Search options (Page 34 of 58)

You need to use nLite BEFORE slipstreaming the DriverPacks!!!

This is absolutely essential!

Other than that, what brand is Inspiron?
Dell by chance?
Do a search on that, there's other suers having problems with that.

Oh, I really hope so.
Usually I end up typing way too long post losing track or getting lost in the middle of it, resulting in a more confusing-than-helping contribution by me...

I see.
Do you want to set up separate user accounts on a single OS for all of them or do you want to install one OS on each disc/partition and using a boot menu for each user to select theirs?

The reason I'm asking is because if you work with different user accounts, there ususally is no need to keep user files on separate drives because, if set up properly, each user can only access/execute/change his directory anyway.
It may be more structured to put them on different drives, but not that much.

Another question is how much space each users needs and how much you have to distribute.
Quadruple OS installations certainly won't go easy on that.
You would also have to install apps multiple times; using user profiles and installing them for multiple user use also means less licensing problems when using non-free apps.

A different approach would be to store all user profiles and data on a server and use the shared PC as a sort of thin-client only providing the interface to this data.
The advantage is that if you have another client PC that can be used, multiple users can use the PC at the same time as opposed to be limited to this one machine (even if others were physically available).

This is all the input I can give you so far because I do not clearly know what exact purpose you want apart from multi-user usage.
HTH so far anyway

Probably the latter.

Those guys doing the actual tech support unfortunately are most likely not educated technicians - it would be way too expensive for any company to "waste" these precious human resources sitting on a phone line or and email account all day.
They have to use some guys/gals that do the flowchart kind of Q&A with customers, also because there are unfortunately (for the companies AND customers like you and me) way too many folks calling who could not be bothered or are incapable of reading the manual.
It's those folks that do need to be talked through the "check whether the light glows, re-attach the cables, make sure you actually powered the device on..." process - of course you do not want a high-payed technician doing this.

The trick is here to get past this "dumbass" barrier by convincing the tech support folks that you are having a real problem, know that you have done everything written in the FAQ (which you also read and understood) and your problem can only be solved by a technician/engineer of theirs.

I find this to work better on phone than on email because it is a more direct form of communication.
They simply cannot just give you standardized pre-recorded answers on the phone as they do with email.
Plus, you can tie them so long until they "give up" and put you through - something you cannot do with mail, either (unless you harrass-spam them, maybe...).

Once you reached someone with which you can talk on an even level - unless they company really does not care about customer support at all - such problems can be sorted out quite quickly.
You know the guy on the other line definately understands you and he knows that this is not just a prank call, either.

It does take quite some endurance to get that far but it can be very satisfying when it does

That's the purpose of KTD, Keep The Drivers.
Granted, it will only provide those that were current at the date of installation, but at least you got some drivers supporting your newly-added HW.

Of course, it would be great to be able to update those KTD'ed drivers with new releases of the DriverPacks.
At least on systems that do not get reinstalled every six months or so...

No.
When you install your OS on a freshly formatted HDD, it will get written to the outer sectors on the HDD platters.
Since according to basic laws of physics, the outer area of a disc always spins faster than the inner ones (angular velocity) and HDDs, contrary to ODDs, always spin at a constant RPM, access will be faster there.

The trick is to also have your swapping/paging file on these sectors.
That is no problem when you freshly install, however, if  you do not use a fixed size for the paging file (default Windows setting is NOt fixed!!!), the file can get fragmented once you exceed the current limit as it needs to be increased in size.
As you cannot easily defragment the paging file, you would mostly end up deframenting the rest of your HDD, deleting the page file and have it rebuild.
Now, the PF will most likely get written onto some more inward sectors, resulting in worse performance.
Basically, you gained little if at all, because you got rid of the fragmentation (which will reduce speed).

In that case, using a separate paging partition (such as Linux distros do this) is the preferred method, as you can easily defragment that one, if needed.
However, you have to make sure this partition is created at the very beginning or at least close to that of your HDD.
Also, might be hard to achieve.

Ask the other way round, is it a good one?
That surely depends on your use of the HDD.
I for one do not believe in partitioning and rather use a separate, additional physical HDD than splitting an existing one into different partitions if I need more than one drive.

This definately does improve performance, btw

Also, partitions always lead to having enough space combined on all part., but not enough on each!
:bleh:
That's when you wish you could somehow redistibute the free space, which is possible, but not easily achievable, poses danger to your data and will also inevitably fragment the whole HDD, which you cannot get by defragmenting.

Also, I have already witnessed partitions simply disappear into the void for no reason whatsoever!
While you can recover them, it's certainly easier to recover data from a single partition.

The only "advantage" I see (NB: this is just my personal opinion about them, if you like them, get happy with them, it's just "no, thanks" for me... ) is ordering your stuff, eg. have a partition for music, one for movies, one for pictures, one for work and so on.

However, the same can be achieved with several drives and also has the advantage that in case of a HDD failure you will only lose that one drive as opposed to all partitions...

Actually, I favour the opposite of partitioning - spanning.
That means you take two or more drives and create one single partition on them using all the space combined.
It's just like RAID in a way...
And yes, I know it does not help with the security as mentioned above but it gets you lots of single, coherent space fast

Guess I have answered that already, huh...?

Best is to ask yourself what you want to gain from it.
Then we can tell you whether you can actually achieve that or not

Indeed, and add some RAM for the Windows installation environment and the 7-zip.EXE '(I'm not sure if that is already included in the 66MB).
Since most older system feature 64MB RAM, that is not going to suffice - and you wouldn't want to run Win2k or better on that little anyway.

That's nice to hear, but the way I understand it that means you can only deselect whole DriverPacks instead of single drivers/devices out of these packs.
So, the only benefit would be deselecting DriverPack WLAN and two of the three DPGs if you do not need these.

(Big advantage would be regarding the 3PDPs, please make sure your friend will take these into account, if possible!
For me, these take up more space than all official packs combined, so there you can save most time)

Not meant as criticism, just wondering, but is there any reason why you are hosting all these test packs on rapidshare as of late?
Thing is, I doubt many folks own a premium account and without one DLing is not very comfortable from that host.
Is there any problem with our test pack server?

May I ask how much RAM those machines sport?

While a slow CPU certainly contributes to the problem I found that too little RAM (<192MB) definately slows down the extraction and installation process by a large share.

This is not meant to vote against your suggestion and probabaly also not the answer you wanted (as it may require spending money on these old machines) but should still not be disregarded

Have you tried filing a support ticket to their QA or whoever is responsible department?
I'm not sure how this works for nVidia, but ATi has something that works reportedly acceptable (not going to get fixed immediately but at least they will update their KB and acknowlegde it in most cases ), so I assume it should be similar for them.

I know that the work-around is probabaly rather simple for us to implement (albeit pushing the size of the packs once more... ), but it should not be our main concern to fix stuff the manufacturer/driver provider broke in first place.
Also, getting them to fix this is unarguably the preferred method of dealing with this issue

Why, I never knew we had that strict rules regarding swearing
As long as your post aren't made up of vulgar by the larger share, I think one or two "bad words" here and there are totally acceptable.
Not trying to persuade you to it, just pointing out

Yeah, I just checked out the dir and I really got no clue about that...

Since basically everyone can access the server, it is absolutely vital to leave a message to the other users about what you have changed and why.
Otherwise, things will become very messy and confusing for the rest of us.

Also, if you update any of the packs, post a thread about it or at least leave a note in here so the OP or me can update the first post of this thread.
Also, do move the old pack into the .../old dir (and possibly delete even older files already in there if you are sure that the now becoming old version worked flawlessly - the whole point is to have at least one backup in case something gets screwn up...).

We are happy about everyone who contributes (even if it's just one driver updated/changed/fixed), but no one profits from it if we are kind of working against each other by not keeping things simple

Thanks for your understanding!

If it's a simple HTML page, you can always chose to save it as an MHT file so you end up with a single file (as opposed to saving as HTML) which basically serves the same function as, say, a PDF.
Plus, you'll only need a web browser to display

Is your goal to speed up the extraction process or do you want to save HDD space used by unneeded (for that system) drivers?

I certainly wouldn't mind such an option with the ability to interact with a couple of seconds (so as to not interrupt the unattended process for too long).
However, I think if you were going to sort through ALL drivers then that will take longer than selecting packages for a Linux distro
And unselecting drivers by packs isn't that clever, either, because you'll ususally need a driver from all of them.

Your best option so far is to simply kick drivers you are sure you will never need out of the pack (extract, delete the dirs, repack).