His forum has been down. Does anyone know what happened?

It's all a mystery to me.

It's a 500 Internal Server Error, though, so it's something at his end, I think.

Thanks Dr

The server is responding, but is messed up.

Any idea when it will be up?

Bold was a strange guy. He really didn't like you if you didn't agree with his methods.

Why do you want to find his site again? He had slightly unorthodox methods about "cleaning" his system, and I think nuhi put him out of business, so to speak.

I disagree.



1) You say that as if everyone else loves it if you continually argue with them
2) I suspect the point probably was that after you've spent a number of years writing a several hundred thousand page guide, offering detailed information about thousands of files, it's a bit annoying when some jumped up code kiddy just says "use nLite". Especially when he wasn't even suggesting the two as alternatives.
3) By "his methods" do you mean "deleting files?" - I suspect that's quite a standard "method" of removing files.
4) Or maybe by "his methods" you mean the way he went through the problem slowly and methodically trying to work out exactly what was wrong and come up with a solution that fixed exactly that problem rather than just "reinstalling windows", "reinstalling drivers" etc.



This is a stupid question.



1) I don't necessarily regard "unorthodox" as a bad thing. You could say that nLite is pretty "unorthodox".
2) I also don't see why that would be a reason to dislike someone.
3) If they work, the actual orrthodoxy of methods, particularly when it comes to computers, is irrelevent.



1) That implies he is somehow doing it to make money. This was not the case. Nor was he offering a "method" or a "guide" that could be followed, he was analysing files, finding out what they did and which ones could be safely removed, or had to be kept to run programems
2) I disagree that an almost one click pre-install, file removal programme has "put... out of business" a huge guide which, as I've said, provided significant details on hundreds of files.

Even if you didn't want to remove files, Bold's guide provided detailed information about the entire windows operating system. It was amazingly useful for diagnosing problems and for running Windows cleanly and simply. I've learnt more tips and tricks from that forum that anywhere else.

Oh, also, in regards to your above comments about Bold_Fortune:

Wow... I seem to have stepped on somebody's toes here. I really didn't mean to go there, but in my experience on his forum and on this one, he had a very specific attitude towards things. From what I remember, if you stepped "across the line" so to speak, he wasn't the friendliest of people.

I think you've completely misinterpreted my point of view. You have every right to disagree - everyone has their opinions. There's a difference between discussing/disagreeing and arguing. I actually love a good discussion or debate, as long as both sides aren't hot headed and things don't degenerate to "I'm right - you're wrong". At that point, it's a silly argument.

By "his methods", I meant deleting files in general. I tried following his guide and I made some progress for deleting this part of Windows, and then removing that one, etc etc. I also used nLite for a while, but I stopped for two reasons. First, everytime I removed something, it broke Windows in one way or another. A program I needed wouldn't install or run, or some functionality that I needed wasn't there. Secondly - I simply didn't have the time. If you've really got all the time to tinker with your system for hours on end - go for it, but I really fail to see the benefit for all of us of having a list of what every single file does. It's a lot of work - don't get me wrong, and I commend anyone who can put in that amount of time on a single project, but in the end... what's the point? What do you gain from knowing that this DLL has that functionality - will that make you work faster, get you a better paycheck, make you a nicer person?

I ask a question because I don't have the answer. If you want to go on talking about "mutual respect", don't call people's questions stupid unless the answer is blatantly obvious or has been given multiple times before. Don't call my questions stupid.

Bold's original guide was not on "what files do what". It was for "how to slim down Windows XP". As such, nLite does a much simpler job of it. Sure - the user doesn't need to know as much about their system, but it goes back to my above comment - most people don't want to bother. They simply want a computer where you go *click* and it works. I can't imagine any large corporate environment where they'd be insane enough to use nLite or Bold's slimming-down-guide on production computers. You'd spend more time troubleshooting problems than anything else.

Again - about his detailed guide - it's definitely impressive. However, I've never needed to consult it for troubleshooting my systems, since I haven't removed any core files anyways. In my experience, things just work better that way.

I also think you need to realize that calling someone "strange" isn't being disrespectful. There are plenty of strange people in this world - I'm one of them, and so are many of my friends. Strange is what makes the world interesting.

Hey Zxian,

Sorry for jumping down your throat there. I just get a bit fed up with people either complaining about Bold_Fortune or nLite or whatever. I mean, especially with something like this, it's a choice whether you use it or not, and if you don't want to fiddle with your system, then don't follow a guide all about fiddling with your system.



This, I think is the point - it does take a long time, and you will have to tinker with your system for hours. But, really, that's what his website was about. Tinkering with your system and discovering new things. To be honest, though, isn't that what this site is about as well? I can't help but notice there are forums here about "customizing" and "tweaking" Windows. I mean, as a general rule, the only reason you write on a messageboard dedicated to altering software in your computer is because you like tinkering around with your system.

I, personally, use a combination of nLite and Bold's guide. Like you, I've had my fair share of things breaking, but, really, if you don't like things not working you shouldn't use computers. Using this guide I have learnt more about computers (and my computer in particular) than through anything else.

On the other hand, if you're not someone who wants to use nLite, who doesn't want to remove anything from their OS, then removing files Bold suggests isn't going to interest you.



You'd be amazed at how often people on Bold's forum were able to very precisely and accurately pinpoint problems users had. By knowing what files do, you can pinpoint the source of a problem and solve it directly, which is usually a much neater solution. I mean, I do think it is a good practice (in life as well as just with computers) to understand what things do. I can't think of a situation when more knowledge and a greater understanding is a bad thing.

As you say, it is a lot of work - and I would never have gone through and examined what every file in Windows XP does. But, now Bold has done it, he has provided a resource which is fascinating and incredibly useful, often when you don't suspect it. It's a fantastic resource for troubleshooting, and there's nothing else which provides such focused information on the Internet.



It may well help with conflicts and dependencies.



Um - I don't know if that's the point. I'm not sure if anything I do to my computer will make me work faster (or even if I want to work faster). I do know that since fiddling with my computer and following many of Bold's insights and tips my COMPUTER works faster.



I doubt it. Will changing your desktop background do either of those things either? Not everything in this world increases your wealth or moral worth (sadly).



I'm sorry about that, but your question was:



Bearing in mind that Bold's site is a forum discussing computers (very much like this one), and both dirtwarrior and I are semi-regular posters on the forum the reason we wanted to "find" his site seems quite obvious to me. Your question seemed more a rhetorical point. Are you saying you actually wanted to know why we wanted to post on his forum again? The answer, presumably, is the same reason that you (and the hundreds of other members here) like to post on this forum - because they like to, and are interested in what it is about. They don't need to give a financial or moral justifcation for doing so.



Well, it's probably best not to use i) nLite ii) Windows iii) a computer then.



No, I can't either. Partly because they would both invalidate any licence from Microsoft. But also, a corporation doesn't care about the thousands of computers they have in the same way an individual may care about his one computer.



That's not the only reason you may need it. In addition, files can often become deleted by accident, other programmes can delete them, they can become corrupted etc. There are also sorts of reasons why it could be useful to see an organised and methodical analysis of your computer's system files. Anyway, I'm not going to try to persuade you to read it. If you're interested in it, you'll read it and like it, if you're not you won't.

My point, really, is I think it's a fantastic resource, and clearly a lot of work has been put into it. It encourages you to think about your system, fiddle with it and tweak it. If you don't like doing that, then just don't bother with it. There's no need for people to keep moaning about it.

I'll be honest, I don't really understand what the problem is between Bold and this site, but he seems to refuse to post here now (as do some other people on his site). I don't follow this feud as I'm a bit of a new-comer. However, I find both this site and his site fascinating and fantastic sources of information. I find it a bit dissapointing/annoying that some of the members of this forum and his forum seem to be at war with each other, because I think they both have a lot to give/discuss with each other.

But, anyway, I'm not brokering a peace treaty or anything, and I'm sure you're not part of the "Bold-hating" community - you're last post just seemed a bit aggresive and off-topic - considering the thread was about why his forum had gone down and whether it would be coming back, it seemed a bit irrelevent to start commenting about his methods etc.

BACK ON TOPIC:

Incidentally, as regards his forum, at the moment Bold does not know what has happened, has had no communication from the host and doesn't believe the forum will be coming back. He also has no plans to start a new forum. The current situation is that he has moved to another forum that contains a mirror of his guide.

I have always enjoyed Bolds site (his views) and his sense of humor (even before he had the site). I dont do that much "slimming down" of my OS but Ive always enjoyed learning and "tweaking" new stuff and I like doing it manually rather than with some app generally speaking. I guess just because Ive been doing it that way for so long Ive sort of gotten used to it. But of course to each, his/her own. Im sad to see Bolds site down (thru what appears to be no fault of his own) but its nice to see how youve highlighted a few particulars here Doc Trout. Thanks, I really appreciate that.

I too like Bold and his forum. He encourages people to experiment and post results good and bad. He is a funny guy. I hope he keeps his forum.

Do you know what these files are?

aaaamon.dll
EqnClass.Dll
kd1394.dll
mchgrcoi.dll
miglibnt.dll
w32topl.dll
winshfhc.dll


He knows.

And although he did not tell me anything, I knew immediately why I should delete them from XP's System32.

GL

It will be a real shame if his forum doesn't come back. Before visiting Bold Fortune Forums, I, and lot of people like I wouldn't dare go into the System32 folder, let alone delete a file from there!

Bold, your welcome to a sub-domain anyday .

Oh well, who knows. Perhaps it'll be up and running now.... or now. or now.

Still down, shame the man rocks.
And he is very polite and helpfull BTW

Thank you all for your kind words.

My site is down, and will remain down. It was never really "my" site, it belonged to Sadie, a lady who lives in England. She gave it to me to support my work on Slimming Down Windows XP: The Complete Guide. You can read more about it here...

http://www.graphixanstuff.com/Forum/index.php?showtopic=9354

Jan has hosted the guide for you in the event of something like this happening. Jan's copy of my guide is the only copy that I have granted permission to host, and it is the only copy posted on the Internet that I keep updated. It's there for you when you need it.

The guide was always for you. That's why I created it. It is my gift to those who always wanted to know which files they can delete from Windows XP but couldn't find the answer...my site was only an after thought.

The guide is here for you when you need it...

http://www.graphixanstuff.com/Forum/index.php?showforum=68

Sincerely,

Bold_Fortune

Are you going to start another forum?

I've got the impression that Bold doesn't plan to start another forum - in fact, from what he's said, I don't think he wanted that one in the first place.

Bold was a friend and I liked his wit and wisdom. This is too bad. His forum was sucessful. I really liked the movie and music section.

Besides the obvious, which has already been mentioned several times,
I regret the pearls of wisdom posted by all the other contributors to that site
that now will disappear into oblivion, never to be seen again.
It's like a vast library of computer knowledge going up in smoke.

So-long Bold, we'll miss you and your forum.

Have a good life!

i agree totally, i asked him once why slim it down and got flamed like mad, i only wanted an opinion on the benefits of it, yet i got a mouthful.
long live msfn, thats what i say

Windows XP (or now Vista) is like a 500 pound man, who says, "Why do I need to slim down?"

The answer should be obvious, to everyone, but maybe not to the man himself.

Windows XP doesn't realize that it's horribly bloated.

If you could ask it " are you OK? ", and if it could answer you, I'm sure the answer would be, "Sure!".

Bold was on the right track, getting rid of the bloat, but some thought that he was "over the top".

Removing a few redundant files from the HD doesn't really impact how fast a program runs, for instance.
Or how fast a web site appears on your screen.

I too like a clean, lean and mean PC, but simple HD maintenance can take care of that, or most of it anyway.

I was an avid reader of that forum for a long time and gained quite a few "insights" from the posts there by Bold and others. I'm sorry to see it gone.

That's a matter of opinion. I've heard all kinds of explanations about why XP is "bloat" and why Vista is even worse "bloat", but you guys should take a look at every *nix based OS out there. If you have a look at the free memory after a few days use, it's usually below 50MB, regardless of the installed RAM. It's because those operating systems cache pretty much everything.

XP runs very well on pretty much all hardware - even that which is 6 or 7 years old (remember - that's the generation of computers that was around when XP was released). I'd like to see any "modern" distro of Linux handle a system of those specs as well (I've tried most - they don't).

exactly, only yesterday i went to fix someones pc, they were happily running XP until the boot sector became corrupt on wait for it..... a 1.3 athlon and 128 MB of ram!
i got it working again and they were so grateful, and to be honest it wasnt half as slow as i thought it might be.
amazing really.

another point i make in these situations is, what is the point when ram is so cheap,processors are so powerful and hard disks are so huge nowadays, it just doesnt make sense anymore to slim down your install.

I have 2GB of memory and can easily use 400MB in maxthon with tons of things opened. I don't need swap. However windows will move data from ram to hd because it is designed that way. In my case it is bad because such swapping is absolutely unnecessary.
On the other hand linux and *bsd (won't say all unix do that) keep as much as possible in ram. Under linux my hard drive can stop itself (laptop) but it is impossible under windows because it doesn't want to use its cache (and see laptop-tools IIRC). Unreal Tournament takes several seconds to load the first time, then if I run the game again, it starts within two seconds because a lot of data is in cache. It would be the same under XP but not to the same point and I would wait 3 or 4 seconds instead of 2 (it's not a matter of seconds, it's a matter of +50% or +100%).

That's not because of how the memory is managed that nix or XP are bloater. XP is (nearly) bloated and OEM XP are certainly. On the linux side, OpenSuSe is very heavy (how the hell can I avoid having all the mono stuff ?) but nor Slackware nor most BSD are.


7 years ago, computers had 256MB of RAM at most and usually 128MB. XP doesn't run that well or maybe but only XP : you can't load anything (yes, I have such a machine which my father uses for his work and which is as clean as when I installed an retail XP SP2 on it and disabled as many things as possible to be a bit further from the 6MB of available memory).
Use slackware upon which is slax based. I guess you know slax and you know on which hardware it boots. 256MB of memory is not a problem for it with kde and several other apps including a compiler (ocaml), emacs...
And you should compile your own kernel : it's not hard and you have enough background (you know enough hardware models).
Oh and slackware is modern. It may be the oldest still around, for me it is the one which works best : it recognizes my hardware better than any ubuntu thing.

One of the reasons I slim my installs is to get rid of windows media player which is as intrusive as an adware. My computer does what I ask it to do, no more, no less and even my mother doesn't have problems (except when she tries to paste a text copied from excel on her usb stick just like a file as she did this morning...).
And another is I want to use my ram for _my_ things, not some of windows I don't care about. Of course 100MB out of my 2GB is not really noticeable but I've already run two virtual machines and other heavy apps. It's just that if you start accepting your ram to be wasted (it is wasted because not available for your own use) at 2MB per app, you quickly lose hundreds of megs.
Btw, I've run Vista. I can run 3 or 4 virtual machines with lots of ram under XP. I couldn't under Vista.

There's the same thing with programming langages : cpu cycles are unexpensive so let's not bother with them.
OK but then you use a scripting langage which casts all over the place : not only int <-> float like in C (this is very expensive btw), but also lists to tables and other structures which is even more unsafe and then even dangerous as you can easily run out of memory.

And one last thing : never ever agree on having less rights or more intrusions in private life because then you will slowly lose everything.

In french we say of some people that when you give them your hand, they eat all your arm. Just don't start and refuse to have the hardware you paid for used by apps you don't want and that in fact also costs you money.

Err... I think you misread my post. I'm not saying that Vista or *nix systems are bloat - I'm saying they're smart about memory management.

Your comment about XP and OEM XP... there's no difference between the two! They're the exact same underlying system. The only difference between the two is licencing. XP comes with a small handful of tools that helps you maintain your system (there are some better third party tools, but let's not go there). I really don't see what's so "bloat" about Windows, nor have I ever understood the definition of "bloat", since people keep talking about different things (memory usage and management, bundled programs/files... etc).

OpenSuSe is only "very heavy" because of all the additional programs that they bundle with it. Pretty much all BSD systems I've tried so far drop you into a console on first boot.

Hey guys,

just wanted to inform you all who asked about bold_fortune's forum. He joined us on WinCert.net and we're hosting his complete work in the new created forum "Slimming Down Windows XP"

Here's the message from him:

A Message From Bold_Fortune

As many of you already know, my site is down. It will remain down. It was never really "my" site, it belonged to a generous lady named Sadie who lives in England. She gave it to me to support my work on Slimming Down Windows XP: The Complete Guide.

The guide was always for you. That is why I created it. It is my gift to those who always wanted to know which files they can delete from Windows XP, but couldn't find their answers...my site was only an afterthought.

WinCert.net is now graciously hosting my guide for you in its entirety. I will keep my guide updated there on WinCert.net.

People have posted my guide on their sites without my permission. These copies are older versions, and are not up-to-date.

Slimming Down Windows XP: The Complete Guide has always been, and will always be, "a work in progress". I edit and make changes to its contents on a continuous basis. I will continue my work there on WinCert.net. So for the best and latest version you will need to look there.

http://www.wincert.net/forum/index.php?showforum=122

Sincerely,

Bold_Fortune

Does anyone know about Bold Fortune site being down?

Hi,


I do whois, I see this:
Domain : bold-fortune.com
Expired : 25 Jul 2008 07:09:38

Hello,

I'm sorry if I'm being a zombie creator but I saw that no one answered the question.

Bold's site is down again, and it's (again) likely that it will not be up anytime soon.

However, one of Bold's friends has a copy of his guide and now has it's own subforum.

Graphix an Stuff