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Andy, I understand what you're saying and that you're trying to be helpful, but all I'm hearing is "blah blah blah...quit being lazy!" 

No, seriously, that's a good idea & once I set that up in Total Commander I'll be sorted. I'll just miss the icons, though. There was one alternate theme (definitely NOT the default) that had absolutely gorgeous icons for all the different bit-rates.

Hopefully, one day someone will adapt that differing icon ability to Vista/Win7.

Congrats to you, Tomos! I think you'll enjoy your winnings. Total Commander is one of the most powerful programs I have ever seen. Every time I find a need for a program to do something very specific & I'm sure nobody has written a program to do suck a task usually a little searching on the Total Commander forum will reveal that TC can not only do what I was looking to do, but do it better than I expected.

No need for apologizing regarding something that was beyond your control. A person cannot rightly complain about the speed in which one is getting something free.

Thanks for organizing this, fenix, and sticking with it all the way through.

I have also had the same problem after removing security software (can't remember which one off hand)!

Some security software do their thing by installing virtual network adapters to route all traffic through for monitoring which, when you uninstall it, has the same effect as when you enable or disable those unused network adapters you were talking about.

Here's my weird activation story...

I used to have a job where one of my job duties was to maintain all the company PCs on the premises. One day we have a power outage and when the power comes back up one of the Windows XP Pro machines was screaming about needing to be re-activated although it was activated before the outage.

I figure I'll deal with the re-activation later and do the mandatory scandisk on all the drives that we always do after power loss. This company was located out in the middle of BFE so power outages were frequent and although we have everything on UPSes we always try to verify data integrity after any unexpected event. Data loss is a bad thing.

Anyway, I tell Windows to scandisk all the drives, it reboots to do so, and I'm sitting there watching the process and according to the report there were no errors that needed fixed. After it boots back up, you guessed it, it was showing itself as activated again. This PC had no internet connection so I know it didn't re-activate itself, either.

Nowadays, I don't maintain anything but my own PCs and I keep all my licensed OS discs safely stored away and on my PCs I run the equivalent versions of those OSes that have had all the activation and WGA nonsense neutered. I have the warm feeling of not being a software pirate without having to deal with all the nonsense of being a legitimate customer.

I hear that the activation routines in Vista and Windows 7 are more forgiving, but MS had their chance. I'm not going to deal with activation and WGA if there's any way to do so.

He's back? I didn't even know he was gone. Or, more accurately, I don't know who he is. Care to fill us in on some backstory?

That's a shame about his last review...but I still agree with what he said in it both regarding Firefox and regarding BetaNews.

BetaNews was a good idea that was allowed to spiral out of control.

I remember this cool program. It's a shame it's abandonware. The neatest thing I thought it did, and no version of Explorer does this, was change the MP3's icon to show the bit-rate so you could have a window full of MP3s open and could tell at a glance which ones were the low bit-rate ones that needed replacing with better versions.

tranglos, I enjoyed your post. It was very informative as I didn't know a lot of that stuff & what made it better was fenixproductions came along and showed how you could do things a little more efficiently with some of the tasks you demonstrated.

fenixproductions, that was an awesome list and you better believe I'm going to be mimicking a lot of your plugin setup. My main problem has always been finding three or four plugins that do the same thing (read Office files, read PDFs, etc.). I think I can be pretty sure you have the best of each type in your setup.

urlwolf, Total Commander just as this amazingness about it that for whatever reason instills envy from people who use non-Windows machines. Not only does Christian get tons of requests from *nix users, but from time to time there are Mac users clamoring for it as well.

I've heard of people having success with Wine and CrossOVer. That puts extra layers of trust between you and your data, though. First you have to trust that Total Commander is going to interact well with an OS that it was not designed to run under and you also have to trust that the Wine/CrossOver people got everything right that TC needs to operate properly. In that equation I trust Christian completely. Those other factors? Not so completely. I'd definitely do some tests on some non-important data before trusting my entire system to such a setup.

btw TC 7.5 beta 4 lists files a lot slower. There's about .5 sec delay that wasn't there before. Anyone experiencing this? I don't remember having installed any new related plugin.

Indeed the 7.5 betas do seem to be listing files slower than 7.04a did. I don't know why that is. 7.5 seems to be slower at connecting to network shares as well.

Take a look into Help file  

Well, yeah...but I was looking for tips like "be sure to set this setting to this value and that setting to that value to really boost your productivity and/or appearance."

There are too many things to write about...

Agreed...but when I was starting this thread I was hoping for people to pick what they thought was the best of the best to write about...not to write about everything they knew.

Obviously: that's not all but I don't really think I should try to copy http://en.totalcmd.pl/download or http://www.totalcmd.net/. I would rather leave the place for curious explorers.

I'm not against exploring, but often you will run into three or four different plugins that offer the same or similar functionality. A heads-up as to which one is the best (and usually there is one that stands head & shoulders above the rest) would be great without us having to duplicate a veteran's work by having to try them all out to see which one is best would also be a great contribution to this thread.

But I'm enjoying the thread...Keep things coming. I'm sure Darwin is learning as much as I am.

I just skimmed this thread so this may have been said before & I missed it. If so, I apologize but this bears repeating in case anyone does not know:

Today's Kodak is NOT the Kodak we knew growing up. The real Kodak went bankrupt years ago & today's Kodak cameras are just the product of a no-name, shoddy conglomerate that licensed the Kodak name to sell pieces of crap under. They have no real relation to the real Kodak company other than being bottom-feeders trying to live off of the good name of an old recognizable brand name.

Deozaan, what new camera did you get?

Wraith, that's a fair enough assessment for some people. Babylon 5 was a space opera on a massive scale. There was lots of groundwork for later plotpoints in early episodes that would leave you wondering, "What's that got to do with the price of tea in China?" and then 3 or 5 or 10 episodes down the line it'd be, "Ohhh! That's what *that* meant!!".

It probably wouldn't fare too well in today's climate of ADD-oriented, instant-gratification TV viewing.

I am one of those weird people who prefers my archive files to have different icons based on type. Iconographically (three cheers for making up new words!) speaking, there's something wrong in my mind with having my zip files share the same icon as my rar files. I like being able to tell at a glance if something is a rar or a zip. Why? Personal quirk, I guess. No real utility in knowing, I suppose, but back when I first started using PowerArchiver it was the only archiver app that could do it. Nowadays, others do, but I stick with what I know best.

Graphically speaking, it's one of the most visually appealing programs of its type available. Turning on Explorer View and using the modern ribbon interface makes for a very efficient UI and it handles more file types than most of its competitors.

For the security conscious, it's very versatile in its encryption capabilities and offers an array of choices of encryption methods.

Their forums are great & you'll get the same great answers for your questions whether you bought the program or not.

Offhand, I can't remember if it's limited to the Pro version or not, but your purchase price also grants you lifetime licenses to their excellent Outlook plug-in and a command-line version of the program that can handle just as many archive types as the GUI-based program.

One little feature that you'd think wouldn't make a difference that has really improved my productivity is in the last few versions they added MRU support for the "Extract to..." context menu command. I extract lots of files to the same few directories over and over so this has been a real time-saver for me.

I won a free license for WinRAR (Thanks, DonationCoder!) and I use that for all my archiving needs, even after getting that free I still bought a license for PowerArchiver Pro for all my unarchiving needs. (I took advantage of their crazy 80% off upgrade to the Pro version before they raised their prices.)

With a bunch of licensed copies flooding DC due to the kind generosity of Christian Ghisler I thought this might be a good time to start a thread where the grizzled Total Commander pros could post all their time-saving, optimizing tips and list out all the must-have plugins to install along-side TC.

I'm sure some of those contest winners have never used TC before and others are like me who have used it a long time, but have not fully tapped this app's power.

What say you, Total Commander experts? Can you throw us who are uninitiated in the eldritch wizardry of Total Commander a bone by wowing us with your prowess?

If someone is a sci-fi fan and wants a far-reaching epic storyline and is willing to make a time investment look no farther than Babylon 5. With a non-static world where if something happens in one episode it is true in all subsequent episodes and story arcs that reach across seasons it's a very well-written space opera with a widely varied cast of characters with plenty of intrigue & cloak and dagger mystery.

I remember httpd.confused well. I had wondered what happened to him. While I didn't agree with everything he had to say I valued his opinions more than I did most on that site.

There are none, unfortunately. This was an anomaly in that one of MS's promotions for a select few escaped into the wild, but they came back and shut it down with a vengeance. I hear the people who got account access illegitimately not only got their accounts shut down, but any product keys that they were able to obtain were quickly revoked and put on the WGA blacklists.

Only way you are going to find a valid coupon code, it seems, is for MS to want you to have one & it'll appear in your email box. Otherwise, you'll be out here looking in with the rest of us poor schlubs.

4wd, betanews.com is popular for people like that. The ones who have to state the same thing in every review for every version knowing full well the product in review will not change.

:: cough :: D.u.k.e.b.o.y.z :: cough ::

Yes, NOD32 is a very good product. It's been slipping down in the AV rankings, but I'm sure it'll bounce back.

Anyone looking to buy NOD32 should keep an eye out for NewEgg sales. Every so often they put it on sale for $9.99 w/ free shipping. You definitely can't go wrong at that price.

Josh, I know it will still work once the subscription runs out, but it still annoys me whether it's a rational annoyance or not.

40hz, I'll take your word for what you are saying, especially regarding PBS, but it seems like every time I am channel surfing (or more accurately surfing the program guide) any time I notice what's on PBS, it's almost always Lawrence Welk.     And on the off-chance they do have something on that I might be interested in watching I've already watched it months/years ago on a cable channel.

And as for NPR, they may have changed, but the last time I really tried listening to them they were going through some kind of Earth Day/Hippie phase. And that's what I meant by telling people what to think. Hopefully, they are over that by now. They are going to have a hard time surviving as things shift more towards satellite & internet radio. Heck, even regular broadcast radio is feeling the pinch of those and MP3s in general. Who wants to spend an hour listing to 35 minutes of music and 25 minutes of commercials? (Yay! Another annoyance for the thread!) More and more people are heading out to the car with their MP3 player full of songs and podcasts for their drive to work or around town.

Josh, was just getting ready to come in here with an update. What transpired exactly was I did an upgrade install from build 7137 to build 7201 and I dutifully uninstalled Daemon Tools like the Upgrade Installer told me to before performing the upgrade.

What the Upgrade Installer should have told me to do was to uninstall the SPTD layer as well. Once I performed some registry permission mojo I was able to get Daemon Tools working again. Yay me. Boo Microsoft.

I'm so retro I have never used an avatar on a forum ever.

Lexx is awesome...I never got to watch the show when it originally aired & I was for darn sure not going to pay the going prices for what the DVDs are going for these days, but I was fortunate enough to get the DVDs by other means...

But that show was razor-sharp. Beyond all the surrealism there was some smart writing with clever plot devices that have not been seen before or since. However, I don't think this show, as good as it is, fits the spirit of the thread. It wasn't a sit & unwind type of affair. It demanded your full attention & if you didn't give your full attention you ended up missing lots of clever bits & pieces.

Eva Habermann was better. Unfortunately, contractual obligations cut her participation in the series short. She's stated in interviews that she would have loved to play the part through the entire series run. Alas, it wasn't meant to be.

Josh, I have no problem paying per version, but having my time ticked off on a calendar before a program shuts down chaps my cheeks.

PBS is in trouble. Back in the days before cable they filled a niche, but their niche has been over-run by the Discovery & History Channels and others like them. NPR stopped being relevant when all of their broadcasting was overcast with a "We're going to teach you the right things to think in order to be a 'properly' enlightened person."

I haven't listened to NPR in years...and haven't watched PBS in *decades*.