nmX.Memnoch

SATA what? If the partition is going to be > 8GB that's a bad, bad, bad, bad choice. Hell, even if it's < 8GB that's a bad choice. Stick with NTFS.I don't know why people think FAT32 is so good. You'll end up with a TON of wasted space on a FAT32 partition simply because of the cluster size.

The only thing I have to add is that the P5B Deluxe might be a little overkill if he's not gaming. The non-WiFi version is also hard to find now. The Asus P5B-E would be an alternate recommendation. I wanted the Deluxe but it wasn't out yet when I upgraded last year. The P5B-E has served me well and I do game.

Yeah, a lot of what I do in my script can be forced with Group Policies. However...I don't have access to edit the Group Policies at work (and they won't create custom ones for us) so I've had to get creative. I hope you can find some use for at least some of what I posted. The email alerting is probably some of my favorite stuff in the script. I need to rework my printer script and post a cleaned up version of that. The eventual plan is to do printer mapping based on workstation location.

Actually, the WinTV-HVR-1800 supports both cable and OTA...at the same time.

Yes, you can do it in the following to registry keys: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders If you're on a domain and want to do it for all users, it can be done with Group Policies.

Marvell Control Panel Applet for VLAN and Link Aggregation: x86 | x64

I would agree with you if it was meant to be a comparison list, but it's a recommendation list. They've even given a reason for each recommendation. If you want reviews and comparisons, check out StorageReview.com.

It all depends on the application. If you're looking for speed you definitely don't want to go RAID5 unless you have a really good RAID controller. And even then you should weigh your storage size and speed requirements to decide which RAID level to use. IMO, RAID5 should never be used for an OS drive. None of the integrated solutions (Intel, NVIDIA, ATI, etc, etc) are considered really good RAID controllers. Using them for RAID0, RAID1 or RAID10 is fine because no calculations have to be performed to write or read the data. Anything higher than those levels though, and you need a real hardware RAID controller with it's own dedicated processor, cache, and optionally a battery backup for the cache. See this thread for more detailed information.

I always try to recommend the Hauppage cards. They're definitely among some of the most recommended cards among HTPC enthusiasts. Check out HTPCNews.com. There's a wealth of information there (when the site returns...appears they're having some Technical DifficultiesTM right now). There's also AVSForum.com.

The JB series drives from WD were horrible in just about every aspect. Their latest drives don't have a single thing in common with those drives other than the WD logo. I'm sure WD would love to erase both the BB and JB series drives from history.

You won't find a Raptor in that price range either. BTW, there is a difference between the Raptor 150 and the Raptor X 150. The Raptor X is an enthusiast drive that lacks the time-limited error recovery (TLER) feature found in the "regular" Raptor 150. It's a feature specifically for use in server/RAID applications and is also found in the Caviar RE and Caviar RE2 drives.

To an extent. Once it gets to a certain number of drives the speed increases stop and the only benefit is having the one large array vs. a bunch of individual drives. If you're going to put more than 2 drives in a RAID0 array, that's when I recommend just moving to RAID10.

Yeah, I could do that with an LDAP query...but it would always be active in the background and query every so often. The Scheduled Task would only run once, and only if the user is logged on. It's something that I can also enforce with a GPO (create a user logon script GPO that checks to see if the tasks exists, if not, create it). I can also enforce permissions on it so that it can't be deleted. However, your idea may be of some use as an addition to SessionManager.

They claim high sustained transfer rates. There have been any reviews yet to prove the claims. Honestly, I'd like to see them pull off what they claim...it'll put every other drive maker on notice, that's for sure.

You don't know what his motherboard supports or doesn't support either so generalizing is something you definitely shouldn't do. Making someone new to overclocking aware of what can, can't, or shouldn't be done, or what can happen, is the best thing you can do. There's a wealth of information on the topic all over the place...some of it good, some of it misleading.I know that if I was new to overclocking and someone told me "yeah sure, it's safe go right ahead" and then I ended up frying something because of that advice...I'd be some kind of mad at that person. Personally, I get paid to look at a situation and attempt to see 10-20 steps in advance what could or will happen. I tend to do that with everything now. When I see someone only give 10% of the information on overclocking my mind immediately fast forwards to two days later with some dude sitting there...his PC in parts...trying to figure out what happened. Ok...let me rephrase. Overclocking your CPU FSB will not, by association, overclock the GPU itself. It could, however, overclock the bus that the GPU sits on. If the bus runs too far out of limits then the GPU will fail to work correctly (or any device on that bus). I recommend you go back and read them. You'll find that most of your comments have already been covered...in detail.

No, the user can't logon if it's outside the logon hours. However, if they logon during the allowed period, they're not automatically logged off when the logon hours expire. Again, the wording of that setting is a bit misleading because that's not the purpose of the setting. I could whip up a quick script that would run in the background to force a logout...that's not a problem. But what good are the logon hours if it doesn't forcefully log them out automatically? For example, if the logon hours expired at say, 10PM, schedule the following to run "Only if I'm logged on" to run at 9:59PM (if you're not familiar with my "style", the code is KiX): ; Loop until 2 seconds before the logon hours expire ; By the time the logout process finishes the hours will have expired ; and they won't be able to log back in Do Sleep 1 Until @TIME = "21:59:58" ; Forcefully logout LogOff(1) BTW...if there's any interest I can take a stab at updating the SessionManager Configurator to include configuring logon hours for local accounts. I can also see about including option to exclude running it on weekends.

I wouldn't recommend Google Desktop at all. Google Desktop Security Search Results (how ironic is it that I used Google to search for that?)

Have you tried setting it as a local machine policy on the client machine?Don't have to...I have a domain, remember? It's all forced through GPO on both the workstations and the domain controller. But yes, I've tried everything. Even this, but it doesn't work. Leaving the /domain option off of the command applies it to the local machine...but again, it doesn't work.

*sigh* Did you even read the entire thread or did you just skip over the "long boring" posts? This is completely dependent on the motherboard and how it's BIOS is setup. For instance, my P5B-E allows me to change the CPU FSB but keep the RAM FSB locked (within a certain tolerance). It automatically adjusts (again, within certain tolerance) so I don't have to worry about it. The GPU yes. But the bus is a different story. Older motherboards (and even some newer cheap ones) will also overclock the PCI and AGP/PCIe buses as well. This can cause the GPU to fail as if it were overclocked too much itself. It's particularly bad with NICs and sound cards.

Thanks but I can't take all the credit. SessionManager itself is jcarle's. That's cool to know that it can be done to local accounts. The only thing that sucks is that Windows doesn't auto-logoff the user when the logon hours expire. I found some settings that are supposed to work...but they don't. It'll disconnect any network sessions (if you configure that) and prevent you from accessing anything...except the internet (unless you use a proxy that requires authentication). But other than that the only thing it does is prevents you from logging on if you're already logged off. Sure...I could do some stuff with a Scheduled Task and what not...but the Network security: Force logoff when logon hours expire setting should work as you would think it would. Here's the description text from TechNet for that setting: Not exactly what you'd think from the way the option is worded is it?

Take a really good look at it. If you have any areas that are thicker than others that means the thinner areas aren't getting good contact...and will run warmer. 8C is a pretty good jump from one side of a CPU to the other, especially when the heat spreader is only about 1.25"x1.25" (the CPU dies are much closer together under the heat spreader than that). The reason for spreading it yourself is so that you make sure you get a nice even, thin spread across the heatspreader.

I'm not arguing with you at all. I'm just trying to make you realize why it's important to explain things to people. If you tell them something should work a certain way, but don't explain all of the details about how to make it work that certain way then who are they going to blame when it doesn't? One, they're either going to blame you, or two they're going to think they have a hardware problem when they may not. Those comments weren't aimed directly at you. Again, I'm just trying to explain the difference between "yeah, it's safe" and "well, you can probably get a good overclock, maybe not that high and you should be aware of 'this', 'this' and 'this'". If you're going to provide people with support then do the research and do it right. Did I say you were telling him or anyone else to get phase change? Again, it was another observation/point.

Hmmm...I'll have to double check that with mine tomorrow. Wait...actually, I know that the wallpaper sticks because we are setting a default one. But we're specifying a specific bitmap instead of removing it. Have you tried completely removing the Wallpaper value? Change this: "Wallpaper"="" to this "Wallpaper"=- You may also want to try adding this "PrevWallpaper"=- As for the screensaver...I'm pretty sure you have to specify the full path to the .scr file. And you can't use system variables (i.e. you have to use C:\WINDOWS as opposed to %WINDIR% or %SYSTEMROOT%).

First, take the quotes off and give it a shot...like this: [COMMANDS] RunOnceEx.cmd REGEDIT /S HKCU.reg REGEDIT /S HKLM.reg Let me know how that works. Other than that, and keep in mind I just looked at it real quick, I see no reason why the settings shouldn't be working.

Again...just blanket recommending "yeah, it's safe" to someone who doesn't now anything at all about overclocking isn't something you can do. He asked if it was safe to overclock a 1.8GHz CPU to 3.33GHz, a clock speed that's over 50% faster than it's rated for, and the answer he got was "yeah, sure...go head". Now, do you think he would go about it by incrementally adjusting the FSB and other settings? No...he's going to go straight to 3.33GHz, thereby taking a chance on data corruption or even worse, burning something up. And who's going to be to blame? And exactly how many people out of the millions that use a computer every day are running phase change? Check that...how many out of those that are overclocking are running phase change? I think you'll find the percentage is still rather small. But yeah, their CPUs will last for a while. Lemme ask you this as well...would you spend a bunch of money on a phase change system to only put a $100 CPU under it?