dates, but it would have been around about 2006 or 2007 when we...

so good I had to post it twice

1: Audio? Who could care less about audio? 2: Too big a plug? WTF? Decent sized plugs (like DVI) are more robust, more reliable, easier to use, easier to tell apart, and (unlike piddly little plugs) difficult to break. 3: But if they wanted something that wasn't DVI (HDMI for example) why could...

DVI does absolutely everything I, or anyone else I have ever met, have ever wanted a connection standard to do. Why do these morons have to keep changing good stuff that works well? It drives people spare. I cannot think of one single good reason to use Display Port OR HDMI.

One other worth mentioning in this thread 'cause it's an excellent utility is Fast Copy. Get it here: http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en Very simple, very practical, very flexible, very fast - pretty much ticks all the boxes. (Some kind Storage Forum member put me onto Fast Copy a few...

Exactly. What is the point of those things? I either get the real McCoy or else don't bother getting anything.

I agree with Mark. But I'd add that the speed differences are not worth the pain of upgrading. Stay with 7. I upgraded to 8, but that was different because I was coming from XP and needed more than 4GB of RAM. Given that (a) I had to upgrade anyway, and (b) that I was going to replace the...

^ Excellent! Thanks mate. :)

Chewy, 'cause I don't know how or where (both things I could find out) or what to classify the bug as so that it gets attention, not ignored. So I thought I'd talk it over with you guys first, see if I learned enough to be able to make a sensible bug report that will actually get fixed. I'll do...

Thanks, but no. That is the exact opposite. That add-on gives Firefox and Seamonkey the ability to do what Opera and Internet Explorer have always been able to do straight out of the box - read and save mht files. The problem Thunderbird has is that, with mht files, it buggerises around with the...

No Tea, there are lots of people who like having their own data, not giving it all to Google (who hand it all over to a foreign government for surveillance purposes and sell it back to you in the form of targeted ads). (OK, OK, my webserver happens to live in Texas so the nasty foreign...

INTRODUCTION If you want to save a web page simply and effectively for viewing later, or for sending to someone else so that they can view it too, an mht file is the way to go. The Mozilla family of browsers was always mht retarded as compared to Internet Explorer (yes, there are some things...

Tea is right. But the second thing you should do is take screenshots of every page so that you have something to serve as a basis for your new site. There is nothing magic about the layout, but it is perfectly functional and if you have a record of it you can use that as a sort of checklist...