cluberti

I've re-opened it for now, but if the user that caused the hiding of the thread keeps returning it will be removed again.

No, in fact don't. It's a leaked key, making this install warez - I thank the OP for making it easy for us to see they've not bothered to read or attempt to follow the very 1st of the forum rules! Thanks! [banned].

Usually if you can see the POST (no matter how ugly) and then nothing, especially if the display is "sleeping" as a Dell of mine did last year, the graphics chip itself is potentially bad. Just be aware of this especially given that you claim a pink hue and then nothing - that wouldn't happen to have a GeForce Go chip in it, would it? The good news is you can usually get a replacement inverter or CCFL for a few dollars, and they're both usually field-serviceable parts. The bad news is that they're both somewhat non-trivial to get at in some Toshiba laptop models where they're housed behind the LCD. The other bad news is replacing them isn't likely to fix it, but given it's only a few dollars to try I'd suggest it anyway just to be sure. Usually inverters go bad either due to poor craftsmanship (possible, but not likely) or they're overworked or overheated. In general, if the CCFL is drawing too much current (gone bad) and overheats the inverter, you'll get no display at all - which is a similar symptom, but that usually happens immediately on power-up, not *after* the POST (a bad inverter usually gives you only a split second of video, and then it goes away). Next, if a CCFL has *started* to go bad, you generally get a pink tint, but it either stays that way or goes away slowly as the unit runs - again, similar symptoms, but you'd notice over time that the display would dim on half or all of the screen, you'd get a pinkish or reddish tint to everything for some time, and *then* it'd go bad and you'd get nothing (no POST display either, most times). The fact you get a pinkish post and then zero output as the display is switched from the BIOS resolution to the kernel (and thus the video driver) would not really be something I see with a dead CCFL or inverter, so either you have some loose wiring (again, possible but not likely unless the display comes back with some jiggling of the screen or laptop) or a bad GPU on the motherboard itself. Again, the actual point of failure, the pinkish/reddish tint during POST, and the fact that the external display doesn't respond to the keyboard display changes would lead me to expect you'll have a bad GPU, not a bad LCD or CCFL/inverter.

+1 on the 615 running DD-WRT, or a Linksys WRT54GL running Tomato.

Sounds like some sort of C or C++ wrapper to ASM, which can be done anyway in any C or C++ project in VS at least. However, if it's *true* ASM and it has a way to make Win32 calls, that'd be mighty interesting.

Depends on the TS CALs you purchased, but user CALs are per device or user, not server (external connector or service provider CALs are different, but I'm assuming you purchased per user or per device TS CALs). You'd need licensing for the Server OS and a license for the TS on it, but the client CALs would not need to be doubled up.

You might consider putting a Forefront TMG or ISA box at each site and use the site-to-site connection, or or go with a Cisco PIX solution at each site to do the same. If the ISPs were the same for both schools you could have simply gotten the ISP to set up your own virtual network, but if they're different you will have to do it yourself. There are other solutions that will work, but Cisco PIX and ISA/TMG are the ones I've used in the past with the most success (even on slow links). Just make sure you create two separate sites in AD for each school to keep replication across the WAN to a minimum.

Windows 7 will only pre-activate on OEM machines using the correct SLiC BIOS, whereas enterprise versions always require a MAK or KMS key to activate if you're being legal (Enterprise is VL only, so it *requires* a KMS or MAK key).

Not to mention if you're using Vista or Win7 clients, printer management scripts are already built-in.

Look into customization of the customsettings.ini file to answer your second question - you can pretty much automate everything, including the task sequence (although I don't suggest it, you certainly can do this). As to the first, you should probably create a new thread for the question and reference this thread as to how you're doing your deployment.

I have an idea - get me a dump of the system via the keyboard the next time it's hung (add the values necessary in safe mode) .

C:\Users\User>err 80072EE2 # as an HRESULT: Severity: FAILURE (1), Facility: 0x7, Code 0x2ee2 # for hex 0x2ee2 / decimal 12002 : ERROR_INTERNET_TIMEOUT inetmsg.h ERROR_INTERNET_TIMEOUT wininet.h # 2 matches found for "80072EE2"According to the error code, it's somewhat obvious what the failure is, but not why. You might want to take a look at a network trace, perhaps, to see why there's a timeout to Microsoft's servers.

Correct - it should read Loaded Servicing Stack v6.1.7600.16385 with Core: C:\Windows\winsxs\amd64_microsoft-windows-servicingstack_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_655452efe0fb810b\cbscore.dll if you were using a real RTM release. Also, it does specifically tell you why it failed, to go along with the statement above - it required the build 16385 components as parents to begin the update, which you do not have installed - it throws an 800f0805 error when this happens: 2010-08-19 20:00:40, Info CBS Failed to internally open package. [HRESULT = 0x800f0805 - CBS_E_INVALID_PACKAGE] The only way to end up with the pre-RTM build 16384 was to download it from a non-Microsoft source (torrent or other distribution) or acquire it from someone who did. I make no judgements about your installation (for all I know it could have been preinstalled by someone less scrupulous than we are), but given that we *severly* discourage warez use and discussion here (it's our very first rule!) continued discussion about this particular OS install (other than how to replace it with a legal copy) will result in a ban. Maya77, please acquire a valid Windows 7 copy and install it before asking any further questions about this particular OS installation here. Thank you. [split topic and closed].

"Half of us will fail this major, the other half will fail after we graduate and get a job"

Agreed, it's not obvious from the wmic call (that's a good thing). Let's have a look at the cbs.log file from \Windows\Logs\CBS\.

What does the command wmic os get /All /format:LIST tell you about your current OS?

If all they need is a simple file server, using something other than Windows may be sufficient (given W2K isn't even supported anymore). I guess it depends on the types of permissions that may or may not need to be set and the knowledge level of the person or persons running the network that would determine the file server OS (Windows is a fine OS for file serving, but it's not free and you mentioned finances / budgeting in your post).

I can't find any public information on this, so you might have to call MS to get a definitive answer. I don't think anyone other than MS really knows the answer to this for retail media.

Right - and since Win2K doesn't have VSS, you *need* an application with it's own shadow functionality to deal with in-use files during backup, or you will have corruption and/or missing data in your backup. This is why Win2K and NT4 backups were the realm of apps like BackupExec, because they did have their own (very good) file-in-use engines via a filter driver. It worked well, but you paid through the nose for them. Otherwise, you have to take the machine offline to get a good copy, and frankly servers being offline for backup is so 1990 .

Well, on my XP SP3 VM I installed the June update, and ended up with all kinds of new files in system32.

Seems like a lot of work that would be just as easy with PXE booting to a Ghost PE over the network. To each his own, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary work. No, WSUS is free and does Microsoft software updates only. If you want 3rd party integration, you need System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) 2007, which is a pretty penny (of course it's much more than a patching solution too, obviously).

Fair enough, if you need to deploy Linux as well as Windows from the same solution and that solution doesn't use Windows PE images to bootstrap the Ghost process, you of course would need to use something other than WDS (or hack it, which isn't really a useful way to do it as it doesn't always work). You can still use WDS and MDT to build your image and sysprep your XP installation, though.Also, since newer versions of Ghost already run via Windows PE images, you could use this to host your MDT Windows PE images as well as your Ghost PE images and consolidate server components. I would suggest it if you hadn't already considered it anyway, as PXE booting is just so much easier than carrying media around if you can avoid it. Yes, this will work, although you will find that building and sysprep'ing the "base" XP image with MDT+WDS much easier, and you can simply ghost the machine or VM after you've sysprep'ed and shut that base XP machine down. See my previous answer, though - I suggest you consider it if you haven't already, which would negate this question entirely. This can be done in the [unattend] section of the answer file, specifically the ProgramFilesDir and CommonProgramFilesDir settings. Set ProgramFilesDir="C:\Programs" and CommonProgramFilesDir="C:\Programs\Common Files", for instance. I still fail to see how this is required, though, as even batch scripts run under a cmd can include spaces if the path is in quotes. Seems like you would be fixing one problem by adding the probability there will be others, and I wouldn't suggest it. I've seen it break .NET patches, IE cumulative updates, as well as a Windows patch or two (it's been a few years, but it's still possible on downlevel clients like XP and 2003 that this could happen again with future updates). I prefer neither, actually - I use MDT to install Windows, then install Internet Explorer 8 or Windows Media Player 11 (or any other app), and then sysprep the machine after I've installed all of the apps I require and have configured the machine and default profile to my liking. Integrating into the source itself, either via add-on packs or command line switches of the packages themselves, has never been on my list of things that I consider doing for XP. On Vista, Win7, etc, yes, as these have good tools to handle this (and technically CBS is installing these things anyway, it's not really integrating them in the classic sense). It's best feature is that with the task sequences for deploying OSes and Applications, it makes repeating your build process 100% reliable - it will always do the same things, in the same order, in the same task sequence. In fact, I don't even patch any of the apps I install in the base image - I handle that on deployment as part of the deployment process (either via WSUS, or via installing them from the Task Sequence doing the deployment or a script). It may take a bit more time, but I can be sure that each and every machine built from that task sequence, at least when it leaves my build lab, is exactly like any other machine built from that task sequence (short of hardware differences on the destination machine that can create small driver differences). For XP or 2003, that's about as good as you're going to get.

I guess it all depends - if you have a user account that is not the local admin and the admin account is disabled during setup (the default), it will automatically log on with the second account anyway (as there are no other accounts to choose from on the welcome screen) in a non-domain environment.

That depends on your version of Windows - XP SP3 should have some of the additional files, but XP SP2 and lower may not.

I would question how you want to deploy these installations first, because you need to plan this much more than you would a Vista or Windows 7 rollout, for instance. I would recommend a build lab on a Server 2003, Server 2008, or Server 2008 R2 server running Windows Deployment Services, with MDT 2010 (Update 1) installed. You can use this to build a base image from Windows XP media, and then install and sysprep it for re-deployment. Also, what is the specific need to move C:\Program Files to C:\Programs? There are things that can break (most notably there have been patches that fail when this is changed), so unless you have a real need for it I would strongly encourage you to avoid doing this at all costs. As to IE8, WMP11, etc, you would install these in the base image and then deploy after sysprep'ing - slipstreaming these things (as nLite does) isn't necessarily the best option when deploying supportable images. It is better to install these into a base image after testing, and patch them post-deployment as necessary. Honestly, you really should start reading up on MDT 2010 and installing it in a lab to play with - it's very easy to use, and can automate repeatable deployments much better than doing things the manual way or using nLite. If you have specific questions, please let us know.