Finally I have come out a solution to use Windows 7 RC1 in my 7 years old DELL 700m with Intel Extreme 82852/82855 GM & the SD card reader.

DELL 700m SD card reader driver that supports >1G SD card

http://www.700musers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=282

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R139212&SystemID=INS_PNT_PM_700M&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=7271&devlib=0&typecnt=1&vercnt=3&formatcnt=1&libid=27&fileid=186169

For Display Driver (82852/82855 GM), you can make use of the vista driver from the following link: -

http://justendeal.com/driver/855gm_vista_driver.zip

(The Info Source: http://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/637-installing-video-driver-intel-855-centrino-chipset-6.html )

But the installation method is a little bit tricky: -

• make sure your Windows 7 display card driver is in "Standard VGA Adaptor"
• in Device Manager, update driver: but select the option that the driver is "inside your Computer".
• (IMPORTANT) select "Intel -> Intel 945 GM Display Driver", it must prompt that the driver is INCOMPATIBLE to your hardware. IGNORE THAT and install it.
• it will prompt for system restart, let it be and your display should be very ugly.
• after restart, in Device Manager, update driver: but select "Have Disk" - the driver expanded from the zip package. it must prompt the driver is not signed. IGNORE THAT and install it.
• the system should reflect the changes INSTANTLY (i.e. you can change your resolution as native: 1280 x 800).

(IMPORTANT) HOWEVER, this is not the end of the story. If you restart the system like that, you will encounter BLUE SCREEN with STOP signal 0x7E. Workaround to that is, according to this URL: -

http://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/637-installing-video-driver-intel-855-centrino-chipset-8.html

Post #74

(Courtesy to comments from Arathranar):You asked, and I can deliver. The 0x7E STOP blue screen is occuring due to the new boot animation in Win7 which runs at 1024x768 but only if an external monitor isn't attached. So if you avoid the new boot animation and os get the default VGA resolution (640x480), it doesn't occur. That can be achieved by running msconfig and checking Boot->OS boot information. Instead of the animation you now get text showing driver loads and the 0x7E STOP blue screen. And now you don't need an external monitor connected each time you reboot.

 

Therefore, after this msconfig fix to "OS boot information" display. That blue screen will not be occurred and your DELL 700m can be maintained in good native resolution forever (even after many reboots!!!)

the rest of drivers (like network / wifi / multimedia etc...) can be reused by using the Jurassics XP ones without any legacy warnings.

Enjoy~!

 

Reading: "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing.."

It's a book full of quotes. I'm now trying to have an excerpt on what the quotes inside: -

• Indexing stock market sectors, a strong idea; Betting on stock market sectors, a weak reality.
• Index funds eliminate the risks of individual stocks, market sectors, & manager selection. Only stock market risk remains.
• Get rid of all your Helpers, then our family will again reap 100 percent of the pie that corporate bakes for u.
• It's dangerous.. .. .. to apply to the future inductive arguments based on past experiences.
• Accurately forecasting swings in investor emotions is not possible, But forecasting the long-term economics of investing carries remarkably high odds of success.
• Fund returns are devastated by costs, taxes, and inflation.
• Only three (3) out of the 355 equity funds that started the race in 1970 - 8/10 of 1 percent - have survived and mounted a record of sustained excellence.
• Yesterday's Winners; Tomorrow's Losers.

The following words are my recent vocabularies learned from surrounding newspapers: -

• slump
• slash
• plunge
• crunch
• cut
• kill
• crisis
• axe
• collapse
• melt - thanks to Luke Tsang in RTHK's LTV cafe
• lose
• dire
• fear
• close

I've just finished the readers of "Freakonomics". I like this part for the naming suggestions of the children up to the year 2015.

Readers can take this reference list on naming your childrens, enjoy~!  : -

Most Popular Girl’s Names of 2015?
• Annika
• Ansley
• Ava
• Avery
• Aviva
• Clementine
• Eleanor
• Ella
• Emma
• Fiona
• Flannery
• Grace
• Isabel
• Kate
• Lara
• Linden
• Maeve
• Marie-Claire
• Maya
• Philippa
• Phoebe
• Quinn
• Sophie
• Waverly

Most Popular Boys’ Names of 2015?
• Aidan
• Aldo
• Anderson
• Ansel
• Asher
• Beckett
• Bennett
• Carter
• Cooper
• Finnegan
• Harper
• Jackson
• Johan
• Keyon
• Liam
• Maximilian
• McGregor
• Oliver
• Reagan
• Sander
• Sumner
• Will

Another reader: "Freakonomics", authored by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.

In the chapter "The Ku Klux Klan and Real-Estate Agents", I like their logic on deduce the effects on these terms in real-estate advertisements: -

Five Terms Correlated to a Higher Sale Price

• Granite
• State-of-the-Art
• Corian
• Maple
• Gourmet

Five Terms Correlated to a Lower Sale Price

• Fantastic
• Spacious
• !
• Charming
• Great Neighbourhood

The logics are simple: laterally think the effects on putting those terms. That's quite a great discovery to me on reading other advertisements

Recently I read a book called "The Little Book of Value Investing", authored by Christopher H. Browne. This book has a chapter talking about a set of questions for you before you place your bet. Let's read....

Of course,  you should analyse her balance sheet, incoming statement; derive various financial ratios beforehand....

1.    What is the outlook for pricing for the company’s product? Can the company raise prices? Each dollar of price increase will increase pre-tax income by $1.00 if costs do not increase.

2.    Can the company sell more? What is the outlook for units? A 10 percent hike in units will increase gross profits by 10 percent if the gross profit margin does not change. Pre-tax income will go up by this amount if other costs do not increase.

3.    Can the company increase profits on existing sales? What is the outlook for the gross profit margin as a percentage of sales? How much is the gross profit margin expected to increase or decrease as a result of changes in price, mix of business, or the specific costs that make up the cost of goods sold?

4.    Can the company control expenses? What is the outlook for selling, general, and administrative costs/margin as a percentage of sales? Have there been any changes and, if so, what are they?

5.    If the company does raise sales, how much of it will fall to the bottom line?

6.    Can the company be a profitable as it used to be, or at least as profitable as its competitors?

7.    Does the company have one-time expenses that will not have to be paid in the future?

8.    Does the company have unprofitable operations they can shed?

9.    Is the company comfortable with Wall Street earnings estimates?

10.    How much can the company grow over the next 5 years? How will the growth be achieved?

11.    What will the company do with the excess cash generated by the business? Every dollar of profit not given to shareholders in the form of dividends will be retained by the company.

12.    What does the company expect its competitors to do?

13.    How does the company compare financially with other companies in the same business?

14.    What would the company be worth if it were sold?

15.    Does the company plan to buy back stock?

16.    What are the insiders doing?

All in all, just one google search gives out this blog...

Hope i can deliver good information from now on :)

when you migrate the web applications from .NET 1.2 to version 3.5 you will discover all validator controls are not functioning at all in non-IE environments (that's the same for all web applications developed in .NET 1.2 )

I have used one whole night to google, and found out the following workaround

source : http://forums.asp.net/t/1283702.aspx

Put it simply, in 'Web.Config', delete the following line: -

<xhtmlConformance mode="Legacy"/>

quote from the original source: -

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

set in your web.config, then client-side validation is disabled in firefox.

To see why, we have to jump down into the validation framework that ASP.Net sends to the web browser. The actual Javascript validation function looks like:

function ValidatorValidate(val) {

val.isvalid = true;

if (val.enabled != false) {

if (typeof(val.evaluationfunction) == "function") {

val.isvalid = val.evaluationfunction(val);

}

}

ValidatorUpdateDisplay(val);

}

Using Venkman, I was able to see that val.evaluationfunction wasn't a function at all, therefore the page wasn't getting validated because of this. A bit more searching found that this evaluationfunction is an expando attribute. In ASP.Net v1, this expando is an IE-only HTML expando, defined directly in the HTML markup. In ASP.Net v2, this is a Javascript expando attribute, defined on the DOM via Javascript, and therefore compatible with both IE and Firefox.

For example, the RequiredFieldValidator calls RegisterExpandoAttribute. You can call this method yourself like:

Page.ClientScript.RegisterExpandoAttribute(TextBox1.ClientID, "value", TextBox1.Text);

This produces a block of Javascript just before the closing tag like:

<script type="text/javascript">

<!--

var TextBox1 = document.all ? document.all["TextBox1"] : document.getElementById("TextBox1");

TextBox1.value = "";

// -->

</script>

where "value" has become the new expando attribute. In the case of the RequiredFieldValidator, the expando name is" evaluationfunction" and it is added to the representing the control at runtime.

It turned out that this block of Javascript wasn't being sent to Firefox in my situation, and I didn't know why. Instead, the evaluationfunction expando attribute was being rendered directly on the element in HTML.
So after good deal of decompilation using Reflector, and debugging using Reflection Invokeing of private methods, I discovered the problem was that RegisterExpandoAttribute checks the XHTML Rendering Mode prior to generating the Javascript and if that rendering mode is set to Legacy, then the expando is rendered directly onto the element and no Javascript code is rendered. The result of this is to prevent Firefox from performing client-side validation when Legacy XHTML mode is set.

I have no idea why the ASP.Net team chose to do this for validation. Perhaps the Legacy XHTML setting should have been called "ASPNetv1Conformance" because that's actually what it does. The docs for Legacy mode state:

"Reverts a number of rendering changes made for conformance to the v1.1 rendering behavior."

Today when I tried to uninstall this guy in a particular machine, it returns "Fatal Error During Installation" halt and no go. Further investigations reveal that the LiveUpdate (version 2.6) is not working properly and returns this error. Therefore the workaround is to uninstall the LiveUpdate first and then next to SAV CE 10. Hope this can solve some of the people worries....

If you are not lazy, you can search the following CodeProject via Google within seconds: -
http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Excel_Application_in_C_.asp
This mechanism can be used, but it has some considerations: for your deployment, you need to apply the Office component (which is using Microsoft.Office..blah blah blah..Excel, instead of the mentioned using Excel; ~!) to read the cells, that means, the deployment machine needs to purchase an extra Office licence for the deployment - most of the small businesses are reluctant to do so.. moreover, since this Office Object is version dependent, when the developer has an office version different from that in the client site, a nightmare .. XD
Therefore, you must ask: How can I accomplish that goal then?..
The answer is: SIMPLY USE StreamReader to directly read the file LINE BY LINE!..
If you don't trust me, you can try it yourself by setting similar Console App and you 'll get amazing results~!
This workaround is valid even for Visual Studio 2003, and the behind scene mechanism of that fussy StreamReader Object is a mystery to me..