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No, Coug, thanks for the heads up. I'll bear that in mind for another day. MangyDog, it may interest you to know that this disgraceful rip-off of an IT system was foisted on my customer by a well known local firm. For a cash-strapped small non-profit charity organisation with a...

I have a customer who bought a Sophos Endpoint Protection site licence a little while back. The company which used to do their IT set it up on the various machines in the network such that it was centrally controlled from the dedicated server and workstations got their updates from there. Then...

The problem with duplicate finders isn't getting one with the features you need, Mubs, it's getting one without the kitchen bloody sink grafted onto it! Most of them are so full of clever tricks and bells and whistles and handy added extras that it's quite difficult to just do what you need to...

Worth telling this, I guess ..... Bloke bought a system last week. We went for Win 8 with Classic Shell and ObjectDock. User is wedded to Outlook, has an Office 10 pro licence. So we fiddled about for a long time doing the data transfer from his old beast - a Pentium IV 1700, would you...

Hmmm ... you know, I'm finding it difficult to really object to placing restrictions on the named administrator account .... you see such screaming horrors come in where all you can really do is marvel that the system ever actually worked and the user still actually has a bank account. On the...

That would be my question also, though purely rhetorical. I just don't understand why anyone would want to use Media Centre when there are several excellent third-party packages that are so much smaller, faster, and all-round nicer to use. You mean there is one worth using? I have yet to hear...

I think I have tracked it down to a faulty $1 mylex-SATA power adaptor cable. I always did hate those damn things, and religiously avoid using them for hard drives as a rule, only optical drives which are not so fussy or so important. In this system, with five HDDs, I need a couple. No idea...

Cheers SB. That is exactly the sort of functionality I'm after. This machine runs XP, so I don't know if I can do anything like your very helpful screenshot with that. I don't want to do anything too radical to my carefully minimal UI setup either. I used to use XTree Gold for this - that...

I'd have thought this would be easy. All I am looking for is an easy way to scroll through a folder of MS Word files, viewing the contents as desired, and managing those files. I have a folder full of invoices in Word 2000 format, I want to be able to sort the contents (e.g., by date), and...

No idea. What is "indexing" in this context? But I have certainly built and worked on a good number of Win 7 systems in the workshop, Mubs, and there was nothing particularly notable about the performance of any of them. Much the same a XP or a well-tweaked Vista machine (yes, you can get Vista...

Good thinking! It's in the port labelled "SATA 0", maybe the system powers them up starting at #5?

Not really a tech support thing 'cause the system is working, just an odd one to throw into the pot for discussion. As detailed in the Windows 8 thread, I recently built a new home server. Well, upgraded one, keeping the old case, PSU, and most of the drives. Out of the box, Win 8 imposes the...

You are asking me? I've never used Windows 7, sorry, no idea. But obviously there is some effective caching and indexing going on with Win 8, no other way to make it so fast.

so good I had to post it twice

And he hasn't actually been to see the movie,. just glanced at the trailer. What a tool. Re really does get it comprehensively wrong, not just once but over and over again. FAIL.

You need Windows Light! :)

I don't do numbers, Greg. Life is too short. :) If it's not different enough to spot with the naked eye, I don't much care about it. In any case, I have never used Windows 7 or Vista (apart from fixing customer machines, of course), so I have nothing to compare with. But data transfer speeds...

Clocker, I only have 5 machines these days. One runs OS/2 (I might retire that one soon, it doesn't have a lot of accounting work to do these days, which is all it does); one is running Windows 8 successfully - not with Start8, I'm using Classic Shell, but still experimenting. All the others run...

I would suggest considering a brute force solution. It may or may not stack up, but certainly has to be worth considering. I have 11TB of primary on-line storage arranged very simply using 5 off-the-shelf SATA drives plugged into an ordinary Gigabyte motherboard in the ordinary way. At present...

^ Good question! My guess is that they won't extend it, and they won't lower the real price either .... but they will do stuff to lower the effective price - i.e., some other special. The way I'm seeing it, they could: a) Extend the special. This would be a massive admission of failure. They...

It never stopped, Max. It started on release day in October and at that time was planned to run until 31st January 2013. I haven't heard of any change to those dates, and the Microsoft website still says January 31st. When it goes from $40 to about $200 (Pro version; Home version will be about...

In broad, Mubs, the answer is "no". Most things that run on Win 7 will run on Win 8. Doubtless Merc will give you a more comprehensive answer. I did strike a weird one the other day. I installed SMPlayer as per usual (I like to have a couple of different media players on a machine, and...

^ You are doing great so far. Any chance you can turn you attention to the short-term future of Randwick? I'd particularly like to know if Laughing Boy will be any good over the 10,000 metres in the fifth, and whether you reckon I should back him on the nose or each way. :)

Quoted for truth. Metro is a massive fail, and already the market sees Windows 8 as a dud, "Vista Mark II" is a phrase I'm hearing quite a lot. And that is a shame, really, as the mind-boggling stupid UI aside, I reckon it is, under the skin, the best Windows ever. Sure, you can patch it up...

I thought it was current right up until JTR started talking about developing 10GB SSD boot drives .... then I started to smell a rat.

Merc is the networking guru, I'm just a muddle-through-and-blunder type, but in my experience most problems of this nature turn out to be caused by missing or mangled NTFS permissions, not by the actual networking permissions. Start looking there.

Not really the answer you are looking for, AzJazz, but my suggestion (for other readers of this thread) is to use a hybrid drive. Seagate make an excellent little 750GB hybrid, the Momentus XT. It is a small flash drive and a fairly fast mechanical drive all in one, with very clever software...

Thanks Connint, maybe that was it. (Never mind that I am a reseller.) But I have stopped bothering with RMA hard drives these days: Seagate send you refurbished drives that are perfectly good for all purposes except attaching to a computer or storing data, so it's easier just to throw them away.

Buy what? From who? You can't buy decent screens anymore, you can only get wide-screen toy rubbish that is a major pain to do actual useful work on. It really, really bugs me that someone spent all that time and money making this expensive, useless toy when they could have made a real screen...

^ Ahh. Makes sense.

Cheers, JTR. I'll try DOSbox out when I finish work tonight. (Modern accounting packages, cost aside, simply are not as good as the last of the DOS-based ones. Speed of data entry in particular is a key. Some tools - a hammer to hit nails, a screwdriver to drive screws, a glass to drink from...

Really? But it's 16-bit? I just tried it quickly. Error: "This app can't run on your PC. To find a version .... etc. Tried clicking XPSP3 and Win95 compatibility modes, nuffin different. How can any 16-bit app run under Win64? I thought that was supposed to be against the rules? Out of...

Drives are vastly better at resisting shock than they used to be, LM, and it's amazing what they will put up with these days, but there are limits to all things.

Ahh, right. That makes sense to me - those faster things you mention are the things that I'm seeing. I haven't noticed any difference worth mentioning for the likes of of (say) Excel or Photoshop - but I wouldn't, as I don't normally use the Win 8 machine for any of those things, and in any...

I miss my Samsung drives. All those years of fantastic service! But I can't buy Samsung anymore, so I went back to my first love from the previous century: Seagate. The Seagate drives are doing OK for me.

Cheers P5, nice to see you. Finally, my own take. This may shock a few people, but I am, of my own free will, not on any drugs or psychotherapy or anything else like that, using Windows 8 on one of my own machines. Yes, me. That's right, the same Tannin who still has an OS/2 machine 'cause it's...

Now the bad news: The Windows 8 UI is the worst ever delivered by Microsoft. Yes, worse than Vista. Yes, worse than 3.0. Yes, worse than ME. (OK, possibly not worse than Windows/286 or 1.0, but I can't remember either of those two, and in any case, they were not operating systems, they were...

First the good news: Under the skin, Windows 8 is the best operating system Microsoft have ever produced. Contrary to what some other posters have said, it is not just faster, it is lots faster. Basic, common operations like startup and shutdown are much better than Win 7, and vastly, repeat...

Lunar, find a good supplier. This is crucial! You need to buy your drives from a supply chain that doesn't mishandle the units, and which knows how to package and ship thetm properly. I would rather buy Western bloody Digital drives that have been handled correctly than Samsung drives that...

^ stupid pricks Pure marketing bs. Why don't they just rename FF4.1 (AKA 5) "Firefox 10" so that they are one in front of Microsoft (which is obviously what they are aiming at) and stop buggerising about with people's browsers?

Added to that, FF4 is by far the best FF version ever - so they give the best Firefox version the shortest life? Stupid. Really stupid. There better be a damn good reason for this.

Huh? They have barely finished rolling out FF4? WTF?

Nope. Most users are utterly clueless about what traffic to allow and what not to allow, and in any case, once the infection has got to the stage of phoning home, you are already in the kakky up to your eyeballs. At this point, you (very sensibly) start wishing that you had spent all that time...

Absolutely! Indeed, my standard working assumption is that ALL versions of Windows are vulnerable until I have applied all the appropriate updates and service packs. Doubtless some are sort-of OK as is, but why take the chance? Easier just to assume that they are all broken and act...

You mean like ~70% of all home computers until a year or two ago? It's routine. Has been for years. You could plug a Windows box straight into the net safely, without third-party plug-ins, starting from the introduction of (if my memory serves) XP Service Pack 2, which was the first one with a...

Nope. Not the tissue-paper horror I was thinking of. Just as well. :)

If that's the case I think it is, I reckon you'd be mad to keep it. Saw a few of them. Dreadful damn things. Got me beat how they could get the spray paint to stick to that tissue paper. So, that leaves: X case X PSU X motherboard X CPU (because a CPU is useless without a motherboard) X...

hang on a mo - I thought the US housing market went into meltdown in the wake of of the GFC? Hell - the US housing market caused the GFC, at least in large part. Shouldn't this be the absolute best time to be buying in, while the market is depressed and banks are desperate to get rid of their...

Eight degrees? Eight degrees? I wish it was as warm as that here!

At $1200 for a tape solution, suited to 5TB+ of data, I reckon that's a non-starter. That same $1200 would get you enough hard drives to back up the entire dataset four times over, with room to spare. If we were looking at, say, 30TB or 50TB, tape would look a lot more attractive.