nmX.Memnoch

I'm with cluberti here...every new Windows release goes through the same thing. I think maybe the only release that didn't was NT4, but that was mostly NT 3.51 with the Win95 interface thrown on top. WinXP went through the same things. When it was released people said it sucked, was slow, had compatibility issues, driver problems...the list just keeps going on. Now look at it. It's a stable, mature OS that, when properly configured, runs great on even modest hardware. I'm not running Vista...yet...but it won't be much longer. To be honest I'm just waiting on the Vista SP1 DVDs to hit MSDN (yes, I have a subscription). I have Server 2008 ready to go as well...but my DC/DHCP/DNS/WINS/file server isn't ready to go (I want to upgrade it to x64 capable hardware first...which probably won't happen before Hyper-V is released anyway, which is what I really want to wait on). You keep waiting while the rest of us keep up with the advances being made right now.

They're pretty big in the SFF market, but the board I was referring to was an AOpen AX6BC...which was a 440BX powered beast. IMO it was a better motherboard then either the Abit BX6 or BX6-II. I know, I know...a lot of people swore by their BX6-II's. I had several of them and none of them worked nearly as stable as my AX6BC. AOpen has pretty much relegated themselves down to the SFF market now as far as systems go. They make a lot of other components as well that you probably don't realize.

Hehe...depends on who you ask. I never thought their quality was all that good. I will credit them with reviving overclocking when the Celeron 300A was hot...but honestly, I got better results with my AOpen board at the time (which didn't have any voltage adjustments what-so-ever). But that's just my opinion of Abit... Actually, the X38 (and X48) still uses ICH9. The X38 officially supports up to 1333. The X48 are binned X38's with official 1600 support. IMO none of the boards out right now have good integrated NICs (except for Intel's because they use their own...but lack some of the higher end overclocking features so that's not an option either). Don't worry about what NIC(s) the motherboard has onboard. Disable it and get a good one. This is what I've been using...they're high quality, cheap, fast and PCI-E: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Se...&CatId=2380

Not XCOPY....XXCOPY. It's a MUCH extended version of XCOPY. I still recommend the imaging method though...it'll save you a lot of work.

Not with just a copy they won't. There are utilities (XXCopy being one of them) that will let you copy both the security and auditing permissions along with the files, but as was mentioned earlier, the easiest method is to just image the array and restore the image to the new array. The largest SCSI Ultra320 drives you can get are 300GB 15K RPM (the 15K RPM drives just hit the market) and the largest SAS drives you can get are 400GB 10K RPM (those are new as well). My recommendation would be to get 4 x 146GB or larger drives and configure them in RAID10 (if the controller supports it...most controllers from the last 5 years or so do). RAID10 will give you a (potentially) more redundant setup and will yield much better performance (the controller doesn't have to do the RAID5 XOR calculations). EDIT: Oh...and as for the drive imaging. Do it from a BartPE disk. Do it in this order and you won't have to recreate shares or reset permissions: 1. Restart the system and boot it from a BartPE disk (make sure you integrate your RAID controller drivers) 2. Image the current array to either another server or an external drive (obviously something that has enough space to store the data) 3. Shut down the server and pull the existing drives out, but number them so they stay in order (this is for recovery purposes if the new drives don't work right) 4. Put in the new drives and boot into the controller BIOS. 5. Create your new array. 6. Boot the system with BartPE again. 7. Restore the image created in step 2 onto the new array. Be sure to change the restore size so that it uses the entire space available on the array. 8. Boot the server back up again. If you did everything correctly you should now have your files restored in the exact same manner they were before with all your shares/permissions still entact and you should have an increased size available for files.

And Dell was using Intel motherboards in the systems I was referring to (you could even flash it with an Intel BIOS and it worked fine). It still used a non-standard pinout. You think the tier 1 motherboard makers won't cater to the tier 1 OEMs if they ask them to make a non-standard pinout for the ATX connector? They know where their bread is buttered...

I've definitely seen more than one broken RJ45. We use laptops in our training/conference room. The cables are run down the middle of the table so there's absolutely no way anyone could trip over them. Don't ask me how it happened, but we currently have two or three laptops with broken RJ45 ports. I'm with jcarle, you should use the security port. Or a design that would attach to the security cable if the security port was in use. ALL modern laptops have that port.

A bit late but I had to reply anyway... No, it isn't. With OEM systems they sometimes use a non-standard pinout. Compaq (now owned by...guess who...HP) was notorious for doing this. Dell also did the same thing at one time (I'm not sure if they still do). So, it's not as simple as just purchasing an ATX power supply and slapping it in the case. If the OEM uses a non-standard pinout you have to make sure you purchase a PSU that uses the same pinout.

People said the same thing when Windows 2000 was released...and then again when Windows XP was released. Honestly, XP wasn't all that great until SP2 was released. Windows 2000 wasn't all that great until SP3, and some would argue maybe not even until SP4. I have a feeling we're going to see much the same with Vista...SP1 is going to make things better, SP2 will make it great. It's not exactly a bad operating system now. As someone else mentioned, it's definitely better than XP was at RTM or even SP1. I'm pretty sure that since Windows 7 is based on the Vista/Srv 2008 kernel that DX11, and probably DX12, will work on Vista. Let's look at DX9 for example...it was ported all the way back to Windows 98. The main reason that DX10 wasn't ported back to XP is because the driver model in the Vista kernel is completely different from 2000/XP. Could they have done it? Sure. But do you realize how much of a headache that would've been for hardware manufacturers? It's bad enough as it is right now that they have to develop different drivers for Vista than they do for XP. Now throw DX10 into the mix on XP...now we have three different possible drivers; 1 for XP w/ DX9, 1 for XP w/ DX10 and one for Vista. Not to mention what that would do for games developers.

I guess my point is that I can edit the .inf and make Device Manager say anything I want it to. Just because Device Manager says "AHCI" has anyone actually verified that features like NCQ and hot plugging work?

And how sure are we that this actually enables AHCI support rather than just making Device Manager say it has the AHCI driver? Remember, according to Intel, the non-RAID ICH9 does not support AHCI.

A logon script is definitely the easier route. Do you have one already?

It's definitely not the RAM. Having more RAM would help the overall operation of the PC but it's not going to improve the burning situation at all. The problem is the PCI bus. The entire PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s and trying to burn multiple copies at once will simply saturate the bus. Even using multiple PCI cards won't fix the problem since they all share the PCI bus anyway. Also, in my experience add-in PATA controllers don't typically support ATAPI devices all that well (often times not at all).

Does this include 2003 SP2 x64? And being that he has a Dell PowerEdge you can be assured that he either has an Intel or Broadcom NIC. They tend to use Broadcom more these days (unless you specifically order add-in Intel NICs).

RAM (aka Physical Memory) and Virtual Memory are not the same thing.

If that's an exact copy and paste from your .reg file then you have an extra space you don't need. "Curr entVersion" should be "CurrentVersion". Don't blame Microsoft on your lack of proof reading.

Wait...you were trying to move an existing install from an old system to the new system? Yeah...that's always a bad idea. Fresh installs FTW.

That's now Lavalys Everest. Here's the old Aida32 site with the announcement.

You should be able to open the case and find out the wattage from the power supply itself. I believe it's required to be on the PSU (you may have to remove it from the case to find the sticker though). Odds are that it has plenty of power to run even an 8800GT based card though.

Turn off Offline Files functionality with GP. Unless, of course, your users are using Offline Files.

Yeah, I ended up opening Task Manager and killing the "javaw.exe" process after I hit Esc. So it's a little buggy...it should still do the job. JScreenFix used to be available as a .jar download as well (I still have it, but I'm not going to redistribute it since the author has taken it off of his site). It works a bit differently (it uses patterns instead of full screen color changes), but the end effect is still the same.

Try this one: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stucksweep Download the .jar file and it'll run full screen. You need the Java Runtime Environment installed for that to work. WARNING: Watching this for too long will likely give you a major headache. Just start it and leave it for a while.

That's new...thanks for the info.

True, true. I don't recall that we've ever had it fail...but you're right, it doesn't give you a clue at all where it failed at.

Also keep in mind that there is no redistributable version of 3.5 yet. Running the 3.5 installer on a machine that doesn't have .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0 will download those components before installing them. If you're installing multiple machines I would recommend grabbing the .NET 2.0 redistributable, .NET 2.0 SP1, the .NET 3.0 redistributable and .NET 3.0 SP1. Installing those before hand will reduce the amount of files that the .NET 3.5 install has to download/install.