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[wierd]

I am still confused.

Which of these is the case?

1) I need the local windows system administrator password

2) I need a connected network appliance's username and password


I have a solution for the first option. It's called the Offline Windows Password & Registry Editor.  You just promote your limited user to a local admin with it, and bob's your uncle.
https://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Promotion in this manner works very simply-- It adds the limited user to the administrators group, which magically gives it full admin powers, even if you do not know the password for the actual local admin account. This makes it pretty safe to use for such promotion.  It *ALSO* has the power to strip a user account of its password.  Since passwords are stored encrypted in the SAM database, the tool cannot just tell you what the password is if one is set. It CAN delete the password though. Doing so has potential harmful effects if there are encrypted files, because the password is used in the encryption algo, and if you blank it, then files will no longer decrypt.  If you just need to get around the "naughty naughty, you are not an admin!" nag, then promoting your limited user temporarily will get your foot in the door, and you can do what you need and get out. (Run the tool again and de-promote, OR-- while being admin, go to the user-accounts control panel applet, and depromote it back to limited user again. Easy peasy.)


For the latter...

Two possibilities. One more sensible, the other less so.

1) Use the system that remembers what this is to log into the appliance, then SET A NEW PASSWORD.  Write it down. Tape it under the lid of the system chassis for the next monkey. It is likely to be you again. Save yourself the grief.

2)  Try to extract the credentials from the browser.

Internet explorer
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/manage-passwords-internet-explorer-10

Firefox
https://www.howtogeek.com/111555/view-and-delete-stored-passwords-in-firefox/

Chrome
https://www.howtogeek.com/406976/how-to-manage-saved-passwords-in-chrome/

[Akura]

This probably counts more as "shopping" advice than computer advice, but should I wait a month for Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals before purchasing a new graphics card? There's a few other parts I intend to get, but the graphics card is the most expensive of the lot yet the one most needed. I have no idea what, if any, kind of deal to expect. A 20%-off deal might be worth it, but I probably won't want to wait if the discount is less.

[Lord Shonus]

I still have a cyber monday ad from last year. A card advertised then at $499 (US) is the same configuration and core as one that's selling for $599 now - and it isn't top-of-the-line in the midrange category anymore. There's no guarantees, but I'd suggest waiting since you're only a little over a month out. Alternatively, if you live near the right kind of store, you might be able to get a good enough price to justify not waiting.



As an aside, DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER buying a used video card. Any card that was used for cryptomining is going to be essentially burned out (as this puts massive strain on the card), and that's where a ton of the used cards on the market come from.

[BigD145]

Black Friday deals are not deals. Find another time in the year to find things on sale.

[Iduno]

Black Friday deals are not deals. Find another time in the year to find things on sale.

Correct. I've seen prices that are higher "on sale" for Black Friday than normal.


If you're buying fairly high-end, wait until a new "the best" card comes out like people do with buying cars that just became last year's model. Mid-range, I'm not sure if the prices change much, I've not bothered following them long enough to find out.

I usually use the newegg power search to find the one I want, then go find a different website to sell it to me. If you don't know what one of the questions means, just leave it blank. I would start the search with condition: new only, because second-hand electronics have high odds of not working for long/at all. Also, you probably want to read some reviews, to see if the common problems are something you care about or not.

[Lord Shonus]

This is almost certainly unanswerable, but worth a shot.



I've been having a problem lately (Windows 10, over the last two dozen patches or so) where I click through the topmost window. For example, I might be trying to drag an Explorer window to my secondary monitor, only to grab and drag a Chrome tab instead, or try to edit a cell in Excel and wind up typing the value in the middle of a Notepad sentence. This happens with maximized windows, and in the middle of windows, so it isn't likely to be a case of misjudging the boundaries.

[Reelya]

That's a weird problem. Maybe start by turning off all Visual Effects, see if anything is different.

Right-click on a "This PC" or "My Computer" thingy, select Properties, the Advanced tab, then in Performance, then Visual Effects, and Adjust For Best Performance. You may want to turn back on "Smooth Edges of Screen Fonts" however.

I got a new laptop BTW and Windows 10 was sluggish as hell on it. Doing this tip actually made it feel zippy.

[scourge728]

What exactly would happen if I uninstalled "Update for Windows 10 for x64-based systems"? would that break my computer or would it just stop trying to update?

[Reelya]

That's a particular update, it's not the "update service". It's a generic name for an update package, and it'll have a serial number which you can google to find out what's in the bundle.

[wierd]

So... this is a rather specific question that I am unsure if others here can answer or not...

This question concerns MSDOS realmode memory management, which is a voodoo topic by today's standards.


I have this really old Fujitsu Lifebook E2010 that I got for free some years ago.
It is a PIII class machine, with 1GB of ram and a 300ish GB HDD in it.  It has ATI integrated AGP video, and an ESS Audiodrive based sound chip.


I THOUGHT this would make a decent DOS retrogaming system (Dosbox just doesn't cut it for some titles). But there's some issues.

1) Whoever designed this thing mixed an ALI/ULI northbridge with an ATI southbridge.  As such, UMBPCI does not know what to do with it (and performance in XP is... bad.)
2) It has an Option Rom at CC00-CFFF that is a PXE bios, that is totally unnecessary.
3) The PCI chipset wants to hang on to the region between D000-DFFF, for nebulously defined reasons. There is nothing in the adapter space there. I checked.
4) The VGA bios is enormous.  It occupies C000-CC00
5) The system bios is also enormous. It occupies E000-EFFF.

So, the memory map looks a bit like this. (VV= Video Bios, OO=Option Rom, BB=System Bios XX=theoretically free area held tightly by PCI chipset RR=Video RAM)

Code: [Select]

(B000)RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR(BFFF)
(C000)VVVVVVVVVVVVVVOO(CFFF)
(D000)XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX(DFFF)
(E000)BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB(EFFF)

If I include the "monochrome mode video ram area" (B7FF-BFFF), the PXE option ROM area (to forcibly unmap it, since it DOES NOTHING USEFUL!), Use the EMM386 Highscan option and forcibly remap the D000-DFFF area to make the PCI set let it go, I can get something like this (where UU=UMB, PP=Page frame, VV=Video bios, BB=System bios, and RR=video RAM)

At this moment, this is the absolute "BEST" I can squeeze out, and is so far the only way I could fit an EMS page frame in.

Code: [Select]


(B000)RRRRRRRRRRRRUUUU(BFFF)
(C000)VVVVVVVVVVVVVVUU(CFFF)
(D000)PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP(DFFF)
(E000)UUBBBBBBBBBBBBBB(EFFF)


The UMB created in the monochrome video RAM area is barely big enough to hold MSCDEX, and too small to hold OAKCDROM.SYS.
EMM386.exe is required, as the MMU has to get involved to forcibly remap the forced include areas, otherwise a pageframe cannot be created, and the option ROM cannot be disabled. It eats a shitton of conventional memory (3kb. Yes, that really is a lot when you only have 640k total.)
The OAKCDROM.SYS is a hog as well, scarfing down 25k!!
There is ~9kb of free UMB, split between 2 ~4k areas (where the option rom was disabled, and at the top of the BIOS area, freed by the highscan option.)

If I switch to JEMM386.EXE from the freedos project, I should be able to claw a bit of conventional memory back (it's smaller than EMM386), switch to SHUSCDX.EXE instead of MSCDEX I should claw back some of the UMBs created in the monochrome RAM area, and if I switch to Acer's Atapi driver, I might be able to get that to fit in the remaining contiguous UMB along with SHUSCDX.

But now the question--

Does JEMM386 support forcible remapping like EMM386 does?  Without the forced remapping, I can't get the PCI set to let go of the D000-DFFF needed to place the EMS page frame.

[Reelya]

I can't help you on the specifics, but back in the day the very largest amount of free memory I ever got in DOS was from installing QEMM - I got a DOS install to have 634KB free RAM with that once. Using the Microsoft standard issue EMM386 is complete rubbish by comparison.

Hopefully JEMM is as good or better than QEMM, but the old QEMM versions were pretty awesome, and I recall that they still worked with early versions of Windows 95.

EDIT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM#QEMM_product_ranges

QEMM provides up to 635K free conventional memory (RAM under 640K), far better than pure MS-DOS EMM386, FreeDOS JEMM386, UMBPCI and many other memory manager programs. QEMM maximum RAM is 635K free conventional memory with up to 256MB XMS/256MB EMS shared.

[wierd]

Since this is a pure dos 6.22 deploy, it might be doable...

I will investigate.

My ultimate goal with this, is to have the dos 6.22 deploy, a win98se deploy, and an XP deploy all co-existing on the thing-- using a combination of GRUB2+memdisk to load the DOS and win98se volumes (hosted on a ~600mb EXT3 volume), a ~8GB FAT volume shared between the two (where all the games are stored), and an NTFS volume hosting XP.

 
EDIT

Well, JEMM is a wash. It wont forcibly remap the area like EMM386 does.

However, I WAS able to get shsucdx and vide_cdd.sys to fit cleanly in the adapter ram area UMB, and was able to use an old memory tweaker called dosmax to load portions of the dos environment, command interpreter, and kernel into the remaining UMBs.  Ctmouse fits neatly in the small spot where the useless option rom was.

Total conventional memory used: 17k.  That's not shabby at all.

[wierd]

Does anyone know how to make windows 10 **STOP** recinding my purposefully set "limit memory" advanced boot option?

This is the 4th time i have fixed the "no sound!" problem on my cousin's win 10 laptop.

the connexant audio codec has a known need for virtual addresses above 3gb in the memory space and if ram is there it does not work.  Windows keeps forgetting that i limited it to a 3gb memory space and did so for a fucking reason.  This is getting old. Is there a more forceful way to assert this restriction?

[King Zultan]

Does any one know how to completely disable HTML5 on Firefox, that doesn't involve downloading any programs?

[wierd]

https://superuser.com/questions/670214/how-can-i-disable-html5-content-in-popular-browsers-like-firefox-and-chrome

??


Basically, a combination of setting an advanced option in about:config, and some noscript rules?