You haven't seen the word users at my place of work. Page breaks are some form of obscene devil-magic. I was recently asked by a user something like "How many blank lines should I have at the top of a page" (paraphrased, but that's the gist of it). I responded that in the UK and indeed most of Europe, there's a de-facto standard of a 2.5cm top margin. They came back with "how do I check that". It's on days like this I really regret not following my childhood dream to be an astronaut.

Replying logged in this time. The photocard needs to be renewed every ten years, but there is no such restriction on the old-format paper license. I've just checked mine (which normally resides in a locked filing cabinet) and it's good for another 30 years or so. I'm not likely to change my name, so change of address is the only likely thing. I've lived in my current place for about thirteen years though, and I'm in no hurry to move.

Replying logged in this time. Mortgage is about £20k remaining on a property that's worth about £70k. While it's not a palace by any stretch of the imagination (two bedroom terrace) it's certainly big enough for me. Combine this with the rock-bottom interest rates in the UK at the moment, and servicing that £20k costs close to nothing.

Well, you could look at Fallout 3 - there's a fair bit of the style that looks astonishingly similar to Bioshock... just look at the "Please Stand By" TV display for example.

[Cocking a snook at the blatant neophilia of the list]

My ten year-old 21" CRT does at least 1024 x 768 @ 120 Hz. I think it drops down to 100HZ for 1280 x 1024 though, but I'd still be willing to give it a shot.

It's a pity that you can't buy decent CRTs any more, as I've yet to see a TFT that comes close to the performance of my current monitor. I'll be forced to change when it dies, but until then you can pry it out of my cold dead hands.

"It took me nearly half an hour to realize that XP Home doesn't let you change permissions on files."

Really? I though you could get at NTFS permissions using (Explorer) Tools-> Folder options -> uncheck "Use simple file sharing".

If not, you still have CACLS if you're prepared to get your fingers dirty.

As well as that, how about setting the default admin account so you have no sounds, no desktop wallpaper, no animated cursors - none of the flashy crap that users seem intent on encumbering themselves with. You want the bling == run as a limited user.

However this would require limiting the capabilities of the Admin account, and this is something I'm not entirely happy with (as, admin *should* be equivalent to god mode).

I've been installing Foxit on new machines for about nine months now, and have a lot of love for it. It was the retarded reboot-on-upgrade policy of Adobe that particularly ticked me off (load times notwithstanding).

I noticed earlier today that V3 is out, will be giving this a trial run sometime over the next couple of weeks. Only thing I'm hoping for is that they've improved the process for unattended setups, as this is the only thing that bugs me at the moment.

You'd *better* believe The Man.

An oldie but a goodie.

unless the submitter has two identical machines. Reason being, if the hard disc is swapped into another system there's a fair chance the wrong chipset driver will be provided and the compisite machine will bluescreen.

Even worse would be if the machine starts correctly and then installs its own chipset driver causing bluescreens when the hard disc is swapped back.

My first port of call, before the memory diagnostic and before running SMART tests would be the event log. It's neglected far too much for my liking.

I'd follow that with perfmon, and then offline AV scanners / liveCDs. Then I'd start thinking about burn-in testing and swapping out hardware.

Had a friend's machine in over the holidays. It would boot, get to Welcome screen, then after logging in machine would log straight back out. You weren't able to interact with the system at all.

Tried safe mode - same symptoms. Therefore I was of the opinion that it was a driver, winlogon-hooked DLL or a service that was tagged to run in safe mode.

The WinPE preinstallation environment allowed me to find/remove some of the offending parties, but still no dice. Snagged UBCD and pulled updates for all of the antivirus / antispyware tools.

Booting to UBCD got _some_ results... Spybot found a large number of nasties (including some identified as Antivirus 2009); A-Squared found some, as did AVG. Even after running all of them, the actual root cause persisted. Unfortunately, SysInternals autoruns wasn't much help, as it retrieves startup info from the currently running system, rather than of the inactive o/s (anyone know whether there's a tool that'll do this?)

Ultimately I waved the white flag and pulled out a repair install of Windows to bring the machine back up, at which point I found the culprit - a process called winlogon.exe in \windows rather than \windows\system32 and invoked via the winlogon registry keys. I kicked myself for not spotting this, but also note that none of the scanners in the UBCD (updated as of 28 Dec) were capable of identifying this as foul.

The offending file has been sent to various AV vendors in the hope that this one can be spotted in future.

To be fair, when I receive a really asinine query - one that the user should have been able to solve themselves - I take great pleasure in using either F1 or Google with a couple of keywords that said user has used describing the problem, and - cor, look at that - problem's solved. I used to think that this would give end-users a cluestick to F1 / search the internet before calling. My optimism was somewhat unfounded.

At our place inline images are permitted. Still, very useful information to have (I've not played with Exchange myself yet). Thanks for the pointer.

In my experience, it's never a collection of screenshots. It's one screenshot. Usually of the entire screen, not the actual error window.

This is sent via an e-mail client. Since we're in MS land (os/x at a pinch) as evidenced by the use of "Word", then it's a pretty safe bet that whatever e-mail app the user has will support inline images. Instead, they've made you (1) open a word processor to display the image and (2) muck about with zoom settings so you can actually read the damn thing.

Also, what you generally find is that the problem description is in the e-mail, not in the document, so you're also having to juggle windows to work out what's going on.

This happens so often where I work that it just isn't funny anymore.