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I got a call from a friend at a University. Their network had some breaches happen, and some fairly sensitive information was stolen.

So off I go to do a little BackTrack auditing.

Not only was the compromised machine set as the DMZ - it was running PRE-SP1 XP.

The IT Head's explanation? He wanted to run a game server on a MISSION-CRITICAL SYSTEM, and service pack updates slowed the computer down.

Bear in mind this young fucktard is 20 AND STILL ATTENDING CLASS.

You'd best believe I'm getting him fired from his position.

Please keep in mind that most consumer cases are not built for a huge tank of a card that's nearly as long as a standard-sized tower. Some of us actually do have our hard drives up front in the middle of the case, right in front of the PCI-E slot. Having to take a Dremel to the inside of my case was NOT what I had in mind for an "Ultimate Experience."

I'm curious to know why I was added to your list. What made you smile and go *click* add to list?

I have a nice shiny new HP Pavilion DV9825nr laptop. It came with Vista. As we all know, Vista is horrible.

Vista died in two days, leaving me with a brick. Ubuntu was an option, but I wanted XP back. So I go about with slipstreaming SATA and network drivers to install XP. I get XP installed, everything runs, except video.

Say that again? Video not working? It's an NVIDIA 8600M GS. All of NVIDIA's cards use pretty much the exact same driver architecture, so newer driver revisions support newer and older cards.

Apparently, NVIDIA wanted to promote the 8600M GS as Vista-only. They never included an entry in the .INF file so the card could install under Windows XP. After a little figuring out how .INF files were created, I modified the INF included with the GeForceGo drivers and the card installed and ran perfectly under XP

With this sort of laziness spotted, I wonder if NVIDIA has any real plans for the future. To be so lazy as to exclude your product from a still-viable market is marketing nonsense. Has marketing taken over NVIDIA or have the developers and engineers gotten too lazy?

This is sad. I knew vista was bad, but this was just off the wall nuts. I bought a new laptop from HP (DV9825nr) and loaded it for bear. Came with Vista, which I knew I'd need because I had 4 GB of RAM plugged in.

Anyways, all is fine and dandy for the first two days, then it just stops working. Vista stop. Any other OS I can liveboot works.

So I start making a slipstream XP install with SATA and network. Everything goes well until...

The onboard 8600M GS is supposedly Vista-only.

Which means it's time to hack up some .INF files, because we all know nVidia uses a unified driver architecture.

Finally, all if working, and running XP.

I never felt so happy to get rid of vista. I gave it a chance, no more.