A Few Basic Win Questions, incl. Net Framework

[Seeker47]

I'm not that much of an accomplished Windows user, and this seemed as good a place to ask as any.
(And I'm much less familiar with XP Pro, which is as far as I'm going anytime soon.)

1. Administrator Rights: If you've got 'em, this should be immediately obvious, correct ? Is there some
screen where Win reveals this, straight up ?

2. Memory Max: If you have 4G. installed, it's only going to address 3.5G. of this ? But wasn't there
some workaround to finesse availability of that last .5G . . . or was that just something for 64-bit Windows,
or with certain hardware ?

3. Net Framework. Let's say you have 1.x installed, and Windows Update is just showing you an option
to pick up the latest ver. 3.5. No need to have installed versions 2 and then 3, on the way to this one ?
(My guess would be that these things are cumulative, and incorporate whatever would have come from
the earlier updates.)

Redwudz, we've talked about Net Framework in the past. I'm prepared to take your advice that it is not
some nefarious plot by MS, and to go ahead with this. Version 1.x sounds like it would not be sufficient,
in terms of those apps I recall requiring NF -- at least the ones that were of some interest. But I still have
a distaste for unnecessary system bloat. Should I just stop at NF 2.0 ? Any reason to skip their latest
offering ?

I still read cautions from some users against XP SP-3, but that train has already left the station. I just hope
I didn't pick up some much unwanted DRM etc. passengers there !

[Ai Haibara]

As for the .NET frameworks - no, you don't have to have v1 installed to install v2, or v2 to install v3(.5). However, programs that use the .NET frameworks will require a specific version of the frameworks. For example, VOB2MPEG requires .NET v2. v3(.5) won't work in this case, so you'd need to install v2 as well.

[Dv8ted2]

The admin rights would show up in the user profile in the control panel. It will say things like administrator, power user or limited user.

[gadgetguy]

1. It is not immediately obvious that you have administrator rights, but it can become very obvious when you don't. Often programs won't install unless you have admin rights, and some won't work correctly unless you do. But unless you are logging in as "Administrator" it's not obvious whether you have them or not.

[stiltman]

Dot NET is going the way of Java
Too many versions and now BLOATED to the max
.NET 3.5 SP1 now is 230mb+ and takes longer to install than XP SP3 did

[freebird73717]

At least with java you can remove the old versions and have backwards compatibility with the newer versions. It's stupid that you have to have 3 different versions of .net framework to run different programs.

I really have no problems with .net and have all 1, 2, and 3 installed but really, why couldn't microsoft just add the functionality of previous versions to the later versions so that you can delete the older versions like you can with java?

[Seeker47]

1. It is not immediately obvious that you have administrator rights, but it can become very obvious when you don't. Often programs won't install unless you have admin rights, and some won't work correctly unless you do. But unless you are logging in as "Administrator" it's not obvious whether you have them or not.

I didn't set up the OS on this box, and there is no login screen in evidence -- it just comes right up to the desktop. My assumption
was that it had to have Admin. status, because I've been installing things left and right, including app.s where I'm asked if I
want to make the app available for All Users (warning that one must be Admin to do that), and it hasn't stopped me yet. Just wanted
to clarify that though.

Unless you are setting up for multiple users, knowing full well that some of those users are going to be: A) Security Risks, B) Idiots, or
C) generally a Pain in the Rear, I don't see any reason you wouldn't go for the Admin status at setup time. For a single user,
it would make no sense to choose otherwise.

[gadgetguy]

My point was that if you just turn on the computer and start using it, there's nothing obvious that says "You are the administrator", but if you don't have administrator rights, you'll run into lots of little "you need admin rights to do this" messages. If you have a working knowledge of what the different user levels can do, then you can see the telltale signs, but as Dv8ted2 pointed out, it's easy to confirm by checking the user profile.

[Seeker47]

Thanks to all respondents for filling in the blanks for me on questions 1 and 3.

No takers on question 2 ? I could have sworn that I once saw something about getting more than 3.5G of Ram to show up and be usable to XP , but it's quite possible I'm wrong about that. I can settle for the 3.5G though: it's way more than I had previously, on other boxes. 8)

To extend this to a 4th. question, what about the swapfile ? The conventional advice that is usually quoted is to have it set to between 1.5 and 2 X the Ram. Nevertheless, on other systems where I had 1G. of Ram, I had the pagefile set for about 500M., and ran it like that for the last six years. I don't run Photoshop or monster database apps, but I do a lot of fairly heavy multitasking. And I never really had a problem in that configuration. This latest box was set up by someone who really seemed to know what he was doing, but he set the pagefile at 2G., which is again around the 50 % of Ram mark. And, as far as I can see so far, that seems to run just fine. So maybe that 'multiples of Ram size' advice is not really any hard and fast rule, or really necessary ?

[Squash]

On question 2, you may be thinking of PAE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

[redwudz]

For Q2, it's not a XP or a OS problem with the amount of usable RAM, it's the type of addressing used. 32 bit OS's only have so many available memory addresses. Enough to address about 3.7GB, depending on what amount your graphics card might be using. There would not be any advantage to trying to access more, AFAIK. In fact it might cause you system problems or slow down the system. If you want to use more RAM, use a 64bit OS. It can address a lot more RAM.

EDIT: And I believe that the ~.4MB of 'unused' memory may not be unused. The OS may be holding it for other purposes besides video card enhancement. Not sure about this, but I wouldn't mess with trying to recover it.

For operations like encoding, check your Task Manager. You may find you are using about 300 - 500MB of RAM. Only a few programs use the whole amount of RAM. Photoshop does as it stores the images you are working on there temporarily. Or if you have a OS like Vista, it uses a lot more RAM for system processes.

.net is mostly libraries for performing different functions. It's more about making operations universal without having to write new code for each one of them. AFAIK, it wouldn't work most of the time to just upgrade it, the libraries are different. I agree it's bloatware, but it does serve a useful purpose. Without it, the programs that use it would be the bloatware. But you only need to install the versions that your software requires, not all of them.

For administrator rights, you likely already have them. But you can check in 'Control Panel>User Accounts.' XP normally makes the primary user an administrator by default. Guests and secondary users may not have administrator rights.

Adding SP3 to XP isn't a necessity. If you've kept up with the regular updates, you probably have most of it installed already. It does add a bit more functionality to the OS. There were a few problems with it initially, but those seemed to have been fixed. I have it on a couple of computers and no problems. It's been out for some time now, and likely will be the last and final major upgrade to XP we may see.

[GKar]

RE: question 2

Microsoft memory mumblings:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

Please note Physical Address Extension (PAE):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366796(VS.85).aspx

To enable PAE:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEdrv.mspx

[Midzuki]

redwudz wrote:

.net is ... bloatware, but it does serve a useful purpose.
Without it, the programs that use it would be the bloatware.

I see. They've hired you, ¿no es verdad?



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