The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Mozzie posted:

I wonder how that looks with red blue 3d glasses

I happen to have some on hand and they do absolutely nothing of interest.

# ¿ May 23, 2009 06:20

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 12:11

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

WoW likes to write to lots of files in its program directory, which doesn't combine very well with UAC. Either installing it to somewhere other than Program Files or granting your account admin access to WoW's folder should make it work correctly without compatibility mode.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2009 19:26

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Bonobos posted:

What is the best dvd ripper these days? I'd prefer free, but I am lloking for something that just works. I've been using DVD Decrypter, which is hysterically ancient, so I assume something more recent / better has replaced it.

Not really. There's a smattering of other options these days but they don't have a better UI or work better, so unless you run into a specific problem there's no reason to switch if you're used to DVD Decrypter.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2009 15:17

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

AlexDeGruven posted:

Yeah... This is still true. While you're not distributing anything that's not publicly available, you're still breaking the rules by distributing outside of the channels.

THOUGH: This is technically not Copyright infringement, so you could really inform Charter that they need to tell MS where to cram it if you were distributing something that was freely available.

TOS Violation: Sure
Copyright Infringment: Nope

Even if it was the RC or beta and not a leaked version, being able to freely download a file from Microsoft does not grant you permission to redistribute it, so it is copyright infringement.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2009 00:25

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Sir Nigel posted:

They compromised and instead of removing IE just included the other big 4 if I read the article correctly and you get to choose during the installation what it installs.

I'm not sure I'd call doing what the EU wanted them to do in the first place a compromise.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2009 14:09

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Munkaboo posted:

If an MSDN account is 250 a year, why dont more people just get the thing, get a few serials, then cancel the account? Do the keys go bad?

Why jump through those hoops instead of just pirating it if you're not going to use a legal copy anyway?

# ¿ Aug 20, 2009 04:58

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

GreatGreen posted:

I wonder if the time it takes to clear out that RAM affects performance in any way.

It doesn't have to clear out that ram. There's no difference between claiming ram that used to store cache data and ram that used to store garbage data.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2009 03:16

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Mr. Blastaway posted:

I'm guessing there's nothing you can do about this. I still don't understand why they choose to have the preview shot be taken so early in the video. Why not about half way into each video or better yet let me set it to wherever I want?

Haali Media Splitter does let you choose, but that's normally only going to be used for MKV thumbnails.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2009 02:57

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

bob arctor posted:

I was thinking of upgrading my work desktop with Windows 7 RTM using one of my Technet Keys however once 7 comes out I'll want to switch it to a purchased key, is there an easy way to change product keys post install? Is this a legit use of a Technet Key? I don't want to use a RC install/key because as far as I know that will require a reinstall.

Just install the RTM and don't use any key at all until you buy the retail copy. You can go 120 days without a valid product key.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2009 23:05

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Man-Eating Cow posted:

So if I get a Blu-ray drive I won't be able to get full resolution through VGA for Blu-ray?

Anything which can't be played at full resolution over VGA in Vista can't be (legally) played on XP at all.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2009 19:20

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

How would native x11 support be better than xming?

# ¿ Oct 6, 2009 07:10

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

MPC-HC includes libavcodec/libavformat, which is about 90% of ffdshow. In terms of playing video the main advantage of using ffdshow instead of the build-in decoders is that it lets you use ffdshow's filters.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2009 23:29

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Cuddly Coach posted:

There's gotta be at least some smarts behind it. I had MAME32 installed in just c:\mame and the program pinned to the start bar. Later, I manually moved everything to c:\programs\mame (for the sake of cleaning up) but didn't change any shortcuts or anything. Clicked on the pinned item and it churned for an extra second or two, but it did start. Further starts were no problem at all

That's how all shortcuts have always worked. If you move the target of a shortcut windows attempts to automatically fix the shortcut.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2009 15:57

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

m2pt5 posted:

Because there are almost no 64-bit plugins, like Flash for instance.

And unless you consider not having flash a good thing, there aren't really any benefits to a 64-bit browser.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2009 01:48

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

madprocess posted:

Stuff like encryption gets handled faster, it's more stable and secure (even compared to 32 bit without the add-ins that only work on 32 bit), and you get to use more than 2 or 4 gigabytes of RAM for the process.

The cpu overload of https is so utterly trivial compared to everything else a web browser has to do that you'd never notice if it went away completely, I'm horrified by the idea of a web browser needing more than 2 gigs of ram, and moving to 64 bit does not magically improve stability.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2009 02:07

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Biodome posted:

Also, whats the best renderer? is it EVR?

Haali Video Renderer is usually the best if you have a video card that supports it, and EVR Custom is the least bad of the rest if you don't.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2009 01:39

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

redeyes posted:

I don't think so. EVR is the best renderer and Haali is old news and not hardware accelerated while EVR is.

Being newer does not magically make something better.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2009 04:09

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

FallenGod posted:

I'm pretty sure it doesn't do that, because then you wouldn't be able to do anything that requires admin access...like turning UAC back on.

There's also always been an easy way to get that behavior: just run as a non-administrator.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2010 23:17

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

kapinga posted:

And yes, programs that are not aware of UAC will fail when attempting to do restricted activities. You must run them as Administrator (right click, run as administrator) to make them work properly.

You can nearly always just give your account access to a few specific things instead. The vast majority of programs that require administrator access really just need write access to the directory they're installed in and maybe a few registry keys.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2010 02:02

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

mobn posted:

You have to launch a screen recorder, multiple chat clients, and steam at startup? Those are all things you could easily just launch when you need them.

Chat clients that aren't left running at all times aren't really very useful.

# ¿ Apr 18, 2010 05:47

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

You can create a scheduled task to run it with administrator privileges whenever you log in.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2010 19:23

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Why it was removed

# ¿ Jul 30, 2010 01:20

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

-Blackadder- posted:

I also haven't been able to figure out how to manually drag around and/or arrange files in a folder. I can still do it on the desktop but not in folders. And after some googling it seems that Microsoft actually took that feature out. I almost don't believe it given how it was such a basic, useful function. I'd love to read an article like the one Plorkyeran posted about why they thought this was an intelligent design decision.

My unsubstantiated guess is that very few people actually want to manually rearrange items in folders, but a lot of users accidentally moved files around then could not find them. Alternatively, they simply didn't have time to reimplement it before beta started, and there weren't a lot of complaints about it during beta.

[e] Oh, there's a link in that thread to a post by a shell dev that says almost no one used it so it wasn't worth reimplementing.

Plorkyeran fucked around with this message at 10:34 on Jul 30, 2010

# ¿ Jul 30, 2010 10:31

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

-Blackadder- posted:

Considering how many people in that thread are complaining about it I don't know how much I believe that.

When something is used by hundreds of millions of people, something which annoys a thousandth of a percent of the users will annoys thousands of people. 50 people complaining in a thread that's a high google result doesn't really indicate that it's a common problem.

Xenomorph posted:

All the other stuff they mention is irrelevant. People just want to change a file association every now and then. Maybe change an icon, change a file type description, or remove an incorrect association.

Third-part apps have proven the old method is STILL valid with Vista/Windows 7.

You can change file associations in Windows 7 by just right clicking on a file then clicking on "Choose default program". Being able to change the icon for a file type would be sort of nice I guess, but it's a pretty niche thing that seems reasonable to dump off on third-party programs. I don't know why you'd want to outright remove incorrect associations for files other than if you managed to associate executables with a program, and adding an easy way to fix that is solving the wrong problem.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2010 21:47

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

What exactly is the point of deleting the association for .sys? All that'll do is make the dialog asking you which program you want to use to open it the next time you double click it, which you can access at any time without deleting the association. I really don't understand how having .sys files associated with notepad is a problem in the first place.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2010 22:53

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

BlondRobin posted:

Out of curiosity, why? This isn't an "i know beter lolol" statement, I'm just curious (knowing increasingly less about computing as it advances) why having the configuration file for a program right next to the program itself is harmful or risky.

What happens when you have two users that aren't allowed to touch or see each other's files?

How do you find all of the files you need to back up to keep your settings after flatting and reinstalling?

How do you stop malicious users from modifying programs which will be run by other users (or if you prefer, malicious programs running as a normal user modifying programs which are run with admin privileges). Note that "modifying" can consist of dropping a DLL into the same directory.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2010 09:12

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Marinmo posted:

What's the difference between those two though? I know *most* of the programs I use (firefox for example) places its' stuff in Roaming, but what's the logic behind those names? Not hating here, just genuinely curious.

Roaming is things worth copying over a network when you log in and Local is things not worth copying. If you're not on a domain the difference almost never matters.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2010 23:02

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

Perhaps in theory, but in practice no one uses LocalLow and non-machine-specific things like browser caches are almost universally put in Local. My LocalLow directory has exactly one subdirectory (Microsoft's) and is a whopping 750 KB.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2010 23:39

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

C-Euro posted:

How about the original Starcraft? I think that's the oldest game I have.

Starcraft has some goofy color issues in the menus that require black magic to fix, but in-game it's perfectly fine.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2010 00:17

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 12:11

Plorkyeran: Mar 22, 2007; To Escape The Shackles Of The Old Forums, We Must Reject The Tribal Negativity He Endorsed

They'd probably have to rewrite a good chunk of it, as Microsoft stopped giving a gently caress about DirectDraw years ago. It's a small miracle they can even still compile it.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2010 02:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Windows and Windows Software Megathread