CelticWhisper

If you're FPS fans, try Nexuiz (alientrap.org) or Cube (cubeengine.org). Nexuiz is an Unreal Tournament-style arena multiplayer game, all free, all open-source. Cube (and its promising successor, Sauerbraten) is more like a classic Quake shooter with some mind-bogglingly hard levels. Hard as in "Here are 50 monsters. They want to kill you. Here are 5 bullets. You shoot things with them. Here's a rubber ducky. You can maybe try to use it as armor somehow if you're really creative. Have a nice day. Bye." Nex is great fun at LAN parties and scales quite well. You can run it with very basic visuals for older hardware, or enable some really cutting-edge stuff including the HDR feature that everyone's been talking about with regard to Half Life 2...apparently really good, not much of a gamer myself so I don't know.

I'm referring to the menus without the 3d-style beveled edges that were the norm in Win95 through 2000. The old-style menus had the popping-out look, but the ones I'm seeing now are purely 2-dimensional with thin outlines and dividing lines between options. Ideally, I would like to get the old-style 3d menus back.

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. We're probably not going to be able to get it up and running before we've upgraded NAV away from this crappy version, but it's a good idea anyway, NAV annoyances or not. Hmmmmmmmm...*shifty eyes*

You're just causing yourself unnecessary headache. No offense but I feel sorry for anyone who is victim to that POS software. Start supporting Kaspersky and/or NOD32. That's the good stuff that actually works. I Googled this for you and the first result was someone else telling the user to ditch Norton as well. Oh, believe me, I feel sorry for us too. Unfortunately the choice isn't mine so I have to do the best job I can with what we have. If there's no way, there's no way, and it's alright. We're moving to the new version anyway and that one has the bug worked out. Still open to suggestions though.

Okay, this is weird. The purple seems to have corrected itself after a reboot. Flat menus are still around though.

I'm quite close to finishing/perfecting my unattended XP setup for my company. Only two small snags remain, and they're cosmetic ones. First of all, the install uses flat menus. I've disabled the option in nLite, and explicitly told it to use normal menus, but they still appear flat on first boot and subsequent logins. I have been wondering, though, is there any performance difference between flat and 3D menus? If one helps XP run more efficiently than the other, I'll definitely want to opt for that one, so there's a chance I may be sticking with flat menus if they're lighter on the CPU. Also, the menu highlight color is a very odd lilac purple which makes the white highlighted text extremely difficult to read. Any help restoring the default 3d menus (assuming they're less resource-intensive) and the classic "windows blue" highlight colour would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all for your help over the last couple weeks. I promise I'll stick around and offer what knowledge I can to anyone else who needs it.

Got it! It was a matter of the autologin setting in nLite. Apparently it was somehow overriding my WINNT.SIF settings, because once I restarted the test VM, it came up to a login screen. Thanks for all the help, everyone.

Not from the same graphics card to a single monitor though... Yeah. I get to wear the dunce cap for the rest of the day for that one.

Dontcha just love it when software presumes to know what's best for your computer better than you do? ...Okay, fine, sometimes it's true. But not now. I'm having some difficulty configuring Norton AntiVirus 2006 to stop complaining that Windows Automatic Updates are switched off. We're on a corporate network and my department manages updates by what we deem necessary to push to end users. We've turned off auto-updating on all of our client hosts and users are not permitted to install their own updates. Norton, however, insists that it knows better than a department full of IT guys and has apparently unilaterally decided that our company policy must be just-plain-ol-flat-out-WRONG-dontcha'-know for not allowing Windows Updates to run automatically. Worse yet, I've told it to not warn about AU being turned off, and yet it does so anyway. So is there a registry setting to force NAV to shut its trap, or do we need to just instruct our users to ignore it and wait for 2007 to be installed on our client systems? Fortunately those PCs with 2k7 do not have this problem. Sorry if I sound a bit miffed. I am. Just not at any of you, but rather at the wise-achers at Symantec. P.S. I know many will recommend switching to a different AV product, but it's not really an option for us at this point in time due to our current installed and supported Norton base.

Tried setting AutoLoginCount to 0 and AutoLogin to "No" (with quotes), and the dirty wee b@st@rd is still automatically logging itself in. I guess it's on to plan B. There...uh...is a plan B, right guys?

Okay, I got this one solved. Somehow the system seems to have lost its video driver (corruption maybe), as the video card had a yellow exclamation point in device manager. Grabbed the driver from Dell and all is peachy. Thanks anyway, though.

So then is this a known issue with an auto-install of the Novell client, that it'll auto-login once or twice? If so, not a big deal, and I'll figure some way to make it work. Thanks for the tip, I'll make sure to force classic logon and strip autologin out of the SIF. Does the "AutoLoginCount" line need to equal 0 or does it need to be stripped out altogether? I know the line above needs to be set to "no." Thanks again, everyone. You're the greatest.

Hehe, yeah, it wound up that way. It was initially connected via VGA and I got around to asking if we had any spare DVI cables, which we did. I plugged it in and switched inputs, and noticed after a while that the colors didn't look as good as the VGA. It's currently plugged in only on DVI, but disconnecting the one cable didn't seem to change anything (unfortunately). Haven't rebooted yet with only DVI as I've been working on an auto-install with a virtual machine. I'll probably try a reboot next when I get a chance and see if that fixes the problem.

I have a 19" Dell LCD connected via VGA and DVI cables to a Dimension 9150. I've noticed that on certain shaded desktop background images and on the window titlebar gradients, the color progression is noticeably blockier and rougher over the DVI connection than over VGA. The monitor has an input-switch button and when switching, the same image looks smoother color-wise when going over an analog connection than when I'm using digital. I've checked my display settings and both are set to 32-bit colour, 1280x1024. I tried downloading the color calibration powertoy from MSFT but it refused to launch on my system (despite installing just fine). Is this a simple matter of needing to remove the VGA cable due to it confusing some internal circuitry of the display, or is there some other setting I need to fix in order to get decent color quality over my DVI connection?

Okay, I tried your trick, and it works! Thank you so very much. There remains, however, one complication. When booting, the system is automatically logged into Windows and the desktop appears straight away. I tested and I'm able to login to my NetWare servers and access shared resources just fine (through the Start-->Progs-->Novell (Common)-->NW Login or via the system-tray icon context menu). However, as it will be for a multiuser environment, we need it to boot to a login screen instead of the desktop. I'm thinking it might work if I clip out the part of your registry file that syncs the passwords for NW and AD. Am I on the right track there, or is there something else I should be looking for?

Thanks much for the info. I'm using ACU as the install utility and have used nciman to import the current settings to the unattend.txt file. I thought maybe there was a conflict between the Novell client and my autologin setting in the Windows WINNT.SIF file. However, when I removed the autologin parameter, it still gave the error. Looking through Google results, I found that most reported cases of this error have to do with the hostname being changed and some registry settings holding on to the old value. As far as joining a domain goes, we're not using AD on our network-it's a straight Novell environment. The only Windows/MS based networking we have is that of a few shared printers done via Windows File and Printer Sharing. I'll look into using your registry tweak, though. It would be a "REGEDIT /S netware.reg" entry in the CMDLINES.TXT file, right? Maybe that'll do the trick. Man, am I ever glad I'm using virtual machines to do my testing. I think my officemates would've called the men in the white coats if they saw me constantly reinstalling on a real system.

I'm working on an unattended XP install (many thanks to C.RAZY for his help with N-lite's options) and I've figured out how to auto-install the Novell client via a batch file and CMDLINES.TXT. However, when the time comes to login for the very first time, an error is displayed at the Novell login prompt saying "a domain controller could not be found for the specified domain." The "workstation only" box comes up checked by default and the "From:" field under the "windows" tab (the only tab available when "workstation only" is checked) has two different options that are both dynamically-generated hostnames, not identical, one with a single-computer icon and one with a networked-computers icon. Anyone have any experience with this that could possibly help me out?

Great, thanks much. I kinda figured it would enable the disabling, since they recommend it so highly and the default is what it is. They gots to fix the wordses though. Most of our users probably don't even know what a driver is, so I doubt we'll have any problems. Looks like I'll be telling SFC to get lost from now on! Thanks a million.

I'm working on an unattended install of XP Pro (alas, no VLK, which creates a whole host of frustrations but that's another gripe for another time) and I'm playing around with NLite. So far it seems like a great little utility, but one setting has some pretty poor wording and I'm trying to figure out how it's supposed to work. The "Patches" tab near the end with the 4 settings on it has, as its last option, a setting regarding file protection that can allegedly reduce the duration of the installation procedure rather dramatically. Unfortunately, the description and toggle have just enough repeat uses of the words "enable" and "disable" to give me a stonking case of head-a-splode-itis. So, then, does the setting here refer to SFC itself, or to whether the setting is turned on or off? i.e. By leaving this tweak "Enabled," does one leave SFC "Enabled" as well, or am I enabling the disabling of SFC? While I'm thinking about it, does anyone have any experience with the longer-term effects of this setting? Does it actually speed up installation as it says, and are there any problems that can arise down the line? This is for a business so it needs to be reliable more than it needs to have a speedy installation. Thanks a ton, I appreciate it much.