Dirty Harry

Use a IE enhancement. My favourite is MyIE2. You get a popup killer, tabbed browsing and much more from this freeware. It is one of the best true freebies I've found in a long time... H.

What ? Where is Max Payne? He's my kind of dude... H.

Anyone know of a way to edit/change the registry of a non-running XP installation ? I have a dual boot system (normally XP1/XP2), and I refresh the XP2 partition fairly often. The XP2 is just an image of XP1 which I use for testing purposes etc. Before booting I'd however like to change some registry settings (especially the mounted devices setting, so that the drives show up correctly). Now I have to boot to XP2, change drive letter assigments, reboot, change some more drive letters etc. I figure there should be a way to fix the registry of XP2 before I boot there. Or is it impossible ? H

Makes sence, altough keep an eye on the HD, that is is performing as fast as it can, thsts one of those things that makes a noticeable speed difference for the user. Try the LS-120 on the HPT controller, if everything works dandy then you have every device on its own controller. H.

Well, I guess you could buy an PCI - IDE controller card... Likely to be cheaper (?) than the a RAID controller. On the other hand, I guess you could keep those 4 devices you've got just straight on the standard 2 IDE channels, why do you want them as four master devices? You propably need to experiment a little to find the best master/slave combination. I guess I'd start with CD and DVD on one cable, HD and LS-120 on the other (unless you copy DVD's to CD's of course)

I have three of 'em: Abit KG7 with HPT 370A Abit KA7 with HPT 370 Abit BE6 with HPT 366 All three manuals contain the recommendation "Thus we suggest you don't connect non-disk devices that use ATA/ATAPI interfaces such as CD-ROM to the HPT3xx connector." The manuals are downloadable on Abits site (at least they used to be) if you don't believe... Besides, the ATAPI interface, which a CD rom uses, is not precisely the same as the ATA 100 or ATA 66 interface. Just compatible. But why on earth would you want to connect a CD to the Highpoint controller in the first place ? You bought the thing to get your HD's up to speed, didn't you ? H.

Don't know about PCI-card contollers for sure, as I have Abit boards with integrated Highpoint (HPT) raid controllers. Here the manual clearly states that you should not connect "non-disk devices" like CD's to the HPT controller. BTW, each controller (normally) has two connectors, and you can, using the master-slave setting, connect two devices to each. As I've understood it: if you have two controllers = you have four connectors = eight IDE channels. Finally, if you only need to connect four devices I've never heard any arguments why you shouldn't connect each device as a master on its own channel. Chaing up two devices means that they compete about the available transfer rate in the channel, and that can not speed things up. I doubt that you will detect any speed difference depending on which controller or connector you use for a certain device (as long as its not slower than the device), but thats easy enough to test, just switch the connector for a HD between two controllers and measure with HD-tach in between. H.

This was discussed in the last few days in this thread: http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23261&highlight= H.

- does ping work ? - have you setup shares and users ? - have you disabled the firewall ? H.

How long is a "loooooooong time" ? Some suggestions and troubleshooting tips could be: Try starting the machines in a different sequence, the machine that starts first will be the "master browser" and sometimes this makes a huge difference, especially if we are talking a new fast PC and a old slow PC. If you have (or have had) Zone Alarm installed that could be the culprit, it must either be correctly configured or partly removed manually. Off is not necessarily good enough. Also, try accessing by using the //computername syntax from a command prompt, does that make a difference ? Does everything work fast and fine when you get in ? Are the NICs identical - are their properties OK in system manager ? Are the shares mounted or do you go in thru "my network places", "workgroup name" ? One thing which would be helpful to know are the reply times. Could you ping the machines from eachother and look at the results (ping A from B and B from A). Any differences in the reply time ? ...and forget about the wizard, learn to do it manually, that way you **know** what the settings are. Plenty of how-to guides out there.

Quote: There must be some software out there that can edit these files. Yes, so I would think - but can someone name one ??? H.

Quote: I use nero burning rom and when I try to copy a cd on the fly, nero compains about source and destinarion device beeing on the same cable. Nero complains, but it doesn't cause any trouble for me. I have four channels (built in HPT controller) so all four devices are masters in their own right. HD1 (HPT-1) HD2 (HPT-2) CD-R CD-RW H.

Well, well, something is wrong, isn't it ? Sounds strange though. As both computers see all shares it sounds like your protocols and hardware are alright but if you easily can you should try a different cable. I'd also suggest you try by manually creating a new share and a new user on both machines to see if that gets you forward. It sounds like one user doesn't have the access rights...Personally I can't stand the wizard, so do it manually, that way you know what your settings are.. H.

Do you have the user account for user B on computer A ? Sorry I never used the wizard, but basically you need to have the shares set, and you need to have users with rights on both PC's if I recall right. Also you have the (XP?) firewall correctly set / disabled and the same services running on both PCs ? H.

Quote: Also, I'm fairly sure that if you have an ATA66 and an ATA100 drive sharing the same IDE port, they'll both run at the slower speed. uuuh, apparently no. I did claim this here at these forums once afew months back, and got a hailstorm of ppl shouting no, not anymore. The ATA inteface has apparently overcome this limitation. See this thread: http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20744&highlight=ata I'd still keep my HD.s on different channels though, old habits are hard to break H

This should work: move all your new messages to a folder xyz, close OE and move the resulting xyz.dbx file somewhere import all your old messages (assuming you have more of them than new ones, otherwise do it the other way around) create a folder xyz in your OE inbox (in addition to your old messages) close OER and overwrite the xyz.dbx file with the one you saved earlier. There you are, all your new messages are in the xyz folder! H

Quote: Anyone use Drive Image instead? Yes, for many years and never had a problem. My main use is to clone my sys partition to an other HD (same PC) in order to produce a 1 to 1 test system. Drive Image has always worked perfectly, but Ghost is supposed to work just as good. H.

There is a little utility floating around the net that shows the registration number, and another one that lets you change the serial, if by chance your serial spells something rude. Some of the big boys have even talked about a third one that actually makes serials... H.

Try using a freeware called Bopup scanner. H.

There is a ready made VBS script + DLL to be found by following this LINK. It will only report the online staus of each PC (ON/OFF) but maybe it gives you some ideas for modding . H.

Quote: DH, use nbtstat -R (case sensitive) to purge and reload the cache on the local machine, then try net view again. OK Clutch , if somebody knows networks here its you so obviously there is no magic "show all connected computers real time" command in windows. Rrrright, purging the cache works, and I even had a batchfile running that did that for a while. I wasn't quite what I was after, as then the PC's have to register themselves again, maybe trigger a new MB election, maybe interfere with LAN operations etc. I was twisting the question a bit; how do I know (constantly) which machines are on and which off, and pipe that. The Coolmon way my desktop is right now showing among other data: PC1- OFF PC-2 ON Just text on a transparent backround, like I would have typed it on the wallpaper. This data gets updated every minute or whatever using the scheduler, and thats a bit too often to trigger a MB election. And no, I'm not in the marketing dept for those guys, its open source freeware, but its just fantastic. As mentioned, If you just wan't to know this every now and then the easiest way is to d/l some freware. H.

Quote: net view shows all systems on the network, and then DF's command will give you the shares on a given system. You can also pipe the results to a text file. Clutch, not that I argue with you, but just net view reads the cache i.e. it also shows all computers that have been powered on recently (the posters orig problem). DF's command returns an error code if the PC is off, real time, as it is polling that machine. I find it strange that there (apparently) is no way to see only currently active PC's on a LAN with one command. Same goes for connected shares, I guess. AFAIK, there isn't really an easy way to display all currently connected users either, except in some circumstances thru the task manager. The most practical solution I've found to do this is to use a script or a batch file, pinging all the PC's of the LAN. There are also plenty of 3rd party apps that show connected computers, but I haven't found one that is both freeware and can automatically print the results to a file. A good one though is Bopup, shows you all info in a window and can (manually) print to a file. The reason I want to do this is that I use a great little app called CoolMon (it is really cool) to show my system stats on the desktop, and I wanted to include the status of the PC's on my home LAN. Works fine know with a script & DLL off their site ! H.

Works fine, but how about several computers at once? Is there windows command to show all powered on PC's on a lan ? Or all shares ? H.

What I want to see is which users are logged on on a small LAN. The View Workkgroup computers only shows the PC's which would be good enough but I'd like to pipe the output (connected users and/or PC's) to a txt file as well, best case regularely updated w/o using scheduler... The command nbtstat shows this data, sort of, but it fetches them from a cache I don't want to release just to get the current data. Somehow I have the feeling that the view workgroup computer window refreshes much faster than this cache - is it really different data ? Ah-hrm, must be too obvious for me to find...but where the heck is the equivalent of the netwatcher tool found in win98 ? The data of the "Master Browser List" must be stored somewhere... but where ? Any suggestions on any of the questions above ? H.

Taskmanager yes, but how do I pipe the output to a textfile ? H.