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drag & drop & shell.  i didn't use the load dialog

As with all monopolies, they had massive surplus revenues. Dvorak just notes a number of ways in which this surplus was frittered away.

Reminds me of the old joke about the guy who runs into an old schoolmate who won the Lotto.  The Lotto winner is totally broke.  The pal says "how could you possibly have spent all that money?"  The Lotto winner says "90% of it went to booze, broads and gambling.. the other 10% I just pissed away."  

Works for me   

[MyDownloads]

From a programmer's pov I'd also like to see a Folder Selection dialog that didn't force you to either, click open + signs to expand a tree so you can click on the folder, or, type in the name of the folder(why have a gui if you're going to type it in?)

I'd like to see some kind of incremental search.  For example, if the only folder in the system with the name MyDownloads is under C:\EverybodysDownloads then when you type MyDo.. into the folder input line, the strand under C: should be expanded and MyDownloads highlighted.  Clicking 8 times to open a folder, or typing in the entire path is lame.  Probably why many use Windows search who would otherwise turn it off... but it's not that handy for program input as in "select a folder to copy" or whatnot.

They've been doing it the same why for how many decades now? Jeez!!

Also, I find Dvorak entertaining, even if he is a hack who trolls people to read his articles.

Yeah, it is kind of weird not to feel the need for Byte or PC Magazine, or even shows like Screen Savers anymore.  Now I just google and there's a forum with tips tweaks and registry hacks.  I  used to watch Dvorak on TV and even listen to the radio show, after I stopped reading PC magazine(probably when they stopped publishing TSRs in assembler.. with 386s and multi MB PCs you didn't have to count every byte anymore.)

Yeah, I remember seeing some documentary, maybe on Computer Chronicles, about how IBM went "shopping" for somebody to do Dos.  Gary Killdall was approached but he said the terms of the contract were such that IBM would have him by the throat.  Then someboy from MS, maybe Gates I don't remember for sure, said some stuff about "well you have to have faith that IBM won't exercise those sections of the contract" or words to that effect.  Sounds like MS was the only one who could accept.  Kind of like when the state legislature goes on a "nationwide search" for the most qualified candidate for a task, who just happens to be the niece of the President of the Senate of said state.

How many more of these "Is this the end of microsoft" articles are we going to see? I swear, a new one pops up every week. I also expect to see another "Is this finally the year linux takes over the desktop market?" thread any day now.

I think Dvorak has one of those pinwheels with the paper-holder spring clips on his desk.  Just rotate and the topic he wrote about 12 years ago is "new" again.

Even if it gets bloated, it's tough for Windows to become obsolete as long as CPU power and cheap storage keeps exploding.  It will take a new age of dear resources to kill it off. Right now a desktop icon for my application is close to the size of total main memory when I got my first Dos 3.1 XT compatible.

Hmmmmm, maybe MS should find a small company to do nothing but write an operating system?  The trick worked for IBM. Where is Gary Killdall when you need him? 

In VMWare you can boot from a recovery CD - you can also mess up the VM MBR to your hearts content and see if it restores correctly.

That may be but I'm assuming once Windows is loaded, there's a Windows driver loaded for the physical HD.  When you boot for real off the BIOS there isn't any Windows driver unless it's on the CD.  If you are talking disaster recovery, I don't trust it unless I test it like it would be if I couldn't boot the machine.  It does me no good if the simulation works if I can't boot up in reality.  Most of these imaging programs work pretty well, if they can see your hardware.  That's why one person says brand x is great and the other says no it sucks.  They have different drives.  It's no fun to have to restore in "compatibility mode."  For one thing, if you have battery backup that can cover you for 5 minutes then the odds of getting through a 45 minute or hour restore are great.  Not so great if it has to run for 9 hours.

[sure]

The only real test that matters is booting off the recovery CD and seeing if it can access your HD.  On the MBR thing if the partition table is what's messed up, a lot of the "repair" programs won't fix it because they deliberately leave that section of the MBR alone.  Best thing is a utility that simply copies a healthy MBR someplace, then copies it back to the HD.  Of course if you alter your partition setup you should store another copy.

As example, the Macrium Reflect 4.2 I used creates a Linux based recovery CD that can see my HD.  But to use the WinPE based recovery I had to learn how to store my HD driver with the .inf file so WinPE could load it.  With these HD schemes changing so fast now it seems like image restore utilities are often one step behind. All I'm saying is make sure the recovery CD works before you have to depend on it.  I got lucky that I could do my restore at the super slow speed.  At least it let me put my Vista image back on(I tried W7 64 bit and it didn't work out well.)

I don't see the setting to disable version compatibility checking, so maybe it does it on install?  But anyway, when you click Tools=>AddOns it should say "addon compatibility checking is disabled.. enable?" if it's disabled.  The layout is changed quite a bit from Mr Tech Local Install as it used to be called and I haven't had to mess with it, so that's why.

I don't use that Opera addon so I can't say what fixes it.  The only thing I used to use was Launchy to "Open with Opera" but that got to be a pain.  I could never add any new stuff to Launchy once it was installed.. so I gave up on it.. other than just using the context menu to open image links.

The thing is, I restored from backup with Paragon and it still didn't fix the MBR.  Of course nobody wants to hose their system just to test the fix.  But, when I bought the first image backup, which was Paragon, I had just been hit by malware that deleted my C: partition.  So at that point I didnt have much to lose.  I put XP Pro and about 1/2 dozen programs on so I could tell if they worked the same after a restore.  I deleted my C: partition, booted the restore CD and laid the saved image on.  Everything was great.  Trouble is you don't know if it will recognize your drive until the moment of truth.  If you have a busted system, that's your chance to try out the various image backup programs.  One thing I definitely didn't like about Paragon is the Personal and Pro versions you can download, don't give a real trial version.  They just give a demo.  Macrium had a time-limited but otherwise fully enabled trial version.  I backed up my system and restored it, verifying it actually worked, before shelling out the $$$ 

[any]

They used to give away Express versions.  Don't know if they stopped it.  The Express versions were the same as Personal but without the folder exclusion and file backup features(just does a complete system image backup.)  But for disaster recovery that ain't bad.  Maybe too many people were doing the Express?  They even had a 64 bit Vista version of Express.

With XP you are probably ok doing the backup capsule esp. if you can find some way to back up your MBR.  There should be some utilities on the web if you search.  They just back up your MBR to a USB key with a program to write it back to your drive.

Before you depend on any backup imaging software make sure the disaster recovery boot CD recognizes your drive.  It's a really unpleasant surprise when you assume it will work only to find out not.  My HP quad core PC is essentially the same as my Vista dual core that I've restored with Paragon a bunch of times.  So I assumed the 64 bit express would work on the new machine(makes the same Linux disaster recovery CD.)  But because HP/AMD decided for some weird reason to stick a fake raid drive in this thing, no joy!!  If you can afford to risk it, the best thing is to actually hose your system and restore it. Then you know it works for sure!!! (say if for example you know the factory system restore discs work or you have Vista install DVD or whatever.)

afa Mr Tech goes, the funny thing is many of my AddOns would work using Mr Tech and Minefield 3.6 pre that would not work on FF 3.0x.  Go figure! 

As soon as Macrium Reflect was done, it worked.  I selected "restore MBR from backup" on the Macrium Restore.  Then I could shrink it by over 400 GB.  I don't think it's a defrag issue.  I've had Paragon capsule creation mess me up a couple of times. If you try it on Vista/W7 I recommend not doing it from the desktop gui if there's another method.  My recommendation in Vista is boot the restore CD and then do the image restore from external drive or whatever.

As I say, on XP Pro the backup capsule creation thing worked.  If there's some issue with Vista then they should detect it and refuse to attempt creating the capsule.  Not just go ahead and crap out!

Also test the Boot CD and see if it detects your HD ok.  If it doesn't, the video will go weird and it will crash unless you select "compatibility mode" and then you can do a restore at 1/10th x.  My fake Raid HD wasn't even usable by Macrium free version. I had to get the 4.2 release as it has a new Linux boot CD that recognized the drive.

Try before you depend on it with all these image backups.

edit: also since the MBR holds the partition table and MBR is a common target of malware attack, I wouldn't use any backup partition as my only image backup.  It's a little slower to back up to external but way more dependable.  Plus it's a good idea to back up to an external and then remove it from the machine.  Makes it harder for viruses that try to infect every drive on your machine/network.

The other thing that can be touchy is the backup capsule creation(at least in Vista64.) That's what provoked my "testing" of the backup.  The system still booted, but it would not let me shrink C: by more than about 13 GB even though I had tons of free space and the drive was defragged.  What fixed the partition table was a backup and restore with Macrium Reflect.  The backup capsule deal seemed to work fine on my XP machine.  Vista seems to cause them problems.

I'm not sure how good the Paragon Raid support is.  I have one of those HP quad cores with an AMD Raid Ready drive that shows no SMART info.  I was able to run a restore using the Paragon 9.0 backup boot CD, but it took 9 hours instead of 90 minutes!! It kicked down to "compatibility mode" because it couldn't see my drive.  I loaded Macrium Reflect 2.4 trial and it worked, so I bought that.  If the Paragon backup sees your drive it works great.  I'd just suggest booting the restore CD and confirming that it can see your drive at full speed before counting on it.

If I could suggest one feature to make drag & drop more convenient.. maybe a simple save of screen position to the .ini file and open at last saved? (maybe even optional with a checkbox?)  That way I can have it come up in one corner of the screen and drag from explorer windows etc..

(edit: btw the checkbox isn't really important.  If deleting the xy location from the .ini file will have it open in the center of the desktop then recovery from a case where the app opens off screen is available.  Doesn't happen that often anyway even with simple xy position save.)

Would you mind trying the latest snapshot build, please, and see if the toolbar icons work again?  v1.0.6.4

Looks like you got it.  Both W7 and Vista64 like it.

[cyberdiva]

cyberdiva it doesn't come up that often so I thought I'd mention it. It's really a hack I wrote for myself, not something I'd put on Softpedia or anything.  Just thought if anyone wanted to use it they can download it from the link. I don't use it as much as I used to.  If you pay via PayPal then the shipping address and all that is done for you anyway after you log into your PayPal account.

[skwire]

skwire, if you want to give me source for a window with toolbar buttons using the same method as your app I can try it in W7 and Vista64 and see if I can find anything out if you like. It's tough to get any clue just from a compiled .exe.

One of the things I like about Opera is the Wand form filler.  I don't like that it leaves the info in opera6.ini in clear text.  I cobbled a hack to encrypt that section of opera6.ini when not it use.  It's just a compiled script that decrypts that info, launches Opera, and when Opera closes, encrypts the info again.

If you are using a sophisticated form fill app then it's not for you.  But if you use Opera Wand and want to make it a bit more secure without a lot of hassle, you are welcome to use RunOperaWand

As with all my utilities, it's free for you to use at your own risk.

( edit: btw sorry if off-topic )

The main thing bugging me with FF now is I'm using Minefield and I like to update it often.

I've quit using nightly builds and early betas because too many of my extensions break which causes pandemonium over here as I don't function well without my extensions.

Guess that could be a problem.  Mine have stabilized.  Then again, I only run 18 extensions and 5 themes. MR Tech Toolkit keeps 'em from gettin' too uppity(which is one of the 18 btw)

If you want to try it out without installing you can always burn one of those "live CDs" that boot into Linux.  At least you can get a feel for how XWindows does things.  It feels a bit different than Windows even though it's point and click.  Stuff on internet feels pretty familiar like browsing and email but text editors tend to be a lot different.  Most don't have the key bindings or philosophy that you're used to in Windows.

[application.ini]

That's good to know.  That Opera download tab can get annoying too.  I mainly use Opera these days to listen to music clips on AllMusic.com.  It plays them navtively.. so I don't have to mess with a media player addon/plugin. Just about everything else I do with FF though.

The main thing bugging me with FF now is I'm using Minefield and I like to update it often.  With the nightly builds that's very very often.  But every time I have to open application.ini and set the Crash reporting to 0, and kill those DDE exec registry settings.  I have a .reg script but to get it to "take" I have to run an Explorer Environment refresh utility about 3 times(just calls AutoIt UpdateEnv() function.)  Sheesh!!!  At least that saves me from having to log off. I'm surprised 3.6pre is in limbo for so long. Seems to work fine for me.  Then again I don't stress it with rows of tabs or dozens of addons.  Seems to run as good as any other FF I've used though.