fdv

I want to emphasize to the initial posters that you use both. You run HFSLIP, install, then you Ghost. IMHO, though RIS comes with Windows and Ghost costs money, Ghost is the way to go for simplicity's sake. RIS requires a special network card, a properly configured 2003 with AD, and the planets in alignment (including Quaoar and Sedna). Where is InTheWayBoy? <shouts> HEY! InTheWayBoy!! InTheWayBoy is the man for RIS. He has used HFSLIP with RIS successfully. AND... he promised me a tutorial Anyhoo let me PM him because we should get an update on that topic.

Well, it is a great guide, but we're working to eliminate the need for doing every step in that process. You just download the right files, drop them into HFCLEANUP, and run HFSLIP... and it will do all of that stuff for you, so you don't have to!

I'm just wondering about the level of demand for reduction sets for 2003. This is not starting a war with nLite or anything crazy, this is just to gauge demand. This is in the HFSLIP forum for a reason... I don't want people in the main NT forum answering "reducing the OS makes it unstable!!11eleven!!" HFSLIP'ers, even if they don't reduce their OS, know the mods here and their work and know we're not careless... we tend to go to painful extremes in fact to get things right, IMO. I want to guage interest in the 2003 reduction set files. I know people like and use nLite, and that's fine, but nLite is made for tweakers, and the reduction fileset work is really to remove a lot of junk from the OS in one shot without having to think about it... a "just make it into a desktop OS" method. (I do realize that nLite lets you re-load your presets).

groovy. building with test version now. (even if i can get it really cleaned out, i am still going to use win2000 for a while.) i feel like creating a win 2003 poll, to guage demand for reduction work we've been doing.

Just some ideas you probably already thought of... Some info you can try about this error. Details an 'advanced rebuild.' More of the same here. No backups? Does your IT guy not like Mac users or something? Jeez. Anyway, what I would do if it were my data (I have rebuilt Outlook, it is the PC version of the same thing, that's never something I want to repeat) I'd copy the corrupte file over to a PC. Then, I'd use a program to split the file if it's big, and use a text editor to recover whatever I could from it, and start fresh.

well, i am going to post on this after all and warn you to try to steer clear, if you can. orkut is very dead these days. but here's another problem: lack of support. a bunch of people signed up a long while ago, then all of a sudden, you had to get a google id. although i did this, and the system will not let me log in anymore. i can no longer edit anything. they claim to have a system to merge an old account with a new google account, but it no workie. no, none of this will apply to you, but this will... there is NO support for ANYTHING related to orkut. something goes wrong? lost password? forget your login 10 months later because you didn't sign in? you're outta luck. all you'll get is form-letter emails. i fully expect this to be, more or less, an indicator of the way google (go ahead, click, it's not google, it's about google) will continue to do things. they expand and expand and never look back. kinda like microsoft... "we forge ahead and please don't bother us with whatever messes we leave in our wake..."

about the HFSLIP thing, i can confirm what Electrician writes and state that we had compatability in mind with USP. i mean, there might be some mild competition at work between the two products, but ultimately we would rather it worked than have things break and have people blame one or both projects

hi folks, i have been researching a media card reader -- one that will take up a slot in my pc, not one that plus into the usb and has to dangle -- and i see a lot of models that always seem to get mixed reviews. i need something for the front of the pc with usb 2, more than one usb slot would be good, and can read sd cards. i am looking for something dependable. whenever i read about a good reader, invariably someone else will say that the same model is junk. thanks for any recommendations

a lifetime ago, i did exactly this. i booted up my pc with a DOS disk. i deleted explorer.exe (windows 2000) and copied over an alternative shell from the D:\ drive, renaming the alternate shell explorer.exe. i know it's not so useful if i can't recall the shell or the error, but the gist of my post is this: don't go unwrapping everything that wears a pretty ribbon. NO! Wait! that's not it. uh, the gist is this: it won't work. windows will try to run the new explorer and will just crash. just sayin'. edit: see, the thing is, with those context menus, that stuff is in MS's explorer.exe. you have to add that stuff to the registry if you want it restored in an alternate shell with explorer.exe shut off (ctrl alt del, as has been mentioned) but when explorer is running again, you get two of each item in the context menu. in other words, with explorer off and the "install" right click context menu choice in the registry, you will be able to keep the menu item, but when explorer is on, you'll have two "install" items in that menu. i tried that, too... the problem chiefly is that MS doesn't document the hooks in explorer or shell32. another bummer? the WINE project has rewritten a lot of DLLs, but substitutiing them doesn't work, either. MSHTML.DLL, from the WINE project, doesn't do a thing. closest candidate for an explorer replacement with MS functionality? it misses the mark, but explorer from the ReactOS Project. that guy is one smart cookie, having made a binary compatable microsoft OS replacement that can interchange some system binaries with windows.

installation monitoring would help a great deal, once something close to a final version is issued. i mean, i could do it myself, but these days i seem to have a lot of pots cooking on a lot of burners so help is always appreciated. if anyone has ie7 install info for 2003 for a beta right now, i wouldnt rely on it too much, but i would like to take a look at it just to get a preliminary idea about what's involved... email if you've got a logfile.

he meant 2003 i am sure as it's known ie7 won't work for 2000. i am making pretty adequate headway. i seem to be busy every f%^&%$&*in weekend with other things but i do get to devote some time to the 2003 thing. tommyp's reduction files will be what i use (i'm pretty sure). the big thing will be a massive inf file that lays waste to the 2003 registry. there might be enough junk so that a fileset is necessary, but i don't think so. as it is i am targeting the ie keys. i will be very curious about whether ie7 relies on them. in 2000, there were a lot of ie keys that ie6 no longer used, so i am assuming that 2003 will have hundreds of ie6 keys that ie7 doesn't need. after all... ie7 is supposedly redesigned, right? <laughing>

I realize. The thing is, it was the first stable Opera build to pass Acid 2.IE fans: does IE yet pass Acid 2? http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html You IE fans can have your IE7, we're not begruding you, but when Tomcat76 says: he's not talking about exploits. This has nothing to do with his tastes and is not his opinion, it's a fact. Google for "IE css problems." Or read the team blog (for example, http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/07/29/445242.aspx )

warning, opera plug coming up... i just have to add my 2 cents, being the guy who worked so hard to rip IE out. i have always been bothered by firefox memory leaks, so i decided to give opera a try, since i read on digg that the most recent build passed the acid 2 test. so, i downloaded a preview (beta) of version 9. i use mozilla (now called seamonkey), firefox 1.5.0.1, and opera version 9 build 8303. i like firefox for easy RSS handling and the little X in the tabbed area stays put. other than these two niceties, i really like opera. a lot. if you remember it from the bad old days of version 4 a decade ago (like me ) then it's definately time to give it a chance... any beta testers here have a chance to look at vista's IE integration yet?

Only for extreme cases... ...if none of that works, note the location of the executable, download Knoppix, boot up with it, and delete the file manually from there. I'd normally also recommend a BartPE disk, but in many cases, since BartPE uses WinXP or 2k3, whatever file XP won't allow to be deleted on the C: drive, XP running on the BartPE will usually not allow to be deleted, either.

Anyone wanna try out a 2003 crap cleaner? http://www.vorck.com/data/2003/sakit.in_ This will NOT work on Windows XP. The file goes into FIX. Best when used with HFCLEANUP files. This WILL destroy Internet Explorer unless you delete the delreg.ie and delreg.mshtml lines at the top of the DefaultInstall sections. The key here is to use this in conjunction with TommyP's reduction files, which should be placed in HFCLEANUP. You can use ALL of the reduction files in 2003, even those that don't begin with "2003."

in any case it's always best to pm me

thanks for the alert, boy did that look foolish. i updated instructions for modifying 2003's SETUPAPI.DLL as well as a note about HFAAO. ? i don't know what this means

I am tired so I might be missing something, but here goes. In HFSLIP, there is an undocumented feature in the program that shows up just before the build process starts... it lets you choose 3 methods of compressing the driver and sp4 cabs via a merge, and three methods without merging them. I am not clear from reading your post that you are selecting options D, E, or F here. SP4.CAB won't be created if you selected to merge driver CABs with choices A, B, or C; perhaps that's what you did?

@cuffy, you're in forum 129 (HFSLIP), you want to be in 89 (nLite). If any of us had super-mod powers, we'd move your post for you, but we do not, so the best thing to do is to repost the question in that forum. having said that, i am familiar with nlite and will say that i don't think SBS is supported. To check into things manually, open TXTSETUP and see what files are on that other CD (non-CD1, non-Outlook) and find them in the listed files and comment them out. i didn't quite say that right, but i am tired and need to go to bed and i think you pretty much get what i mean anyway. we need a smiley icon with a little 'night cap' hat on and little, tired slits for eyes. FDV, working on the 2003 registry, which ain't small...

Oleg_II's site is here: http://kitaist.com/ about future apps for windows. maybe this is too much speculation... but i read (and i do not have the url handy) that Win FX is just add-on to Vista, and so is Framework... meaning no part of Vista is written natively in Framework or Win FX. anyone know if this is true? if so, it would mean that most apps will probably continue to be written in the same nt 5.1 API as 2003 and xp apps, right?

Gosh was a she, BTW. To be sorta sexist (maybe?), female contributors on MSFN are rare to be sure. The only other one we have now and again is Wendy (OS2FAN2). I'm around now and again as Super-Magician notes, but in a technical thread like this you've gotta remember that this is script-heavy, new-feature testing stuff, which is rare for me to participate in anyway... I have cruised Oleg_II's site and have not heard from him since like February. He appears quite gone to me, unfortunately. I hope he resurfaces. I have been busy mostly with Windows 2003. Many of my test installs just die right after filecopy. I have had the modded setupapi for a while but I see I should have released instructions on it, so I have written them finally. Ok, I'm gonna go back to plugging away again. Random: I recommend the DVD "Primer" to you all. It's a great techie film about the head games that happen between two engineers when they accidentally create a time machine (it's not cheesy like Back to the Future or anything, it's really good!)

on this whole alternate shell thing, i am too lazy to do the research so the various shells all allow users to move icons around the desktop now? only one did back when i was paying attention.

dump them all into one folder, dont use subdirectories. these zips are just as TommyP provided. once things settle i am sure he'll repackage them somewhat. again, apologies for the delay...

Hey men, I am VERY sorry I did not get to it. It's all up. See http://www.vorck.com/hfexpert.html Cleanup set IE add-on remover Dial-up add-on remover MS Office Jet, ODBC add-on remover I got busy at work and couldn't do any testing. Yuck, the friggin server went down due to a hard drive failure. And ya know what? The ghost image was unuseable. Corrupted. And to complicate things? The old old video card I threw in the thing (because a doc server sure doesn't need a fancy vidcard) was failing TOO, causing boot anomalies. Yeah, all that sucked. I had to reinstall 2003, not so bad, but also had to reset security permissions on hundreds of items in the shared resources. So anyway, I have been busy at work. Oh yeah, the boss is on vacation too! That means I have to do her job too, which long explanation short involves turning some people's questions over to attorneys who then send back legal advice that I have to make anonymous and then send back to people. Which means I have to read her mail and not just forward it but read for content. Ohh yeah, my car's also in the shop, which means I have to rely on the wife for rides to and from work, which means I have to wake and go to bed on her schedule, preventing any late-night work. Sooooo, there ya have it, FDV's mega excuses, not like it matters, but I hope it's worth a chuckle to someone, heh heh... And now, for no apparent reason, Alyson Hannigan.

well, i suspect you're probably thinking of using it as a workstation type of operating system. it's feature set is really 2003 server plus a superset of extra capabilities not in 2003 that most users wouldn't necessarily need. it is just this shotgun approach to launching operating systems that is slowly (or quickly, depending on how you look at it) causing user frustration as they leave behind sloppily patched products that they could have taken a little more care in fixing (win 2000 sp5) or breathing new life into (nt 4.5). in other news, fedora core 5 will be out in about a week from when i write this.