Login with username and password (forgot your password?)

Too late...I bought both Fallout 1 and 2 when they hit the shelves & have played them both through more than once.

I'm working my way through Fallout 3 & I'm having a blast with it. One just has to keep in mind that it is more of a spiritual successor to Fallout 2 (much like Fallout 1 was the spiritual successor to Wasteland like you mentioned) rather than a traditional sequel. I've been downloading some mods off of Fallout Nexus & some of them have me giddy like a schoolgirl.

But....I'd love to see an updated Wasteland using the latest state of the art graphics, game mechanics, and UI.

Microsoft history is full of silly mistakes like that. My favorite one, and one I got in on, was back in the days of Windows 98. You could fill out a request form on their web site & you'd get four CDs in the mail for trial of their products: One was a time-limited copy of Windows 98, the second disc was Microsoft Office, the third was Microsoft Publisher, and the fourth was something I forgot.

It was a great promotion for Microsoft till someone realized that the Windows 98  disc was the only one time-limited. Everything else was full retail products...corporate versions that didn't require serial key input, too.

Ahh...good times.

Someone else in this thread mentioned it, but I'll bring it up again....the grand-daddy of all post-apocalyptic RPGs Wasteland. It had absolutely horrific graphics by today's standards (EGA), but it had a wonderful story & is another one of those wonderful intellectual properties that has been lost to the sands of time. I don't think anyone knows anymore who owns the rights to it so it has never been re-done.

Well, thank God we fixed your goo flushing.

I ran WoG on Windows 7 with an ATI card and I didn't notice any corruption of anything on exit on my system.

Distracted by shiny things? Laughs...I must have missed that part as I just glossed over the description. I think everyone is more prone to distraction than we used to be due the way things have changed culturally speaking.

As for Macs, I have nothing against them or the people who use them. I have used Macs before and they just don't work the way I work. This isn't as bad as it used to be, though. Before OS X those poor souls didn't even have pre-emptive multi-tasking.

mnemonic,
You spoke about routers and that is something a lot of people ignore. If you get a good firewall that performs real stateful packet inspection you can circumvent a lot of the random attacks out there and then concentrate on defending on the reduced amount of crap that makes it through.

My recommendation is to visit the third-party firmware web sites for routers such as DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT & find the firmware you like best. Once you've done that carefully look over your chosen firmware's list of supported routers & get buy the one that has the features you want at a price you can afford. Once you get that firmware installed you'll have a firewall appliance running Linux offering you firewall features that are usually only available on devices costing $500+ dollars.

As for security products, I can't sum it up any better than saying it's like walking a tightrope. The more features a product offers to secure your PC the more resources it's usually going to take up. KAV, for example, makes a system feel more sluggish than one running NOD32. One of the reasons this is because KAV is looking out for a lot more trojans and malware than NOD32. Even if you are fine with the resource usage of KAV, moving up to the single-stop security solution of just getting the KIS security suite isn't necessarily a no-brainer because the firewall in KIS is not as good as some offerings.

As for free anti-virus programs one has to realize that generally speaking one is going to have to put up with more false positives, perhaps reduced features, and definitely getting AV signatures at a later date than those using the paid version of the same product.

Firewall programs are not easy to choose, either. Generally, the most secure ones are the ones who offer the most granular control over your system. Unfortunately, with that granular control usually comes increased popups like with Online Armor. I understand that someone can get irritated and frustrated with all the increased questions of allow this and disallow this after installing one of those products, but you can't let it get the best of you. As long as you are telling the firewall program to remember your decisions as you progress through the popups you are only going to have to answer each of those questions once. After the firewall has been trained on all your installed programs you're only going to see a popup question once a week or two...or even less.

The security software market is unique in that you will always be better off staying away from the major market players that overflow store shelves. Keep McAfee, Norton, TrendMicro, and BitDefender off your PC and you'll generally be a happier person for it.

I missed this topic first time around, scary taskbar girl. Funny you should be the one asking about how to remove something from a taskbar. 

Anyway, if your friend is still wanting to do such, maybe PresStart v1.3 will do what he is looking for. It's written by the same guy who wrote TrueLaunchBar.

http://www.tordex.com/tools/

There are a few other tools on that page he might find useful as well.

This promotion was a reward for filling out a survey for MS available to a select few. Once MS caught on that the giveaway link was being used by everyone and their brother they shut it down.

Don't feel bad for not making it in, reports are trickling in that illegitimate accounts are getting shut down.

When you're dealing with Avira one thing that you will have to get used to is false positives. Every release I have tried to date has way too many false positives for my liking.

I bought Agnitum's suite for the firewall mostly. In every firewall test I have seen 3 products dominate the top of the charts every time: Agnitum's Outpost, Comodo, and Online Armor.

Comodo has way too much drama swirling about it for me to ever take it seriously as a product that's going to keep my PC safe no matter how well it does in tests. Online Armor, while good, is quirky at times and the numerous BSODs people are reporting with the product doesn't leave me feeling warm and secure. Online Armor does not yet support x64 or Windows 7 yet, either.

Even if I eventually end with turning everything off in Outpost except the firewall and using it alongside another anti-virus I still think I got a good deal.

I've only just installed AntiSpamSniper and it has substantially slowed my downloads. Of course, I'm only downloading a few at a time, so doesn't really matter to me.

Sorry I missed this message the first time around, Dormouse, but if you are having "substantially slowed" downloads then you may have AntispamSniper configured to check too many DNSBLs. For every DNSBL you have enabled, AntispamSniper has to check with that server against each email you receive.

I know what you mean. There's been more than a couple programs I missed getting at a reduced price that I ended up regretting I didn't get for one reason or another.

I nearly passed on the Agnitum offer at the time as their software didn't knock my socks off at the time, but figured I'd end up regretting it if I did.

I loved Privateer as well. I just didn't play it until sleep deprivation stepped in...I actually stopped to sleep with that one.

The problem with so many of the older games and why they haven't been re-done is that either no one knows who owns the intellectual property anymore or, in the case of Privateer, the IP is own by total asshats like Electronic Arts.

The only AV I am currently using is called Common Sense v1.0. Unfortunately, it's not sold in any store and it's hard to find more than a handful of people who actually own it, let alone have it installed and are actually using it.  

Seriously, though, my email patterns make it very, very unlikely that I'll receive a virus that way. For everything else I think it through before I run anything. Another thing is I'm the only person who uses my PC. If you have anyone else who uses your PC that opens up who knows how many unknown attack vectors.

EDIT: A solution to your problem is to just add an exclusion to The Bat!'s mail directory to your AV's real-time scanner. Any viruses will be picked up when you unarchive the file and try to run it anyway.

Dang! I'd jump at something like that... Though $15-30 a year for peace of mind is a small price to pay, all things considered. Still...

Yes, as was said above this was discussed on DC. Where were you, Darwin?

http://www.donationcoder....m/index.php?topic=16332.0

And I just realized that I got a better deal than I thought...that lifetime license is good for 3 PCs.

CodeTRUCKER, that's a very good point. I suppose that's possible, but no one would be able to say for sure if this is the case without being able to look over Murray's shoulder at his code.

I've never had a major problem with AdMuncher, but I have never had a qualm about running beta software, either.

I'm running a beta version of AnyDVD, a beta version of The Bat!, a beta version of Total Commander, a beta version of ACDSee Pro v3, and more on a beta version of Windows 7. I love running beta software because I always seize an opportunity to use new features.

I agree the developers are writing checks with their mouths that their butts can't cash. Personally, I'd prefer more frequent releases with fewer features added between non-beta releases, i.e. the developer said the only reason the current beta hasn't been released as final is because they don't have all the features coded that they want to be in the v4.73 release.

I say fine...release what you've got as v4.72.1 then. Add/fix some more stuff and release that as v.4.72.2, etc. When things are how you like it release that as v4.73. Then you can start the whole cycle over with v4.73.1.

At the current pace I don't think we have to worry about Linux and the v5.0 release. That's something our grandkids will have to deal with.  

I love Star Wars, but I hate MMOs. They are just huge money and time sinks.

If I wanted to 'grind' I'd go do some yard work.

Major disclaimer up-front: I am not a programmer, not a script writer, and/or not a "codemonkey" in any way, shape or form.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, to my neophyte mind this sounds like it'd make a great GreaseMonkey script.

Crazy applications. Nothing I'd ever use, but I'm glad you were able to find an exact clone of the app you were looking for.

Hmmm...it just struck me that this app isn't for me because I'm a rabid multi-tasker. I'm always doing at least 3 projects on my PC at once. For those more "uni-task" inclined I'm sure something like this is a godsend.

Here's the first one I came across on a Google search:

http://www.scan2email.net/

CodeTRUCKER, if a) everything was working one day and then not the next; and b) everything goes back to normal when you disable Avast then the problem is most likely that Avast got a signature update that is causing problems.

You have two choices and one is to find a replacement for Avast or another is to try to 'ride things out' and hope that a future signature update will make Avast revert to its normal behavior.

Steven, I think CodeTRUCKER was only storing his mail on the server so he could troubleshoot his problem. A person who uses The Bat! never needs to keep their mail stored on a server like other email programs as The Bat! allows one to have hundreds of thousands of emails in its database with no slowdowns at all.

As a matter of fact, a fellow on The Bat! Beta Mailing List was talking about how he has over 1 million emails & The Bat! is still quick and responsive.

Boy, I didn't mean to stir up a hornet's nest with my little joke, but here's a reply on a few of the points above (in no particular order):

BrotherS, at one time you could just move install AdMuncher over your old directories and your registration info would be preserved. However, the latest versions have moved to a stricter online validation so I don't know if it will still work, but try it and see.

Glacial pace of development: It's been a slow road because it's been a two man operation. Fortunately, their income levels have increased to the point where they could afford to hire on another programmer. Hopefully, once he gets up to speed on the code things will move faster.

Forcing people to move to the beta version: They have come up with a new, more efficient way to filter that requires quite a bit fewer signatures to accomplish what they were able to do before with the bigger signature list. Unfortunately, this new way of doing things makes the new signature list incompatible with the old. Having to maintain two signature lists would slow development down farther than it already is.

Post-poned features: Gzip/HTTP 1.1 (yeah, they are practically the same feature code-wise) and 64-bit support have been a long time coming and people have a right to be upset. These were all supposed to be in the v4.72 update. However, after being near-lynched on the support forums for Vista support, the author decided to drop everything and get Vista support implemented ASAP or risk losing his entire customer base. What was to come in v4.72 was pushed back to v4.73.

Unfortunately, on the way to v4.73 Windows 7 was announced and builds were starting to pop up everywhere. It was then discovered the hack to get AdMuncher to work with Vista failed miserably on Windows 7. It was then decided by the author to move back those promised features again and re-writing AdMuncher and the installer properly to support Vista and Windows 7...and hopefully, every future Windows OS with UAC. He's concentrating on OS support first and the other features later. Whether or not that was the right thing to do, I cannot say.

One other thing is slowing development and that has been re-writing the old Assembly code into some flavor of C for easier maintaining of the codebase.

My guess is Murray is a perfectionist and he's got a case of OCD with his code not working just the way he wants it to before he releases it. That's just a guess, though, and may not be accurate.

AdMuncher is not perfect and I read above someone is leaving it behind for something else, but what? I've yet to find anything that does what AdMuncher will do for every program you have installed. Most adblockers restrict themselves to working with web browsers. If there are any true alternatives to AdMuncher I'd love to hear them.

I'm not using anything right now when I have been using something I usually install Agnitum's Outpost Security Suite Pro. In the past their AV has been weak, but recent AV comparison tests show that they've been working on fixing that flaw.

Their firewall is best in class. It's one of the few that consistently scores 100% on leak tests. For those with affinities towards skulls, Agnitum thoughtfully included an auto-learn mode for the firewall. For one or two weeks you can put it in auto-learn mode and all your programs will be given firewall permissions.

It's a little more resource-intensive than I would like, but it protects you from everything & the latest beta will allow you to opt not to install the components you know you aren't going to use.

I bought it on a whim during their last sale when they were selling lifetime licenses and I was in a mind to putting an end to yearly AV subscription costs.

I'm using the The Bat! Professional v4.1.14.2 RC2 + AntispamSniper Pro v3.2.0.6 and while I'm not using any antivirus or firewall now I have used NOD32 v3 & v4, Eset Smart Security v3 & v4, and Outpost Security Suite Pro.

I haven't had trouble with any of these programs interacting and I'm the type to leave my email program running 24/7. Avast is a good candidate for your troubles, though. It's wreaked havoc in the past with programs like Newsbin Pro.