Idontwantspam
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Dell has had laptops available with Linux for quite a while now...
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Not sure how prices differ in Australia, but around here you can get an Intel e8400 for $169, which is only $7 more than you're paying for that e7200. An e8200 is $165. Are you buying from a local reseller or online? You might be able to get a better proc for your money.
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So are you saying that you don't actually have kids right now?
Heck all of this will be obsolete by the time your kids are 4 years old, let alone in high school...
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Best company at all or best tech company?
Best company ever? I don't know. Probably someone who makes food. Maybe Ghiradelli Chocolate.
Best tech company? Gotta love Intel for the hardware side of things, and VALVe wins for software. The FSF isn't really a company, but they're pretty cool. MS as a company is actually kind of mean - anti competitive practices and all that. Apple just sucks. So there you have it.
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If you want to use the old Windows 2000 style users and groups control panel, go to the start menu, click run and type
control userpasswords2
You can also use the local users and groups MMC snapin if you have XP Pro. It is lusrmgr.msc.
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I have rather mixed views on this issue. Being a kid myself gives me one perspective, but managing 15 computers in our school's physics lab and trying to keep kids from doing stupid stuff to mess them up gives me the opposite perspective as well. I am not a parent, so I can't really comment from that direction as much.
What I would advise is a mix of restrictions and education. One thing that makes us kids mad and rebellious is when someone, be it a parent or a teacher, makes our computer so restricted that it starts to interfere with learning and having fun using the computer. Hence you need a balance. The first thing you should do, as was mentioned above, is to educate your children well on basic internet security. I don't know how old your kids are - I'm old enough and savvy enough to notice unusual situations and avoid them, but a 10 year old might not understand that (s)he shouldn't give away their address to random people they met on, say, a computers forum. Teach them that the internet is a lot like the real world in that they should never tell a stranger personal information, such as their age, address, phone number, personal email, real name, etc. Also point out that with the internet, it is much harder to tell the "good" guys from the "bad" guys. Someone could be pretending to be your friend from school, when in reality they're a creeper whose email address happens to sound like something your friend might have made up. All of these basic things that might seem natural to some of us need to be taught by someone. Information is key.
That being said, not all kids are going to be responsible. My parents trust me with the computer - I have never gotten into any sort of problematic situation with anybody on the internet. Nor have I ever gotten a virus or spyware. Not all kids are like this. I am more technically knowledgeable than the average kid my age. I fix my computer, I fix my parents' computers, and therefore I have earned the privilege to do what I want to my computer. If your kids are not this savvy, or you do not trust them, then you need to lock the computer down to some extent.
If the kids are younger than high school aged, I would suggest that you give them their own limited user account, and occasionally ask them to show you around. We actually don't mind showing our parents stuff; it's when parents just go snooping around that we get disgruntled. Keep an eye on who they are emailing and about what, but don't read every one of their emails - that's a blatant invasion of privacy. A limited account can still install some software, but is not likely to be able to install a catastrophic virus or some such. Again, just keep an eye on what's on the computer. If they install something "bad", talk to them about it, don't just turn immediately to locking it down tighter, because there's a good chance they'll find a way around it, and whether or not they can, they will be mad at you. Once again, communication is key here. OpenDNS is a great suggestion - that way you can filter out potentially harmful content. Keep in mind that your computer will also be affected by any blocking. It is possible though to set just the DNS on that one computer to use OpenDNS, but why wouldn't you want to use OpenDNS anyways?
If your kids are high schoolers, things are a bit different. Teenagers will expect a certain degree of privacy, and I think you should honor this. While you might not be comfortable giving them full reign of the computer, you should at a bare minimum let them have their own account, not demand to know all their passwords, and leave their email to themselves. Ask them periodically what they're up to on the computer - it's good to check in. Do not constantly watch their every move, as this will quickly put you in an unfavorable light in their eyes. If you trust your kids' internet safety skills and computer capabilities, you might even consider giving them power user or admin access. I would advise still checking periodically to see what they're doing, but let them use the computer to the full extent possible. If they start getting viruses, teach them a little about how one gets a virus, what to do about it, and remind them that if it happens too many times, they'll lose their privileges. Do not block IM. I can tell you that as a high school student, it is a very useful tool for both school and social uses. While it might be a minor distraction at times, I have had many a time where my classmates and I have had good discussions about homework via IM, or helped eachother with difficult assignments and so forth. Obviously you don't want your kids just talking to random people on the internet, so it might be ok to occasionally as to see who's on their contacts list, but flat-out disabling IM isn't going to do you any good. OpenDNS is again a good idea for blocking dangerous content, which is one thing that I think ought to be strictly controlled.
All this being said, if you really can't trust your kids with the computer for some reason, either because they are irresponsible, stupid or trouble-causing, then it might be a good idea to look into disabling booting from a CD, using steadystate to implement some basic restrictions, and taking other such methods. Use these sparingly though, because the harder you try to inhibit your kids' computer experience, the harder they will fight back, which is no fun for anybody.
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It's not possible to get into the recovery console if the admin account has no password, I think. You should be able to use BartPE or something of the like though to get in there.
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Most laptops that run XP will run windows 2000, and often the drivers will work fine, however, I'm curious as to why you would want to use windows 2000 when xp is much more up to date and would probably suit your purposes better.
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Viruses sometimes mess with group policy settings. Try opening the registry editor and navigating your way to
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies
And see if there's anything odd looking there.
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I'm pretty sure he left his product key out on purpose... I would assume that it's in the actual WINNT.SIF.
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Have you tried just copying the old OEMBIOS files you made?
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Well, I recently installed Tomato on my WRT54GL. DD-WRT has some nice features that it likes, but I didn't use most of said features all that much anyhow. Tomato seems a bit cleaner, and ever so slightly faster. It also has bandwidth logs which are pretty and mesmerizing to watch.
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Hmm... DD-WRT doesn't mention v7 of your router, although some other versions are there so maybe yours will be supported eventually. DD-WRT v24 has bandwidth logging.
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This can be done at the router level with some routers. What kind of wifi router do you have?
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Of course. If there's no password, anyone can just walk up and log in as administrator with no password. However, they cannot be accessed across the network using the administrator account, as windows doesn't allow network access to accounts with no password.
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Is this an active directory environment? If so you can use group policy to set a startup script for all computers in the domain. Have it run
@echo off
net user administrator password > NUL 2>&1
exitThis will set the administrator password to "password" (have it be whatever you want, of course"). The "> NUL 2>&1" is so that the output won't show up in the command window that opens, i.e. it'll just be a blank window that pops up for a split second.
Now, since this will have your password in plain text, it's imperative that you keep the script safe. Wherever you store it on the server, make sure that only domain admins have even read access to it - users don't need to have read access for machine startup scripts.
The other option, if you are not in an AD environment, is to just put that script on a cd, have it autorun, and go around to all the computers and just pop in the cd and pop it out. You could make a version that has a little bit of feedback, too, for that purpose:
@echo off
title Set Admin password
cls
echo.
echo Sets admin password
:choosemethod
set /p manDef=Use default, or set manually? (m/d)
if /i %manDef% == m goto M
if /i %manDef% == d goto D
echo Please choose m for Manual or D for Default.
goto chooseMethod
:M
net user administrator *
goto done
:D
net user administrator password
if %errorlevel% == 0 goto done
cls
echo.
echo An error occurred. Attempt manually:
net user administrator *
:done
cls
echo Done
pause
cls
exitAnd to answer your other question... yes it will keep you more secure to have an admin password, and if you have a corporate image, you should definitely have an admin password on it by default that goes to all newly imaged machines.
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Yes. Trying it in a VM is a good idea though.
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I'd opt for windows steady state. You can make a partition that they can save data to, and have everything else be restored when they restart. Additionally, it has a sort of basic group policy, which lets you restrict them from doing some stuff.
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No... once you install XP, if you image it and put that image somewhere else, then it will still be installed on C:. That doesn't change. You can put a Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Vista image (each on their own partition of course) all on the same computer, and they will each still be installed on whatever drive letter you originally installed them on. You might have to manually set up drive letters for the remaining drives, but that should be trivial.
C: != primary partition. You can image XP onto any partition and it will still think itself on C:. The one thing you will have to change possibly is boot.ini to make sure that it's booting to the proper partition.
But if you figured out another way, then good job!
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Just curious - why does the drive letter matter? If you just install to C:, which is the default, then the images will all use C: too. It's not a big deal. Keep in mind that the drive letters one OS sees are totally separate from the other. My laptop's XP install thinks it's installed on C: and Vista is on E:. Vista thinks it's on C: and XP is on D:. Both think that the Documents partition is F:. XP thinks the CD drive is D: whereas Vista thinks it's E:. The point is, drive letters are installation-specific, and it shouldn't be a problem to install to C:.
The other thing to keep in mind with images though is that you will need to make sure to change the SID every time you image a different PC!! I think sysprep can be set to do this, but I've never used sysprep. There is also a tool in the SysInternals suite that can do this.
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While Vista Home Premium is plenty for most users, beware that you *cannot* upgrade from XP Pro to Vista Home Premium, as XP Pro is a corporate/business product and Vista Home Premium is a consumer product. Therefore, an upgrade license would NOT be valid for you. A Vista Business upgrade license would work, but it does not have the extra media features that a home user might want. I would advise either buying a Vista Home Premium OEM license, unless you specifically need some feature of Ultimate that Home Premium does not have. Home Premium does not have some of the features of XP Pro such as joining an active directory domain, group policy editor, etc.
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Ah - I see the issue, Windows has to load first. Well, since shutdown.exe can be made to wait before shutting down, you could just run it from WPI (i've never used WPI - is this possible?) or else just using the RunOnce registry key, and instead of having it shut down immediately, have it wait however long you think it should. If you have it be the last thing that runs, then you might only need it to wait about 30 seconds. To make it wait, just do shutdown.exe -r -t xxx, where xxx is how many seconds to wait.
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You don't need to bother with the batch file. Just have it run
shutdown.exe -s -t 0
when everything is done. That's all there is to it.
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I voted Nvidia in the poll a few days ago, but am considering changing my mind (although it's too late for the purposes of the poll itself.)
Well. The latest news is that a whole other bunch of nvidia chips are bad. I used to prefer Nvidia, but am seriously considering buying an ATI card. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 looks nice, and allegedly performs on-par with a GTX200, even though it's far cheaper.
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Windows Server 2008 as OS option
in Site & Forum Issues
Posted
I've been using Windows Server 2008 recently since it became available through DreamSpark, but there is only an option for Server 2008 x64 when choosing one's OS in the forum controls. Why is there no 32 bit option and would it be possible for one to be added? Thanks.