RogueSpear

I'm guessing that you'll need to create more logic in your batch file for it to do what you want it to do.

Ok for starters you're in a workgroup, not a domain, so right there that means accessing shares amoung multiple computers is going to be a huge PITA. Make sure everyone has an account (or knows the credentials) for everyone else's computers. And make sure all of the accounts have passwords. You can't share something using an account that has no password. I don't know how much budget plays a role here, but you could probably save yourself a ton of grief by picking up one the many cheap NAS boxes on the market. Just plug it into your switch (or router/switch) and go. Tom's Networking should have plenty of reviews.

I'm sorry but this is simply not a revolutionary change like from 3.1 to 95. It's more like a big cosmetic makeover from the enduser point of view, except it's going to confuse the hell out of people who are a little shaky with XP. As a network admin I don't see any benefit for me or my users. And as for budget concerns, you may as well forget it. I just hope Microsoft doesn't repeat the broken promises of NT4 SP7 and W2K SP5 and they actually deliver on XP SP3. The way I see it, I will hopefully have another 5 years out of XP before I'm forced to upgrade everyone. As far as my personal computer goes, yea I'll probably upgrade. I just can't get excited about much of anything MS is doing these days. It's sad too because I've always been a big Microsoft supporter since the days of DOS 3.3.

Because Ryan includes the .cat files for each hotfix, the new versions of files replaced are protected under SFC. The new files really do become a native part of your source. This is really a fantastic benefit. So much so that I really can't believe that Microsoft has not actually devised an officially supported method that does what Ryan has been doing for over a year now. If there is any possible downside, and this is pretty debatable anyway, if you use Ryan's Update Pack you're getting all of the hotfixes on Windows Update. I suppose someone somewhere may not want a specific hotfix for one reason or another, but really you're getting a source that should be as up to date and bug free as possible natively. I think that if someone makes a blanket statement that this way of integrating hotfixes is somehow not as good as using /integrate, then they don't have a full understanding of both how Microsoft is doing things and how Ryan is doing things. This really is one of those rare instances where the unofficial way of doing something is superior in every conceivable fashion to the official Microsoft way. For all of their greed, DRM fetishes and attempts to patent the air we breathe, Microsoft really does do a pretty good job planning things out and tieing everything together in a sensible manner. This is just one of those things that makes me scratch my head.

I may have the syntax off slightly but perhaps you need a %1 in there: HKLM, "%CLASS%\.Base64\shell\Base64Dec", , , "Base64 Decode" HKLM, "%CLASS%\.Base64\shell\Base64Dec\command", , , "base64.cmd %1"

Take a look at your DHCP client list. Look at your arp table, etc..

Update - 20060422 Updated Eraser to V5.8 Updated FileZilla to V2.2.22

It sure looks like it. Going to have to give this a good test drive. Thanks for bringing it to my attention!

No I don't have anything to do with BitWise other than being an end user. I wish more people used it though so I could ditch MSN, Yahoo, etc. It's just such an incredibly tight, clean, simple and secure program, I really can't say enough good things about it. Oh and the price is right too.

It's configurable so that your "trusted" contacts can just snag files at will When you first do it, it's a little confusing in that it looks as though someone needs to authorize something, but it works great. This is actually how I transfer files from my work computer and home computers. I have a VPN connection going in the main internet connection, but my desktop computer at work is multihomed, so BitWise allows me to offload file transfers to the secondary internet connection. It's not a half bad IM client either. It's now even "portable" in that you can put it on your USB flash drive and run it from there.

I had recommended BitWise because that way you wouldn't have to mess around with all of this stuff, particularly if the main goal is file sharing. Keep in mind what it is you would like to accomplish. If you're transferring files over a VPN connection by simply copying them via Windows Explorer, you'll be fairly disappointed the first time a 100MB file craps out at 95MB done and you have no resume function. BitWise on the other hand has an autoresume in case a transfer dies on you. If there's something else you'd like to do, there's probably an easy way to accomplish that as well, like port forwarding on each of your routers. If you need to do RDP for instance, just forward port 3389 TCP/UDP on each router. It just seems that setting up a VPN for fairly simple stuff is like killing a mosquito with an elephant gun.

I do a full defrag prior to configuring the page file so that there is enough contiguous free space for the newly created page file to made whole. If you want to change things around, you're more than welcome to do that. For the time being though, I'll be keeping things in their current order.

Well there's OpenVPN, though I've never tried it personally. I stick with Cisco VPN for client to network connections. For network to network VPN setups, Linksys has a pretty bomb proof solution aimed at the home and small office segments.

If your main goal is file sharing, then take a look at BitWise. It's definately the best way to go for that.

I'm aware but thank you for the reminder. Working on a few more changes first.

Update 04212006 It appears that there has been movement in making everything 8.3 compliant for those wanting to execute their unattended installs from winnt.exe. So I made a few changes to try and further that trend of compatibility. For the extra 7z archives, I changed the names replacing the previous long names with SR (SystemRoot) and SD (SystemDrive).

For all TrueCrypt users: I put a special note in the entry on page 1 for this utility. You must make sure to uninstall V4.1 and reboot prior to installing V4.2. For unattended installations, just install as usual.

Putting aside all the benefits of bug fixes and increased security, a huge benefit to integrating the hotfixes is that you won't have to spend a long time inside of Windows Update / Microsoft Update after the OS installation is finished. Depending on your connection to the internet, this could take hours. If you are working with a non-connected machine, then you're stuck installing them all by hand.

You may want to check out the InstallShied Knowledge Base. I believe it's within the Macrovision web site now but regardless, it's one of the most complete resources I've seen a software publisher make available.

Update - 20060420 Updated FileZilla to V2.2.20 Updated GrabIt to V1.6.0 Build 928 Updated TrueCrypt to V4.2

There are some problems with the scenario. First, most if not all USB flash drives are natively supported by XP as far as being a "drive". Second, even if you were to collect the drivers for all of the proprietary encryption schemes some of these vendors supply, non-admin users cannot install hardware. Yes, there are exceptions, such as flash drives which should install just fine, but the encryption driver and/or software is another matter entirely. I work at a police department where a lot of the brass think they're the main star of 24 or something and like to encrypt everything all the time. What I did for them was stick TrueCrypt on each of their flash drives and show them how to use it properly. TrueCrypt is free, open source, and portable with multifactor authentication, so it works out rather nice with these flash drives.

Actually Google offers a nice neat .msi file for GPO deployment and an .adm file for managing it. Even I prefer Microsoft's desktop search product to Google's, I find it mildly ironic that Google's product is so much easier to deploy and manage.

I just have all of my computers prestaged in their appropriate OUs and there's no problem rerunning RIS. The computer account in AD stays the same, the computer even stays in the same "group" for Symantec AntiVirus. I've never had to delete a computer object before. Granted, I'm only talking about a little over 100 workstations at my main site, not the thousands Fencer has to manage, but it seems like it should scale upwards fine.

It appears to me that you want the AutoLogon info in 500_Setting.ini to be used. If this is the case do not include the .hta file. See the instructions as quoted below: It appears that you do not have PageDefrag on the computer. Either download it or set OfflineDefrag=No in 500_Settings.ini. As per the instructions quoted below: I made that installer months ago and have used hundreds of times (literally) without any problems. I'm going to guess that there may be a problem with it installing properly on non-English installations. I can't say for sure, but there's no way I could even think of recreating the problem since it's the most bullet proof install you could ask for.

I'll take a peek at it today or tommorow. Depends on how far along I get cleaning up a mess at work.