Recent Posts

6726

General Software Discussion / Re: Defraggler,add another defragger to the list

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2007, 04:40 AM »

Heh, "regular Jon Doe who uses office and surfs the web a bit won't feel a benefit from more thorough defragmenting, so we won't do it at all" - way to go, Microsoft.

Proper defragmenting certainly is noticeable for the rest of us. Large game data files, virtual machine disk images, etc... And do try burning a heavily fragmented DVD image and watch the buffer indicator while doing so...

Craptastic.

6727

Living Room / Re: Forum Signature Spam: Let's discuss how to handle..

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2007, 04:33 AM »

I am in favor of allowing quotes and textual links but no images nor banners and such. Also, the signature shouldn't have more than 5 lines. The actual post is more important than a signature.

-housetier (September 27, 2007, 12:14 AM)

I don't think images/banners should be disallowed as long as they're small and tasteful. Like mine :]

6728

Living Room / Re: Microsoft patches applied - EVEN WHEN AUTOUPDATE IS OFF

« Last post by f0dder on September 27, 2007, 04:31 AM »

BinderDundat: Microsoft have been offloading to akamai for quite a while now.

justice: it's still a wrong thing to do when you have turned off automatic updates. "keep working"? The right solution would be to update the windows-update components once needed.

6729

General Software Discussion / Re: 64-Bit Software

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 06:16 PM »

Well, an extra thing 64bit gives you is a larger number of general-purpose registers (and 64bit in size instead of 32bits), this can help tremendously with computation-intensive applications. And because of the way the x86-64 was hacked in (actually, done pretty well all things considered, even though I'd have preferred a clean architecture), code size bloating isn't that bad.

Then again there's of course things that have to be 64-bit - drivers for example. And unless an elaborate thunking mechanism is implemented, plugins (including explorer shell extensions) for 64bit apps have to be 64bit as well.

Sorry for this slight hi-jacking of the thread

6730

General Software Discussion / Re: 64-Bit Software

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 05:47 PM »

Hum, do ask yourself which apps need to be upgraded to 64-bit, though... not much needs the large address-space, and not everything benefits much from the additional registers - and code size does grow a bit with 64bit. (What's my point? If you have 32-bit apps that work fine, don't look for 64-bit replacements "just coz").

That a vendor has 64bit versions of their software does hint a bit at their code portability/quality though, so it's not like it's useless

6731

Living Room / Re: Upgrading Your BIOS - experiencing ecstasy

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 05:44 PM »

So, did the readme from the BIOS update say what was fixed/added? Sounds like quiiiite some changes.

6732

General Software Discussion / Re: Can you recommend Selkie Rescue Data Recovery??

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 09:50 AM »

Reading through the stuff at www.tugboatenterprises.com I have no idea what the product really does, except that it can boot from a CD/DVD and has network access - it doesn't actually tell if the application does recovery, or it just lets you copy files off a (uncorrupted) partition. The pages are also a bit too much for-dummies and buzzwordy, reminds me a bit of www.grc.com even though not that bad.

It's definitely not something I'd buy without checking the demo first.

EDIT: added the missing "not", thanks Curt

6733

General Software Discussion / Re: SharpKeys: Nice Donationware Key Mapper

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 09:37 AM »

Don't overlook OkayKeeBees by Jackass JoeJoe.  Doesn't solve everything, but I don't think it messes with the Registry either (could be wrong here).

-rjbull (September 26, 2007, 09:22 AM)

The page says it uses a global hook and not the registry... this is okay for testing purposes (and interesting if you're stuck with NT4 - I might be having a good look at this app), but for permanent remapping on >= win2k, I'd certainly use the built-in remapping functionality through registry key instead.

6734

Living Room / Re: How much RAM do you have on your PC?

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 06:19 AM »

Carol: XP doesn't have problems supporting PAE, it simply imposes artificial limitations on how much it supports, for market segmenting reasons. Would be interesting testing a pre-SP2 XP and see if it supports more RAM, because according to the MS link pre-SP2 had the limit physical memory, not address space.

But yes, ASUS is right that you need chipset+bios combo that supports memory remapping, because of memory mapped devices.

6735

Living Room / Re: How much RAM do you have on your PC?

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 05:59 AM »

Carol, using the "memory remapping" thing maps the additional memory above the 4GB (and thus 32bit) marker. XP probably isn't just limited to "4GB of address space", but "the first 4GB of address space". Lame with artificial limitations, and they could at least have made it physical memory instead of address space. And XP does support PAE, it just imposes artificial limitations...

6736

Living Room / Re: How much RAM do you have on your PC?

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 04:32 AM »

Hm, perhaps it's artificial limitations built into XP - this MS arcticle says XP supports "AWE API and 4 GB of physical address space", instead of 4GB of RAM - bastards.

The BIOS "remap RAM" options, as far as I understand it, remaps your physical RAM to higher-than-4GB in the address space, meaning you can access it in 32bit-PAE or clean 64bit mode, without conflicting with memory mapped hardware. But if MS artificially restricts you to 32 bits of address space, I guess there's nothing to do, except going 64bit or getting a server edition of windows.

6737

General Software Discussion / Re: Good parental control software

« Last post by f0dder on September 26, 2007, 04:26 AM »

cysoon: are you affiliated with either of those services?

6738

Living Room / Re: How much RAM do you have on your PC?

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2007, 04:12 PM »

Cynic, look through the BIOS settings to see if there's some RAM remap options. Also, PCI (and PCI-e and AGP) devices can require memory mapped I/O, which will eat part of the *address space* (even though not the physical RAM) - you need PAE mode, and XP might be braindead about that.

6739

Developer's Corner / Re: Software Copy Protection Questions

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2007, 03:55 PM »

Armadillo?

Oh well, your choice.

6740

General Software Discussion / Re: Shareware that don't have freeware replacements

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2007, 02:27 AM »

Doesn't sound like "PS tray factory" is that special, should be possible to find some freeware that does tray icon management too, unless PSTF does something really special.

Googling for "rapidshare download manager" got me this: http://www.rapget.com/en/index.html - haven't checked it, so have no idea if it sucks, but it was linked on softpedia and seems to be freeware, *shrug*.

6741

General Software Discussion / Re: AUDIBLE: No content downloaded if you use Opera

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2007, 02:23 AM »

Ooooh, DRM - never getting in the way of legit customers, and doing such a good job hindering the pirates
</sarcasm>

6742

Developer's Corner / Re: Software Copy Protection Questions

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2007, 02:17 AM »

Swinto: just for the record, are you affiliated with either of those products, or do you have experience with them?

mouser: both asprotect and armadillo have been targetted pretty heavily by crackers, and there's unpacking tools available for various versions (perhaps not public tools for the latest versions, but cracking groups do have internal tools).

I'd advise anybody looking into ready-made solutions to check which information the reversing scene has published on the net. Google for things like "armadillo unpack", "asprotect tutorial", and check the www.woodmann.com forums.

Another protector is SVKP, from http://www.defendion.com/ . I don't know how effective it is (I frankly haven't looked into these matters for quite a while), but I saw the MazeGen obfuscation engine it uses demonstrated at the FASM 2007 conference... at least that part means I wouldn't want to trace through the protection code

6743

General Software Discussion / Re: CPU Usage shoots up to 100% !?!

« Last post by f0dder on September 25, 2007, 02:04 AM »

"System Idle Process" is the process windows schedules when it has nothing else to do - it means your system is idle . So the higher "CPU usage" this special pseudo-process has, the better (the less your system has to do).

40c/28c idle temperatures are fine, nothing to worry about.

6744

General Software Discussion / Re: CPU Usage shoots up to 100% !?!

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2007, 10:06 AM »

Motherboard problem perhaps?

6745

Living Room / Re: Update on member KenR health status: Surgery went well

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2007, 05:43 AM »

That's good to hear - hope the surgery is going to get him better. I'll keep my fingers crossed!

6746

Living Room / Re: Fanless computer

« Last post by f0dder on September 24, 2007, 05:42 AM »

Hm, it does seem like a bit of a risk getting such powerful hardware cooled passively... but it might be possible. I'd look a lot for reviews before buying one, and I'd certainly prefer being able to see the system before purchasing (and run some CPU intensive stuff and check temperatures).

6747

Living Room / Re: A new technology for optical discs

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2007, 03:41 PM »

You wouldn't/shouldn't use optical discs for a massive data collection, imho... better to use a massively redundant RAID.

6748

General Software Discussion / Re: Cracked while installing Linux :)

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2007, 01:06 PM »

I'm personally wary of running one of the "minor" linux distributions for anything serious - what are you going to do if the project, for whatever reason, dies? You can't be sure that there'll always be somebody in the community to continue the project.

Even something as old+big as slackware seemed to face serious problems when it's front figure, Patrick J. Volkerding, got seriously ill...

(And even with that said, I personally use www.archlinux.org for a couple of servers - doh! ).

6749

General Software Discussion / Re: System drivers

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2007, 07:50 AM »

I don't bother too much unless I have problems with my system, which I usually don't. The only driver I upgrade on a regular basis is my graphics driver, since those tend to have speed improvements now and then, or bugfixes for games (that I don't have time to play, but hey).

MSI has a pretty decent tool for detecting driver updates, but I'm mostly using ASUS boards nowadays.

6750

Developer's Corner / Re: Software Copy Protection Questions

« Last post by f0dder on September 23, 2007, 07:06 AM »

I'm afraid mouser is right.

Okay, first off: use a "wad"/"pack"/"bigfile" approach, instead of individual files... (ie., like ID software have been doing since doom and earlier). This will keep regular users from messing around, but will be "no match for batman". You can add encryption on top of that to prevent hexeditor-capable users from identifying file signatures, but obviously this won't stop reverse engineers.

For some additional ideas on how to protect those WADs, check out starforce RE tools that the RELOADED group released... this also shows that even relatively sophisticated schemes are futile. (Sorry if that link isn't appropriate here, mouser).