OK Link 1.
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-compared-windows-7-vs-vista-vs-xp-615167?artc_pg=8
Is for testing with Beta, which was amazing, thought it was the Best OS that Microsoft had ever released, all drivers worked on all machines, all machines were light years ahead in speed. But the Release is a slow POS... they are two different animals.
The release has more crap in it, which slows it down, they added security, which is great, but it should not be at the expense of speed.

Link 2.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15&displayLang=en
This will tell you if the OS will run,
It will NOT tell you if it is going to run well,
you should also know that as of now, their is NO direct upgrade, so you would have to reinstall all of your programs. At home no big deal but when you administer 500+ windows XP desktops... well yeah no thanks...

I will leave it as this,
I would/will not adopt it as my home OS until the cost of a very fast machine becomes cheap. I will also wait until service pack 2 comes out. I may not ever adopt it in the work place, and skip it completely, while i wait for the next OS. Or i will just switch to Linux and use Wine for my applications.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/vista-windows-7-ubuntu-904-and-910-boot-speed-comparison

Hey Ready, I'm looking at the 291 course just now and its scaring the **** out of me. No wonder its the hardest test for the cert...so many crap...its worst than the 290. I hope you can help me through this...*gulp*

Well if you have any questions feel free to ask i will do my best...
I should be on here more often, as i was just laid off, although now i am in the mids of creating my own company, so i will be on and off here more often..

I have an old operating system, WINDOWS ME. I know I need a newer system but I can't afford it right now. I was using the opera 10.01 web browser and it was working great. On Thanksgiving night I turned my computer on and I got a message when I clicked on my opera browser that a newer version, 10.10 was available and did I want to upgrade. I downloaded the upgrade and windows installer supposedly installed the program successfully. When I clicked on the opera icon on my desktop, I got this message-"Failed to load the Unicode compatibility layer OUniAnsiDLL because one of the library files needed to run this application cannot be found." So, not only did I not get the upgrade of Opera, it wrote over the version that I had and now I don't have any Opera browser. I had some problems a couple of months ago and finally got that straightened out but ever since then, my system restore doesn't work. I've ran the system application recovery CD 3 times and I still am having errors when I try to install a newer web browser. Of course, running the recovery CD changed the version of the Internet Explorer browser that I had and now I'm getting errors when I try to install a "newer" version of that. I'm about to pull my hair out! LOL! Any suggestions?

This doesn't pertain to MS. I was hoping you could answer anyway. Why does it take about 45 minute's for me to receive an email from a dating site into my Yahoo account?

Norton has been known to lock vital system resources causes computer to crash, that and along with mccafe they seem to protect computer well at the expense of system resources. The best way to protect yourself is get a light weight virus scanner, and watch what you download of external sites that you do not know. Also know that anytime your computer is plugged into the internet you are at risk of getting viruses, trojans, worms, or intruders. Some people think if they leave their computer running on the internet but do not download they will be fine, that is not always true. Always keep your virus definitions up to date, sometimes having firewall active helps out a lot. General computer maintaince helps along the way, keep your files organized, backed up, and watch how much you download for computer performance, type msconfig and check what actually is starting when your computer is on desktop, most people use most of their system resources with background programs running that they don't even use. There's about a million tips to make computer run more efficiently and better, including cleaning the inside of your computer out which is very simple, scanning hardware frequently for any problems, etc. It's like taking care of your body, if you take care of yourself well, your body runs better, a computer is very similar. For any questions feel free to message me I can help.

Ok,
well where to start..
1. The reason that these virus programs lock out vital system resources, is to keep you protected, as they are the most typical places viruses will attack. Mcafee has issues with this and does cause BSOD on occassion, Norton will do the same but ONLY if you are infected with something, or need certain Nic drivers to run certain functions, this is something that is common in older windows OS's such as windows ME, 98se, 98, 95 or NT4
2. Downloading, well on this i am sorry but you are mistaken, your machine the moment you connect to any WAN allowed network using TCP/IP will pull info from the internet, if local LAN, your machine will pull info from WINs, DNS, DHCP, and other servers, on WAN open networks you will pull info whether it is DNS info, or Listening Ports. You can check this by using Netstat -a in the command prompt, by default your machine will listen to a slew of ports, you can lock this down with group policy, but most people do not know that this function even exists. Also windows 95-7 have a feature built in to look for updates.. If you want to know about your security issues you will want to run a command prompt gpresult /Z this will display your full group policy settings and security.
3. Msconfig, although a good begining point to look for possible issues, and also idiot proof, as unless you delete your boot.ini file, or stop all services from boot, you cannot kill your machine by using this, but this does not list hidden services, found in C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc you can look at a flat file called services this file holds your hidden system services, if you have a infected service running it will run from this file, and launch an EXE or DLL file from the associated path. Now if you use Msconfig, you can stop legit programs from launching, however the typical trojans are smart, and will hide in run once, which you will need to go into your registry to find, these run once files change their names on reboot, which is what makes them such a pain in the a$$, now if you had Norton, Mcafee, Trend, Sophose, or NOD32 this directory would be one that would be locked out, your simple little scan utilies have no lock on these locations which is why they are not the best for the typical end user.
4. Simple maintenance, yes, it helps keep your machine running good, but what do you see as maintenance? Moving files around causes fragmentation, and will decrease MFT file allocation space, which may have adverse effects, also Indexing will slow down your machine due to moving files around. Windows Defrag is a good program, however it should be noted that if you have a solid state drive defraging will destroy the disk, also, you should always baseline your defrag prior to running a defrag (defrag c: -b)then run (defrag c: -f) this will force space to defrag.
The best programs for XP
1. Ccleaner - removes temp files, and will clean out old registry keys
2. O&O free2000 Version will run on XP and will defrag down to the block and not the file, it is much better, and yeilds much better performance.
3. if you can find it disk keeper 2007 has the ability to increase the MFT file on your machine, this will help alot,
4. If you dont search your machine for stuff often, turn off indexing service and help service. also if you are not on a domain, turn off remote regristy in services as well it will help keep agains possible remote attacks if you become infected with a worm.

OK Windows ME, it will not run IE8, IE7.. I cant help you with Opera, since that is Mac owned i wont get involved with that. I will say you can run IE6 with SP1 you can find that here:
[html] http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1E1550CB-5E5D-48F5-B02B-20B602228DE6&displaylang=en [/html]
you can also run Firefox Version 3.0.13
[html] http://www.oldversion.com/download_Mozilla_Firefox_3.0.13.html [/html]

If you need other software it can be found here
www.oldversion.com
This will also have AIM and YIM for ME..
Note you will need to google what versions will work.. or just ask here...
You will get prompted to update both Firefox and IE, but just say no, or disable, since if you update you will have the same issues.

Hope this helps..

Well this one is difficult to tell since i have no idea as to their network structure, but on a guess, i would say it is like this..


You get mail here...
Their is an automated message logger that checks for mail every 15min.
The message is logged, and sent to queue, the que sends the mail,
the mail hits yahoo's server.. the server sees if it matches any of the qualitys of spam, checks your settings, checks the list, and delivers the mail.

Now if you are connected to the mail via outlook add in an additional 5-15min time to check the mail..

Again this is just a hunch since i have no clue what either networks run, or if you use a client..

it has taken me a day to get mail from here, so 45min is not that big of a delay...

Thanks for the question

Thanks for your help ReadyFOrMOre. I appreciate you. I wasn't able to download Firefox version 3.0.13 on windows me but at least I could download 2.0 version. I also downloaded Netscape, so at least I have some other options. I still can't download Internet Explorer version 6 with SP1. I had that version along with Opera 10.01 until I tried to do that update on Opera. I know you don't deal with Opera though. I still get an error message when I try to download the 10.01 version of Opera, the version that I had. I lost IE6 with SP1 when I ran my application recovery disc for windows me. Now when I try to download that version, there's an error message saying that not all of the application downloaded and the browser is one of the things that didn't download. Also, after the application recovery disc ran, I lost my printer connection. When I try to reinstall it, it detects the printer and says the download of the software was a success, but when I go to use it, I get a message saying "printer is not detected, try downloading the software again." This has happened about 3 or 4 times. I think maybe I've picked up some kind of virus. I ran Clamwin and detected a trojan and I quarantined that. I also ran Avast and detected 13 viruses and it deleted them. There's not many options on virus protection for windows me. Any ideas? Do you think maybe it's a virus causing these troubles.

To be completely honest, with ME, their isnt much you can do, your issue with you running the different browsers sounds like you are missing needed MS windows updates, and since it is no longer supported you are really stuck, i assume you can download them off the net somewhere, but i haven't touched ME since 2000.

I would recommend that you download and install Xubuntu
you can get it here www.xubuntu.org it is a free OS, it is supported, and should run on your hardware, however, if you need windows in order to run certain programs, unfortunately you are kind of out of luck.

you will need a CD burner, and will need an ISO burner,
I would suggest downloading and using ActiveISO which if you search on google you will find it, its free..

As for printers, if the printer is the age of the machine, you will need to look for drivers on the net, download, save AS do not download or open from the site, save to a folder, or your desktop, and if needed you may need to get winzip to run the folder, also all-in-one printers will not work, as you will need .net framework for your machine, but you will not be able to get it without windows updates, you can download it but it will most likely not work due to various different updates needed.

Ultimately you need a newer machine, you dont need to buy brand new, you can get a new-er refurb machine from microcenter for about 99 bucks.. with windows xp. www.microcenter.com

AV for old machines.. Stinger from McAfee should work, so should Malwarebytes.
They are both free, neither will do automated scans...
If need be i can give you instructions as to how to make a simple program to automate the scans with malwarebytes.

http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/ubuntu-iso/CDs-Xubuntu/9.10/release/xubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso


Direct link to download Xubuntu


Requirements;

P2 500Mhz
64MB ram
2GB of hard disk space..

Note the Link is for 32Bit Intel/Amd processor machines Only!

Ok, here's one that has me looking at going back to dreamweaver mx...

Expression 2 Web. Why the hell does the program add a <title> tag to the top of any php page on publish? It does not do it being saved, but I'm trying to upload my mysql connection script (that I call from various pages) but by adding the <title> tag, I can no longer set a cookie for the shopping cart I'm writing (because that sends the headers). FTPing the php files separate is getting really irritating.

can it be turned off or am I reloading Dreamweaver?

Andrew,
I will ask my colleague this one, as i am not a programmer, or a website developer, however bare with me about 24hrs on this and i will see if i can get a "how to" on this issue, or if you are gonna have to reload dream weaver.

Thanks for the question..


Andrew,
In the mean time, you might want to go here..
http://social.expression.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/categories
This is a microsoft based forum, that will have better information, also, from what i have read their, it seems that you are not alone in this issue, however they may be better suited to answer your question.
I will still ask my Colleague about this and as soon as i get some kind of response i will post it on here...

ReadyFOrMOre, thanks again for your replies in trying to help me solve my problem. I wish it had been 10 years since I touched windows me! LOL! I'm not sure if I want to get involved with installing a new OS (Xubuntu). I don't have an installation disk for the program I'm using, (windows me) and I'm afraid if I tried something different and didn't like it, then I would be in a mess. What I don't understand is why my PSC was working great a week ago? I have an HP PSC 1315 all-in-one that is probably about a 2004 model. I don't have an installation disk for it either. I got the driver for it at Driversdown.com, (basic driver 4.2.0). My problems all started when I got the message that a newer version of the Opera browser, 10.10 was available. I had 10.01 and should have just stayed with it. The download of the newer version had errors and the 10.01 version has the error message "Failed to load the Unicode compatibility layer OUniAnsiDLL because one of the library files needed to run this application cannot be found." Thinking it might solve my problem, I ran the system application recovery disc for windows me and since then, my PSC hasn't worked and I lost the IE version 6 with SP1 also and trying to download IE again has not been successful. As for virus protection, I looked at downloading malwarwbytes but got the message that it didn't support my system. As for the PSC, I wonder why it would work great a week ago but now my system doesn't detect it?

Well it sucks but your kinda out of luck..
I mean you could spend months trying to find the correct sequence of software that you need to update your machine to the point where things work... The error you got was due to the version of opera, IE as it is native to windows will not allow you to upgrade to a version that isn't supported. Opera as it is native to Apple doesn't know the difference between windows or any other OS. This is why i usually just stick with IE.. Now if you didn't restore i could easily have walked you though repairing the machine, but since you did restore back to factory settings, AKA recovery; you are now missing updates that havent been around in a long while..
You can try to...
Go to google and search installer 2.0 for windows ME, you should get a link for microsoft, you will need to download and install that...
then..
you should be able to install IE6 then IE6 sp1,
You will need to download them first, then install them as windows updates will not work...
which can be found on www.oldversion.com
aside from that, their are no other available updates anymore. I searched around through my Files too, to see if i had them, but i no longer do...

FYI: Unicode compatibility layer OUniAnsiDLL
Unicode to ANSI conversion is for Windows 95/98/ME to run Opera, they took out that support when windows 7 was released, the last version is 10.01 that supports Windows 95-ME.
Nice of them to tell you right?

Andrew,

I want to start with, i don't get involved in any web based development or database issues, the last database i worked with was AS400... As that is the case, i dont want to give you wrong information, but i did speak to my friend.. And this is What is Noted as an issue right now..

(IE8 will not work correctly with Expression 2, you will get pages that state to be compatible but you will see header information and missing links in published pages, this is NOTED by microsoft and they are working on a solution to the issue, The issue has been fixed with Expression Version 3, in publishing, but has not been fixed in IE8 yet... This was Noted as an issue with Windows 7 as IE8 is native to it Microsoft says if you are not running Windows 7 you should downgrade to IE7 till the issue is resolved)

I would try to view your published pages with IE7 or with Firefox to see if you still have the issue...

I dont know if this helps, but my buddy told me that their are to many possibilities to cause your issue, but he said the most recent has to do with Windows 7, or IE8, and i am uncertain as to what you are running, but figured if you are using IE8 you may want to start their to see if you are really having your publishing issue, or if you think you are because of IE8.

As for your other issue, he said that it is possible you are having these issues due to IE8 and how it ties into the OS..

If you are running Windows 7, you may want to contact Microsoft directly as they may be able to provide you with a clean install disk without the IE pre installed, then you can run IE7.

yeah, windows 7 as of last week. I'm thinking about going back to XP though because it is a bit slower on my netbook. I'm still a bit weary to go up to 7 on my desktop because all I use it for is photo work. As well laid-out and streamlined as windows 7 is, i have not found one thing that I cannot live without; however the lumping all my files into a pane in the explorer and 'open' boxes is far more efficient.

it isn't the viewing that has any errors - i've had to do a few coding tweaks because microsoft still will not go to the mozilla standard, but only when I upload it from expression to the web. maybe i'll try it on my xp box and see...