cluberti

Cool . I've always found it best to image the PDCs/BDCs as a snapshot, then do the upgrades as previously mentioned. Now, with VMs it's even easier (using vmware converter) to make a backup and test first, to see what's gonna happen if you've got the hardware to run the number of VMs it would require.

WDS in legacy or mixed mode on 2003 still has RIS (Windows Deployment Legacy in the Administrative Tools folder).

Nitro, what I used to do back in the heady first days of NT to 2K migrations was thus - power down the original NT4 machine, and image it. Then, bring it back up and upgrade to Windows 2000 on the server (to do the NT4 -> AD migration). If anything went wrong, the original image was still on the old PDC, but the upgrades almost always went smoothly enough. After a few days, I'd make sure that upgraded DC did not store the GC or have any other FSMO roles, then dcpromo it to remove domain controller duties. If all went well there, I'd remove it from the domain and rebuild it cleanly (and re-add it as a DC once I was sure everything was OK).

Well, useless to you maybe.

http://www.msfn.org/board/Symantec-AV-10-D...-de-t90358.html By default, Symantec AV tries to disable Windows defender during install - therefore, you will need to install it with the command line in the article I linked above to "skip" that step. I honestly don't know if that will work for sure (if they put an explicit check in the installer to see if defender is installed for instance, it'll probably fail), but it's worth a shot.

Good luck, and I wish you well. Hopefully you can get it worked out so that you can have your Windows VM(s) running for the Windows-based stuff, and migrate the other functions to Linux on cheap hardware. That should extend your budget .

And that is fine, it is your opinion. But most of us who like to run Vista will do so on newer hardware, and as such this is for us.

I would have to disagree with this - if you need to use vlite to give your Vista box performance increases, then you are doing something wrong or have a box that meets the miminum specs and not much more (ever try to run XP on a minimum spec box for XP? exactly). You are welcome to your opinion, and your tweakage - but this article is pretty much spot-on for long-term performance design for Vista. First, that statement is incorrect in so many ways I can't even think of where to start. The pagefile is created during setup in the largest contiguous free space available, and usually near the first third of the drive. It can (and likely will) get fragmented if it needs to increase size over time, as it is inevitable that there will be little to no free space near the end of the current paging file during resize. This is not something easily programmed around - would you rather it get created at the end of the drive? It cannot grow there without being defragged and moved offline, so that's not possible. How about the middle of the drive? If files get placed anywhere after the paging file, it cannot grow without fragmenting, so the initial problem remains.So I ask again, where should it be placed during setup? Windows is going to place the paging file on the boot volume for (amongst other things) recovery purposes - yes, a paging file on a separate volume is preferred for disk fragmentation, but you get no dump data if the box bugchecks nor any log of the problem in the event log if said dump is not generated. With the speed and size of today's hard drives, you don't get markedly better performance anymore in trying to lay all of your data out on specific parts of a drive. At this point in time in hard drive and controller technology, as long as the data is fragmented as little as possible you will get good performance (especially in Vista). 6-10 years ago this might have been something to worry about, but at this time it really isn't. Please re-read entirely before bashing a post again. And, I've read your other posts (like your partitioning post, for instance), and have not commented on how I disagree with it on newer hardware (that maxtor drive is slow and old). Your theories may be right on old hardware and Win9x or 2000 (or even XP on older hardware, to a lesser extent), but this post is about newer hardware and Vista. Please limit your comments about this article to what this article is about - most people receiving Vista going forward are going to run it on newer hardware, and as such this is entirely accurate.

As far as I'm aware there's no way to create a VPN connection itself via a CLI, but you can create them via the CMAK and install them from the package it creates. However, USING a VPN connection that's installed from a command is easier - look into the rasdial command (for example: rasdial.exe <vpn_connection_name> <username> <password>).

Normally I wouldn't suggest this (those that know me know why), but it might be better for you to consider looking into building up a domain via Samba and using cheap OTS components and PCs for most work. It will be a small problem if you need actual support (sometimes newsgroups aren't the fastest method), but if you're just the IT guy for the whole shop, this should be acceptable if you have management support. It will give you more freedom to do things at less cost, and building a VM environment on Xen or VMWare server should be cheaper too. Unless you absolutely NEED something that SBS provides, with that kind of budgetary constraint and the need for you to do VM testing, Linux for most things is probably "the right tool" for you.

Well, that makes no sense at all. I could see a 2003 Office version without the compat pack not being able to open 2007 docs, but not the other way around. Can he remove/reinstall Office? I'd suspect the load from the manufacturer to be faulty, honestly.

According to the EULA, you can make a backup copy of the software, but you can't run them both at once. So, I'd say yes, you need a second copy to be legal and keep it running.

You miss the point - technically, from the viewpoint of the BSA and the company who produced the product, any invalid use of the software is a lost sale (regardless of whether or not the user would have actually bought the software or not). It's a license in-use but not paid for, therefore it's "lost revenue".

If developers take the time to write drivers and software that is Vista compatible, they should have no problems with Win7. http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsv...-windows-7.aspx

Well, you are free to your opinion - but it's just that. And statements like "bloated crap I don't need" and "doesn't work" seems to indicate that 1) you haven't run Vista (SP1) and are relying on heresay, 2) you ran it on an old machine and it didn't work properly, or 3) you like XP and Linux and anything designed after 2004 is "new and bloated". The Vista drivers for new machines issue is valid, but that has more to do with hardware vendors writing drivers for what they're shipping with the hardware, and not wanting to spend the money to rewrite the driver for XP.

I'd suspect memory or the video card, but knowing that the problem seems video-specific isn't 100% definitive that the video card is at fault (although it does lend credence).

If explorer is crashing, you should consider using ShellExView to disable any new/updated/non-Microsoft shell extensions, and see if the problem continues. If so, get an application crash dump of the explorer.exe process.

That's odd. My defrag.exe command in Task Scheduler is %windir%\system32\defrag.exe -c -i, which means the -i is not documented (but -c tells me I'm defragmenting all attached volumes): Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6001] Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. C:\Users\thisuser>defrag /? Description: Locates and consolidates fragmented files on local volumes to improve system performance. Syntax: defrag <volume> -a [-v] defrag <volume> [{-r | -w}] [-f] [-v] defrag -c [{-r | -w}] [-f] [-v] Parameters: Value Description <volume> Specifies the drive letter or mount point path of the volume to be defragmented or analyzed. -c Defragments all volumes on this computer. -a Performs fragmentation analysis only. -r Performs partial defragmentation (default). Attempts to consolidate only fragments smaller than 64 megabytes (MB). -w Performs full defragmentation. Attempts to consolidate all file fragments, regardless of their size. -f Forces defragmentation of the volume when free space is low. -v Specifies verbose mode. The defragmentation and analysis output is more detailed. -? Displays this help information. Examples: defrag d: defrag d:\vol\mountpoint -w -f defrag d: -a -v defrag -c -v I did some searching and found that -i tells defrag.exe to pause when the machine is not idle (hence -i).

I would suggest going into the system properties, advanced, and settings under Startup and Recovery, and make sure the "Automatically Reboot" option is unchecked (just in case the machine is crashing and rebooting too fast for you to catch the bugcheck). If after setting this you still black screen and reboot without going to a BSOD, that would indicate something lower than the Windows kernel, and point more towards hardware problems.

From what I am reading, you are saying that the machine seems to slow when viewing a folder full of TIFF files, and explorer crashes?

Run process monitor while trying to save - see what the "actual" error is (you should probably filter on just file system activity, and exclude registry and process / thread activity).

This might help: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/258261

If it's just you, use the /console switch with the mstsc.exe client. Otherwise, you can use the "restrict user to one session" option in Terminal Services Configuration (tscc.msc) to try and avoid mutliple logon sessions for a single user on a TS.

Not really, at least not in AD. Server 2008 and Citrix Presentation Server (installed on a 2003 server) allow application publishing over terminal services (2008) or Citrix app publishing services (2003 + Citrix), but that's it. You can also use Software Installation policies (intellimirror) to preinstall apps or install apps on first use, but nothing non-local via group policy.

The focus here is the request to consider live chat, which we have done numerous times (and even tried once). It isn't going to happen on MSFN. It's not a problem, it's a feature. And it lowers the quality of the board in our opinion, and as such we are sticking to the forum-based board as it is to keep an archive of (almost) all posted data, for others to search, use, etc. I have empathy that this feature you would like is something we will not consider at this time, but I reiterate this is not the first request for this. Answer given, post closed.