cluberti

What you've found is all accurate - the reason 0x47 (71 decimal) "unhides" the My Computer zone is simple math, as it sets the following values: Value Setting ------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Allow changes to custom settings 2 Allow users to add Web sites to this zone 4 Require verified Web sites (https protocol) 64 Show the Requires Server Verification dialog box Note that 32 (Do not show security zone in Internet Properties) is not set, meaning the zone IS shown. Setting it to 0x27 (33 decimal) means that the following are set: Value Setting ------------------------------------------------------------------ 1 Allow changes to custom settings 32 Do not show security zone in Internet Properties (default setting for My Computer) Note that this will hide the security zone. There are other valid configurations that make 32 set as well, but you have to do the math (in decimal, then convert to hex to set the reg key if you're doing it in a .reg) to figure out what numbers include what settings, and what they exclude. These are additive, remember.

You are free to your opinion, but I think that there are portions of this board that deal with everyday issues. If you hang out in the Vista or XP/200x/NT forums all day, that's about all you are going to see, but if you try some of the other forums (unattended section, programming section, network/hardware section) there is a lot of problem solving going on. Remember that until Vista (and adoption has been slow), no new OSes had come out of Microsoft since 2003. Since 2003 RTM'ed in March of 2003, and XP RTM'ed in October of 2001, you're going to find most people are moving from understanding the OS to trying to tweak it now, and that's the bulk of the posts in these forums (notwithstanding the small number of people running Win9x or WinNT/2K who want to string that along as well). In about a year, when Vista SP1 and 2008 become more widespread, we'll likely see a lot more of break/fix and "how do you do x" posts again, and that'll last for a little while until we start getting back to the tweaking before the next release. It's a cycle I've seen a few times now here since 2001, and I expect it to continue.

It looks like they're using the WMV format, and you have a problem with Windows Media Player on your machine similar to this one.

That would be good, but I need servers now that work. I can't wait until 2009 for them to fix a problem they've had since the P4 released!

Yes. Intel still hasn't fixed their I/O bottleneck from the CPU to system memory, just moved it - the DHSI, which was supposed to fix the bottleneck, simply moves it from the CPU to the northbridge. All memory and I/O from CPU to memory subsystem has to go through the northbridge, which under heavy load becomes more like a bike path than a superhighway (single point of convergence). The AMD chips and chipset have no such limitation, as each processor can address directly through the hypertransport any memory bank (and two processors can access each bank simultaneously, although at a slight performance hit if the traffic gets hot and heavy). Intel did introduce VT-d to do a direct bypass of the CPU for hardware I/O in virtualization, which AMD won't release until the next chipset release later this year, and that was pretty cool. Not enough to sway, but definitely a cool addition. If you don't put a heavy load on your box, you're good to go (better even) with the Xeons. If you run lots of VMs doing a decent amount of memory I/O, the Xeons quickly fall behind the Opterons.

Doubtful, at least for a few more years.

I think that's the true tenet of fanboi'ism of any kind (Intel/AMD, Apple/Microsoft, Linux/rest of the world's OSes) - you're too close to the chalkboard to see any position other than the one you've sidled up to and is right in front of your nose. Technically, there really isn't anything wrong with that either - what you have served you well, there's no compelling reason to do anything different, IMO. I know we'll never agree, but judging AMD on anything prior to the later K7 models (when they finally were big enough and had the R&D budget to "get it right", so to speak) really does limit your ability to judge favorably. I'll stick with my Opterons and Tyan motherboards for virtualization and database performance, as I have tried Intel in this role, and the Xeons honestly just can't keep up.

LAN parties are generally for gaming.

I've tried it. Definitely not something I would suggest for a prime-time Exchange cluster, it's just not robust enough. It worked fine with one Exchange instance on an active/passive with about 200 users, but when we bumped it up to 4 instances on an active/active/passive/passive setup with about 1000 users, it crumbled under the I/O load. Went back to fiber, no problems. Even SCSI kept up pretty well (we tried it just for kicks to see if it would scale, and that was pushing the limits of the technology), although it had it's moments of faltering under heavy load.

As always, as a HEAVY virtual machine user, I have to respectfully disagree with jcarle on this. Intel is NOT where it's at .

The first issue I would have is using the server as a router - you'd be better off using a "prosumer-class" router to handle this, rather than a Windows or Linux/BSD server.

No, that's called "terminal services", which requires a server. It's not silly at all, honestly. If you need multiple people logged in simultaneously to a machine, you use Windows Server or a Linux or BSD variant.

Is this an XP Home machine by chance?

I forgot to touch on this in my previous post - you will need a cluster (2 servers, external storage, either SAN or (i)SCSI) to achieve this kind of thing with an Exchange server.

Honestly, I would say the easiest way is to use nLite to integrate them into the OS (don't do anything else with nLite if you'd like a stock install). You could always try using the OEMPreinstall=YES and OEMPnPDriversPath=\DRIVERS\SATA in your winnt.sif file and using the \$OEM$\TEXTMODE and \$OEM$\$1\DRIVERS\SATA folder structure if you'd like to [url="http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/prork/prbc_cai_fnnb.mspx?mfr=true"]learn how to do it manually[/url], of course.

That's what I thought may happen, but I wanted you to check. You cannot put a 16bit app in compatibility mode, so the fact that it's unavailable means it is indeed a 16bit app and as such obsolete at this point in history. Not a problem, and good luck.

I would suggest the following: 1. Reset security to out-of-the-box defaults by running the following command from a command prompt (start > run > cmd > click ok): secedit /configure /cfg "%windir%\security\templates\setup security.inf" /db ss.sdb /overwrite 2. Reboot 3. Reinstall the Intel Matrix Storage Manager to reinstall the iastor.sys and other supporting files. 4. Re-scan the machine with antivirus and spwyare scanners to make sure it truly is clean - once a machine has been infected, I always suggest rebuilding after backing up your data, because you can never be sure that install is ever truly clean again. However, that is always your choice.

NTVDM.exe = NT Virtual DOS Machine Also, since you are trying to launch ntvdm.exe, you do have 32bit Vista (64bit vista does not contain 16bit components, and ntvdm.exe is used to launch 16bit or 8bit apps inside a 32bit process - backwards compatibility from Win9x days, brought forward even to Vista 32bit). These instructional applications - if they're launching ntvdm.exe, that means they're trying to run inside a command prompt, meaning they are probably quite old. I did some research on "Asymetrix ToolBox II", and found it to be "courseware authoring software" that was likely used to make the training you are using, and was released in retail in December 1996. Since the training was made with a tool for Windows 95, but still tries to run in a DOS box, I'd say the training probably dates from sometime in 1997 or (very) early 1998 - making it 10 - 11 years and (depending on whether or not you count WinME) at least 4 Windows versions ago. Those are (extremely) likely to NOT run properly on Vista, as they were designed either for Windows 95 or actual DOS 6.x (probably Win95, but they still try to run in a DOS box). You can _try_ to run these in Windows 95 compatibility mode by right-clicking on the icon that launches these and selecting "properties", then clicking the "compatibility" tab. Click the "run this program in compaitibility mode for" box, and select "Windows 95" from the drop-down list. If that doesn't work, you are either going to have to contact the vendor and see if the product has an update (at least for Windows 2000, if not XP), or go back to running these under XP. Honestly, you're probably better off upgrading the package to something newer (preferably to something that was written for Windows 2000 or Windows XP, if not something that is certified to run on Vista).

The reason for this, in a nutshell, is that TCP/IP has some overhead on the connection - if you've ever used other protocols in the past (like IPX, for instance), especially on non-ethernet or dialup (say, token ring ) you see almost 100% saturation. TCP/IP gets you roughly 80% util, and less on an ethernet lan (although good 100/1000Mbit switches can offset that a bit).

Server 2003 does not have this ability natively, although I think perhaps Citrix has added this functionality to Presentation Server. If you want to do this, you'll need to install and use a 2008 TS gateway or use ISA to enforce smart card logins at the firewall, although that would be very messy comparatively to a TS gateway box.

Does this occur immediately after a reboot, or does it take some time for this to occur?

That this fixes it is well known - the problem stems from the fact that the Microsoft Update client brings in enough new apps to check for that the XML file used by the WU engine becomes quite large, and causes high CPU spikes due to msiexec parsing over and over on a far higher number of products (Office being on the system usually makes it as bad as it can be).

Windows Vista Multilingual User Interface Step-by-Step Guide is about as good a guide as you are going to get.

Vista SP1 cannot be "slipstreamed" to an offline Vista image (and that includes the RTM install.wim from the Vista CD). The only way is to make an image, install the SP, then read the new WAIK documentation on how to sysprep that properly. Or, get a DVD from Microsoft with SP1 included.

If a machine attached to a domain is logged into the domain it is joined to, it will be using the DomainProfile keys, and when not, will use the StandardProfile keys. If the settings are the same between the two, yes, you should (and will need to) push down both to catch both scenarios.