All we can say is THANK YOU for a great website, for your leadership, and for all the great stories! The world is your oyster.

Although they may not officially encourage this kind of use, the Toyota Prius smoothly goes from forward to zero and reverse drive: Just throw the car into REVERSE while powering it forward. I've tried this up to about 10pmh or so,and it runs its planetary-gear setup through the motions like silk. I haven't had the nerve to do this at higher speeds. BTW, going into PARK while moving at highway speed just causes a motor-controlled slow down followed by neutral. This may be the easiest way to get around the "stuck-accelerator" problem (which I have experienced, very scary indeed).

Professor Richard Schmidt says user reports are often unreliable: 'When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong." My '08 Prious has had three "surge" events. I was able to stop all three times. In the most serious case there was a group of people standing about 20 feet in front of me, and my car stated surging towards them. I jammed my foot on the brake but was not winning the battle. Normally the Prius brakes are very sensitive and do not have to be pressed hard, so I was using my normal braking force. Quickly becoming alarmed, I pushed harder on the brake, with some effect, but still fighting the electric motor and the gas engine trying to power the car forward. I had to push harder than I ever recall doing to stop the car. At that point engine activity ceased. The people, now about 10-feet away, looked at me like I was an idiot, gunning my car toward them! I was just glad to be stopped. I challenge professor Richard Schmidt: If my foot was on the accelerator, how did I in fact stop? The Toyota people have told me they'll be reflashing the processors of all the Prius cars in a few months so any brake signal will shut down the engine. Why wasn't that done from the beginning? But anyway, I'm looking forward to the modification. In the meantime, I'm practicing quickly hitting the Neutral gear lever.

But.... Windows 7 does seem to use too much memory, not as much as the O.P. claimed, perhaps, but more than Windows XP used. My system rapidly ramps up to the 75 to 80% level, which is a bit surprising. I installed 32-bit Windows 7, whereas I see most of the commercial offerings are the 64-bit version. The latter can utilize more than 3GB of memory, and arguably, may be happier with smaller amounts of ram than 32-bit installs.

I for one am delighted to hear this news, and appreciate the posting by Odoital. The wags here who have trash-talked assembly-language programming are not fans of small machines, doing small, dedicated and often time-constrained tasks on low-performance x86 processors. The right tool for the right job. There are places where MASM was the right tool, then WASM, and now JWASM. As a hardware engineer, I run into these places all the time. For example, say I want to take an inexpensive processor and turn it into 16-unit PWM (pulse-width-modulation) engine. The PWM resolution and frequency I can achieve will directly related to how tightly I can predict and control the processor, instruction by instruction.