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I agree with you completely Martin, XP easily outdistances everything I’ve ever used in letting me get the jobs done efficiently and yet staying out of my way as much as possible…but I process data by the tens of gigabytes a week. Work work work, oh, and I’m a mad gamer online as well.

At the same time I realize that if one hands another enthusiast a shiny red metal bauble; they’re going to play with it, and tell others of their experience. Its an approach from a completely different direction to using a computer, but Microsoft has afforded them the opportunity and they’re taking advantage of that since they are those types of enthusiasts.

It can easily seem like THAT is the world of computing to read these posts, and it certainly is much more interesting to read than one that says I processed 63 gigs of data today with XP overseeing and no errors occured. That’s a dirty old ball with leaves stuck to it! : )

I’ve also had problems with getting good reliable performance from AHCI mode with 64-bit. Maybe I’m just unlucky and get the driver support (all AMD AM3 boards). It very well could be since on the last one I said what the heck and selected the install ALL drivers and utilities on an ASROCK board…what a mistake. The LAN utility hung Network, the FastUSB utility hung shutdown with a USB drive attached, Norton was on there and had to be removed before it could work its magic and slow down the system… got me to thinking that these utilities could be responsible for a large percentage of problems with new installs just as software from OEMs can cause issues.

BTW, now that I have some experience with 7-64-bit, its been my experience it needs more RAM than 32-bit or it doesn’t run as smoothly (at low levels; 2 gigs specifically), so I only run 64-bit on the systems that have two VMs running on a separate SSD for obvious reasons. I have enough 32-bit systems to provide all the compatibility I need without having to go through the rigmarole to get the 64-bit systems completely compatible with 32-bit network resources.

If everything was 64-bit from the ground up or not part of an established network, I don’t think there would be much in the way of issues at this point.

I seem to be stuck in what you might call “the real world,” grandchildren, hobbies, and helping people with real world problems.

Not your loss…but, those are some of the exact reasons for getting INTO the social Internet; especially the grandchildren when they integrate and suddenly you can follow them; their activities, their interests; communicate with them online. No secret to Facebook’s success. Skype integrates pretty well with Facebook as well so now there they are; grandma and granddaughter, two and a half hours apart (or 5 minutes when she’s home from school), face to face (pardon the pun), having a chat.

Yes, what they all said, and the reason Apple doesn’t use it was because of a long-standing war AND flash is hard on devices with limited resources, especially when smart phones and touch devices first came out. They’ve since gotten much more powerful, but its still somewhat difficult and there’s still the war.

If you’re going to use Sandboxie on a 64-bit system, be sure to visit their website and read about the reduced protection disclosure and their proposed Experimental Protection package to help close the hole they can’t prevent otherwise.

Limited accounts for anything engaging potential infection with a virtualization layer (in the past SteadyState for XP; effective but a bit cumbersome) like Returnil and a good hardware router would be; is(!) so robust, there wouldn’t be a need for anything else, period.

Problem is that the concept is almost as alien as the idea of walking nude on the moon and “sticking with it” as cloudsandskye said. Put OpenDNS on the job as well to protect against phishing sites and general types of sites you want to keep yungin’s off of anyway and a PC is practically impregnable because even the occasional virus that is hand-held and led across the barriers (the vast, vast majority-is there a kind way to say users are so close to 100% at fault its virtually 100%, so we don’t have to say no no, its not your fault, you just need better AV and maybe don’t click on “that” again) is gone with the next reboot.

To me it is so mind-non-bogglingly easy, but guess how many people I know that are set up this way? Yep, no others, ‘cept my immediate family.

We have since moved on to just employing virtualization for the cognizant adults since XP really is a pain when it comes to limited accounts, and we’re still running free and clear, 12 years and counting (it helps to be physically isolated as we are as well–in a city I would take additional steps to secure wireless of course. MSE is on a couple systems but only used for scanning downloaded PDFs (even though we use safemode display in FoxIt) and the like and Malware bytes is available for the occasional scan.

This might be another alien concept but I don’t consider it malware vs. my computer. Its my brain vs. malware writer’s brain and I have the superior hand because he/she has to get into my fortress; and if need be, I have the ability to make my fortress vanish right before his or her eyes even if they’re standing in the courtyard thinking they’ve succeeded…someday, if my brain loses to a malware brain, I might even get to pull my parlor trick! Right now I just get to use it for dumb stuff, like using a trial program without using a trial program because I don’t think I use it often enough to purchase it.

Haven’t found a nickel’s worth of difference using Revo occasionally myself, its probably a very gentle reg scanner because the last thing it needs to do is get anything even hinting at being occasionally destructive to the registry, hence my never finding anything additional that was cleaned up making any difference in the long run, though there were some initial differences, such as the interrupts and state reached of something like a reinstall.

Agree with SSDs, only type of drive that has not failed on me…yet. Seagate has been the least reliable over the past two years and are the Samsungs the ones with the Deskstar (formerly “Deathstar”) brand now? Deskstars have been the most reliable mech drives for me, but like I said, 7 or 8 SSDs and no failures.

Disagree on the RAID 1, it only protects in case of hardware failure in one device, any non-hardware read/write corruption, or deletions or the like, instantly affects both drives, and does nothing to insure accident befalling both drives simultaneously. Its better than having just one drive but that’s all, better. Best is separate, backup to the backup miles away, if my home should burn or be damaged in some way affecting the drives; got it covered. I do it for free too by the way, just the cost of the drive and a friends good will; using GBridge to backup over the Internet to my own drive. Beats Carbonite and others of that ilk like a dirty rug but its a bit geeky; free to back up externals, network drives, you name it, no restrictions.

Sure, its the absolute sweetest spot I’ve ever found, the more modern stuff is good for further format compacting without much quality loss, but each has its little problems that bothers me so I’m sticking with the classic.

I use VDubMod by proxy through the AutoGK suite. Advanced setting there allows me to choose fixed width (in 16 pixel increments) and that sticks until I change it. No height adjustment though as that’s determined by aspect ratio.

Only one way to access the control panel if you want it close at hand whether it’s XP or Win7 and that’s to go into the start menu customization and check Control panel to appear and option as a menu.

I always go to Download.com (CNET) if I can get the file/program there. They’ve obfuscated the process a little as well but not as bad as the others.
FastStone image viewer is the full thumbnail browser program.

Also would say that Picasa is good, they just came out with version 3.9 and it has an A-B button now where you can compare edit with original…so if the basic adjustments in Picasa were adequate, that’s very useful to some…and as stated, very adjustable thumbnail layout though one has to switch over to the Picasa viewer for full screen preview…some of my family members use it exclusively because then it can keep track of the photo database and tell you exactly which photos on a camera card are already on the computer and don’t need to be imported again…useful when the collection gets into the tens of thousands…don’t care how good anyone’s memory is!

Not sure what would fit your needs the best but hopefully you can try one or more out and find a much better option than Win 7 by itself.

That’s pretty good on small batches, but what is your experience with thumbnail generation with large folder populations? Its been nothing but terrible for me. Its slow, or slower, your choice, and it doesn’t generate beyond the visual window pane until one scrolls to reveal and after a couple thousand or less, it craps out altogether; other than that…and XnView thumbnail info can be as much as EXIF, IPTC, XMP, GPS, Shortcut, Automatic Rotation, Embedded Thumbnail, and ICC profile…of course for almost everyone, that’s way up on the overkill side, but I like options up the wazoo and steady preformance on any population of images.
That’s my main beef with IrfanView as well, it doesn’t handle large populations per folder well, a little better than Win7 but not much.

Hard for me to tell exactly what you want but I saw custom size and # per row in there…there are much MUCH better photo handling/organizers than what Win 7 has to offer, even with Photo Gallery live. You might try XnView and FastStone Image Viewer. I like FastStone a bit better than XnView but you can customize the layout and icon size and attached info six ways to Sunday with XnView and even give each a nice neutral gray background, truly great managers for the price (free). You can also run more than one instance of XnView at a time quite easily so if you have the horsepower, that’s also a great management tool, especially if running with more than one monitor.

More virtualization, give Returnil a go (activate the virtual mode before connecting with the Internet). Protects you from virtually everything by misdirecting anything potentially harmful…you still get attacked, you still get compromised, virus starts congratulating itself on a job well done; you reboot and its gone. So are any other changes so you don’t want to install some large program at the same time with virtual mode active.