packman

Sampson, thanks for that but I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. I don't want a plug-in for WMP, I simply want to REMOVE the Roxio burner that's embedded in WMP9, because, as I see it, you must never have installed a second burner when you already have Nero. The two will conflict.

What do you mean by 'display glitches', Philipp? With Firefox, I'll try clearing the cache, as you've suggested, and then I'll get back to this forum again. Personally, I preferred things as they were before you embarked on this whole recent change, as your webpage still occupies only about half my screen width, in both IE and Firefox. Yeh, I noticed Firefox 1.5 came out today, and I've downloaded it, but I'll not install it until I hear feedback from real usage. Experience has demonstrated that bugs in it will likely remain or new ones get introduced. I'll maybe send you my latest IE and Firefox screenshots, Philipp. Bear in mind I'm using Win2k and v1.0.4 Firefox.

Philipp, Sorry for any delay. Yes, using the Bold option vastly improves the readability, although I'd say that pushing up the font size by another point or two is desirable. Also, I'd like to make it clear that this vast improvement is only sensibly viewable in Internet Explorer on my dual-browser setup. In Firefox, for example, the entire layout of your homepage gets moved around and, as before, long strips get generated, with lots of blank areas around. I've tried putting Firefox's default fonts back, but that's made no difference. I think maybe the default fonts and default sizes don't actually return when you uncheck 'Use My Fonts' in Firefox. At present, in both IE and Firefox, your webpage now, width-wise, occupies 10" of my available 16", which is certainly an improvement but, for my 20" monitor, is still wasting a lot of screen space. Do keep trying to improve it. Check how things work out, using the Firefox browser (as well as IE), if you can. Then, if you settle on a good compromise, you'll be able to tell me which default fonts and sizes to use in Firefox. Note that, in Firefox, I set my minimum fontsize to 15. Of course, you might very well be able to reach a very good compromise on this. However, in order for me to continue using Firefox for other completely different websites, I'll still need to use my customised Firefox font settings. As I said at the start of this whole discussion, the fault lies with all those other webpage designers; you're the first to take this seriously (and I applaud you for that). Your current provision of an Appearance option on the homepage is a good idea.

Are there any known issues of Windows Media Player 9, under Windows 2000 SP4? I've just updated my WMP v7.1 to v9.00.00.2980 and I'm blowed if I can get the Radio Tuner to work at all; it's completely dead. It worked fine in v7.1. Am I missing a trick somewhere? Does it require a plug-in before it'll work, now? I've been through Options, so all the appropriate file formats are chosen. I'm on a broadband connection and am not offline. So, why doesn't the Radio Tuner open? It usually then displays music categories and then stations playing those, but with Radio Tuner selected, all I get is some brief text on the screen from Microsoft and one or two facile control buttons at the top, but that's it. One other thing I've noticed is that WMP now has Roxio CD Burner built into it. I normally use Nero for CD burning and want to continue with Nero, yet you shouldn't have a second burner installed when using Nero, otherwise they'll conflict. In v7.1 of WMP, you could deselect Adaptec CD Burner but I've seen no evidence that you can do the same here. What do you advise I do?

Adding windowsmedia.com as a specific trusted site hasn't helped at all. In fact, even temporarily disabling the firewall on my machine has had no effect on this problem - the Radio Tuner is still not responding at all. Cookies are normally enabled on my machine. Any further suggestions would be welcomed.

Right, I ran WMP again and it's now updated to v9.00.00.3250. That's as far as it'll go, under my Win2KSP4. That now fits with what some of you say. Thanks. I still can't figure out why the Radio Tuner in WMP doesn't work, though. It could possibly be a cookies problem or a firewall problem, but exactly what I need to do to correct it isn't at all clear.

No, "windowsmedia.com" isn't specifically listed in my firewall as a trusted site, but winplayer.exe is. With v7.1 of WMP, I didn't need to set windowsmedia.com as a trusted site in order to use Radio Tuner. If I were to now try that, though, would there be any risk of some other site masquerading as windowsmedia.com? And here's a couple of riders. In the setup for WMP9, I unchecked just about every option involved with licensing, MP3 downloading, etc, though nothing concerned with streamed radio. Perhaps that wasn't wise. I've no idea how to get back to those options again. Another thing that's puzzling me is that, according to Microsoft, WMP10 is the latest version. So, is mine v9 or v10. When I click on Update, it tells me my version is now the latest. I've actually got v9.00.00.3250, not 2980 as I reported. Or can only v10 work under WinXP?

Ok. Thanks, Philipp.

Philipp, The new layout is still a 6-inch strip, on my screen.

That's good news. I hope you're right, Philipp. Designing webpages that suit everyone is not an easy task.

Phiipp, I'm using a 20" LCD display with a native DVI-D resolution of 1600 X 1200. Pitch is 0.25mm. I cannot come down from that resolution, unless I recable and quit DVI digital mode, which would be stupid to do. I can't alter Cleartype rendering, as I use Win2K and there's no such facility in that. I can make a screenshot but if it's of my entire display size, it'll be a big file. You'd need to tell me how to place the file into an ntcompatible forum contribution like this, as well. 1280 X 1024 might be better, but it'll be a case of you doing it and then me seeing the result. Bear in mind that my screenshot will show the special font I've chosen to get around the Firefox font problem.

Philipp, Just to repeat what I contributed earlier: your webpages are now just a 6" strip in the middle of my screen (20" screen, 1600 X 1200 native resolution). Not only do I find this now a gross waste of screen real estate but it's terribly annoying, as I now have to scroll all the time to see anything. Before, your webpages nicely filled my browser window. I normally use Firefox but, annoyingly, the Mozilla webpages people refuse to use Arial Bold, so some time ago I had to customise my Firefox with a more easily readable font, one that's a Heavy or Bold type. It's far from perfect, though, and I often get parts of the webpages obscured. As for ntcompatible now, well, in Internet Explorer, it's still a 6" strip of course. Not sure what the default font is you're using now but it's okay, except that, again, on a screen like mine, it's difficult to see because there's so little contrast with the background and surroundings. As I said before, it really needs a Bold font instead, not necessarily a completely different font but just the Bold version. Okay, that'd use up a bit more space proportionately, but not that much. I'm sorry to say that I think what you've done with the website has, for the most part, been a backward step. I hope you'll reconsider and make some changes for the better.

Philipp, It's not that I'm asking you to do anything different. Before, your pages quite naturally filled my screen, so your coding was therefore optimum for that. You've now moved away from that. One other thing that has bugged me about certain browsers and certain websites (but not yours, really) is the use of small, light fonts (eg. Arial). Whilst Arial is universal and is appropriate in many cases, what most webpage designers don't seem to realise is that Arial becomes almost invisible on 20" screens (unless you've got 20-20 vision). In other words, it appears very thin and wirey with resolutions of, say, 1600 X 1200. That said, NT Compatible (as was)was customisable, in conjunction with my Firefox browser, to a different basic font, one which though contains a lot of serifs, is much easier to read. That seems to be retained in the latest incarnation, thank goodness. I know this isn't always easy to do and can risk monotony, but I would advocate the use of Arial Bold (yes, Bold) wherever possible, at not less than 13-point.

For me, the new layout of NT Compatible seems to be a backward step. I use a 20" monitor, with fixed 1600 X 1200 resolution and whereas before your webpages nicely filled my screen, all I get now is a narrow strip down the middle. It's just wasting screen space and causing me to have to scroll more. The background colours are somewhat depressing. Whilst the website perhaps did perhaps need revamping, you've now fallen into the trap that so many other websites have, namely designing the webpages to suit small screens only. Think again, because the biggest uptake in new screens these days is for 19".

How safe is it to leave instances of Java and ActiveX in place? Microsoft Antispyware Beta (MSAS)lists eight instances of ActiveX, for instance, the vast majority of which I recognise and some that I definitely downloaded from trusted sites in order to run specific tests on my PC. MSAS regards all of them as benign at present, though it doesn't recognise Direct Animation Java Classes. Anyone know much about Java and ActiveX?

Amiralda, Not using any antivirus software? Are you having a laugh, or something? If you're truly not using any antivirus software, you're extremely foolish. Not only will your computer have probably already been infected by one or more viruses but also you may very well have caused hundreds, if not thousands, of other people's computers to be infected as well. Do get and install some antivirus software AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. There's no excuse for not having any. As for Drive Image 5.0, I wish you luck with it. I used to use Drive Image 5.0 but dumped it after struggling with it for about two years. It simply wasn't reliable. 50% of the time it either didn't properly create the image or it didn't restore it. I lost my root partition many a time, through using that awful bit of software. These days, I use Norton Ghost 2003. It's infinitely better than Drive Image 5.0. It's easier to use and is far more reliable. Do yourself a favour - dump Drive Image.

I've just done a clone of my main hard drive, using Ghost 2003. It appears to be successful, in that I've tested the destination drive, to see if it boots. But the bootup, at one particular point, is extremely slow, taking about FIVE times as long as on the original drive. Has anyone who's used Ghost ever encountered this and, if so, can you explain the cause and possibly give a remedy? The operating system is Win2K and the slowness occurs in the very first screen of the booting up into Windows, namely the one where it says "Starting Up .....Windows 2000 Professional". It's the screen where you see the blue progress bar. Subsequent phases of the bootup suffer no slowness. I'm wondering if perhaps I still haven't done the cloning properly. A number of factors applied during the cloning:- 1)In PC-DOS, I ignored Options (I think one option gets set by default). 2)I cloned with the destination drive on the Primary SLAVE channel. Subsequent testing of that drive, on its own of course, was also done on that SLAVE channel. 3)As the destination drive started to boot into Windows, my System BIOS generated a boot sector alarm and required me to acknowledge a change there.It didn't say what the change would be, though. 4)Prior to cloning, I'd added a 'write signature' to the destination drive, which was a brand new drive, identical in every way to the original. This is a Microsoft requirement and programs in Windows won't recognise drives until the signature has been applied. But presumably, this got overwritten during the cloning? 5) When the destination finished booting into Windows, Windows gave a message saying that not all hardware had yet been installed and that I should restart the PC for that to happen. I did that. Why should it have needed this, though? 6)The cloning overwrote existing partitions on the destination, creating some unallocated space where none existed before (this was required by me). 7) Presumably, other changes got made to the MBR? So, has anyone any idea as to why the bootup spends so long now in that particular screen I've mentioned? It's a wait of some 30 secs - 1 minute. Does the MBR, or the partition tables, now not reflect the true layout of files on the destination drive?

I've found the answer! When I switched the destination (with the cloned contents in it) to the Primary MASTER IDE connection, it booted at normal rate. There's clearly something about Windows that means that if you run a drive on the Primary SLAVE channel that was, in effect, previously on the Primary MASTER, it'll spend much more time booting up. As for the hardware error message I got when the destination drive first booted to the Desktop, this is a valid and genuine message. It's caused by a disparity that Windows finds between the serial no. and firmware of the respective drives. Once the PC is restarted, this message never appears again. And as for the 'write signature', I doubt whether that's necessary when you're cloning a drive, as the cloning is done completely in PC-DOS.

I've been using Ghost 2003 for a year or two but have only recently tried using it to clone one whole hard drive to another, on the same PC. Both hard drives were of the same manufacture and identical in capacity. The partitions on the source disk numbered four and I'd deliberately left some 500MB of unallocated space on it. I used the Windows mode for doing the cloning, where you start the process off in Windows, Ghost then exits to PC-DOS and does the cloning, then jumps back into Windows when it's finished. I was careful to turn off and remove the destination drive (fitted in the same PC) before the PC actually had a chance to boot back into Windows. You should, of course, never allow this to happen. I've subsequently managed to check that the destination drive did get properly written. The destination drive does boot into Windows and mostly looks okay. However, I found that Ghost didn't copy the partitions properly. It didn't accurately reproduce the sizes of the partitions and, in particular, didn't reproduce the unallocated area and instead spread it amongst the partitions. I'm planning to re-clone the drives. To do that, I'd need to work wholly in PC-DOS, of course. But I'm wondering if I'll get the same result. If you go to Symantec's website and look for FAQs on cloning with Ghost 2003, there's an article there entitled "How to Perform a Disk-to-Disk Clone" and, in it, it says "The entire contents of the source disk, including partitions and unpartitioned space, overwrite the entire contents of the destination disk". So, is this statement correct, or have those of us with Ghost been seriously misled? Does Ghost work more accurately when you use it entirely in the PC-DOS environment?

Another factor might be the Options I chose, in PC-DOS. In fact, I chose none, apart from the one default choice that was there. Frankly, I didn't understand that particular option, so just accepted the default.

I'm still wondering why Windows takes much longer to boot up now, using the cloned drive. Anyone got any ideas? The bootup spends around FIVE times as long in the "Starting Up...Windows 2000 Professional" screen than with the original drive. About a minute, I'd say. In hardware terms, the drives are identical. A number of factors came into play when doing the cloning, and I wonder whether one or more of them might be responsible for the slowness. For instance: 1) In order for Windows (and therefore any programs under Windows) to recognise the existence of a new drive, I had to run the Win2K "Write Signature and Upgrade Disk" wizard, prior to running Ghost (see Microsoft article 837160). Just the write signature bit, you understand. I don't recall ever needing to do that with the original drive and is presumably a more recent feature of Win2K. But presumably that signature would have been overwritten, anyway, when I finally did the cloning? 2) Throughout the cloning process, and later when testing the destination drive on its own to see if it booted into Windows, the drive was used on the Primary SLAVE IDE channel. Would that be why the bootup is so slow? 3) When first booting with the destination drive that'd now had the complete copy of the original disk on it, my System BIOS generated an alarm signal to say that the boot sector information would be changed. Has this got anything to do with it? Remember, it's currently on the SLAVE channel and is on its own. 4) Generally, could there have been some other changes made to the MBR that could now account for the slowness? 5) I also observed that, once the destination drive had first booted fully into Windows, it showed a Windows message indicating that not all hardware information had been loaded and that I needed to restart the PC again. Obviously, I did that. But why was there a need for that? Surely, if this was a straight copy of the other drive, the hardware drivers should have been copied across as already embedded? 6) Has the slowness got anything to do with the fact that a specific portion of the destination disk was left as deleted by the cloning process (enabling a 500MB unallocated space)? My guess is that when existing partitions are deleted under these sorts of circumstances, the deletion is done by raising a flag, rather than by 0s been written over the partitions. Obviously, if later I had to use the destination disk in earnest, I'd bring it out of storage, change its jumpering to Master and then fit it in place of the existing drive. In other words, normally, I would use the drive on the Primary MASTER channel.

I might add that I tested the clone (the destination drive) as a lone SLAVE on the Primary IDE interface. Could that, somehow, account for the slowness in booting up? All hard drive settings in the BIOS were left at Auto.

Hi all, I've now managed to do a fully-accurate clone of my main hard drive. NTFS partitions, BTW. The secret WAS indeed to do it entirely within PC-DOS. It seems that, if you run it from Windows instead, the cloning process not only approximates the partition sizes but also fills the entire destination drive with partitions, irrespective of anything different you might want.When you run entirely in PC-DOS, you're allowed to change the partition sizes and, for guidance, it even reminds you of the existing partition sizes on the source. Another distinct advantage I've found of the PC-DOS method is that, unlike in the Windows method, you're given the opportunity to quit from PC-DOS and to turn off the computer and remove the destination drive. You might know that, if you allow both drives to attempt to boot back into Windows on the same machine, the system will be confused and you're likely to corrupt the operating systems on the two drives. I've tested the destination drive since doing it, of course, and it boots okay and programs open okay, etc. Actually, during the first post-cloning bootup of the destination drive, my System BIOS flashed up a warning message about boot sector information being changed and asked my approval for that. There was, of course, no option but to agree to that. Subsequently, I've found that in the initial part of the bootup into Windows - the very first screen that says "Starting Up .... Windows 2000 Professional" and which has the blue progress bar - it spends far, far longer there than is the case in the source drive. Any idea why? Is it something to do with the MBR having been changed? Is this perhaps one other side-effect in Ghost of which we're unaware? Would it have been better for me to have written 0s all over the destination drive first, as it had the wrongly-cloned partitions on it before I re-cloned?

In theory, I see no reason why the cloning process should turn out to be any different if you start off in Windows, rather than in PC-DOS. But yes, I intend re-running it entirely in PC-DOS, and looking to see if there's an option for sizing the partitions.

Yes, it's possible that the problem's been caused entirely by my starting off the cloning operation in Windows. That's nonetheless supposed to be a perfectly valid method. I've the intention now to try it entirely in PC-DOS (I'm using Win2K which doesn't have DOS, so Ghost creates a PC-DOS environment instead). However, from what I hear, Ghost will still try to fill up the destination drive and will therefore automatically calculate and apply different (though proportionately-related) partition sizes. In the Ghost manual, however, there's fleeting mention of you being allowed to re-size partitions on the destination, when running in PC-DOS. I suppose all I can do is experiment. It's a pity Symantec haven't been clearer about this. BTW, no pre-formatting was necessary and I guess it'll be the same when working 100% in PC-DOS. If I get the same result, I think I'll have to clone partition-by-partition instead, though I reckon I'll have to delete all existing partitions on the destination drive beforehand, for that to work. Otherwise, I can't see how I can end up with an EXACT copy, including the 500MB of unallocated space (unless PC-DOS is extraordinarily clever and can pre-delete the partitions).