Comodo TM became infamous because of innumerous bugs. Don't know if this changed with the new version. Any reports from you guys?

All disk imaging programs do some kind of tricky things to keep the disk & file system in a consistent state while backing up - so you can imagine that there is some contention among them.

I put all Acronis services on manual and use the following batch file to start Acronis (I do not use the scheduler ever) - the processes get killed automatically when I close Acronis using this process killer utility:

I alternate images between Acronis (make sure you don't upgrade Acronis right away when a new version comes out -- wait a good bit until the bugs are worked out) and Drive Snapshot and I always image with verify backup enabled.

I must say both have never let me down! But especially with Acronis I stay away from the "fancy" features like recovery zone or time capsule (whatever they name it) and just do the basic imaging. I wish they would have an Acronis light product with emphasis on the essentials because those 100MB installation packages take a lot of disk space.

Terabyte has always made excellent software. I trialed their imaging product but wished it would be faster and make smaller files. That may have changed by now, though.

Thanks.

There used to be sthg like .NET runtime binaries? F.e. old winlite versions had this. Is it still around?

Hi everybody,

I really don't like .NET and therefore have it not installed on some of my computers. My reasons are my reasons - meaning I do not really want to discuss them here .

Yet some programs upgrades (f.e. latest beta of text crawler) now require .NET.

Now I heard about Mono being a .NET replacement, so I thought I install Mono and then I can run those .NET programs w/o .NET.

Doesn't seem to work with Mono compact installation though.

Is my reasoning faulty?

Please enlighten me - is there a way of running .NET programs w/o installing .NET?

Hi,

we have received this morning our brand spanking new HP Officejet 8500 Pro AIO.

Now I have read on different occasions that all of HP AIOs *require* the installation of the entire program suite on CD (incl. OCR etc.).

Does anybody know of a *tested* workaround for only installing the necessary driver components for network use, since I really dislike littering my HD with all this stuff?

Though I use a PC we also have a number of Mac users.

For any other hints and tips for using/installing/calibrating the unit I would also be grateful.

Linux Mint and Mepis get my vote.

Antix Mepis for old PCs.

Some of you might remember me asking in this thread for forum software.

The result of my research was either SMF or MyBB.

I went for SMF v2RC2 and have no regrets according to the performance, looks, ease of use and administrative abilities.
 
I followed the SMF community quite closely due to this decision and quickly learned of the internal difficulties they are having.

At first it concerned me very much. However, the more I thought about it and the more I studied SMF itself and the people behind it, the more my fears calmed. Now, please mind you - this is not easy to admit, since I have a birthday coming up - I am probably older than most of you and have worked in responsible roles in NGOs for 35+ years. Therefore I have seen a lot of organizations in upheaval, sometimes one might even think that most NGOs are in a constant state of upheaval .

Definitely there will come some change to the current organisational structure of SMF - but that is not so bad, organisations need to reinvent themselves from time to time if they have been in a period of stagnation.

Agreed, SMF has been slow with upgrades, but that is also a good point. RC2 is just a release candidate, though has been performing flawlessly for me, no matter what I threw at it. So do you want to go through buggy releases or get good code? Good code takes time to test and write and retest.

So I did think of switching (to MyBB in case you want to know), but when I saw how vibrant the SMF community still is (much bigger than the MyBB community), and how much involved they are (if I have a problem I quickly get answers on their forum, and even if I do not mark my topic as solved, somebody will get back to me and ask if the matter really has been settled to my satisfaction), and how friendly and cooperative, I don't think this software will die a quick death. And even if it does eventually die, I have the strong belief that the community will pull together and develop a successor which you can install either over SMF or for which there will be better conversion software than presently (update: a project named Phoenix is already in the very early formative stages - competition is good and will bring out the best in everyone).

However, after my original thread and also after reading about the upheaval, I became very careful about installing mods. I think it is the mods that can/will give trouble when converting/upgrading as mouser pointed out in the thread referenced above.

The nice thing about SMF 2 is you hardly need any mods, because it is quite feature complete. But I think five times about installing a mod and really assess how many users would really NEED it for a quality forum experience.

Furthermore - to update you on the SMF situation - all people that were banned from the SMF community forum for their criticism have been reinstated and the different parties are again talking to each other via designated speakers and mediators. So progress is there (albeit slow) and I think what will come out will be for the good of the entire SMF community. And just reading some of the most recent posts there people are happy about the new RC3 - and everybody should update reasonably soon (when the mods have been updated to RC3, which is trivial in most instances) from RC2 to RC3, because some security issues (only affecting administrative access accounts - therefore they may not be regarded as serious) have been addressed.

BTW you can tell that SMF is there because the German Government is running a heavily moded SMF site on creating petitions for their federal assembly.

Finally let me give you one quote from a friend of SMF - Christian Land - who actually made the following comment in a thread that deals about switching forum software:

If you ask me, SMF's future looks better than ever before. Either the whole issues around it are solved or some kind of "fork" (or new project) will happen. In both cases "staying with SMF" is the best option.

My thanks go to SMF for this great free forum software they created and I wish them well and think they have proved that they deserve our loyalty.

Hi Mouser,

thanks for SC, it's really great.

For the workflow it would be really great if we could have all the blur, dim and secure black tools in the sidebar too like for arrows or clipart, so that they can be picked out by mouse w/o going through the specialfx menus.

F.e. if I want to send a screenshot to my financial software provider I need to take out many informations like acct names and numbers. For that this would be very helpful.

Alternatively or additionally maybe you could make that right sidebar customizable, so that the user can add his own special button.

These would be a great addition to an already great program.

Regards,

B.

Thank you all for your help.

I installed SMF 2.0RC2 and it is working fine.

Elgg also seemded nice, but I felt in the end that a forum is more inviting to just jump ahead and work instead of building up your own identity in a more social network related place.

MyBB was also in the running, but I couldn't get a successful install the first time around, so I simply favored SMF.

SMF's administration panel could be more logical organized, sometimes options are difficult to find.

If MyBB would have been OK on first install, I have the feeling that I would have favored it.

Be well,

B.

Just checked out Ning: Seems toooo social for me. More work and collaboration oriented would be better.

Any comments on Liveray yet? What does it take to install?

Thank you Mouser for your input.

Can I not handle d.) Multimedia by incorporating AEVA mod?

So you would choose SMF again, if you would start from scratch and start a forum forgetting about your familiarity with administering SMF?

Hi everybody,

when I attended a conference about physiological research over the weekend in Holland, the attendants agreed to stay in touch and continue collaborating through the internet.

So it fell into my lap to start a forum on the net, something I have never done before.

Therefore I hope that with the combined brain power of our dear Donationcoder members, I will be able to whip something up in a jiffy.

Now in contrast to the "jiffy" thing is my tendency to be overly thorough and perfectionist as well as forward looking .

So here are my thoughts/questions/requirements:

1.) Could you recommend free forum software which is

a.) Easy to use and administer, while still having an (overly) full feature set and which is rock solid.

b.) Preferably it should be able to handle HTTPS, be strong on privacy/security features (no search robots access, invitational password to sign up, if possible for a certain board only), and have fine permission granularity (childboards and even subchildboards with different permissions). F.e. one group of researchers working on a particular project has access to a certain childboard, but not to another one which deals with another topic.

c.) Some aspects of "Social Networking" should be incorporated into the board, so that every member can in some way have there own little space and a list of friends or something like that. I want the members to be at home and not feel the necessity to go to one of those evil places on the net, where the dignity of their personal privacy is compromised even before they signed up for their service (by already profiling non-members on the basis of invitations they received -- sorry I am getting OT  ).

d.) Multimedia should be easily incorporated: f.e. a movie of physiological measurements in a subject over a period of several minutes as shown on the computer screen of the researcher - or help screen casts on using complicated medical software.

e.) Download repository

f.) Oh - and did I mention free and open source?


2.) Beside being a collaboration ground, I also would like to have companion/integrated Wiki- or Knowledge-Base software with the forum. Again, that software (which I hope you can also recommend) needs to have granular access rights. If a common password facility could be used it would be perfect (am I dreaming???), so that people only need to sign up once for the forum and then have access to the corresponding wiki or knwledge base.


3.) Another possiblity/(dream?) should be integration with mumble, so that voice chats for collaborating groups may be possible in the future, if the bard takes off. I think it would be too  much for me to install murmur or integrate a murmur server right now, but I think it would be nice to have in the future.

So that's it for now, I hope more considerations will become clear in the lively (I hope  ) ensuing discussion.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Kind regards,

Brahman