Some preventative advice (thanks Acronis)

Ouch.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I installed Trumpet’s Winsock program. It was shareware and when the time expired the software took other pieces of the OS with it. As it turned out this was a designed feature, not a bug. (Yes, that’s what the tech dude said.)
I had Acronis once, but lost it in some re-install. I don’t think I’ll grab a copy now. Thanks. 🙂

I used to recommend Debian when people had windows problems. These days I recommend whisky. Talisker for preference.

I’ve been using acronis for 7 years to image my servers before upgrading. Best product i’ve found

As someone who installed slackware linux before Win95 was released, I’ve got to say windows has come along way, but any time your installing or unistalling programs that do low-level stuff like virus detection, disk imaging, some custom networking stuff your heading into “there be dragons here” territory. Another one that borks your machine on uninstall is AT&T’s DSL/WiFi software.

I use Acronis as a full image cloning /system backup / system recovery tool a lot, but I use the boot disc version and never the installed version. It has served me well for several years for both Windows servers and PCs.
Symantec do an installable image recovery software called Symantec System Restore. I don’t know what range of features it provides.
For Linux I have started using Mondo backup after years of using command line cpio. Haven’t had to use Mondo in anger yet, but that’s only a matter of time.

Big fan of Acronis

I don’t know about Windows 7, but I’ve just had to do a ‘Repair Install’ on my workshop machine’s XP. It had broken its registry, and wouldn’t start at all, safe mode included – not from uninstalling some unfriendly bloatware, just a seriously aging HD (!). The beauty of a Repair Install is that at least it leaves all your installed software installed, and it doesn’t wipe the drive before installing. Naturally, as a competent computer user, you’ll have all your data safely backed up, like we all do …
I’ll quote the process for XP, but it might be as well to search for “Windows 7 repair install” as it may be different a few generations on. It could also be worth learning how to make a slipstreamed install disc with as many as possible of the updates on it to save time (or at least to keep the ones you’ve already downloaded in a safe place) if this process is still there in 7.
For XP, then, the process is:
– Boot from the install CD;
– DO NOT run the Recovery Console when invited, but continue ‘installing’;
– A bit further down the line, ‘Setup’ finds the old installation and offers to try and repair it: this time you accept (in XP, press R);
– Keep going through the install process (you will need the CD key);
– After the usual reboots you should have the original installation back in running order.
Nothing quite cures the rage and impotent frustration one feels at these things going down, though it helps quite a bit if you don’t have to find installers and reinstall / set up everything you use as well. My (not-quite-) trusty old box is ticking over happily again, although whether I get round to finding it a new drive depends on how long it lasts this time 😉
As for Acronis, I’m with BQ. Some things just work so much better from a CD.

Seagate still has the free application called Disc Wizard. It is built on/around/is the Acronis True
Image program, but trimmed down some due to it being a free version.I have used it to create a system image backup of the OS drive, but you can create an image of any partition/drive. Restored the OS partition successfully every time. I think at least one of your HDD’s must be a Seagate though. Runs on my Win7 64bit no problem.

With my windows 7 I get “no boot manager” messages if a hard drive is on while the SSD contains the WIndows and also is the first boot or only boot device I list. That’s even if I put every other thing listed as “disabled.”
I think it’s an SSD thing.

_Jim says:
May 9, 2013 at 2:10 pm
What’s an “update”? (I think I turned off updates on all but one computer here. Running the latest Service Packs, but that is all.)
======================================================
I have several XP machines that I haven’t updated in 5 years !!!
Works just fine.

@Sean, system restore usually will not work in this scenario.
@Anthony, while never been a real fan before, there are some seriously good uses for VMware and Hypervisor. You can build an image from your revitalized machine, or from Windows 7/8, Server, etc., then install that in the VM. You can make copies of the VM in stable form and store it. And, you can then map removable media as a network drive through the VM system for your data. I got my Surface Pro running images of a USB 3.0 Toshiba 1.5TB drive and storing data on it. I was impressed enough that I will get a full copy of VMware 9 when things slow down. I was able to build a firewall and a management server and run it on a Surface (for config testing), and a Windows client. And just turn it off when I am done with no effect on my computer. Kind of nice. And Acronis can BSOD the VM session all it wants…

All fascinating stuff, not only from Anthony, which was very interesting, but also from the commentators. Thanks, lads (guys and gals)! Me, I gave up on Acronis a long time ago, but only because the back-up was so slow.

Unfortunately, I think all these ‘disk manager’ programs will at some stage walk on something from the OS. I had McAfee do it, Norton Ghost did it (and kept on reappearing after complete re-installs like a ghost 😉 ) So far I have had no problem with Acronis (yet) but then I am not being at all inventive with its use. Its the old thing though keep backups of backups, keep data on separate disks to the OS. Have a spare mirrored machine with same software and NAS disk copy. I also keep a soft copy of the installation software and license keys on a ‘Software’ folder – that has saved me several times.
But with all computer systems and raid drives – it is a case of WHEN they fail not IF. It is not paranoia it is reality

I had exactly the same issue with a client computer last week. There are tons of articles you’ll fine about their upper filters drivers not being gone after an uninstall and if you do remove the files they point to – viola – you get your bsod on a reboot. And same observations – used to love it, recommend it but it’s become bloatware trying to push their cloud backup. They have a published uninstall tool, but they warn that it might not work either. WUWT?
I can empathise
Typically, these days, I just do backup with Microsoft’s own little disk2vhd program. This gives you a nice vhd file which you can mount and restore as you will, or in a pinch can be mounted as a whole pc with a program like virtualbox or Microsoft’s own hyper-v (which now comes with Win8 Pro).
Also, the built in Microsoft server backup tools in 2008 and 2012 server work fine. Not so much call to buy 3rd party backup programs anymore unless you are looking for a specific feature.
I use ‘Reflect’ to clone/move/upgrade people to SSD drives from Mechanical Drives because it’s one of the few ‘Acronis’ like programs, that, unlike Acronis, will align the partitions as needed for best speed with an SSD drive.

There’s no such thing as as a perfect operating system. As far as my experienced is concerned with various OS, the principle differences are all acquired through habits. Windows captured the world market by MS arranging for the OS and previously DOS to be installed on every machine sold. There nothing wrong with either. Personally, I use Linux at home, releases varies. I have XP on an under the desk system and Windows 7 on a laptop. The biggest handicap Linux has had is the absence of user-level documentation – it all used to be in what I called the language of “man,” – as in “% man ls” – which is designed for grumpy sophonts whose keyboards are full of beard dandruff. Windows and Apple were always – or used to be -superior in documentation, bu the rise of pdfs and cds has put a serious crimp in that. There’s nothing dumber than “help” that requires a connection to the internet, when your problem is getting a computer to boot.

Backups?

Acronis, just like Hotel California: you can check out any time you want but you can never leave

Ditto the comments on Acronis, the Home version booted from CD or USB key works well enough, but it doesn’t support “server” versions of Windows. I’ve never been happy with the installed version. And I have never found the option to make an image bootable on any system usable. When moving images I just let Windows boot using whatever default drivers it needs and then find and install whatever is needed. That usually works well.
Clonezilla appears to work well too. But the user interface is less than friendly. If you know Linux and have been doing Linux admin for years its mostly recognizable and usable.

I’ve hung on to my Ghost 7.5 version which was about when they got NTFS support right. Coworkers recommend Clonezilla, but I haven’t taken the plunge yet.
One tool I can’t do without is GRC’s Spinrite, which has rescued many hard drives when they’ve gotten flakey. (Even SSD, on level 2 scan.)
I’m even local! Chico is my adopted home town.

I run all my Windows instances within VMware ESXi Server (free). I make incremental copies of each vm. I run the vm’s on Macs, but one could run it on anything.

ShadowProtect by StorageCraft is a far superior product to Acronis. We mainly use on servers, but have several of the desktop versions to – very powerful software.

I should add- please don’t install ShadowProtect on a machine that has had Acronis installed previously, or you will have the same issue as the OP. I believe the issue you have Anthony, is related to a file called snapman.sys – by Acronis which does exactly what you are describing.

@rbabcock
“Love VMWare.”
VMWare, now that is a company that know how to run support services for their product. Respect!

Anthony, what was the Stop Error you were getting? Also were you using a Beta build of Acronis? As this is the only Stop Error I could locate on their site and it is coincidentally associated with uninstalling;
http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/beta/atih2013_release-notes_u1.html
“ATIHXOXIII-3704 Computer went to BSOD with a stop error of 0x0000008E after removing Beta build”
If you were I recommend NEVER using Beta builds of anything. I am very interested why this would even happen as backup software should not be messing with lower levels of the operating system or drivers.

There is really no need to use a third party backup program with Windows 7 as you can make images using the built-in Windows 7 backup program,
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/back-up-your-programs-system-settings-and-files

“Duster says: Windows captured the world market by MS arranging for the OS and previously DOS to be installed on every machine sold.”
Correction, Windows captured the world market by making their operating system work with every PC sold.

Best not to install Avast on Windows 7. After one of the Windows auto updates Avast caused a reboot loop for me. I was able to boot up in safe mode and then roll stuff back. I then installed Avast and then the update and confirmed that the combination didn’t work. I now use AVG again.

EasyUS Todo backup is the mutt’s nuts (a free version is available, too). Acronis used to be good, wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole now.

Legitimate technical reasons why Linux on the desktop is not ready for prime time and may never be,
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#TLDR

Gotta say, Win7 is probably as close to the perfect OS as MS is ever going to get. When it came out we actually had some XP machines that ran FASTER with 7. Although, the company I was working for didn’t have XP, they skipped that and stayed with 2000. Now, Win2K was a great OS then. But… not 10 years great.
Win8 will never be installed on any hardware I own.
Linux is awesome. As a server OS. All my servers use it, and I’m quite adept at getting it to run and play nice with Win machines on the network. There was a learning curve for getting web servers up and secure and optimized, but I can practically do it in my sleep now.
Then Mac. They’re good for…. um… people who don’t know much about computers? Gotta love those one-button mice.

I’ve been a fan of BootIt Next Generation from TeraByte Unlimited for many years. I tried Ghost in around 1997, but couldn’t get it to work properly. BootIt NG has a slightly geeky interface, but all you have to do is follow the instructions. What’s important to me is that it worked first time and has never failed me, so I haven’t bothered to look at Ghost or Acronis, etc. since then. I’ve used it to create partition images and restore from them; create, re-size, slide and delete partitions. It’s been replaced by BootIt Bare Metal which I haven’t got around to trying yet.

Poptech said May 9, 2013 at 6:52 pm:

“Duster says: Windows captured the world market by MS arranging for the OS and previously DOS to be installed on every machine sold.”
Correction, Windows captured the world market by making their operating system work with every PC sold.

That’s borderline outright baldfaced lying, possibly only true at the beginning. I well remember when M$ released the bloated Vista beast, decreeing that much current iron would have to be scrapped as incompatible as M$ insisted on transforming the PC into an anti-personal “anti-piracy” corporate spying machine. The hue and cry was loud, with makers complaining bitterly of changing hardware to conform to Vista.
That’s the real truth about the M$ monopoly, new version comes out, hardware makers must conform to M$. Not the BS you’re shelling out.
And even at the beginning, to get the market share, did M$ make their OS work with every PC sold? Hell no. No one who has had to search for days to find a working device driver would ever buy that crap. Before XP, before even ME, even when 95 was a revolutionary product, it didn’t work with every machine. There were hardware and software incompatibilities up the wazoo. I ran Norton Utilities because it would catch the many machine freezing or BSOD crashing incidents and keep the system running.
I was there. I remember those times well. If you’re going to shovel that stuff and say how great M$ was and is, you better stop at this site first.
—
Poptech said on May 9, 2013 at 9:14 pm:

Legitimate technical reasons why Linux on the desktop is not ready for prime time and may never be,
http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html#TLDR

You boldly toss out a link to a Russian site? You must really trust your virus protection! Either that or you’re drumming up business for those who fix hosed systems…
Reading from the top of the document, the whining is largely of an old familiar variety:
Hardware makers don’t release specs, keep everything proprietary, those who would write free device drivers don’t have the info needed, so hardware doesn’t get supported.
That’s about 70% of the complaining right there. And that’s how the M$ beast works. M$ releases the info about their OS with non-disclosure agreements to the hardware makers. They in turn make their stuff to work with the M$ product, using proprietary closed-source drivers. Hardware makers are “rewarded” by having their stuff work with the OS that’s forced onto virtually all PC buyers.
There’s little incentive to release info to make free Linux drivers. Some companies do release Linux-version proprietary drivers, for those who want to use them.
Other whining is how hard it is to make closed-source software using open-source Linux. Duh! That’s usually right in the licenses for open source, you’ll release the code of software you derive from it (make your work open source as well).
Plus, some of what this document says is just plain WRONG. For example, Hardware section:

7. Intel has refused to support Linux on its Clover Trail platform.

Quick Google later, from Sept 18, 2012: Intel Clover Trail Will Support Linux After All
Your “2013” anti-Linux doc doesn’t even have the facts right for the end of 2012!

@andic
As a fellow mainframer from the last millenium, I feel your pain 🙂
If you trace the steps to Windows and the movement of people from company to company, you kind-of understand why everything is not perfect. (Mind you, I really like Win 7 and Win Server 2008R2). Burroughs MCP (disclaimer: I worked for them) was ahead of its time and never fell over. When digital’s VMS (disclaimer: I worked for them too) was created an an “homage”, it still seemed to be OK. Then Microsoft hired a bunch of guys from digital and created NT and I heard stories that Bill Gates made some detail design decisions. Windows 8 is NT 6.2.

I have changed from an old Acronis (works fine from CD, but had problems with a new harddisk) to the Win7/Win8 system backup with CD.
I notice that nobody comments on using these. The main reason is probably that Win7/8 is very stable.
But I would like to hear from somebody who actually needed to use it.

As others have mentioned VMware is your friend, I’m shortly going to purchase this so I can set up a machine with the O/S, hardware and utility SW such as ZA and VMware Workstation, take a disc image (I think I have a version of Acronis that runs off a boot disk and so isn’t installed, then I will create various VMware images, one for Oracle, one for my personal stuff, one for my work environment (I telecommute).
This way I can restore the basic machine from a terminal BSOD or HW failure using a disk image, takes no time at all, then copy the VMware images back, something like that anyway. Quick and easy in comparison.

I know you don’t want those ‘use a Mac/Linux/whatever’ replies – but have you considered virtualizing? The free version of VMware would allow you to easily restore a given state of the Windows OS on the virtual machine, so you’d never have to do the complete re-installation again. There’s very little (if any) penalty in performance, too. I fiddled with all this for the first time a couple of months ago and was very impressed with how easy it is to get up and running.

Hi Anthony,
maybe I duplicate some comments – can’t read all of them right now. Just some practical personal experience.
You talk about “disk image backup”. Do you backup a whole disk, or selected partitions? This matters. It triggers my comment.
My point being, irrespective of what operating system you use, the way you organize your computer, if done “smart” may help you a lot in recovery. I am not a computer expert, but I have done my juggling with the beasts so as to be the master and not the slave. These are my general rules.
Always create partitions and dedicate them according to their use. To start off always store your data in seperate partitions and never on the same partition your operating systems is. Secondly, as much as possible, also put your programs in a seperate partition. I know Windows stores a lot of the stuff on the C-patition anyway, and some programs just have to be on C, but the goal here is to keep the system-partion as small as possible. It makes backing-up a lot easier. The problem nearly always is with the system-partition, so you have to just concentrate on that one.
The advantage of working with partitions also is it helps you a lot with making an image in your own way. You don’t need a commercial program like “Acronis”. You just do it yourself with free tools. And the easiest way is to just copy a partition say to a usb-device.
The easiest tool I know of is Minitool Partitionwizard. The best way is to boot from a live cd. This tool can also recover data and restore partitions, repair the mbr, edit the boot.ini and explore the content of partitions (fat and ntfs). But there are other free tools of course.
Whatever you do, good luck and patience!

I’ll also put my vote in for Revo Uninstaller and Easeus Todo Backup. Revo finds all sorts of stuff that built-in programmes leave behind. The only time I’ve got caught is when a softwares built-in programme (which Revo runs when you ask it to do the job for you), wanted me to re-boot the PC to complete the process. DO NOT do this, but let Revo continue until it has finished.
As for Easeus Todo – I take regular images with it, and keep them on separate HDD’s, and also used it to make a bootable disc. I had occasion to see how it worked, after removing some software that came with a Microsoft own brand keyboard & mouse! This messed up the standard mouse controls, but after removal I found myself in a boot loop situation. My old laptop’s CD/DVD drive is faulty, so with some trepidation I plugged the backup HDD into one USB port and an external (powered) CD/DVD drive with the bootable disc into another. To my great relief both were found, and I was able to restore from an image and get the PC working again. I had to do a few “tweaks” to some of the basic settings and preferences, but this took a fraction of the time that doing a full install would have taken.

I say with not a hint of gloating, you, and everyone else would generally be better off running their preferred flavor of linux because of just the sort of issues brought up in the top post.
I don’t suggest it to people so I can feel snooty or “elite” or whatever, I’ve just never been as satisfied and productive with my, or anyone else’s, computer since I moved out into the wilderness of open source software.
If you’re honestly happy with your OS and software choices being made for you by someone else, awesome, I’m naturally skeptical, but hey, rock on!
Last time I broke something and needed a full reinstall, it was my fault for experimenting with shoehorning a kubuntu 13.04 upgrade into a lubuntu 12.10 install without checking to make sure I wasn’t going to break anything, or better yet, seeing if there was an already established and easy enough method posted online somewhere.
Happily I moved to separate / and /home partitions a couple ‘buntu generations ago, so I just grabbed my handy dandy usb stick and loaded a fresh kubtunu on it, took 15 minutes from downloading the .iso/unetbootin’ing it onto the usb until I loaded up my familliar home environment from my botched experiment.
It’s nice out here, honest, but again, good luck with the rebuild… I haven’t checked in a while, but you can set up a separate home partition on your disks with windows too can’t you?
Being able to maintain the same exact files/folders/settings while hopping distros is awesome, would be nice for cases like the Acronis-extraction snafu I think.

It looks like no-one has mentioned snapshot.exe yet. It’s really bare-bones, but it has saved my bacon in more than one occasion. Here’s a link to its intro page:
http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/intro.htm

I’d hate to disappoint you, so yes, run Linux if you want reliability and bulletproofness. NO version of Windows has been bulletproof. XP and 7 are simply the best of a generally bad lot, although they are both a lot better than their predecessors or successors.
I’ve been using Linux at this point for almost 20 years, eighteen as a primary interface. Over that entire time my machine(s) have been hacked precisely one time, and that was more my fault than the OS’s. When I say “my machines”, I mean not only personal machines but entire departmental networks of machines.
OS bugs in linux are far from unknown, but bugs of all sorts get fixed VERY quickly in most of the important distros. Compare that to 6 month or longer lag times between when exploits for Windows are discovered and when MS gets around to patching them…
Macs aren’t bad, either. I know a lot of sysadmins who run macs. I know remarkably few who run Windows anything as their OS of choice.
rgb

Mr. Watts, which version (and build) of Acronis were you running?

“Steve C says: But, further up that same page …
“I want to make one thing crystal clear – Windows, in some regards, is even worse than Linux and it’s definitely not ready for the desktop either.”
The post is by a Linux developer with limited Windows experience. The problem with his post is Windows is already on just about everyone’s desktop.
“registry (a chaos and a single point of failure – most Windows failures are due to registry)”
Actually this is not true and Windows has kept backup copies of the registry since Windows 95. System Restore was added in Windows ME ect….

From Artem S. Tashkinov on May 10, 2013 at 11:17 am:

Just because my website is hosted on a Russian web server doesn’t make it less legitimate or infested with malware.

I have been keeping track of the addresses used by the assorted highly questionable email spam that makes it to my inbox, also paying attention to the (windoze) virus outbreak warnings and countries of origin. Russia is a hotspot.
Seriously, I could blacklist the entire .ru domain from my inbox, set the ad blocker to likewise reject anything from any .ru site, and not lose a single thing worth seeing besides increasing system security.
Hey, does anyone out there know how to set a browser and/or computer to never send any information to a certain address, like *.ru? So if a computer does get infected, it still can’t “phone home” sensitive info?

It’s 100% HTML5/CSS3 compliant…

Now that you mentioned it, I gotta check it.
Document in question:
Passes HTML5.
Passes as CSS Level 3.
Web site start page:
HTML5 error.
Passes as CSS Level 3 but with 3 similar warnings: “Property -****-border-radius is an unknown vendor extension”
Come to think of it, controlling malware by slipping some “extra” info into an innocuous web document, which would be ignored by the browser as superfluous, would be rather ingenious.
You should be aware that HTML5 is not yet a W3C standard, but only a “Candidate Recommendation”, thus implementation is not guaranteed, especially of all features.

Just because you’ve found just one (!) outdated clause doesn’t mean the entire article is outdated or wrong.

I only bothered to check two. That one, which showed you were wrong. And the stupid thing about Linux’ “questionable legality”, which is crap, of which your link went to some message board whining about mpeg codec licensing fee or some such nonsense, which is crap.
I checked two, it was wrong on two. I summarized the document’s total whining to my satisfaction. Why should I go further?

“_Jim says: When was the time you inventoried all executing/resident tasks on your PC (or PCs)?”
What is your point? Malware can pretend to be anything it wants on your PC or be completely invisible (rootkits) – you have no idea unless you scan it. Unless you are trying to troubleshoot something or increase performance there is no reason for him to do this.

“And yet, you offer _no_ alternative(s) in the same class (free). Overlooking tools from the ‘horses mouth’ even (assuming one has an Intel processor), such as:”
I never said it does not have some useful tools on the CD, my point is it has multiple tools that do the same thing, instead of just the best ones, which will be confusing to just about anyone. The Intel CPU diagnostic is not a bad utility and definitely better than nothing but it is still not as thorough as commercial diagnostic products.
“Remember Poptech old chum, I recommended (basically) a field ‘triage tool’ (ala Swiss Army knife), not a full complement of what one would find in a full-up ‘operating room’ … even Dell (my choice in PCs) supplies various diagnostics for their MoBos for free on their cust support website (for the Optiplex series: again, my choice) …but _not_ every vendor does …”
Again, the problem is most people will have no idea which tools to use and not understand that it does not include full system diagnostics. Dell diagnostics again are better than nothing but they miss memory issues that memtest98(+) will catch.
“The previously over-looked (or probably unread?) caveat : Of course not, but I’m a responsible, knowledgeable adult (and engineer and techie) and I am plotting my own course and destiny based on my assessment of my needs, wants, desires, and technical requirements and am willing to work with the trade-offs to ‘get there’, thank you very much.”
This implies that you know this is a responsible thing to do while you will not find anyone with experience in the IT or security industry suggesting any such course of action because it is irresponsible. The only reason things like botnets exist is because people either do not apply security updates, do not have an antivirus program installed or their antivirus program is outdated.

“kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: I only bothered to check two. That one, which showed you were wrong. And the stupid thing about Linux’ “questionable legality”, which is crap, of which your link went to some message board whining about mpeg codec licensing fee or some such nonsense, which is crap.”
The “message board” is Slashdot. Are you new to the Internet or just tech sites? ROFLMAO!
And the Linux codec issue is not “crap” but legitimate,
http://www.datamation.com/article.php/3689726
http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/legit-linux-codecs-in-the-us/
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/70035.html?wlc=1274437690
So legitimate an issue that Canonical (Ubuntu) licensed H.264,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/05/canonical_h264_video/

From Poptech on May 10, 2013 at 12:25 pm:

So Microsoft did not release system requirements when Vista was released?

Of course not, they were released beforehand.

What new PCs being sold at the time would not work with Vista?

After the loud and noisy retooling period among the hardware makers, there were many machines sold as “Vista Capable”, barely working slugs at the “minimum system requirements” you’ve listed. To get the Aero interface and anything beyond bare functioning required the “Vista Premium Ready” level, which was the real “minimum standards”.
Come on, it played out like a huge bait-and-switch. Buy Vista Capable, then buy the upgrades to use Vista. And if you upgraded components like video cards, you might have been buying some more to get stuff Vista would agree to work with. Even Wikipedia notes the problems.
Heck, I even remember seeing the PC’s at Walmart selling with XP but “Vista ready” with free upgrade when it became available. One of those and a few hundred more bucks might actually get you a PC that really was running Vista in a meaningful way, if you only needed memory.

All of the same hardware “scrapping” applies to Windows 7 and Windows 8.

True, dat. M$ commands, hardware makers submit or die.

Microsoft cannot make any PC maker conform to anything.

Yup, they can voluntarily decide to go out of business. Some have.

PC makers choose of their own free will to sell Microsoft operating systems and thus meet the system requirements.

A. They conform to M$ system requirements like vehicle makers conform to gasoline, it’s just about the only thing out there to run in their iron, it’d be suicide not to do so.
B. PC makers do have a choice, sell with M$ installed for about $100 or so added on the price tag that the consumer doesn’t notice,
or sell without M$ a little cheaper, but condemning customers who want M$ to spend $200 to much more for a full retail version they have to install themselves. The second option guarantees ticked-off non-customers. First option is the easy path.

Name the hardware that met Windows 95′s system requirements that would not work. I built hundreds of Windows 95 machines with varying hardware and it all worked so long as you had the right drivers.

You must have forgotten all the “magazines” for system builders, selling hardware and software. The joys of having a generic ISA half-size VGA card, identified as having a “Trident” chipset, figuring out which if any of the included drivers will work, and what settings you have to tell Device Manager to use to get it to play nice with the hardware…
And the Hayes-compatible internal modems!
You nailed it, “…it all worked so long as you had the right drivers.” But finding the drivers! Oh, what a godsend sites like DriverGuide were, to finally have a central repository, at a time when the “right driver” may have been one furtively sent by email to a desperate user by a sympathetic tech support person who “liberated” it from testing…

It is nonsense that Norton Utilities was required to keep it stable.

Well 95 wasn’t so bad, but I needed it for ME. About, what, once a day minimum, “…intercepted a crash…”

And of course it is all a conspiracy theory why hardware makers don’t make drivers for Linux.

Why would you think that? Linux is a small market on the PC side, the market incentive isn’t there to devote resources for Linux drivers. Of course the Linux community can make their own drivers, but they’d need the full hardware specs, which the makers are loath to release as it gives too much insight to their competitors. Etc.

Explain how an operating system is “forced” onto a new PC. Do you not understand how markets work or is every Linux proponent this ignorant of economics?

I’ve already explained it a few times, not my fault if you can’t follow it, especially as it’s somewhat obvious you’re deliberately refusing to understand it. It’s how markets work, and it’s the economics of it.
But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, and share with an old “pro” like you the sleight-of-hand that is the standard experience of M$ pre-loading from the ordinary consumer’s viewpoint:
Do I get the computer that gives me Windows for free, or the computer that’s cheaper without Windows but I’ll pay hundreds later to get Windows then?
(Of course astute readers will realize this is a false choice. You can’t find PC’s or laptops at Walmart that don’t have Windoze pre-installed. There is no choice.)

From CodeTech on May 10, 2013 at 8:50 pm:

Yeah sorry, more ranting.

But it’s honest ranting, and was informative, so nothing to be sorry about.

Gee Poptech, if you’re going to do long circuitous ranting, can you at least TRY to format so the quoted and the ranted are more distinct?
As to the very tail end of it, OEM versions are cheaper because M$ doesn’t do the tech support. The system builder does. If you put a system together for someone, install OEM M$ and sell the complete system to them, YOU are tech support when M$ screws up.
If you put OEM on your own system, and I have, you don’t get to call M$ support when their product goes tits-up. Hopefully you have a working machine somewhere that you can get online with to look for help to get the hosed system working.
BTW, historical Pro Tip: Re-installing Windoze did not fix everything. But it did make you wish you had remembered all the tweaks, kludges, and Registry corrections you needed to get the old installation working. Although later (around the ME reign), once the base system was marginally running again, I could just run a System Optimizer a few times until the M$ cruft and errors stopped being detected and fixed.
What ordinary user, or someone putting together a system for a friend, would want to put up with that? They’ll go retail box so M$ gets the call.
Looking slightly up your screed:

This is because their is no market for PCs without an operating system installed.

Actually there is. This Dell Optiplex I’m currently using had no OS. It was used, presumably formerly corporate leased, with a wiped HD. Well, there was enough of some free DOS for a bare command prompt, that’s it. It’s always been Debian Linux. There must be quite a market for such used computers without OS, as I personally know that company was selling such for well over a decade.
Also, if you’re doing “build your own” on the Dell or other sites, you can skip the OS.
So the market is there, it’s just a very small and quiet one.

No one is making you buy any PC or Windows, it is your choice.

Technically not, in a roundabout way, after many lawsuits. If you want the nice new PC or laptop you’ve seen at Walmart or Best Buy, you’ll be buying it with Windows, can’t be avoided. But by an arcane process who’s existence is now mandated in the US, if you can ever uncover the details, you can apply to “return” Windows for a refund, which will be for far less than the amount asked for the OEM version, provided you can show you’ve NEVER used it on the machine, and can somehow completely remove it the machine, and send all copies, documentation, and related back to M$.
I’ve read about some people who got back about $30 for Vista.
So you are technically right, since you can return it, in the final summing technically you would not have had to buy Windoze!
Now if only that was true on site, at the store…

Wow – first hand knowledge about the same thing from two different perspectives. Interesting!
Let me throw this in. Windows has evolved into a useful, solid, stable system. Hardware vendors were often guilty of the proprietary hardware syndrome… as an example, when I worked at Tandy in the late 80s they were still selling PCs that used the proprietary Tandy printer cable. Why? Because only they sold the cables. Hardware vendors did NOT want to be selling appliances, they wanted you to buy their products exclusively. That way they could buy more airliners and yachts and… Just look at the ridiculous Microchannel fiasco from IBM… for a while there, IBM was not building “IBM compatible” computers. That miscalculation was a crushing defeat for them, but a GOOD thing for the rest of us. Imagine if the trend in PCs was being set by a giant multinational calculating machine company from the 1800s. Whether you hate MS or not, it was their work that freed us from what could have been. Bill Gates recognized early on that the hardware was eventually going to be secondary, but MOST of us remember a time when the hardware was primary.
Microsoft has a lot of “sweat equity” in Windows. They have put immense R&D into it, and to be honest I think they deserve their position. Remember that Intel was also in on it, in fact the 386 was partly spec’d by MS since Intel didn’t seem to understand what was needed. Those who say Windows is crap, without qualifying which part or in which way, seem to have stopped looking some time ago. I agree with PopTech that the biggest issues I ever had to deal with were drivers. The OS itself has been quite stable since 3.1
How about this: if someone would create a version of Linux (which they could if they had the capital) that could replace Windows on desktops, it would quickly drop Windows off the planet. But nobody has. Just because I could get a decent GUI and system set up on Linux doesn’t mean everyone can, and since computers have become “appliances” any current implementation of Linux is perceived as more of the hobbyist toy than a serious OS. Yes, I know the difference, but that is the perception. In fact, Android is a fairly thin veneer on Linux, but someone put a lot of R&D into making it a genuine OS. And even though Open Office is pretty good, if it was a for-sale retail product it would be considered total crap. Without a single guiding hand it is riddled with inconsistencies, horrid documentation, vastly different design concepts inside each module, and a general feel of amateurishness.
And that’s where most Open-Source and Linux based apps stand today. There is some awesome stuff. Linux is excellent in underlying mechanicals, it’s the underpinning of the entire Internet after all, but I’ve seen more user interface faux pas and downright obtuse software in the Linux world than Windows could ever hope to generate.
By the way, kadaka, when Vista first came out a lot of computers were sold as “Vista Capable” that weren’t. I knew several people that got suckered into them. That was a horrible miscalculation by MS, it killed the brand, and turned a lot of people away from Windows that otherwise could have just skipped that generation. Sure, they ran Vista. But nothing else. Like, you know, any useful applications. But they looked pretty.
My point is that the perception was more important than the reality. Vista worked great on capable computers, but the hardware requirements were too steep for it to be a simple upgrade. Up until that point all Windows iterations were incremental. A Win95 machine could run Win98, often better because most of the drivers were included in 98 that they had to install for 95. ME was a travesty (I was one of those kicked out of ME beta because we refused to sign off on what we knew was a buggy, unstable OS). The leap to NT-based Windows changed it all. The 2000->XP->Vista->7 chain has a gaping chasm after XP that probably should have had something in between.
I think both kadaka and PopTech have valid points, instead of seeing this as an argument or disagreement might it not be better to find that middle ground?
Windows is not that bad, but it’s also not as good as it could be. Win8 has taken too many years of development time for an interface that could possibly kill the brand. As many people know, the man responsible for Win8 resigned the week it was released.
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2224304/windows-8-creator-steven-sinofsky-resigns-from-microsoft

kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: WRONG. M$ was reasonably clear about the requirements:

Um, no I am note wrong. What I stated was Aero’s minimum requirements NOT the recommended ones. I am well aware of the details of what is needed to run Aero and at what resolutions. Your inability to understand what you are reading is amazing. “Windows Vista Premium Ready” requirements are NOT Aero’s minimum system requirements.
Maybe you missed these footnotes;
* 1 GB of system memory (RAM) is required with Integrated UMA Graphics to use the new Aero interface.
** Supported resolution up to but not including 1280×1024 on a Single Monitor System.
These are the full Aero requirements;
Aero Minimum System Requirements:
800 MHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) CPU
512 MB of system memory – RAM (Integrated UMA Graphics not supported) *
64 MB Windows Aero-capable DirectX 9-class graphics card **
* 1 GB of system memory (RAM) is required with Integrated UMA Graphics to use the new Aero interface.
** Supported resolution up to but not including 1280×1024 on a Single Monitor System.
Aero Recommended System Requirements:
1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) CPU
1 GB of system memory – RAM (Only 256 MB can be used for Integrated UMA Graphics Memory)
128 MB Windows Aero-capable DirectX 9-class graphics card
Aero-capable Graphics Requirements:
DirectX 9-class GPU that supports Pixel Shader 2.0
Supports a WDDM driver
Supports 32-bits per pixel
Passes the Windows Aero acceptance test in the WDK
(Single Monitor and Mobile Systems)
– 64 MB up to but not including 1280×1024
– 128 MB up to and including 1920×1200
– 256 MB over 1920×1200
(Desktop dual monitors)
– 128 MB up to but not including 1280x1024x2
– 256 MB for larger dual monitor configurations

“kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: As to the very tail end of it, OEM versions are cheaper because M$ doesn’t do the tech support. The system builder does. If you put a system together for someone, install OEM M$ and sell the complete system to them, YOU are tech support when M$ screws up.
Name the documented issue an average end user would experience, caused by Microsoft “screwing up” that required calling Microsoft tech support.
“If you put OEM on your own system, and I have, you don’t get to call M$ support when their product goes tits-up. Hopefully you have a working machine somewhere that you can get online with to look for help to get the hosed system working.”
WTF are you talking about? I have never had to call Microsoft support in my life to fix mine or anyone else’s system. All the information you need is freely available online. I personally have multiple systems and multiple smart phones not to mention all the older systems and parts laying around. So if someone only has one system, no smart phone and no friends or family to help they can buy a version with tech support if they wish.
“BTW, historical Pro Tip: Re-installing Windoze did not fix everything. But it did make you wish you had remembered all the tweaks, kludges, and Registry corrections you needed to get the old installation working. Although later (around the ME reign), once the base system was marginally running again, I could just run a System Optimizer a few times until the M$ cruft and errors stopped being detected and fixed.”
You don’t need any tweaks or registry fixes to get ANY version of Windows working out of the box. One of the most idiotic things you can do is run a “system optimizer” which is more likely to break various components in Windows and can actually REDUCE performance by irresponsibly applying worthless “tweaks” that disable performance enhancing features.
Windows ME worked even more reliable than Windows 98 since all it was, was an updated version of Windows 98SE, with more reliability features built in like system restore. I built hundreds of ME systems without incident and had less tech support calls than 98. You will not find complaints about ME from PC manufacturers but clueless end users who tried to do things like use Windows 95/98 drivers and then whined when their system did not work right. When pressed you can never get anyone who complained about ME to demonstrate a legitimate issue with it that Microsoft did not fix.
“What ordinary user, or someone putting together a system for a friend, would want to put up with that? They’ll go retail box so M$ gets the call.”
What exactly do you need to call Microsoft for that you cannot find online?
“Actually there is. This Dell Optiplex I’m currently using had no OS”
Yes and you can find others as well. My point was the market is effectively non-existent for a very specific reason – customers want an operating system installed when they buy a PC.
“Technically not, in a roundabout way, after many lawsuits. If you want the nice new PC or laptop you’ve seen at Walmart or Best Buy, you’ll be buying it with Windows, can’t be avoided.”
You are not following the conversation and I am not interested in your emotional meaningless rants.
Who is making you buy a certain PC or Windows? Does someone hold a gun to your head when you make the purchase?

clipe says:
May 9, 2013 at 3:40 pm
I have an older free version of Acronis on an old XP machine suffering BSODs.
In my case, I’m blaming bad drivers or a bad memory stick or a malware infection.
Some of the error messages encountered… blah, blah, blah…
Bad memory stick after all.

This is a prime example why people like Kadaka have no idea what they are talking about. Windows 95 came with a custom version of MS-DOS that did exactly two things,
1. Served as a boot loader
2. Acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer
There was a lot of confusion about this when Windows 95 was released and tons of misinformation on the Internet and apparently to this day.

Poptech said on May 14, 2013 at 10:17 pm:

This is a prime example why people like Kadaka have no idea what they are talking about. Windows 95 came with a custom version of MS-DOS that did exactly two things,
1. Served as a boot loader
2. Acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer
There was a lot of confusion about this when Windows 95 was released and tons of misinformation on the Internet and apparently to this day.

I give you Microsoft’s own directions for creating a DOS boot disk with utilities with Win95.
Now you’re basically claiming that is impossible, the MS-DOS with 95 couldn’t do that. Therefore you know better than Microsoft what they were releasing.
Except the stripped-down DOS wasn’t Win95, it was WinME:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269524
Overview of Real Mode Removal from Windows Millennium Edition
Win95 ran over MS-DOS, it was just a GUI.

Nope, I was wrong, just a bit. It was a tricky piece about Win95 and DOS, and it’s been well over a decade since it meant anything, think I only heard it once or twice.
I found it in a blog post by Raymond Chen, Windows developer, a little tidbit of lost lore:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2007/12/24/6849530.aspx
What was the role of MS-DOS in Windows 95?

MS-DOS served two purposes in Windows 95.
* It served as the boot loader.
* It acted as the 16-bit legacy device driver layer.
When Windows 95 started up, a customized version of MS-DOS was loaded, and it’s that customized version that processed your CONFIG.SYS file, launched COMMAND.COM, which ran your AUTOEXEC.BAT and which eventually ran WIN.COM, which began the process of booting up the VMM, or the 32-bit virtual machine manager.
The customized version of MS-DOS was fully functional as far as the phrase “fully functional” can be applied to MS-DOS in the first place. It had to be, since it was all that was running when you ran Windows 95 in “single MS-DOS application mode.”
The WIN.COM program started booting what most people think of as “Windows” proper. It used the copy of MS-DOS to load the virtual machine manager, read the SYSTEM.INI file, load the virtual device drivers, and then it turned off any running copy of EMM386 and switched into protected mode. It’s protected mode that is what most people think of as “the real Windows.”

Etc. That was the quirk, Win95 was 32-bit, but conversed as 16-bit.
It also worked hard to appear to be a GUI over DOS.
But Win95 had “fully functional” MS-DOS, from which could be made “fully functional” MS-DOS boot disks with utilities, as I said. Booting Win95 started with booting MS-DOS, then it switched to “protected mode” Win95.
Later on came Win95B, aka OSR2, making it all 32-bit.
BTW, Chen’s post has some interesting clues about the relationship between Slashdot and “technical competence”. From the very top:

Welcome, Slashdot readers. Remember, this Web site is for entertainment purposes only.
Sean wants to know what the role of MS-DOS was in Windows 95. I may regret answering this question since it’s clear Slashdot bait. (Even if Sean didn’t intend it that way, that’s what it’s going to turn into.)

And down in the comments:

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Christmas Special of Slashdot rantings from people who claim to know more about how this stuff works than the person who actually worked on Windows 95 or sits everyday beside someone who did.

Further down “Slashdot trolls” are mentioned…

Damn, Poptech, you’re a really petty SOB. I do my own research, man up and admit the bit I got wrong, so you mash together that and the earlier comment so you can crow about it in all bold.
But you’re still wrong. Win95 still made boot disks with working DOS, that was able to access my WinME HDD. It happened, and your twisting isn’t changing that.

You phrase “wiping them back to bare metal” makes no sense as the drive head never touches the surface of the drive.

Now you’re just being obtuse. You’re embarrassed you didn’t pick up on “wiping a HDD” while in full-blown rant mode, so you’re trying to pull the face-saving CYA move. Don’t worry, Poptech, I won’t think any less of you for blowing such an easy reference.

Strawman, I never claimed that those who post at Slashdot are all necessarily technically competent. I stated that anyone who is technically proficient would have heard of Slashdot.

Which is beyond asinine. College computer classes and training, “build and maintain your PC” books with included software sold at Waldenbooks (I bought one), printed magazines full of new and current tech info sold at newsstands and book stores… And your “sure sign” of being technically proficient is having heard of a particular website?
So if I was hiring a PC tech for my company, to check for technical proficiency would I:
A. Have set of PC parts spread out on a table, with blank HDD and OS install disks, and have them assemble a working PC (including setting jumpers)
or
B. Ask if they knew about some geek site where nerds discussed tech articles posted elsewhere.
Tough choice.
Hate to expand your tiny little worldview, but I think it’s possible to be technologically proficient without ever hearing about Slashdot, even more so now than it was way back when Slashdot was relevant.
From almost six years ago:

When Was The Exact Day Slashdot Jumped The Shark?
Monday September 10, 2007 4:53AM
by Noah Gift in Opinion
In the era of Web 2.0, it appears that Slashdot has “Jumped The Shark”. The question now, is when did this happen? I remember in the early 2000’s, Slashdot was THE geek website, but something has changed and it appears they have lost the magic. I decided, today, to take them off of my RSS Reader, as I find their stories trite, boring and dare I say, irrelevant to IT?
…

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From Poptech on May 15, 2013 at 9:53 pm:

Really? What version of DOS?

The DOS that came with Win95, of course, which was fully functional.

Anyone that understands how “Wiping” and HDs actually work would never use such a phrase.

Told you, I wouldn’t think anything less of you for blowing that. You can stop trying to cover it up now, it’s not working.

You just proved my point, you claimed to be in the “know” during this time. It doesn’t matter, I have already proven my point to anyone technically proficient reading this.

The point that’s proved is you’re a stuck-up condescending elitist, who comes off as if you were certain someone knows nothing about S&M because they don’t know about The Red Scarlet down on Castro Street, since everyone you know who knows S&M knows The Red Scarlet.
Gee, I’m sorry I never thought much about your favorite hangout, and got my info elsewhere. Deal with it.
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From Poptech on May 15, 2013 at 10:47 pm:

Does “wiping” a HD recover more disk space than formatting?

Potentially, yes. Hard drives may have hidden utility partions that a normal format will miss. Viruses and other programs can alter allocation tables, place hidden files and sections on a hard drive that, again, a normal format will miss.
So wipe the drive back to bare metal, and reclaim all of it for a fresh partitioning, formatting, and OS install.
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kadaka, do you really think that anyone in the IT field uses a Wipe Utility to erase everything on a drive when there is no concern over security? Why would they waste time having a utility overwrite every sector on the drive for no reason? Do you have any idea what a waste of time that is? This is what I am talking about – you just don’t know.

From Poptech on May 15, 2013 at 10:47 pm:

The point again was that you never heard of “THE geek website” <- your quote.

If you had actually paid attention to what I wrote instead of aggressively searching for confirmation of your bias, you might have noticed that I was aware of Slashdot way back then. I had heard of slashdotting, went to look at the site.
I was not impressed. Sorry. I got my hot tech and science news elsewhere. I could spend hours at El Reg, just wandering and absorbing, for example. And believe it or not, I did have other interests than just tech.
So I knew of Slashdot way back then. And didn’t find it to be worth my time way back then, and still don’t.
Thus you have been ranting for days about my not knowing of Slashdot which was proof I must be technically incompetent, when it wasn’t at all true.
Which was sorta fun to watch. You’re not technically proficient if you don’t know about Slashdot, you’re financially incompetent if you don’t know about Barron’s… Same elitist bias, different packaging.
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kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: This is a common misunderstanding,

No it is not a misunderstanding are you REALLY this computer illiterate?
formatting (defined) “to prepare (a disk) for writing and reading.”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/formatting?s=t
This includes partitioning. What you are referring to is called high-level formatting.
high-level formatting (defined) “the format for the root directory and the file allocation tables and other basic configurations”
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/high-level+formatting?r=66
I am at loss for how far you are willing to bury yourself in your own hole.

you might have noticed that I was aware of Slashdot way back then.

Oh come on, you really must be embarrassed to try and pull this one,
“kadaka (KD Knoebel) May 10, 2013 at 3:04 pm says: I only bothered to check two. That one, which showed you were wrong. And the stupid thing about Linux’ “questionable legality”, which is crap, of which your link went to some message board whining about mpeg codec licensing fee or some such nonsense, which is crap.”
You said it not me. Anyone that has heard of Slashdot would – 1. Refer to it by name, 2. Knows it is not a message board.

You’re not technically proficient if you don’t know about Slashdot, you’re financially incompetent if you don’t know about Barron’s

What competent financial planner does not know about Barron’s?
None of this has to do with Elitism, it is about technical knowledge – something you do not have and are not desperately trying to Google for.

Wow PopTech, you’re still down here fighting with kadaka?
Anyone who thinks Win95 after OSR2 was 32 bit doesn’t really understand the concept, someone who actually believes the “GUI over DOS” myth, and someone who can’t tell the difference between low-level formatting, high-level formatting and partitioning certainly shouldn’t try to copy and paste tech information for actual tech people to read.
However, for the record, I never really liked slashdot either and tended to avoid it…
Norton’s stuff was essential in the DOS days, in the early-mid 80s, but like almost every other utility or add-on for Windows it was bloated, obstructive, and ultimately either useless or worse than nothing.

From CodeTech on May 16, 2013 at 4:53 am:

Anyone who thinks Win95 after OSR2 was 32 bit doesn’t really understand the concept, someone who actually believes the “GUI over DOS” myth, and someone who can’t tell the difference between low-level formatting, high-level formatting and partitioning certainly shouldn’t try to copy and paste tech information for actual tech people to read.

Then can you enlighten me about OSR2? It’s been a long time, I remember going to 95B then 95C on about the same day, had just downloaded both upgrades. And I had a hard drive broken up into smaller partitions that I then wanted to consolidate.
“GUI over DOS” was 3.1, as I linked to above Win95 was made to look like it was over DOS. Although back then I still booted to DOS for some serious work. When I had to remove those System Restore points that WinME refused to, no matter what Poptech and MS claim, I went to DOS and an earlier version.
Also, up to and including WinME was DOS loading first, then Windows.
Yes, I knew the difference between low-level formatting, as done to a blank drive, and high-level formatting, which set up a partition for a particular file system. But it hasn’t been part of my computing experience for awhile.
And after a quick search, I’m not sure either you or Poptech are using those terms correctly. Disk formatting:

While it is generally impossible to perform a complete LLF on most modern hard drives (since the mid-1990s) outside the factory,[14] the term “low-level format” is still used for what could be called the reinitialization of a hard drive to its factory configuration (and even these terms may be misunderstood).
The present ambiguity in the term low-level format seems to be due to both inconsistent documentation on web sites and the belief by many users that any process below a high-level (file system) format must be called a low-level format. Since much of the low level formatting process can today only be performed at the factory, various drive manufacturers describe reinitialization software as LLF utilities on their web sites. Since users generally have no way to determine the difference between a complete LLF and reinitialization (they simply observe running the software results in a hard disk that must be high-level formatted), both the misinformed user and mixed signals from various drive manufacturers have perpetuated this error. Note: Whatever possible misuse of such terms may exist (search hard drive manufacturers’ web sites for all these terms), many sites do make such reinitialization utilities available (possibly as bootable floppy diskette or CD image files), to both overwrite every byte and check for damaged sectors on the hard disk.

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Okay kadaka, I was scrolling through the comments and I thought you were stating that win95 OSR2 was 32 bit Windows. Now I see you were referring to the introduction of FAT32. Sorry.
And, Poptech, sorry to say but ME was released with some serious problems, and in my opinion they wanted it that way to make NT based systems look awesome in comparison. Win2K was such a step up it was worth trashing the stuff that didn’t work on it. ME was always junk. As I said above, I was a beta tester and got booted out of the program for not signing off on it. One example is the shutdown problem.
kadaka, forget whatever simplified explanation you’re getting confused by wrt formatting.
Low level formatting is now done at the factory, and most people never need to worry about it. With low level, each and every sector is written, which rewrites all of the sector dividers that are required for a drive to be readable and writeable. The ways drives work now this is rarely something an end user would need to do. Performing a low level format is the closest you’ll get to “bare metal”, which as Poptech pointed out is not really possible. In fact, doing this on a modern drive might actually reduce the reliability of that drive.
High level formatting checks readability of critical sectors and only writes high level information like boot sectors, FAT tables, etc. In high level formatting only the essential indices are written, previous data is considered trash and is ignored.
Partitioning is a process between the two. Once your low level format is complete (or with a new drive, or when you’re redoing a drive) the partition table maps out where each logical volume begins and ends on the physical drive. After the partitions are set you need to high-level format them.
Shredding a drive is writing a strictly defined pattern of bits on each sector, then another pattern, and sometimes several more to ensure that no background data can be recovered. This is because even after writing over a sector there are ways to pull the old data out, detecting the residual magnetism for each bit.
(heh, at this point I read what you quoted above… pretty close)
Anyway, there are several different types of techies, and you two are two different types. I also have been involved in multi-thousand machine rollouts, been stuck upgrading thousands of machines, even converted an entire corporate 3270 network with Token Ring (33 floors worth!), spec’d corporate machines, built and installed machines, supported newbie users, “power users”, executives, etc. And etc. I’ve done this with full time employment AND contracts, and I’ve done so since I was 15 in 1979 (granted I started at Radio Shack with TRS-80s! But we connected realtors to the mainframes at the local real estate board when nobody else was even thinking about it)
The most important thing is always that it works. The second most important thing is that it works “properly”. I realize that flies in the face of strict logic, but… it’s there. My last employment situation I was working for an “IT manager” that had no formal training and was still living in 1992. In fact, some of the computers I was supporting were still from the 90s, and I’d LOVE to be exaggerating but I’m not. He ran that IT department on a shoestring budget, and they skipped XP and Vista, while I was in the process of getting Win7 rolled out when our arrangement was terminated.
Consider trying to support a Win2000 infrastructure, with 3 Win2k servers and 34 local Win2k clients, plus several in remote locations on dedicated DSL lines, running SQL Server 2000, VBA under Office 98 for several million lines of custom code, a database with over 100 million records running on that stuff, and a company owner that doesn’t understand a word of it. Now consider the “manager” who is responsible for all of this, taking home 3 times what they’re paying me, buying a bar and spending all his time and income keeping the bar running… leaving me to keep that mess going.
There’s my rant. Poptech, it’s GOOD to have everything working “properly” and understanding every aspect of what’s going on… but in the real world it’s not really necessary. What counts at the end of the day is that it works, and kadaka has demonstrated that even if he didn’t always understand everything, following rules of thumb and doing research keeps it working. Nothing wrong with that.

From Poptech on May 17, 2013 at 4:50 am:

He was following nonsense advice and did not know how to do the research. So he wound up wasting his time.

Well excuse me for being in that lowly subclass of near-humans who couldn’t afford the FREAKING services of your FINE company and made do with what we could get and did our own work. I’m so sorry that our helping out each other, sharing solutions, searching for and trying whatever kept our systems going, wasn’t up to your standards of prettiness.
Good news, you’ve won! You knocked me down, stuck it in, smacked me down again anytime I complained. You even brought your buddies over to show off your dominance, “Ha, look at the little piggy, he’s trying to squeal! Watch me make this piggy squeal! C’mon piggy, squeal for daddy!”
Now you’re done, you got in the celebratory wiping off of your superiority complex on my cheeks, the “Ah c’mon, you deserved what you got ’cause I’m (smarter/richer/stronger) than you!” I’ve had to deal with your kind all my life, you’re better so I gotta bend over and take it, you’ll beat me down until I do. News flash, you’re certainly not the first, probably won’t be the last.
Hope you like what you got off of it. I’m a generous guy, people have taken advantage of that for years, but it’s better than being the person I’d be if I wasn’t.
But if I found you bleeding to death on the side of the road, and knew who you were, I’d have to watch you die. I wouldn’t give you a chance to complain about my obviously inadequate medical knowledge. Heck, someone like you, you’d sue me after I saved your life for daring to do so without being a board-certified trauma surgeon.
Now go off and find whatever Circle is reserved for arrogant unhelpful know-it-alls who get off shoving their superiority at anyone they find inferior, you deserve it.
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