Idontwantspam

Well... not sure which edition you have, but it it's business, enterprise or ultimate, the best solution would be: use XP. Because of downgrade rights on those versions, you can do that.

what? Since when was zxian disabled... or am i missing some sort of sarcasm or joking?

So in addition to what I've already posted: Now I've got a used 19" LCD attached to my laptop, for a dual display setup. It's incredibly useful, and has improved my productivity a lot. It was cheap, too - only $50 and it works fine, although I wouldn't use it for high-performance uses such as gaming or CAD, and it doesn't have DVI. Also, there's a shared desktop, which is a dell dimension 4700: Pentium HT @ 3.0 GHz 512 MB DDR2 Memory Intel Integrated Graphics GMA910 Some dell motherboard that it came with Integrated audio A dead DVD-ROM drive that I should probably remove A working CD/RW drive An Epson Stylus C86 Printer Some scanner that I got for like $5 somewhere A Western Digital external USB 2.0 HDD, 500 GB, for backups of the... 80 GB SATA HDD Regular boring 'ol PS2 mouse and keyboard, no special features A crappy 17" Dell CRT Windows XP Professional, SP2 Additionally, I've acquired an old Dell OptiPlex GX110, which is sitting in the living room. Pentium III @ i dunno 512 MB PC133 RAM 30 GB IDE HDD A 3Com Sound Card that sometimes works A logitech something or other keyboard, with fancy buttons and a cool shape A standard Microsoft PS/2 laser mouse A CD/RW drive A floppy drive A 17" IBM CRT Oldddddd Intel Integrated Graphics - 810 or something like that Asus WL-138G Wireless adapter Windows 2000 Professional, SP4 There will be pics at some point. OH and the might-be server one that I'm about to get rid of. It's ancient (1999, ok, not tooo ancient) and here's the awesome specs: Compaq Presario something 250 MHz Citrix processor (IIRC) 32 MB RAM, some sort of SDRAM, but I'm not quite sure at this moment A 5 GB HDD A network card from an unknown vendor No keyboard or mouse No display Windows 98, maybe linux + samba soon? I kinda doubt I'll ever actually use it; I'm more likely to just pick up a cheap system somewhere and use that. EDIT: Added a picture + changed info on the GX110, which now has its power strip and wifi card.

So, we've got a thread about people's computer hardware and such, I thought I'd start a new one on what people's home networks are like. I know there are members here ranging from just one computer with a dialup connection to an entire AD domain in their house, with many inbetween. So, share what you've got and how it works. So, as far as I go: Qwest DSL (1.5 Mbps - they don't offer anything faster in my area) connected through a... actiontec M1000 DSL modem, which is attached to a... Linksys WRT54GL wireless router (I just got it a little while ago and it's awesome!) 3 PCs: 1 desktop connected with ethernet My laptop, using wireless An old Optiplex GX110, with an ASUS wireless card That's it right now. They're all in the same workgroup; when I get a server together, using an old computer of ours that we're not using, I might set it up with windows server '03 and get an AD domain going, but we'll see. The actiontec modem is lame. It's a router-built-into-a-modem, which means it's a pain to configure it to play nice with the wireless router. I just set it to Transparent Bridging mode and the WRT54GL authenticates the DSL using PPPoE. The WRT54GL is running DD-WRT, which is totally awesome and infinitely superior to the default linksys firmware.

That... that... something i hear... long ago... brings back memories of something; a video game of some sort but I'm not sure what or when... Anyhow, happy birthday, zxian!

echo Y | net user TestUser IhateThisStuff0! /add That should work. However... usually you don't need to hit Y for a net user command, imo...

Apache > IIS Well, traditionally, Windows has been bundled with IIS, so that home users can have a server for personal use, or for small-scale business use. However, it is not a server class OS, and for uses such as the ones he is describing, it does not seem like the best choice. I'd go with a LAMP server myself....

Why XP as a server? XP is not meant to be a server... if you need to use windows for some reason, I would recommend getting a windows server license if you can afford it. Or, you could try using linux, since it's free and there are distros meant to be servers.

-sigh- Look in the unattended section - unattended.msfn.org. It clearly explains how to use reg tweaks with an unattended CD. The other way to do it, which isn't in there but that I like, is to install a fresh copy of xp, make any group policy changes you want, then copy %windir%\system32\group policy for cdroot\$OEM$\$$\system32\group policy. then all administrative templates will be applied.

Why do you have to disable the task manager? It seems like something that you really should enable. If an application freezes, it's nice sometimes to be able to close it using the task manager. They've disabled it at my school, and let me tell you, it's very annoying and there is really no use in disabling it. What's the worse we can do? A regular user can't kill system processes or even processes running as a different user. Worst-case scenario they kill explorer and have to log in and log out since you undoubtedly disable the run dialog too.

>_< The whole OEM licensing thing is screwy. All dells with vista home premium installed have the same key, as do their recovery/reinstall cd's. All of 'em. Then all the business versions have the same key, etc. Just reinstalling from the CD should work fine; you should never even have to put in the product key in the first place. It's normal for a key-finder utility not to match with the COA, they're almost always different.

Microsoft SyncToy Powertoy for xp?

Grrr! OK I can't get this to work. I'm trying to do the same thing, and annoyingly, every time I change it in the registry as per the instructions above, it changes itself back to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My ______. Shared Docs itself stays, but the subfolders refuse to do so! Any idea what the problem might be? I created the folders + copied over the data, and \Documents\My Pictures doesn't appear elsewhere in the registry, same for music and video. Any idea what keeps setting it back and how to prevent that? Or other ways to change it? EDIT: Never mind - I forgot the part about creating the new string values.

Is tweakui installed? It has an option to enable the watermark for the user's desktop, as well as an option to copy desktop settings to the login screen. So maybe you could just set your desktop how you want the logon desktop to be and then transfer the settings with tweakui, then reset your desktop to how it was?

They will be forced to change, come the time. However, they will not be forced to change immediately even if their current passwords don't meet the policy. You can of course force a change password on next logon for each user; I don't know if there's a way to set that for all users at once or not. Keep in mind that if you make the password policies too strict (although somewhat strict is good) you'll start getting this: Password1! Password2! Password3! etc... All of those match the requirements (long, "complex") and aren't the same, so the user will be happy. They just keep incrementing the number, and looping the # 0-9, thus following the remember 10 policy. So maybe go for a slightly less strict policy? Less frequent or remember fewer perhaps? I know I'd find it hard to follow those policies... Oh and make sure to enable the account lockout policy, too. I'd say 30 min on each and 5 invalid attempts. Good luck!

I'm fairly certain that it will allways ask for username and password. Maybe you could try setting permissions for anonymous logon? I don't know... I don't think you can turn on simple file sharing in 2003.

Try opening a command prompt, then type net user and see if anything appears.

I like the XP one. Although people complain about the programs menus flowing over the screen, I like that much better than the vista method - I like to be able to see all the options available without having to scroll up and down, and I simply can't stand the way it all stays in one frame - it makes it harder to see where you came from. Then there's the shutdown button that took however many years to make. I don't like it. It's unclear what its default action is, as there's no indication of that without side-clicking on it. The classic shutdown dialog is much better. Just my $0.02.

The "meh" starts now... Last night I installed vista home premium on a second partition on my laptop, thinking that at SP1, it would be bearable perhaps. It came with xp and a free upgrade to vista home premium, and I've installed it a few times before and it's never lasted long. I just end up going back to XP. I gave it the same 10GB partition size that XP got (with an 80GB HDD, I give each of two OS's at once 10 GB usually). After installing Vista itself, I then started installing drivers. Each and every driver install brought on a UAC prompt. Annoying as hell! I would think that for the exact same request repeatedly it would just ask once - as in, all drivers are approved for the next 15 minutes and if within those 15 minutes another would-be uac action comes up it extends the timer for another 15 minutes. But no... Well, anyhow, after installing the drivers, I started trying to install SP1. i had already installed MS office 2007 on the hdd, and SP1 now refused to even download because there wasn't space on the hard drive. On XP I have all my apps installed with windows on C:\, along with updates, drivers, etc. All my documents are on F:\. It all fits just fine. However, on Vista, no such luck. Not even SP1 would install. Well anyhow, I haven't had a great vista experience so far... that install is gone now and I'll be installing Windows Server 2003 soon to try that out. Thanks DreamSpark!

The version he linked to has a system builder license, so I think it would come with downgrade rights...

You mean something like this... 24" in the middle, and 20" to the sides. -drool- Yes, that's what I mean.

Same process as on windows xp - the bitmaps are in msgina.dll. There are instructions on this forum and elsewhere on the web on how to do so.

If the divider down the middle annoys you, how about 3 displays? One big-ish (~27") in the middle + two slightly smaller ones on the sides (19-20") gives you a wide area to work with, centered on one display. Of course, I don't have one of these, but if I could I would. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001076.html Another opinion...

Although I don't have a dual monitor setup at the moment - all I've got is my tiny 15.4" laptop screen - I'd advocate for dual monitors. In my experience, two 19" displays are superior to one 30" display. 30" is too big imho, and with dual displays you have the advantage of splitting into two work areas. I'd say go with 2 smaller monitors over 1 larger.

What?