Posts by Joseph Chavez7

Right here you can find more detailed instructions on how to build extensions from scratch, though honestly, it’s much smarter to just repurpose one that already exists. You just download the extension manually, and since an xpi file is really just a standard archive, you can easily pop it open using WinZip. If you feel like diving into the guts of it, go for it...

The current setup is fine as it stands, though I honestly think we’d benefit from including all the subforums in the view. It would also be a massive improvement if we had a "customize" option so users could actually decide for themselves what they want to see and what they don't. And, just to echo what David Price5 was saying, having the forums positioned above everything else would make much more sense.

urbantiger9 said:Yeah, and I also need to convert some MP4 files into MP3 format. Is that actually doable?

Of course it is, assuming you use something like Handbrake or one of those other similar tools out there...

urbantiger9 said:I have no idea when I'll be able to play this DVD from my computer, and frankly, I haven't the slightest clue how to even identify what kind of file format we're dealing with here.

Just do a quick search online or check the manual for whatever DVD recorder you used to burn the disc to see exactly what format it was saved in.

Dell said:Look, debating what’s actually considered "cool" these days is a rabbit hole I’m not interested in diving into, but I can say with absolute certainty that this particular option is solid, free, and won't turn your computer into a paperweight:

McAfee Personal edition Classic

As far as operating systems go, if you're running a beast of a rig packed with massive amounts of RAM and lightning-fast drives—especially if you've moved up to Windows Vista—you might have options, but otherwise, Windows XP service pack 2 still gets the job done perfectly fine...

👍

I’m actually a fan! 👍 👍 👍 👍 👍

😘

Regarding Guard Antivirus, since I'm running an older machine, I can confidently say it doesn't drag my system down at all. The performance difference between running it and not running it is practically nonexistent.

electriccyclist15 said:Of course, the film is just this supreme piece of postmodern sci-fi absurdity. I mean, seriously, what other movie lets you watch a blue alien deliver a performance so inspired it basically functions as a techno-opera? :-)

It’s a total masterpiece, plain and simple. For me, it stands as one of those truly high-quality films—it's just brilliant...

ironranger61 said:Man, I’m running into a headache too, though this time it involves my Windows XP setup.

I had this Windows XP + SP2 disc that worked perfectly—it would boot up without a hitch, just smooth sailing. That was until I, in a moment of pure stupidity, lent it to a buddy of mine without making a backup, and then he went and handed it off to someone else. Long story short, when the disc finally made its way back to me, it was absolutely trashed and covered in scratches.

So, I tried to play it smart by manually copying every single folder over to my hard drive, and somehow I managed to grab almost everything, except for a few files related to Chinese language support. I figured, honestly, who cares about that? I burned everything back onto a fresh disc, but now, when I try to actually boot from it—and I mean a true boot at startup, not just some Windows autorun nonsense—absolutely nothing happens.

Is it possible that the boot sector, or whatever you call that specific part, somehow got wiped out during the process?

http://www.reddit.com/r/tech #23

Just go through everywhere it mentions 64BIT and swap that out for SP2 in your case, and you should be good to go....

Sarah Hughes97 said:I was seeing about 16GB when I gave it a shot

Exactly, we're talking about a beta version here, and once the full release drops along with all those inevitable updates...
...you’re easily looking at 20GB. 😉

Sarah Hughes97 said:you're going to need

about 16GB of space since it eats up that much
plus you'll probably need around 600MB of RAM just to get things running smoothly

.. word on the street is you might actually need 20 GB

crimsongull3 said:I’m sticking with XP since I already shelled out the cash for it...

It gets the job done.

When the day finally comes for me to pick up a new machine, Windows Vista will be pre-installed on it anyway, so there's really no sense in rushing headlong into the future before we actually have to.

Exactly! 👍

It was a .zip file, yeah, but I already touched on the massive difference between zip and rar archives. Even though zip encryption algorithms are significantly weaker, it’s clearly possible to extract them under Unix without the system ever asking for a password. Now, whether the same thing applies to rar archives... I honestly have no clue. Go ahead and try extracting a password-protected .rar file the same way just so we can see if the result is identical.

Even if it does work, there is almost zero chance I'm installing Unix just to deal with one single protected rar file, regardless of whether it bypasses the password prompt or not...
But thanks anyway for the heads-up.. 😉

Unknown said:Just install Unix and you can easily unpack any zip or rar file without needing a password before moving it back over to macOS😉

Oh, sure, please elaborate on that logic because I’m clearly missing something here—what on earth does using Unix have to do with bypassing a password in WinRAR ..?!?

No, I didn't mix things up... the machine is about five years old, though it’s in pretty great shape—well, more or less, mostly. But that isn't really the point here since we're talking about WinZip 10.0; back when you were dealing with WinZip 3.0 through 2.8, you could hammer through thousands of passwords every single second, whereas the versions from 2.9 to 3.x utilize much beefier encryption, which tanks the speed down to just a handful of passwords per second. At that point, a brute-force attack is basically a fool's errand, leaving a dictionary attack as your only remotely useful option. Then there's the whole issue with .zip archives where traditional PKWARE encryption lets you blast through about 15 million passwords a second, yet once you hit that newer "Advanced encryption technology" found in WinZip 9.0 through 10, that speed plummets to a measly few hundred passwords per second.

It totally makes sense that it took you 45 to 50 days if you set a password that was only 5 or 6 characters long, but honestly, what happens when someone uses 15 or 20 characters, or a complex mix of letters, numbers, and symbols?

That was exactly my situation... downloaded a RAR file from a torrent, and naturally, my first instinct was to try guessing the password, which obviously went nowhere. After wasting a chunk of time messing around with a program like that, I just gave up, which is why I'm asking if anyone actually knows of a little utility that can just bypass the password entirely or swap it out for a new one, just in case I run into this exact headache again. Besides, 40 to 50 days is a massive amount of time, especially if you've downloaded a 30 MB .rar file; you're probably not going to sit around waiting for nearly two months when you could just grab the same file from a different source, right?
It would be absolutely fantastic to have a tool that just sidesteps the security, so next time you stumble upon a protected file you can just think, "...not this again..." then click, click, and boom—the password is gone, particularly when you're dealing with massive files. 😉

Has anyone here ever actually wrestled with protected .rar files? I’m talking about those ones where a password has been slapped on them, making extraction an absolute impossibility without the right credentials.

Naturally, I’ve already wasted my time messing around with tools like Passware and its various clones, but the real headache is that WinZip uses such incredibly beefy encryption that these recovery programs just crawl along at a snail's pace. It’s frankly ridiculous; the software manages to check maybe ten or fifteen passwords every single second, so when you look at the "time left" estimate, it’ll tell you something absurd like 7y 210d 16h... to complete, or if you're lucky, it just gives up and says "too many."

So, my actual question is whether anyone out there knows of a faster, more efficient way to crack a lost or forgotten password on a .rar file? Or perhaps someone knows of a specific program that can somehow bypass the password prompt entirely during extraction, or maybe even lets you just swap the old password for a new one of your choosing... something along those lines?

Sarah Hughes97 said:I'm running into a bit of a wall here and I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. I managed to download Windows XP Pro 64-bit edition, but I have absolutely no clue how to make it a bootable disc so I can install it via DOS or through Windows XP SP2. I've got an UltraISO file, but honestly, that program is a total disaster and I can't make heads or tails of it.

Look, since you’ve already gone ahead and grabbed Windows XP Pro 64-bit and have the files sitting on your machine, you might as well just burn it to a disc and make it bootable all in one go.
All you really need is a blank CD, an image file that actually supports booting, and Nero.

Before you even start, just do yourself a favor and organize things; create a folder named "xp" on your C: drive, then put two subfolders inside: one called "xp-64-bit" where you'll dump the Windows files you downloaded, and another called "xp image file" where you'll save the actual boot image.

First things first, let's deal with that image file. Pop in a Windows XP SP2 disc—it has to be a Bootable CD—then open up ISO Buster (install it if you haven't yet), find the "Bootable CD" section on the left, right-click "Microsoft Corporation.img" on the right, and hit Extract. Save that directly into your "xp image file" folder.

Fire up Nero, and once that New Compilation window pops up, select CD-ROM (Boot) on the left side. On the right, under the "boot" section, select Image file, click browse, and grab that Microsoft Corporation.img file you just extracted to your folder.

Check the box for "Enable expert settings..." and then set it like this:
Kind of emulation: No Emulation
Boot message Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit
Load segment of sectors (hex!): 07C0
Number of loaded sectors: 4

Go to the ISO tab.
Set Data mode to mode 1, File system to ISO 9660 + Joliet, File name length to Max. of 11 = 8 + 3 chars, Character set to ISO 9660, and for Relax restrictions, just check every single box available.

Move to the Label Tab.
Set it to Automatic (Name: Microsoft Windows XP 64-bit).
Under the "more Labels" section, fill in Volume Label, System Identifier, Volume set, and Application with WINXP_64-BIT_EN.
For Publisher and Data Preparer, just type in MICROSOFT_CORPORATION.

Head over to the Dates tab.
Under File dates, just make sure "Use the date and time from the original file" is checked.

Now the Misc tab.
Just check everything.

Finally, the Burn Tab.
Make sure both Write and Finalize CD (No further writing possible!) are selected, and set the Write Method to Track-At-Once.

Insert a blank CD and let it rip. Once it's done, leave the disc in the drive, reboot your computer, and try booting from it. It should work without any drama; I've done this about ten times myself and it’s been smooth sailing every time.

rustyheron20 said:I wouldn't say I'm so clueless that I don't know how to move files over to the D: drive.🙂 When Windows XP first dropped, I didn't even know how to actually "turn on a computer." I can't remember the exact year it came out, but I'm 14 now, so you do the math. My mentor and I are currently trying to install Vista on the school computers, so there isn't really anything at stake here. On my laptop at home, I'm still running a perfectly fine version of Windows XP.

1. Moving stuff to the D drive—just saying...
2. You're 14—you're just a kid...
3. A mentor—what is he teaching, gym class? Because if he doesn't know this, what does he know...
4. School—just wipe everything and pocket the hardware; there's nothing to lose, right?
5. A laptop—must be nice to have the cash...

In that case, just pop in the Vista disc, boot from it, format both drives, and enjoy your brand-new installation of Vista...
If your data is truly that precious, just move it all to the D drive, then reinstall Vista from the disc onto the C drive by formatting only C, since rowdytrucker27 claims that C is the system partition and that Windows "usually" won't let you mess with partitioning... Now, if that supposed "rule" actually holds up (because Windows is Windows, and we all know how much they respect "rules"), then once you have everything neatly organized on C, you can move the data back and format the D drive by right-clicking it and hitting format. Then the D drive will definitely format without any issues...

rustyheron20 said:So, what kind of tool did they use to format it?

They didn't use any special tool because we handle everything manually here...

You can wipe them out using this method:

If you have Windows XP on your C partition and Windows Vista on your D partition, when you boot up the system, you'll see a menu asking which version of Windows you want to load, at which point you will naturally select Windows Vista.
Essentially, you need to boot from the D partition—meaning you have to be running Vista.
First, try right-clicking on the C partition and selecting Format, which, in theory, should allow you to format the entire partition without any annoying questions.
If that doesn't work for you, just open the command prompt... switch over to the D partition (since you obviously can't format C while you're currently sitting on it, and to switch to D, you simply type D: )
then type format /? and spend an afternoon looking through all the different options for formatting the C partition to keep yourself entertained...

Despite whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, I have to point out that everyone else is actually right! I honestly don't understand why you would bother switching to Vista; Windows XP is perfectly fine, whereas Vista hasn't even reached its final, polished state yet, so all you're going to get out of it—despite those flashy new interfaces—is a massive headache ranging from driver issues to being unable to play newer games. Just think back to when Windows XP first launched and how hundreds of updates have been released since then... and that’s just the beginning for Vista..

Just hang in there for a bit... and if you're really that bored, instead of struggling with these kinds of problems... just play Tetris...

You can't just go around deleting Windows like it’s some kind of casual errand; the smartest move is to migrate all your files over to the partition running Vista, wipe the XP partition entirely, and then shuffle everything back onto a clean, freshly formatted drive...

A buddy of mine actually tried your method of just deleting the OS, but he ended up stuck with about 4 GB of mysterious, ghost-like junk data that refused to budge, leaving him with no choice but to format the whole partition just to get some peace and quiet...