nmX.Memnoch

No need to use BeyondExec...shutdown.exe supports remote shutdowns with the -m switch. Instead of doing it manually you could write a cmd file/script that parses all of the workstations that are online using net view, and then pass the shutdown command from there. Something like: net view | find "partial_workstation_name" > workstations.txt I could do something for you, but it'll be KiXtart based as that's what I deal with...someone else here may be able to do something with VBS if you prefer that. C:\>shutdown.exe /? Usage: shutdown.exe [-i | -l | -s | -r | -a] [-f] [-m \\computername] [-t xx] [- c "comment"] [-d up:xx:yy] No args Display this message (same as -?) -i Display GUI interface, must be the first option -l Log off (cannot be used with -m option) -s Shutdown the computer -r Shutdown and restart the computer -a Abort a system shutdown -m \\computername Remote computer to shutdown/restart/abort -t xx Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds -c "comment" Shutdown comment (maximum of 127 characters) -f Forces running applications to close without war ning -d [u][p]:xx:yy The reason code for the shutdown u is the user code p is a planned shutdown code xx is the major reason code (positive integer less than 256) yy is the minor reason code (positive integer less than 65536)

Only having the room for 1 expansion card would make 1U "pretty much out of the question" for most people trying to use a rackmount case as a desktop system. You have to get specialized motherboards, HSF's, RAM, etc, etc to use a 1U case. A lot of 2U rackmount cases use riser cards as well, but some can use half-height cards. You can find some really good half-height cards such as the Intel GigE Server Adapters, 3ware SATA RAID controllers, LSI SCSI controllers and a few others. The thing you won't find is a high-end half-height video card. There are some ATI X300 and X600 base cards that are half-height, but I wouldn't call these "high-end cards".

The ones on the CD may not be the latest version. Here's a link to the Windows 2000 SP4 Deployment Tools. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&DisplayLang=en There may be subtle differences, but some of them can be important. This is especially true if you're using, for instance, the XP Gold or XP SP1 deployment tools on an XP SP2 deployment.

You have to go with at least a 4U case or full height cards won't fit. If your cards are all half-height (unlikely) then you can get away with a 2U case....and a 1U case is pretty much out of the question. Also, check the power supply mounts. Most rackmount cases are made for specialized server motherboards that don't use "regular" ATX power supplies.

Actually...I have a hard time recommending anyone purchase at the moment unless they have an immediate need. Intel's Conroe based CPUs will be out in a few months and there's every indication they'll take the overall performance crown back. http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2716 http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=219 http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4843

That's all you needed to say.

Great case. This is what I currently have. Personally I'd be looking at something based on the 955X or 975X chipset. If you want to stay in the same price range as this Gigabyte board then check out the Asus P5WD2. If you can stand to spend a little extra then check out the Asus P5WD2-E Premium. I'd really recommend splurging a little on one of the 65nm Presler based P4's. Not only will it run cooler but it has double the L2 cache. I'd do a little research on this. The X800 series GPUs don't have Shader Model 3.0 support. While this may not be overly important for current games it will be for upcoming games. You can get a 7600GT based card for around the same price. Not a bad choice either, but see motherboard recommendations above. Not a bad drive but their 7200.9 series drives are out now...and they're SATA 3.0Gb/s drives. The motherboards you're looking at all have SATA 3.0Gb/s interfaces so you'll definitely want to get a drive that can take advantage of that. Based on personal experience, and I believe several people here will agree with me on this, I'd recommend looking at the NEC ND-3550A. Another good choice would be the Pioneer DVR-111D. The Mitsumi 7-in-1 comes in black. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16821104104 http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetai...ductCode=110407

I second that...configure the arrays in the controller before starting setup. This will allow you to create all of your partitions during install so that your drive letters are already setup. I also second going with your original plan....two WD400's in RAID1 for OS, four WD2500's in RAID5 for data. This should give you the best mix of performance and redundancy you can have with your current setup.

You can apply your same registry entries as before...they just have to be done as part of SysPrep. Look for the [GuiRunOnce] documentation in deploy.chm.

To answer your question...The MSI motherboard using the Intel 440BX chipset which does support 100MHz FSB PIII CPUs. So yes, the PIII 650 should work. You may need a BIOS update so do that before removing the PII 350.

Buildling a server and then co-locating it somewhere can get quite expensive. You're paying for both the space in the rack as well as whatever bandwidth you use...and the bandwidth with co-location can be pretty expensive. If you're looking to run several websites and want total control of the server it's better to just rent a server for a monthly fee. It's much cheaper to do this and you also aren't responsible for the hardware...meaning that if a hard drive fails, stick of RAM goes bad, etc, it's up to the HOSTING COMPANY to repair the server at THEIR cost. I've been using Server Matrix, a sub-company of The Planet in Dallas, TX, for years. We've had some minor issues with them but nothing serious and nothing that wasn't resolved really quickly. Most of their packages include 1500GB transfer/month, 10MB/s connection (upgradeable to 100MB/s for very little extra), your choise of OS, etc, etc. http://www.servermatrix.com/products/superServers.html Any one of those servers would be just fine as a web server. If they're going to be low traffic sites you could even just go with the P4 2.4 box. We're currently running several sites on one of their P4 3.2 boxes without any issues at all (on FreeBSD 5.x). We're in the process of transitioning them to the Super Xeon (dual Xeon 2.4) setup though. It's not really necessary...but we were already paying for both boxes and just decided to combine everything. Anyway, renting the server gives you complete control over the box other than being able to physically put your hands on it (and you can't add your own upgrade parts either)...and it leaves them with the responsibilty of repairing hardware outages.

I highly recommend that if you're doing a motherboard upgrade that you reinstall Windows. Differences drivers required for various chipsets can make all the difference in the world between a stable system and one that crashes hourly. The only time I wouldn't do a reinstall on a motherboard change is if it's a direct replacement of the same motherboard from an RMA or something. As for the error, see the following knowledge base article. Hopefully it'll help you... http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=830084 If not a Google search for C0000218 {Registry File Failure} returned quite a few hits.

You're talking about installing to the new WD 250GB, correct? You can create your partition and format it during the XP install...no need to use anything but the XP CD. If you haven't created an Unattended XP CD you'll probably be required to manually add your hard drive controller drivers during the text mode part of setup. To do this download the required drivers and put them on a floppy...start the install and press F6 when it prompts you (immediately when the "blue screen" shows up). It'll get to a point where it'll ask for your hard drive controller drivers...just specify and go from there.

Sounds like it's a workgroup environment...although I have no idea why that would be done when he already has the server OS to create a domain.

Another option would be to change the default RDP port to something other than 3389. This would be yet another piece of the puzzle they'd have to get before being able to RDP into the server. http://support.microsoft.com/?id=187623 The same information in the KB article also applies to Server 2003.

Yeah, Sysprep pretty much sets everything back to default "just installed" settings. You should be able to modify your Sysprep answer file though to include those changes back into the system(s).

There is such a thing as 168-pin EDO SDRAM DIMMs. Most of what you will find now is ECC though, which his board doesn't support. The very first PII boards that used the Intel 440LX chipset used them. Do some research. http://www.pricegrabber.com/search.php?for...DIMM&topcat_id= You also have to take into account that when the manufacturers original support specifications were released for those boards low-density 256MB PC100/PC133 DIMMs were a rarity (possibly not even publicly available at the time). They rarely, if ever, go back and update those original specification documents.

Once again, that "patch" (it's really a hack) has nothing to do with the max connections per share on a Windows XP machine. There is no way around the 10 max simultaneous users to a single share on Windows XP. If you need more than that you should be using Server 2003 anyway.

According to this site you need older EDO SDRAM to be able to use 256MB sticks. http://www.resoo.org/docs/_hardware/th99/m/I-L/36011.htm If you use standard SDRAM then you can only get a maximum of 384MB, which would be 3 x 128MB SDRAM sticks. With EDO SDRAM the board is capable of handling 768MB RAM, or 3 x 256MB EDO SDRAM sticks. Non-ECC EDO SDRAM is kinda hard to find anymore though.

You may also want to look into the SCHTASKS command line tool built into both Windows XP and Server 2003. You can tell your tasks to run as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM using this utility. C:\>schtasks /create /? SCHTASKS /Create [/S system [/U username [/P password]]] [/RU username [/RP password]] /SC schedule [/MO modifier] [/D day] [/I idletime] /TN taskname /TR taskrun [/ST starttime] [/M months] [/SD startdate] [/ED enddate] Description: Enables an administrator to create scheduled tasks on a local or remote systems. Parameter List: /S system Specifies the remote system to connect to. If omitted the system parameter defaults to the local system. /U username Specifies the user context under which the command should execute. /P password Specifies the password for the given user context. /RU username Specifies the user account (user context) under which the task runs. For the system account, valid values are "", "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM" or "SYSTEM". /RP password Specifies the password for the user. To prompt for the password, the value must be either "*" or none. Password will not effect for the system account. /SC schedule Specifies the schedule frequency. Valid schedule types: MINUTE, HOURLY, DAILY, WEEKLY, MONTHLY, ONCE, ONSTART, ONLOGON, ONIDLE. /MO modifier Refines the schedule type to allow finer control over schedule recurrence. Valid values are listed in the "Modifiers" section below. /D days Specifies the day of the week to run the task. Valid values: MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI, SAT, SUN and for MONTHLY schedules 1 - 31 (days of the month). /M months Specifies month(s) of the year. Defaults to the first day of the month. Valid values: JAN, FEB, MAR, APR, MAY, JUN, JUL, AUG, SEP, OCT, NOV, DEC. /I idletime Specifies the amount of idle time to wait before running a scheduled ONIDLE task. Valid range: 1 - 999 minutes. /TN taskname Specifies a name which uniquely identifies this scheduled task. /TR taskrun Specifies the path and file name of the program to be run by this scheduled task. Example: C:\windows\system32\calc.exe /ST starttime Specifies the time to run the task. The time format is HH:MM:SS (24 hour time) for example, 14:30:00 for 2:30 PM. /SD startdate Specifies the first date on which the task runs. The format is "mm/dd/yyyy". /ED enddate Specifies the last date when the task should run. The format is "mm/dd/yyyy". /? Displays this help/usage. Modifiers: Valid values for the /MO switch per schedule type: MINUTE: 1 - 1439 minutes. HOURLY: 1 - 23 hours. DAILY: 1 - 365 days. WEEKLY: weeks 1 - 52. ONCE: No modifiers. ONSTART: No modifiers. ONLOGON: No modifiers. ONIDLE: No modifiers. MONTHLY: 1 - 12, or FIRST, SECOND, THIRD, FOURTH, LAST, LASTDAY. Examples: SCHTASKS /Create /S system /U user /P password /RU runasuser /RP runaspassword /SC HOURLY /TN rtest1 /TR notepad SCHTASKS /Create /S system /U domain\user /P password /SC MINUTE /MO 5 /TN rtest2 /TR calc.exe /ST 12:00:00 /SD 10/20/2001 /ED 10/20/2001 /RU runasuser /RP SCHTASKS /Create /SC MONTHLY /MO first /D SUN /TN game /TR c:\windows\system32\freecell SCHTASKS /Create /S system /U user /P password /RU runasuser /RP runaspassword /SC WEEKLY /TN test1 /TR notepad.exe SCHTASKS /Create /S system /U domain\user /P password /SC MINUTE /MO 5 /TN test2 /TR c:\windows\system32\notepad.exe /ST 18:30:00 /RU runasuser /RP * SCHTASKS /Create /SC MONTHLY /MO first /D SUN /TN cell /TR c:\windows\system32\freecell /RU runasuser

1a. Use BartPE as the bootable CD.

Unless you've done some hacking you should have DX 9c already because XP SP2 installs it automatically.Try the Feb 2006 DirectX Redistributable.

BAT files work in the context of command.com. CMD files work in the context of cmd.exe. There are some things you can do within CMD files that take a bit more work to do in a BAT file. For instance, if I wanted to "start" a process and tell the script to wait on it to finish this would be the line to use in a CMD file: START "" /WAIT process_to_start.exe But to do the same thing in a BAT file you have to do the following: %COMSPEC% /C START "" /WAIT process_to_start.exe which effectively calls the CMD.EXE environment with the %COMSPEC% command. If you're using strictly Windows 2000 or XP then I personally would stick with just using the CMD extension.

You can create a custom wallpaper for the logon screen though. HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop Wallpaper WallpaperStyle TileWallpaper Those are the values you would need to set. Wallpaper being the full path to the bitmap you want to use. WallpaperStyle being whether or not it is Centered (0) or Stretched (2). TileWallpaper being whether or not it is tiled (1 = tiled, 0 = normal).

Check your boot order in the BIOS...I think you'll find that your primary master isn't actually specified as the main boot drive. Check your drives and see if NTDETECT.COM and NTLDR are in the root of C: or in the root of one of the other drives.