cluberti

It would help if you would have posted a question rather than a statement. Hopefully this was cathartic for you, but otherwise this is a useless post.

Interesting - doesn't seem very enterprise-friendly though. Working in a single domain environment, or allowing only one partition (well, 2, but one of them is used by DistriBrute, so effectively one) means it's just not meant for anything large scale. Still a cool idea though.

Well, I would check the registry to be sure all of the required data is there - assuming it is, I cannot explain it. This works properly on my own XP SP3 VM (just tested it to be sure). Make sure you're watching out for line wrap on the code box in the thread - if you copy/paste directly, the file is all screwed up. I've attached the .reg I use to this post (renamed to .txt, of course) if you want to try and download/run it. Here's it in action, working properly on my XP SP3 VM I just built: folderviewsettings.txt

Moved. Welcome to the forums, kasimalli, but please do try to post questions in the right locations going forward. Thank you.

There is a thread in the winlogon process (since the WGA updates in early 2005) that checks the license status of the currently installed license on every boot, and you may see connections to microsoft.com periodically due to this. I'm guessing it's downloading a list of blacklisted product IDs and checking that your key doesn't match one, as the data passed is really quite small - also note it doesn't seem to do this on every boot, just some. However, we know that the WGA notifications portion of WGA does seem to check approximately once every 24 hours with Microsoft servers, but I'm not sure how it handles being offline for extended periods of time (doesn't seem to cause any issues, so I'm not sure exactly what it is doing or trying to do - it's probably doing the same as the thread in winlogon, and the traffic looks very similar, but given it's all encrypted I suppose only the folks who maintain this at MS know for sure).

Unfortunately, with the current default skin/color schemes from IPB, the text for links is barely different from non-link text. Using bold is actually a good idea - never though about it . I went back and fixed the link in that post to be bold, just in case someone else comes across it, and using bold makes a HUGE difference in readability.

Then don't use it, use another OS like OS X or Linux - problem solved. At least the data sent back doesn't personally identify you or your PC, unlike certain other software vendors in the news this week.

Probably because IE7 was the first IE version to actually support transparency and other parts of the image specification.

Redistributing Microsoft binaries would be a violation of their copyright (and a violation of board rules). However, there is a tool here called Windows Updates Downloader that can handle doing the download of hotfixes for you.

This has been discussed before.

I'm not sure that's relevant with a Win7 source as the installation media. I've found that using a Win7 x86 source seems to work fine in all scenarios thus far - export all versions (Vista, 2008, Win7, 2008 R2) to a new .WIM, then place that as install.wim in place of the existing install.wim in the \sources folder, and everything installs fine from the Win7 sources. I'm using x86 because you cannot install an x86 image from an x64 source, but an x86 source can "see" and install x86 and x64 images.

Technically an ISO can be larger than 4GB if the software reading it can handle it, but of course physical media size is limited. If we're talking about Windows Vista or Windows 7 images, you don't even need an ISO - you just need a bootable USB key and the flat files copied to it for it to work (again, the machine booting the USB key must also be capable of booting from removable media, but most computers built in the last few years have this capability).

Given that it works *most* of the time, my guess is that given you have hardcoded paths in your specialize pass, the machines where it is failing are likely failing because of drive letter differences. When you run into one, SHIFT+F10 and take a look to see what drive letters are actually there. That's the only thing I can see in the file that I would expect could cause problems.

Attached is a quick sample I mocked up.ShareInfo.vbs.txt

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490893.aspx Basically, you want to start with "list disk" and then "select disk #", where # is the disk you're trying to view. From there you can list partitions and volumes via the list command, and start modifying things as necessary. The link above contains all the commands possible in diskpart.

If you have partition table issues, the disk management MMC (which uses the standard APIs for disk access) will have trouble with the partitions and disk. Diskpart, however, bypasses most of these and gets the raw data. It's been available for use since August 2001, and was first seen in Windows 2000. So it's been the "hit program" for about 9 years.

You would only need this update if you were using kerberos tokens and authenticating to a web server that required kerberos authentication and the extended packet data required. If you do not log into sites that require this, you would not necessarily require this update, no.

Except there are a LOT of things you can't do on a mobile platform, being limited not only by the CPU but by memory and board footprint. If it weren't for software actually trying to push hardware boundaries, we might still have the capabilities of a PDA of yesteryear, but in a highly inefficient CPU tower! . Some people see feature creep and things as bloat, but personally I'd rather see less minimal, more manageable code and hardware to match rather than trying to write an entire C program in 100 lines or less because I've only got a 4K buffer on my phone. While the latter is better for some people, most developers (myself included) will tell you not only is it a nightmare to code, debug, and qualify to ship, it's an even bigger headache to maintain long term. Obviously given I've been a Unix and Windows developer for most of my work years (and some before) I prefer code re-use and the OS to provide many of the APIs I use, and not have to write my own unless necessary - it's more cost-effective, the code is easier to port and patch from one OS level or patch level to the next, and SE maintenance over 3, 5, or even longer year deltas means if I wrote readable and debuggable code, any good developer should be able to plop down and be proficient quickly.Yes, tight and well performant code should be a goal of every developer, but not at the expense of readability and supportability. I for one am glad that lots of computers nowadays have multiple (real) CPU cores and lots of memory - hopefully it will bring about programs that make good use of those resources.

Do you see things if you view the disk and partition(s) in diskpart?

Phoning home, yes. Advanced, not very . I don't really see this as a problem, per se, but if you do, you are free to your tinfoil hat. There are a plethora of OS options for those folks who want to run an OS that doesn't check to verify periodically if you're legally using your software, but most of those choices aren't Microsoft Windows, and none of them are versions of the OS that the vendor supports.

If you know the specific share name you want to look up, you could use the WMI win32_ServerConnection instance.

It might be worthwhile to have the service running, and the firewall on the PC allowing UDP 138 while on the domain, but when off having that port closed. You can configure both the service and firewall profiles in Group Policy.

Do not cross-post. I've closed your other post and left this one open.

Do not cross-post.

Probably, and I'll move it, but x64 itself does give some overhead compared to x86 just because binaries and memory pools are larger. I'm not sure what you can strip from a base PE image, but we'll see if anyone else has any ideas in the WinPE section.