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CAPS LOCK?

rconn wrote:
| Quote:
| > Do you expect to convince Steve or Vince?
|
| Neither.
|
| Steve was about the last 4DOS / Win98 holdout here, and was inconsolable
| when I dropped 4DOS (two years after Microsoft dropped Win98 support!).

For many years thereafter the freeware version of 4DOS continued to prosper!
Its NG had posts within the past week...

| Now he's similarly stuck on XP, despite a continuing stream of feature
| requests from him that require a newer version of Windows to implement.

I am stuck because I cannot afford to buy new hardware. My desktop runs on a
fast system, but the motherboard-based audio is dead, and Win7 "upgrade
tester" does not recognize any of my adapter cards.

Yes, I'd like symlinks, though - to tell the truth - I'd much rather use the
old VMS concept of "logical names".

|
| I suspect the only way to move the hardliners over is when I drop
| support
| for XP when Microsoft does.

The support forum still gets 4nt issues!
--
Steve
 
vefatica wrote:
| On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:14:45 -0400, DMcCunney <> wrote:
|
|| On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 4:40 PM, vefatica <> wrote:
||
||
|| ---Quote---
||| On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:27:55 -0400, rconn <> wrote:
|||
|||| 7) XP is ugly, ugly, ugly ...
|||
||| Do you mean visually? *I've been looking at the same desktop for
||| about 15 years (classic task bar and 0,100,100 background). *I'll
||| want that from Win7.
|| ---End Quote---
||
|
| I sure as heck won't go to third party software to make Windows look
| the way I
| want it to.

MS had long ago forgotten what the "P" in "PC" stands for!
--
Steve
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 5:26 PM, vefatica <> wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:14:45 -0400, DMcCunney <> wrote:
> |On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 4:40 PM, vefatica <> wrote:
> |---Quote---
> |> On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:27:55 -0400, rconn <> wrote:
> |>
> |> |7) XP is ugly, ugly, ugly ...
> |>
> |> Do you mean visually? *I've been looking at the same desktop for about 15 years
> |> (classic task bar and 0,100,100 background). *I'll want that from Win7.
> |---End Quote---
> |Look at http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/index.html
>
> I sure as heck won't go to third party software to make Windows look the way I
> want it to.

Why not? You use third party software for most other things.

It Windows won't let you do it natively, you have three choices:

You can:
1) Use third-party software (There's a reason why things like
WindowBlinds are popular.)

2) Live with a new interface you don't like

3) Refuse to upgrade, but at some point that's a non-viable choice and
you'll be forced to upgrade, in which case, see 1 and 2.

One of the nice things about Linux is that the GUI is a layer on top
of the OS. You can run with *no* GUI if you like. If you want a GUI,
you have a plethora of choices.

ClassicShell works fine here on the SO's laptop, and provides the XP
style interface she was used to.

And it's free and open source, and uninstalls cleanly if there's an
issue, so the risk id limited.
______
Dennis
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Steve Fabian <> wrote:

>
> For many years thereafter the freeware version of 4DOS continued to prosper!
> Its NG had posts within the past week...

There are still people running 4DOS. I use it along with FreeDOS on
an ancient notebook that is utterly incapable of running a current
flavor on Windows. I multi-boot 2K, FreeDOS, and two flavors of
Linux, but 2K is about to go away as effectively unusable. (It runs
only for a very flexible definition of "run", and you grow old and
gray waiting for operations to complete.)

For that matter, I still have a few MS-DOS apps I run, and use 4DOS
with them under XP. But I'm aware of the limitations, and it's a "for
fun because I can" exercise. It is not a setup in which I do actual
work.
______
Dennis
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 5:55 PM, rconn <> wrote:

> ---Quote---
>> I sure as heck won't go to third party software to make Windows look
>> *the way I want it to.
> ---End Quote---
> You don't need to. *You can make Windows 7 just as butt-ugly as XP without
> any third-party apps.

Making it beautiful is another matter.


> Rex Conn
> JP Software
______
Dennis
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 3:27 PM, rconn <> wrote:


> #2 is probably a lot less than 100%/99%, particularly since you obviously
> crave symlinks, which don't exist in XP.

Steve is the guy who posted that list. *I* crave symlinks, but yes,
they don't exist in XP, Hard links do exist, I use them, and while
symlinks would be a convenience, they aren't an essential, and I've
successfully lived without them for as long as I've run Windows. I
multi-boot Linux and have them there, and have a functional equivalent
in the Cygwin environment in Windows.

Symlinks alone are not sufficient reason to upgrade to Win7.


> Rex Conn
> JP Software
______
Dennis
 
rconn wrote:
| Quote:
| > I sure as heck won't go to third party software to make
| Windows look > the way I want it to.
|
| You don't need to. You can make Windows 7 just as butt-ugly as XP
| without any third-party apps.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder! WinXP is not ugly - esp. if one uses a
blank screen as the desktop!

But I could do without needing to learn a new picture for every generation
of some software. A picture is worth a thousand words - but replacing a
single word with a picture just wastes screenspace. IMHO GUI is really
useful when observing or creating something with a structure of not more
than 2 dimensions, but really useless for selecting from a one-dimensional
list.
--
Steve
 
On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:55:25 -0400, rconn <> wrote:

|You don't need to. You can make Windows 7 just as butt-ugly as XP without
|any third-party apps.

Are you saying Win7 has the classic taskbar? Unless there's another way to get
the seconds to appear in the system clock, I require it (and with it I use
TClockEx).

Several mode Win7 questions ...

I just discovered UI0Detect, a hidden service (on Vista, at least). It's
supposed to let you see and interact with desktop 0 (where interactive services
run). Does it actually work (how)? Does it exist in Win7?

It is possible to turn off UAC and DEP ... right ... how are they done? I want
to run everything as administrator and with admin privileges without ever having
to respond to a prompt ... possible?

In response to one thing Rex said ... faster ... I'll believe it when I see it.
I have XP trimmed down to 12 system processes (10 if I stop the SMTP server I
run as a service, and DiskKeeper), 17 processes right after a logon. It's fast
(and it does all I want). In my experience, every new OS from MS is slower than
the previous one, given the same hardware (and does more things that I don't
want).
 
vefatica wrote:
| On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:55:25 -0400, rconn <> wrote:
|
|| You don't need to. You can make Windows 7 just as butt-ugly as XP
|| without any third-party apps.
|
| Are you saying Win7 has the classic taskbar? Unless there's another way to
get
| the seconds to appear in the system clock, I require it (and with it I use
| TClockEx).

My taskbar is 2-rows high. My TClockEX displays ISO date in line 1, HH:MM:SS
DAY in line 2. I look at that corner many times an hour...

Returning to symlinks: when all your work is done on a single drive,
junctions are just as effective. Hard links are faster than file symlinks.
--
Steve
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 8:28 PM, vefatica <> wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:55:25 -0400, rconn <> wrote:
>
> |You don't need to. *You can make Windows 7 just as butt-ugly as XP without
> |any third-party apps.
>
> Are you saying Win7 has the classic taskbar? *Unless there's another way to get
> the seconds to appear in the system clock, I require it (and with it I use
> TClockEx).

I don't believe so. See my prior recommendation.


> It is possible to turn off UAC and DEP ... right ... how are they done? *I want
> to run everything as administrator and with admin privileges without ever having
> to respond to a prompt ... possible?

Probably, but why?

Bear in mind why Vista/Win7 went the route they did. Would you always
run as root in Linux?


> In response to one thing Rex said ... faster ... I'll believe it when I see it.
> I have XP trimmed down to 12 system processes (10 if I stop the SMTP server I
> run as a service, and DiskKeeper), 17 processes right after a logon. *It's fast

I have 68 processes running in XP at the moment, on a 2.6ghz CoreDuo
box with 4GB RAM. It's fast enough, thank you. It takes a few
minutes to boot, but I don't especially care, because I reboot only
when a software requires it, I'm fiddling with hardware, or I boot
into Linux instead. Most of the time, it's simply on 24/7.


> (and it does all I want). *In my experience, every new OS from MS is slower than
> the previous one, given the same hardware (and does more things that I don't
> want).

It's the "same hardware" that is the sticking point. I'm willing to
bet the vast majority of Windows users do not upgrade an existing copy
of Windows. They get a new version of Windows because they get a
whole new machine that has the new version pre-installed.

My desktop is built from components, and the only original part left
at this point is the mid-tower case. While I have upgraded Windows, I
never upgrade *over* an existing release. I do a clean install to a
separate drive, and multi-boot.

But no current plans to migrate to Win7. I'd want faster drives and
upgraded video, and have other things to do with the money.
______
Dennis
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 8:48 PM, Steve Fabian <> wrote:

>
> Returning to symlinks: when all your work is done on a single drive,
> junctions are just as effective. Hard links are faster than file symlinks.

The limitation of hard links is that they can't span file systems.
Symlinks can. (And the file system is logical, not physical. A
single drive might be partitioned into multiple file systems (my boot
drive is), and hard links are only valid within the same file system.

I have yet to see an instance where the speed difference between a
hard link and a symlink was *measurable*, let alone noticeable, so "a
hard link is faster" is fairly meaningless here. (If you are
benchmarking code that does file I/O, your benchmark tests might show
that it's faster to open, read from, write to, and close a file that
is a hard link rather than a symlink, but I'd be surprised if a user
running the code could detect a difference.)

I have multiple physical drives in my desktop, and true symlinks in
Windows would be useful, but not enough to be the sole reason to get
Win7.


______
Dennis
 
On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:49:02 -0400, DMcCunney <> wrote:

|---Quote---
|> It is possible to turn off UAC and DEP ... right ... how are they done? *I want
|> to run everything as administrator and with admin privileges without ever having
|> to respond to a prompt ... possible?
|---End Quote---
|Probably, but why?
|
|Bear in mind why Vista/Win7 went the route they did. Would you always
|run as root in Linux?

Yes I would. And I did for the few years I used Linux (and before that,
Coherent).

|---Quote---
|> In response to one thing Rex said ... faster ... I'll believe it when I see it.
|> I have XP trimmed down to 12 system processes (10 if I stop the SMTP server I
|> run as a service, and DiskKeeper), 17 processes right after a logon. *It's fast
|---End Quote---
|I have 68 processes running in XP at the moment, on a 2.6ghz CoreDuo
|box with 4GB RAM. It's fast enough, thank you. It takes a few
|minutes to boot, but I don't especially care, because I reboot only
|when a software requires it, I'm fiddling with hardware, or I boot
|into Linux instead. Most of the time, it's simply on 24/7.

68 processes ... wow! I'll bet 30 of them are the OS doing things you don't
need or want. Same here. Typically I buy a computer and turn it off 6-8 years
later when I buy a new one. At home I'm at 87 days uptime. At work I was
nearing 200 days until last week when a crew excavated their way right through
my building's power supply line.

|---Quote---
|> (and it does all I want). *In my experience, every new OS from MS is slower than
|> the previous one, given the same hardware (and does more things that I don't
|> want).
|---End Quote---
|It's the "same hardware" that is the sticking point. I'm willing to
|bet the vast majority of Windows users do not upgrade an existing copy
|of Windows. They get a new version of Windows because they get a
|whole new machine that has the new version pre-installed.

I figure my 2.5 year-old 2.66 GHz quad-core is good for a few more years.

So what about the "upgrade" route? It would be appealing because (I hope) it
would respect some of my customizations (OS in c:\, profiles in e:\Users, all
software over whose installation I had control in d:\) and, of course, all the
software installations themselves. I've always preferred new installs figuring
upgrades left a lot of fat hanging around. But I'm getting tired of doing it.

Win7 uses "Users" instead of "Documents and Settings", right? What about
"Program Files"? Have they switched to a name without spaces? I simply refuse
to deal with having to quote names.
 
On 7/24/2011 5:28 PM, vefatica wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:55:25 -0400, rconn<> wrote:
>
> |You don't need to. You can make Windows 7 just as butt-ugly as XP without
> |any third-party apps.
>
> Are you saying Win7 has the classic taskbar?

You can get the legacy "big-wide-box-per-window" if you really want it.
I'd highly recommend using Windows 7's taskbar as is without tweaking
anything at all for a month to get used to it, along with pinning your
most commonly used applications. It really is faster.

Similarly, use the search box in the start menu -- Especially if you're
a keyboard guy, you can launch things a ton faster using it than without.


> Unless there's another way to get
> the seconds to appear in the system clock, I require it (and with it I use
> TClockEx).

XP doesn't display seconds either, without add-ons. Look for add-ons
for Windows 7.


> Several mode Win7 questions ...
>
> I just discovered UI0Detect, a hidden service (on Vista, at least). It's
> supposed to let you see and interact with desktop 0 (where interactive services
> run). Does it actually work (how)? Does it exist in Win7?

On 2008 R2, you'll get a prompt when a service pops up offering to take
you to the session ID 0 review to interact with the service. It won't
allow you to access services' UIs in general (or across the primary
desktop) since this is a fairly massive security hole.


> It is possible to turn off UAC and DEP ... right ... how are they done?

UAC, yes, if you really want to. Why would you want to turn off DEP?


> In response to one thing Rex said ... faster ... I'll believe it when I see it.

It really is, at least on semi-modern hardware (vs XP on that same
hardware). XP runs on the lower end better (it's designed and built for
machines that were around 10 years ago), but Windows 7 runs modern
hardware a heck of a lot better than XP did.


> I have XP trimmed down to 12 system processes (10 if I stop the SMTP server I
> run as a service, and DiskKeeper), 17 processes right after a logon. It's fast
> (and it does all I want). In my experience, every new OS from MS is slower than
> the previous one, given the same hardware (and does more things that I don't
> want).

Step #1 will be to stop doing that, and use the OS for a month or two
without tampering. You'll hurt yourself more than you'll improve
performance when you start doing things like that in Windows 7.

For one, Windows 7 does a much better job of using memory than XP did.
Unused memory is wasted memory, and Windows 7 works very hard to use
otherwise unallocated RAM to boost performance. It works, it works
well, but if you stress out over the available physical memory
indicator, you'll have issues. If you're worried, look at the pagefile
related page files in resource monitor instead.

Similarly, Windows 7 has a lot more queues and uses them appropriately.
You can defrag (even with third party defraggers that don't know how to
back-off) in the background without evening noticing a performance
difference. Windows 7 defers the startup of a lot of items until the
bootup is finished, or the system is idle, meaning that you get an
improved power-to-login-screen time, and a greatly improved
power-to-usable-system time.
 
> |Bear in mind why Vista/Win7 went the route they did. Would you
> |always run as root in Linux?
>
> Yes I would. And I did for the few years I used Linux (and before that,
> Coherent).

I thought that way when I first switched over, but quickly realized it was,
frankly, dumb. I'm now running in a "mid-way" configuration that only
prompts me when it's installing something system-wide.


> Win7 uses "Users" instead of "Documents and Settings", right?

Yes and no -- the old name is still linked, so you can use either one.


> What about "Program Files"? Have they switched to a name without spaces?


No, but you could create your own symlink.

Rex Conn
JP Software
 
On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:48:48 -0400, thedave <> wrote:

|You can get the legacy "big-wide-box-per-window" if you really want it.
|I'd highly recommend using Windows 7's taskbar as is without tweaking
|anything at all for a month to get used to it, along with pinning your
|most commonly used applications. It really is faster.

All I want is seconds in the system clock.

|Similarly, use the search box in the start menu -- Especially if you're
|a keyboard guy, you can launch things a ton faster using it than without.

In an area totaling about 2.5 square inches, I have a couple of PowerPro bars
with a total of 39 clickable buttons (labelled with letters, for drives, or
icons). Each responds differently to left/middle/right clicks. That's 117
one-click functions. And I have a PowerPro bar that pops up when I bump the
bottom of the screen; it has 16 buttons each of which pops up a menu. I reckon
I have another 100 or so two-click functions there. It's the best thing since
Borland's Dashboard! :-)
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 9:15 PM, vefatica <> wrote:

> On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:49:02 -0400, DMcCunney <> wrote:
>
> |---Quote---
> |> It is possible to turn off UAC and DEP ... right ... how are they done? *I want
> |> to run everything as administrator and with admin privileges without ever having
> |> to respond to a prompt ... possible?
> |---End Quote---
> |Probably, but why?
> |
> |Bear in mind why Vista/Win7 went the route they did. *Would you always
> |run as root in Linux?
>
> Yes I would. *And I did for the few years I used Linux (and before that,
> Coherent).

I've been a Unix admin, and spent the odd few hours locking down the
system to make sure people could not casually *get* root. The notion
gives me hives. (My experience has been that it gives hives to anyone
who deals with *nix for a living. Hobbyists doing it for fun haven't
had the experience of "You shoot yourself in someone *else's* foot"
that you see too often on true multi-*user* systems.)

One of the OSes I have installed is a Linux variant called Puppy
Linux. I got it because I was looking for a distro that would run
acceptably on low end hardware. I'd been given an old (circa 2002)
Fujitsu Lifebook by a friend who had upgraded but loved the old box
and wanted it to go to a good home, not a dumpster. She warned me it
was "slow slow slow".

It has an 867mhz Transmeta CPU, a 40GB UDMA 4 HD, and a whopping 256MB
of RAM, of which 16MB are grabbed off the top by the CPU for code
morphing. It came to me running WinXP SP2. Gee. No surprise it was
slow. XP wants 512MB to think about running.

Puppy is reasonably peppy on the machine as long as you stick with the
bundled apps, all of which were chosen for small size. Go beyond that
and things change rapidly. Firefox 4, for example, takes 45 seconds
just to load an initialize with a minimal configuration, and is
perceptibly slow when up. (Click a menu choice. Wait a few seconds
for the click to be recognized and acted upon...)

For reasons that elude me, the developer who created it made a Puppy a
single user system where you *always* ran as root. The mechanism for
creating other IDs had been ripped out. Puppy gets away with it
because it *is* a single user system, and hey, MS-DOS and Windows had
the same "The logged in user is administrator with all powers." up
through XP.

But I also have Ubuntu installed on the box, and spend most time in
it. It's a little slower, but still quite usable, It's a lot closer
to a standard Linux distro, and I don't *want* to run as root all the
time. There are simply too many quirks and potential problems when
you do.

With Vista and Win7 MS switched to "The logged in user is a Power
User, not Administrator", and must take extra steps to *become*
administrator." Personally, I think this is the tack MS *should* have
taken much earlier, like around the time they switched to the NTFS
file system that supported the idea of multiple users with different
permissions. I've spent too much time professionally cleaning up
messes on company systems that would not have occurred if the user had
not been running as Administrator.

Win7 has streamlined things, so it's a lot less obnoxious about
enforcing things than Vista was. The restrictions are still there,
but easier to deal with.


> |---Quote---
> |> In response to one thing Rex said ... faster ... I'll believe it when I see it.
> |> I have XP trimmed down to 12 system processes (10 if I stop the SMTP server I
> |> run as a service, and DiskKeeper), 17 processes right after a logon. *It's fast
> |---End Quote---
> |I have 68 processes running in XP at the moment, on a 2.6ghz CoreDuo
> |box with 4GB RAM. * It's fast enough, thank you.


> 68 processes ... wow! I'll bet 30 of them are the OS doing things you don't
> need or want.

You'd *lose*. I started in computers on an IBM mainframe, and worked
my way across and down. I have a decent idea of what is running and
why, and always have. There may be things running I could live
without, but the system is fast enough that I have no reason to expend
additional time and energy to identify them. This is not a hard-core
gaming system when I want to squeeze out that last few FPS for Quake
III Deathmatch. It's a multi-purpose general use desktop, where the
goal is "fast enough", not "as fast as possible".


> |*It takes a few minutes to boot, but I don't especially care, because
> | I reboot only when a software upgrade requires it, I'm fiddling with
> | hardware, or I boot |into Linux instead. *Most of the time, it's simply
> | on 24/7.


> Same here. *Typically I buy a computer and turn it off 6-8 years
> later when I buy a new one. *At home I'm at 87 days uptime. *At work I was
> nearing 200 days until last week when a crew excavated their way right through
> my building's power supply line.

I'm not fanatical. I shut down and reboot frequently enough. But I'm
not one of the folks who always shuts down and powers off at night and
turns on and boot up in the morning.

And the current system is built from components and has been upgraded
in place for years. The case is the only remaining original part.


> |---Quote---
> |> (and it does all I want). *In my experience, every new OS from MS is slower than
> |> the previous one, given the same hardware (and does more things that I don't
> |> want).
> |---End Quote---
> |It's the "same hardware" that is the sticking point. *I'm willing to
> |bet the vast majority of Windows users do not upgrade an existing copy
> |of Windows. *They get a new version of Windows because they get a
> |whole new machine that has the new version pre-installed.
>
> I figure my 2.5 year-old 2.66 GHz quad-core is good for a few more years.

Probably. Clock speed isn't the usual limiting factor. Most home
systems are I/O bound, not compute bound, and the CPU spends most time
in a wait state waiting for I/O to complete. As the wag put it, "All
machines wait at the same speed."


> So what about the "upgrade" route? *It would be appealing because (I hope) it
> would respect some of my customizations (OS in c:\, profiles in e:\Users, all
> software over whose installation I had control in d:\) and, of course, all the
> software installations themselves. *I've always preferred new installs figuring
> upgrades left a lot of fat hanging around. *But I'm getting tired of doing it.

I believe it would respect things, but haven't played enough with Win7
to state definitely.

Here, I essentially have three physical drives, with 4 logical file
systems. I multi-boot 2K, XP, and Ubuntu. Those live on two
partitions of one drive. The second drive is the master data drive
shared by everything. My My Documents folder actually lives there,
and is seen as My Documents by both 2K and XP. The third drive holds
my software repository and is storage for stuff I don't necessarily
need access to. It occasionally gets swapped for a different drive if
I'm doing particular things.


> Win7 uses "Users" instead of "Documents and Settings", right? *What about

Yes.


> "Program Files"? *Have they switched to a name without spaces? *I simply refuse
> to deal with having to quote names.

See Rex's comment.

Personally, file names with spaces is the the way this particular OS
does things, so it's what I do when I'm on this particular OS.
Quoting names have never been a real imposition for me. As OS quirks
go, it's trivial.

And Program Files is split in two. Current systems are all 64bit
CPUs, but software is playing catchup. So there is a section for 64
bit stuff, and an X86 section for legacy 32 bit code. (There is a 32
bit edition of Win7 that probably doesn't have that split, but most
folks will have no reason to get it.)

And see thedave's comments about Win7. He's exactly right.
______
Dennis
 
On 7/24/2011 8:13 PM, DMcCunney wrote:

> For reasons that elude me, the developer who created it made a Puppy a
> single user system where you *always* ran as root. The mechanism for
> creating other IDs had been ripped out. Puppy gets away with it
> because it *is* a single user system, and hey, MS-DOS and Windows had
> the same "The logged in user is administrator with all powers." up
> through XP.

16-bit and 95/98/WinME.

NT 3.5 (from the 90s) and up (including NT4, 2000 and XP) had multiuser
concepts and worked fine as a standard user for workstation use, if you
so desired.


> With Vista and Win7 MS switched to "The logged in user is a Power
> User, not Administrator", and must take extra steps to *become*
> administrator." Personally, I think this is the tack MS *should* have
> taken much earlier, like around the time they switched to the NTFS
> file system that supported the idea of multiple users with different
> permissions. I've spent too much time professionally cleaning up
> messes on company systems that would not have occurred if the user had
> not been running as Administrator.

The difference with Vista is that the default account had a
standard-user token rather than an administrative token, and a user
could simultaneously be logged in with and without the administrative
token on the same desktop, under the same account. Also significant was
that Windows elevated automatically rather than requiring users to runas
or similar.

In previous versions, the default was to give everyone admin rights, but
users could create standard users if desired. Few home users did, but
anyone security conscious (or with a security conscious administrator)
did (or had it done for them)
 
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 12:43 AM, thedave <> wrote:

> On 7/24/2011 8:13 PM, DMcCunney wrote:
> ---Quote---
>> For reasons that elude me, the developer who created it made a Puppy a
>> single user system where you *always* ran as root. *The mechanism for
>> creating other IDs had been ripped out. *Puppy gets away with it
>> because it *is* a single user system, and hey, MS-DOS and Windows had
>> the same "The logged in user is administrator with all powers." up
>> through XP.
> ---End Quote---
> 16-bit and 95/98/WinME.

Anything running FAT16/FAT32, which has no place to store the data
involved in enforcing ownership and permissions.


> NT 3.5 (from the 90s) and up (including NT4, 2000 and XP) had multiuser
> concepts and worked fine as a standard user for workstation use, if you
> so desired.

NTFS, which supported the concept, since an assumption was that the
boxes would be on a LAN.


> ---Quote---
> The difference with Vista is that the default account had a
> standard-user token rather than an administrative token, and a user
> could simultaneously be logged in with and without the administrative
> token on the same desktop, under the same account. *Also significant was
> that Windows elevated automatically rather than requiring users to runas
> or similar.
>
> In previous versions, the default was to give everyone admin rights, but
> users could create standard users if desired. *Few home users did, but
> anyone security conscious (or with a security conscious administrator)
> did (or had it done for them)

The problem was precisely the default: everyone was a power user. At
a previous employer, we finally got corporate authorization to do a
desktop refresh and get everyone on XP and Office 2003. (There had
been a hodge podge before, including Win98, WinNT 4 Workstation, Win2K
and WinXP. As part of it, everyone got a standard image, and a Power
User profile. If the user needed something non-standard, they got
their boss to sign off on the exception, and someone like me with
Domain Admin powers did the install for them.

The upgrade was a PITA, but I helped out happily, as my life would be
much easier when it was done. (I was the main Unix admin, but the PCs
all needed to connect to the Unix boxes, and so did the printers.
Want to make me cringe? Whisper "Support connection of a Win98 box
through Samba to the Solaris box." in my ear. Then duck fast to avoid
the reflexive roundhouse swing.)
______
Dennis
 
thedave wrote:
| Windows 7 defers the startup of a lot of items until the
| bootup is finished, or the system is idle, meaning that you get an
| improved power-to-login-screen time, and a greatly improved
| power-to-usable-system time.

Just like WinNT 3.51 started much faster than Win3.1?
--
Steve
 
On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 6:49 AM, Steve Fabian <> wrote:

> thedave wrote:
> | Windows 7 defers the startup of a lot of items until the
> | bootup is finished, or the system is idle, meaning that you get an
> | improved power-to-login-screen time, and a greatly improved
> | power-to-usable-system time.
>
> Just like WinNT 3.51 started much faster than Win3.1?

More like WinXP started a lot faster than Win2K. (And it does. I run
both here.)


______
Dennis
 
On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Steve Fabian <> wrote:


> Yes, I'd like symlinks, though - to tell the truth - I'd much rather use the
> old VMS concept of "logical names".

Which reminds me: if you're an old VMS hand, this may interest you:

http://users.skynet.be/michel.valentin/dcl/

PC-DCL is an emulation of the DCL command language interpreter found
on OPENVMS systems, running on WINDOWS.

This is not an attempt to bring full VMS on to Windows. Lots of
features are missing but VMS addicts may find it funny or even useful.


______
Dennis
 
Rex said:
#3 isn't true -- Win7 has a built-in XP VM that'll run anything that runs in
native XP.
What, where is this thing? How does it work?

Win7 is pretty much working to my satisfaction. Classic look and taskbar was easy and TClockEx works fine to give seconds in the tray clock.

I got access to the service with GUI interface (Mercury/32 mail transport system) with the help of the AUTOEXNT service (from Win2000, still works); AUTOEXNT just runs a batch file, so I can get it to do anything I want. Whatever AUTOEXNT starts runs on desktop 0. Win7's "UI0Detect" service is aware of apps interacting with desktop 0 and lets you switch to it. Desktop 0 is rather uninteresting ... 1280 x 1024 x 2 of all white plus the interfaces (a bit washed out in appearance) of whatever is running there.

I even ran TCC on desktop 0. It worked, reporting that _WINUSER = SYSTEM. I couldn't think of anything else interesting to do with it. I wanted to capture an image of desktop 0. PrintScreen worked. I could start WinWord from TCC and paste the image into a doc but got an error when I tried to save it (perhaps because SYSTEM doesn't have much of a profile). I could not "START /runas vefatica ... winword" while on desktop 0; access was denied.

Poser: Vista was never installed on this machine, except virtually on a VHD booted via VirtualPC from Windows XP. However, after installing Win7 there was a "Windows Vista" entry on my boot menu (it's not in XP's BOOT.INI); it pointed to the (real) drive containing the aforementioned VHD file. How did that boot menu entry get there?

Tirade: It took three phone calls (nearly 2 hours) to get MS support (India, Philippines, Panama) to understand the paragraph above and the fact that I wanted to get rid of the bogus boot menu entry. Their solution was download EASYBCD (third party); they refused to help me use BCDEDIT. That realy p###ed me off and I let them know it. I got rid of the entry myself with BCDEDIT.
 
vefatica <> wrote on 08/02/2011
12:49:53 PM:


>
> #3 isn't true -- Win7 has a built-in XP VM that'll run anything that
runs in

> native XP.
>
> What, where is this thing? How does it work?

If you are running Win7 Professional it is a free
download from Microsoft.


>
> Win7 is pretty much working to my satisfaction. Classic look and
> taskbar was easy and TClockEx works fine to give seconds in the tray
clock.

The new task bar is actually much nicer than the old
XP task bar. Once you are used to it, it just works better.



> I got access to the service with GUI interface (Mercury/32 mail
> transport system) with the help of the AUTOEXNT service (from
> Win2000, still works); AUTOEXNT just runs a batch file, so I can get
> it to do anything I want. Whatever AUTOEXNT starts runs on desktop


> 0. Win7's "UI0Detect" service is aware of apps interacting
with

> desktop 0 and lets you switch to it. Desktop 0 is rather
> uninteresting ... 1280 x 1024 x 2 of all white plus the interfaces


> (a bit washed out in appearance) of whatever is running there.

Is this similar to the SRVANY service that will run
any process as a service?

How do you use UI0Detect? That could be handy.


>
> Poser: Vista was never installed on this machine, except virtually


> on a VHD booted via VirtualPC from Windows XP. However, after
> installing Win7 there was a "Windows Vista" entry on my
boot menu

> (it's not in XP's BOOT.INI); it pointed to the (real) drive
> containing the aforementioned VHD file. How did that boot menu entryget
there?

My guess is that MS detected it when you installed
Win7 and automatically added it during setup.


> Tirade: It took three phone calls (nearly 2 hours) to get MS support
> (India, Philippines, Panama) to understand the paragraph above and


> the fact that I wanted to get rid of the bogus boot menu entry.
> Their solution was download EASYBCD (third party); they refused to


> help me use BCDEDIT. That realy p###ed me off and I let them know


> it. I got rid of the entry myself with BCDEDIT.

If you had posted it here in the open forum, you would
have gotten an answer within a few minutes I gather.

-Scott
 
Vince's post about this got me to fiddling. I'd seen that desktop a couple times before, but I didn't know much about it or how to access it "on demand" until now. Thanks!

I got access to the service with GUI interface (Mercury/32 mail transport system) with the help of the AUTOEXNT service (from Win2000, still works);

The Resource Kit for Server 2003 seems to be the latest version of AUTOEXNT, if you're interested:

microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17657

AUTOEXNT just runs a batch file, so I can get it to do anything I want. Whatever AUTOEXNT starts runs on desktop 0. Win7's "UI0Detect" service is aware of apps interacting with desktop 0 and lets you switch to it. Desktop 0 is rather uninteresting ... 1280 x 1024 x 2 of all white plus the interfaces (a bit washed out in appearance) of whatever is running there.

I even ran TCC on desktop 0. It worked, reporting that _WINUSER = SYSTEM. I couldn't think of anything else interesting to do with it. I wanted to capture an image of desktop 0. PrintScreen worked. I could start WinWord from TCC and paste the image into a doc but got an error when I tried to save it (perhaps because SYSTEM doesn't have much of a profile). I could not "START /runas vefatica ... winword" while on desktop 0; access was denied.

I was able to save a screen shot to a file by pasting it into mspaint and saving it to the root of C:.

.
.

Aha... I tried to run explorer.exe from cmd.exe that was started by autoexnt.bat and got some error about the identity being wrong. But, I just tried it from tcc.exe started by autoexnt.bat and it ran, complete with the dialog in the upper left about different things being set up (like in the olden days) and then the "desktop" appeared. Interestingly, it appears to be running as just another program. Clicking on the Explorer desktop causes the other windows to disappear behind it. Alt-Tab can be used to bring them back to the front, though.


Scott,

UI0Detect is already there and ready to go any time something that runs on that desktop needs attention. The service associated with it is called "Interactive Services Detection".
 
|If you are running Win7 Professional it is a free
|download from Microsoft.

VirtualPC is free anyway, isn't it? And then what do you do? Must I install XP
from distribution media on a Virtual hard drive? If so, then I would hardly
call any of it a feature of Win7.

|The new task bar is actually much nicer than the old
|XP task bar. Once you are used to it, it just works better.

I like the classic one and insist on seconds in the clock. I do have the little
taskbar icons for running processes; they're nice.

|Is this similar to the SRVANY service that will run
|any process as a service?
|
|How do you use UI0Detect? That could be handy.

I used SRVANY a long time ago and don't remember exactly how it worked. IIRC it
actually installs some target app as if it were a service (could be wrong about
that); that might not work well with newer versions of windows. AUTOEXNT is a
real service; it interacts with the windows service manager. But its only
function is to run AUTOEXNT.BAT (in which you can put anything ... or at least
anything reasonable). After AUTOEXNT.BAT has been executed, you don't need the
AUTOEXNT service. The last line of my AUTOEXNT.BAT is "net stop autoexnt".
Whatever was started continues to run (on desktop 0).

As for UI0Detect ... if it's running, you wouldn't know it unless something GUI
happened on desktop 0. When that happens you get an attention-craving taskbar
icon ... clicking it opens a message box asking if you want to "view the
message" (which really means switch to desktop 0) ... if you say yes, you switch
to desktop 0 and see/interact with what's there (in my case the mail server's
GUI interface (and TCC in my little test)).

For my purpose (a constantly-running GUI interface) it's somewhat awkward
because UI0Detect repeatedly finds it. So I leave the UI0Detect service off and
start it when I want to administer the mail server. I hope I can find (or
write) something that will more easily and simply let me switch to desktop 0 on
demand.

|> Poser: Vista was never installed on this machine, except virtually
|> on a VHD booted via VirtualPC from Windows XP. However, after
|> installing Win7 there was a "Windows Vista" entry on my boot menu
|> (it's not in XP's BOOT.INI); it pointed to the (real) drive
|> containing the aforementioned VHD file. How did that boot menu entryget
|> there?
|
|My guess is that MS detected it when you installed
|Win7 and automatically added it during setup.

Then it must be that VirtualVista, which uses the same boot mechanism as Win7,
left something in the **real** drive for Win7 to find.

|> Tirade: It took three phone calls (nearly 2 hours) to get MS support
|> (India, Philippines, Panama) to understand the paragraph above and
|> the fact that I wanted to get rid of the bogus boot menu entry.
|> Their solution was download EASYBCD (third party); they refused to
|> help me use BCDEDIT. That realy p###ed me off and I let them know
|> it. I got rid of the entry myself with BCDEDIT.

|If you had posted it here in the open forum, you would
|have gotten an answer within a few minutes I gather.

Has anyone here used BCDEDIT? AFAIK it's the only built-in tool for the job.
Using it isn't for everyone. I suppose the intention was to prevent folks
screwing things up (as could happen editing the plain-text BOOT.INI).
 
On Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:45:39 -0400, TEA-Time <> wrote:

|---Quote (Originally by vefatica)---
|AUTOEXNT just runs a batch file, so I can get it to do anything I want. Whatever AUTOEXNT starts runs on desktop 0. Win7's "UI0Detect" service is aware of apps interacting with desktop 0 and lets you switch to it. Desktop 0 is rather uninteresting ... 1280 x 1024 x 2 of all white plus the interfaces (a bit washed out in appearance) of whatever is running there.
|
|I even ran TCC on desktop 0. It worked, reporting that _WINUSER = SYSTEM. I couldn't think of anything else interesting to do with it. I wanted to capture an image of desktop 0. PrintScreen worked. I could start WinWord from TCC and paste the image into a doc but got an error when I tried to save it (perhaps because SYSTEM doesn't have much of a profile). I could not "START /runas vefatica ... winword" while on desktop 0; access was denied.
|---End Quote---

|I was able to save a screen shot to a file by pasting it into mspaint and saving it to the root of C:.

Cool. Maybe I'll try that. How did you get to desktop 0 in the first place? Do
you have a service that does anything graphical?


|Aha... I tried to run explorer.exe from cmd.exe that was started by autoexnt.bat and got some error about the identity being wrong. But, I just tried it from tcc.exe started by autoexnt.bat and it ran, complete with the dialog in the upper left about different things being set up (like in the olden days) and then the "desktop" appeared. Interestingly, it appears to be running as just another program. Clicking on the Explorer desktop causes the other windows to disappear behind it. Alt-Tab can be used to bring them back to the front, though.

Wow! Did the SYSTEM user wind up with a real profile?
 
Cool. Maybe I'll try that. How did you get to desktop 0 in the first place? Do you have a service that does anything graphical?

You mentioned AUTOEXNT starts stuff on desktop 0, so I found and installed that and set AUTOEXNT.BAT to run cmd.exe or tcc.exe. I'm just using the Services manager in Administrative Tools to start or restart (if it's already running; it doesn't shut back down right away) the AutoExNT service.

Wow! Did the SYSTEM user wind up with a real profile?

Yup, under C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile. That's where the System profile always is, just, as you said, not complete (until now. heh).
 
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