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Lum, Xenomorph, Smoke, madprocess, and Sweevo posted:
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 14:31 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 06:53 |
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Xenomorph posted:All the motherboards I've seen still have DOS based upgrading. On my Gigabyte board, I was able to update the BIOS without ever leaving windows. Course I needed to reboot after the update. Worked without a hitch. I was pretty impressed, my first BIOS update without having to deal with bootdisks.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 14:56 |
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Dyscrasia posted:On my Gigabyte board, I was able to update the BIOS without ever leaving windows. Course I needed to reboot after the update. Worked without a hitch. I was pretty impressed, my first BIOS update without having to deal with bootdisks. Abit you can apparently do from Windows too, but I booted to a flash drive and did it that way anyway.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 15:13 |
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Smoke posted:Let's not forget new systems that for some reason still need XP on them, you'll need a floppy for the SATA drivers. I still have a floppy drive around just in case I ever need it for something like that. I've actually had some success with using a USB floppy drive for the SATA drivers, on modern systems with Legacy USB options in the BIOS it appears to the XP setup as a proper A:\ drive and works fine. There's also the nLite option. -Dethstryk- posted:You don't need a floppy drive to flash a BIOS. All of this crap be done on a bootable CD. How do you back up the old BIOS? How do you recover from a bad flash where only the bootblock BIOS is working?
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 15:38 |
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I'm not saying floppies are cool. They loving suck. They are insanely un-reliable. Strangely, many of the disks I have from the 1990s still work. But if I go pick up a 10 pack from Circuit City right now, less than half the box will still work next month. I wouldn't provide support to anyone with a floppy issue. *I* still use them because I feel I have to sometimes. I have no reason to pull the drive from my system, and I just know that the second I do, I'm going to end up in a situation where I need one. With my ThinkPad 560 systems (560, 560E, 560X), a floppy drive + zip drive are the only way I can load a fresh operating system on them. They are a "necessary evil". Xenomorph fucked around with this message at Jun 10, 2008 around 15:51 |
| # ? Jun 10, 2008 15:42 |
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Rock Tumbler posted:Apparently Outlook 2007 blocks access to attachments that it deems "unsafe." You cannot access these attachments. "But surely, Rock Tumbler," you say, "an option exists to override the warning message and allow the user to download the attachment anyway!" But most people just zip their "unsafe" files to prevent this.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 15:51 |
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-Dethstryk- posted:You don't need a floppy drive to flash a BIOS. All of this crap be done on a bootable CD. Then again, CD burning and cheap flash drives were not as ubiquitous back then. 
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 15:56 |
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ZeeBoi posted:It's funny because back when Apple decided to stop including floppy drives on Macs there was a huge backlash and PC users were haw-hawing that. Well, wern't Apple pushing to include Zip drives instead? What's that phrase about frying pans and fires?
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 16:28 |
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This is the only acceptable use of a floppy.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 17:44 |
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Lum posted:Now I have a small rant, hoping someone will know the answer. I just got a new work laptop with XP Pro and Office 2007. Of course I've set XP to use the "Windows Classic" theme, but in Office I only have 3 choices, "Garish Blue", "Nice-ish silver with unreadable text" or "loving ugly black but at least the text is readable". It looks ridiculous next to all my other apps, is there no way to make it look like standard windows apps. There is a third party "Classic Menus" app for Office 07 that will make it look like Office 03, Google it.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 18:00 |
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ZeeBoi posted:It's funny because back when Apple decided to stop including floppy drives on Macs there was a huge backlash and PC users were haw-hawing that. There was less you could do with a floppy on a Mac than on a PC. On a Mac, floppies were used for storage. Newer/better stuff came out. End of floppies. Keeping a floppy around for backwards compatibility wasn't a big of an issue on PC because Apple likes dropping support for old hardware. You have to buy a new Mac to use a new OS. No need in keeping that old system alive. On PC, floppies were for storage, recovery, flashing, testing - and still are. You can still run many modern apps on PCs over a decade old, and floppies may be the easiest/only way to get them up and running. There may be better stuff for storage, but only on newer computers. There may be some better stuff for recovery, but only if the system is new enough to handle it. Nothing yet has come out that completely replaces the Floppy in all situations, and nothing may ever come out that can replace it totally. That's why tons of floppy drives are still being manufactured and sold.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 18:46 |
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Vista/Server 2008. I gave up on Vista once already to test out Windows Server 2008 as a workstation after a thread here on SH/SC equated it to the Second Coming. Had tons of audio problems (streams would stutter for seemingly no reason at all, nearly poo poo themselves if I encountered a UAC prompt), and generally performed worse than Vista. I'd love to keep using it, but after wasting three or four days of productivity on this experiment, I gave up. I reverted back to Vista and have since left it fairly stock. I come in most mornings and find my desktop hasn't suspended or hibernated itself, which is odd (I suspect Vista is up all night finding new ways to write my swap file and obsessing over my local data index). I unlock, and it takes a good minute for the system to become usable. Other mornings, it will have suspended. I wait for the PC to start up, and about a minute later, Vista will display its "workstation locked, ctrl+alt+del plz" UI. It won't actually respond to ctrl+alt+del, of course, not for another two or three minutes. Once I unlock the workstation, the screen fades to black, and another minute or two is passes before the mouse cursor appears. Eventually, the desktop is drawn, and then it's a matter of waiting while all the running processes desperately grab for the resources they lost. Once everything has calmed down, most of the the apps will behave strangely (Virtual PC dragging rear end, Outlook toolbar won't accept clicks even after closing and restarting it -- these are just the issues I noticed this morning), and won't recover until I reboot the computer, which is what I should have done in the first place. While waiting, I make a mental note that booting from a cold stop, logging in and manually reloading all my required 'all the time' apps takes half the time it did to recover from suspend. This is on a C2D 2.6Ghz system with 2GB of RAM and an adequate video card. Also, Vista's Explorer is a crash course in UI disaster. It requires a third-party file browser out of the box. My friends and I have a game we play, and it's called, "Guess the Vista bug". Anytime we encounter a new issue, we attempt to figure out what the problem is. A friend of mine was playing a game, but had it minimized. He'd been at the desktop for a few minutes when suddenly, the game music began playing again. We figured it out: The background music was a loop, and even though it had a function to 'mute' itself when minimized, Vista's new audio subsystem confused it, so when it reinitialized its buffer or whatever, it began to play over the desktop instead. When he returned to the game, sure enough, the game muted its music again, and it didn't return until it completed its loop, reinitialized its buffer and attempted to restart the music again. Doesn't reproduce under XP.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 19:50 |
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Fishstick posted:This is the only acceptable use of a floppy.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 20:47 |
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Xenomorph posted:There was less you could do with a floppy on a Mac than on a PC. Eh, partial credit. On floppy-equipped Macs you could use the floppy for all the things it was used for on PCs, hell the only reason it became so important flashing and hardware testing was the PC world finally being dragged kicking and screaming away from DOS in the late '90s and early '00s. On a Windows 95/98/ME or previous system you still had the same low-level hardware access as always to flash a BIOS or test a system component. You still might want to kick out to DOS to eliminate other tasks and increase stability, but it wasn't necessary. Since even boot floppies were still running the Mac OS on a Mac, unless you had made your system unbootable there was no reason to bother booting from any external media. NT/2K/XP then came along and suddenly the direct hardware access that the flash tools enjoyed was no longer there, some hardware companies did it right and gave us a driver to allow flashing from Windows but most were lazy and kept using DOS, which then obviously required bootable media. There's no reason this can't be a CD, but most hardware vendors only provide tools to make a boot floppy (which is silly in my opinion, burning an ISO is easier than imaging a floppy and every machine in the last decade has been able to boot from CDs no problem). Most BIOS vendors have solved this problem, so the only time I've seen a need to drop out of Windows to flash is a primary video card or primary storage controller. All the major test tools have CD ISOs and the same applies to recovery suites. That leaves one major reason people have built systems with floppy drives recently, and that is XP's lack of support for loading storage drivers during the install off of anything else. Even Vista was to be the same until a holy shitstorm of nerd rage made them reconsider and give us USB drive support like they should have from the beginning. Microsoft's laziness is the only reason the floppy drive still exists in my opinion. The reason Apple didn't have this problem is that as the exclusive hardware vendor they could make sure that there was no reason one would need those undersized pieces of poo poo. It might have made sense to include a USB floppy drive for free for at least a few years, since USB flash drives were still expensive at the time, but for at least since the early '00s drives with many times the size of a floppy were available for under $10.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 20:51 |
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Stupid people bragging about how smart they are or how smart they think they are. Stupid people acting humble like they think there really smart but tell people they aren't THAT smart. Those people should commit seppaku immediately
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 21:07 |
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I hate how clicking on the address bar in Safari doesn't highlight the entire address. It's probably the reason why I use FF on Mac. That and the extensions.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 21:34 |
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sm8000 posted:There is a third party "Classic Menus" app for Office 07 that will make it look like Office 03, Google it. Oh I found it, plenty of times, when looking for something that would actually do what I want, which is to fix the loving skin so that it looks like classic windows. You know, plain, non-textured grey background, blue title bar that's only 18 pixels or so high, normal looking _ [] and X buttons and so on. You may think this complaint is entirely cosmetic, and for most people it is, but the fact that it slows down screen refresh when using MSTSC makes it even more annoying.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 21:51 |
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sm8000 posted:There is a third party "Classic Menus" app for Office 07 that will make it look like Office 03, Google it. People who do this instead of taking a whole 10 seconds and providing an actual link.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 23:18 |
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amerrykan posted:Vista/Server 2008. Do you have a USB keyboard? I think that Vista takes a while to reinitialise USB controllers, my PC un-sleeps instanatly but it takes a few seconds before I can use the mouse while it figures out what it is.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 23:19 |
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Solenos posted:Stupid people bragging about how smart they are or how smart they think they are. Stupid people acting humble like they think there really smart but tell people they aren't THAT smart. Those people should commit seppaku immediately I'm confused, which one are you?
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 23:20 |
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Peven Stan posted:I hate how clicking on the address bar in Safari doesn't highlight the entire address. It's probably the reason why I use FF on Mac. That and the extensions.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 23:25 |
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Peven Stan posted:I hate how clicking on the address bar in Safari doesn't highlight the entire address. It's probably the reason why I use FF on Mac. That and the extensions. Click the icon next to the address. It's not difficult.
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| # ? Jun 10, 2008 23:39 |
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Chris Knight posted:People who do this instead of taking a whole 10 seconds and providing an actual link. Boo loving hoo. If I knew more info I'd post it. I happened to be working for a living at the moment of my post and couldn't spend much time on it. Besides, the sum total of my exposure to said app is uninstalling it from one computer a couple of months ago. I don't even use Office 07.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 00:25 |
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Smoke posted:Let's not forget new systems that for some reason still need XP on them, you'll need a floppy for the SATA drivers. I still have a floppy drive around just in case I ever need it for something like that. Any SP2 disc should have the drivers you need. I've not had a problem in the slightest with SATA drivers since SP2 hit.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 00:33 |
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timb posted:Click the icon next to the address. It's not difficult. lol, I didn't know that. Thanks for the tip. I might be using Safari more often now.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 03:59 |
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Casao posted:Any SP2 disc should have the drivers you need. I've not had a problem in the slightest with SATA drivers since SP2 hit. With the new Intel chipsets lacking IDE, I ran in to this issue a few weeks ago while helping a friend build a new machine. SATA works great (it's native mode and doesn't ever need drivers) but IDE required them and conveniently that's how his only hard drive hooked up. With no floppy in sight, I ended up having to nLite a CD with the drivers built in. SP3 may have them, I'm not sure.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 04:07 |
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Bloggers that think the loving iPhone will be a DS/PSP killer, its a god drat phone you dip shits. 
Ryvannis fucked around with this message at Jun 11, 2008 around 05:38 |
| # ? Jun 11, 2008 05:34 |
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:You know you can make Ghost CDs, right? They're so much better, they load a hell of a lot faster and they don't wear out. Maybe I just have it on a good floppy. I have made a CD, it just doesn't work most of the time. Floppy version works fine 100% of the time. Also it really rubs me the wrong way to burn that little onto a CD.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 07:36 |
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More motherboards just need to support booting from a USB key. It's more reliable than floppies and more convenient than a CD. With 4GB keys so cheap ($15!) they can fit many OS installers too.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 07:40 |
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talk show ghost posted:More motherboards just need to support booting from a USB key. It's more reliable than floppies and more convenient than a CD. With 4GB keys so cheap ($15!) they can fit many OS installers too. Definitely true. I carry a 1GB Ubuntu boot USB drive in my pocket (speaking of which I need to update that to 8.04) I just wish they had a good live system built for USB keys that had for instance let me install packages (like ntfs-3g and ntfstools)
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 07:50 |
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Xenomorph posted:All the motherboards I've seen still have DOS based upgrading. I own a MSI and an Intel motherboard and both support flashing the BIOS from within windows. I'm willing to bet you didn't look hard enough on the other sites either.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 10:30 |
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talk show ghost posted:More motherboards just need to support booting from a USB key. It's more reliable than floppies and more convenient than a CD. With 4GB keys so cheap ($15!) they can fit many OS installers too. USB keys give the awesome possibility of holding the complete OS on the drive and taking it with you. Combine that with some of the webapps and you could, conceivably, have a mobile office that'll run your family apps in any place with a network connection. If you could give it something akin to Marco Polo for the mac (location guessing via fuzzy logic) and store multiple configurations on the key, you could conceivably have a USB key you do setup for once, then plug into machines and it just works. This would be a real place where Linux actually COULD outshine either Windows or OSX. It's easy to make lightweight, free and, when running primarily webapps, the flaws of having 40 different window managers all but disappear. This is the kind of poo poo I would put my spare key to work for.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 10:33 |
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Lum posted:How do you back up the old BIOS? How do you recover from a bad flash where only the bootblock BIOS is working? You can make a backup of the current BIOS of Gigabyte boards, and save it to whatever medium you want. Then you can re-flash from within the BIOS off any FAT-32 formatted HD if you want to. Although I admit I don't have any experience doing this, but the functionality is there.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 12:14 |
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timb posted:Click the icon next to the address. It's not difficult.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 12:38 |
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John Dough posted:You can make a backup of the current BIOS of Gigabyte boards, and save it to whatever medium you want. Then you can re-flash from within the BIOS off any FAT-32 formatted HD if you want to. Although I admit I don't have any experience doing this, but the functionality is there. Well nobody uses FAT32 for HDs any more, and you certainly can't have AWDFLASH.EXE burn your old BIOS to your boot CD. I suppose you could put the registered version of NTFSDOS onto your boot CD, but that costs money, IIRC it's more expensive than buying a floppy drive and a box of disks. Ironically with Gigabyte boards you don't need to bother, since they have that whole dual BIOS thing to get you up and running again after a bad flash. I'm pretty sure they offer all their old BIOSes for download too so that you can just grab it again if you need to go back to an earlier version.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 13:21 |
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HatfulOfHollow posted:I own a MSI and an Intel motherboard and both support flashing the BIOS from within windows. I'm willing to bet you didn't look hard enough on the other sites either. MSI bios updater wouldn't work with vista 64 when I built my machine a few months ago, its nice to have a floppy and a drive around for backup moments like this.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 13:24 |
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Spotlight on OS X really winds me up because it could be so good but there's so many little irritating things.
The biggest thing that irritates me is inconsistent results: for example, if I type in "V" then I could expect to see VLC, VMware Fusion, FFView and DVD Player come up under Applications. However, if I type in V right now then I only get VLC and DVD Player; Spotlight only shows applications that have been recently accessed and that means, despite opening VMware Fusion 12 hours ago, it's not on the list of results. What's the point of this? I can understand not showing applications if they've not been opened for days but not showing them if they've been unused for 12 hours? That's just stupid. Inability to learn from results is a pretty big flaw too: nine out of ten times I type "V' I end up selecting and opening VLC but if I have VMware Fusion open (even if I don't open it through Spotlight) then typing V suggests VMware Fusion as the top hit and not VLC. I've never opened VMware Fusion through Spotlight (I type the names of my .vmware files to open them) so why should it be the top hit for "V"? Spotlight should be able to learn my usage patterns and deduce that when I type "V", I want VLC as the top hit each time. Finally, Spotlight forces you to use search phrases in exact order. By this I mean that if you want Quicktime Player then you can't get it by typing "QT", even though that's a logical abbreviation of the application name. Typing QT will never bring up Quicktime so you have to backspace one and type "Qu" to get it. Ditto trying to use NP for NicePlayer. It also includes file extensions, which is frustrating when I try to open AppZapper - "App" will bring up all recently used applications and so you have to add the "Z" to get AppZapper as the top hit. Quicksilver does all these things but it's just too unstable on Leopard to use right now, which is a shame.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 15:07 |
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Xaalouse posted:Bloggers that think the loving iPhone will be a DS/PSP killer, its a god drat phone you dip shits. Well it certainly has potential but apparently less power than than the PSP, and clearly more expensive and locked over the DS. The DS is so popular in Asia because all the girls only play with R4's.
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 15:12 |
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ranathari posted:Quicksilver does all these things but it's just too unstable on Leopard to use right now, which is a shame. I use Quicksilver with Leopard on my G4 Mac mini and it's fine. What sort of instability are you seeing?
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 15:31 |
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| # ? May 25, 2013 06:53 |
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I loving hate how Windows Update will just go ahead and restart anyway if you don't do anything. God forbid I leave my computer running overnight to transcode some video or something. And why isn't there an option to just let me RESTART THE COMPUTER MY OWN GODDAMN SELF? It's either Restart Now or Bother Me Again in Five Minutes and Do It Automatically If I Don't Respond. My favorite is when I'm watching a movie or something and the update window doesn't take focus, so I don't know it's even there until OKAY I'M RESTARTING NOW BYE!
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| # ? Jun 11, 2008 18:02 |
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