RogueSpear

I have to be honest with you.. it's been so long since I got those registry settings the way I wanted them that I have not looked in there in ages. Just watch out for any branches that might have non or semi-related entries.

I'm not sure exactly what shortcuts you're trying to clean up, but I believe there some that are created from registry commands or something. They're a complete pain in the butt too. I've basically got all of them taken care of with the exception of "Address Book". Having the following in your WINNT.SIF will eliminate a lot of the bothersome shortcuts: [Components] IEAccess=off OEAccess=off WMAccess=off WMPOCM=off

I haven't had much luck with PeerGuardian, though that's probably due to me more than the program. For a home user I like to use a little freebie called eDexter. It has not been updated in ages, but it really does the trick.

I know it's "R" in DP LAN because I always remove the RealTek LAN drivers otherwise my NIC challenged computers won't authenticate to a domain prior to the user logging on. I don't remember for certain with DP Sound because I only do that for certain installs (a few select Inspiron laptops).

Ok.. being stuck in my old ways I've always had it set to NTFS.

I used Advanced Registry Tracer to do a before and after snapshot to get the toolbar just the way I wanted it. I'm attaching the relevant entries. Beware, it's not pretty. However, it does work for me every time. EDIT: I would recommend trying this in a VM first in case you don't like it or for some odd reason it has unintended results. cmdlines.7z

I can't say for sure, but I don't believe * is a valid entry for the File System entry. That could be throwing it off. Just a suggestion.

The short answer is yes it can. The longer answer is that it's not quite perfect at the moment. BTS has decided to migrate away from the older ATI control panel to the new one (forget what it's called). Anyway, in my experience installs for either ATI or nVidia video adapters has worked very well with the driver packs. He does support all of the various control panels for sound and video adapters.

@WildKat, I would have to agree with coconut on this one. The other benefit here is that would wouldn't be putting a drag on the PC with two network interfaces and your wireless laptop wouldn't be dependant on the availability of the multihomed PC for it's internet access.

I always make alternative versions of DP Sound and DP LAN, both of them have one modification: no RealTek drivers.

Normally I would say yes you can using Internet Connection Sharing, but maybe not. There is a good chance that your router uses the 192.168.1.0 network and that you can't change it. It's been an awful long time since I've messed with Internet Connection Sharing, but I believe that it creates a private network and acts as a DHCP server for clients using the exact same network. And I don't think you can change that either. I could be wrong though. Best thing probably would be to give it a shot if you already have the USB WiFi adapter.

I don't even think the restricted ActiveX entries would even come into play unless an ActiveX control is attempting to run. So for general browsing and so forth, that shouldn't make a difference. The restricted sites listing must exact some kind of hit since whenever you browse, even within the same domain, the browser needs to know what zone rules the particular page will adhere to. In my purely anectdotal observations, the performance penalty is next to nothing. I actually have client machines running XP SP2 on Celeron 400MHz CPU with 256MB of RAM and they browse just as quick as can be with all of these registry entries in place.

Host file blocking is nice because it blocks all communications, not just Internet Explorer and not just http. It will literally block all communications to a given domain, except for direct IP, because of where hosts fits in the name resoltion scheme. I usually save host file blocking for only the most egregious of domains like readnotify.com, doubleclick, etc. And I've found hosts to be necessary in some corp environments where a proprietary application wants to use DNS, but the knuckleheads never bothered to set an A record for their server (don't get me started). I've seen people put in the neighborhood of 6,000 entries in their host file and then it takes forever to boot, forever to browse, etc. They even have utilities specifically for host file management, the most prevelant being Hostess. Another solution along these lines is a proxy, something like eDexter. It uses a file similar to hosts, but it allows for wildcards and some other neat tricks. If you spend the time devising a good configuration for it and a method to automatically deploy and activate it, it's really a nice little program. It's a freebie too.

I haven't noticed any slowdown at all, even on slow machines. The same cannot be said for using host file blocking however.

I typed out a long descriptive response here and then MSFN's server problems wiped it out Short version. If a firewall is blocking ICMP traffic you cannot ping. It does not matter what IP "class" you're in either, you can ping from a class C to a class A, etc. Don't really know where he got that info from. You may want to try the "pathping" command too.

Try adding a 1 to the end of it so that it's V6011.7z

You could set up your computer to accept a Remote Desktop connection. You would need to either have the computer in the DMZ or use port forwarding on your router to forward the RDP ports. Of course if you have a direct connection to the internet you wouldn't need to do that anyway. Another possibility would be to use GMail Drive. The big limitation there is that you are limited in that each file can be no bigger than 10MB. Whatever you decide to do, make sure you test it out thoroughly before you leave.

Any time

I have four computers behind a Linksys which is attached to my cable modem and have UPnP disabled on the Linksys and all four computers. The only things I can think of off the top of my head you would need UPnP for would be if you're using a media server type of application like Nero Home or Windows Media Center Extender, MSN Messenger where you are using Request Remote Assistance, or if both you and your brother are using BitWise. There are not too many applications out there that need or use UPnP. Regardless, if you insist on running it, then your Linksys should support it out of the box and if you're running XP SP2 it's built in firewall natively supports it. Pretty much every single firewall outside of the one built into Windows will block UPnP by default. You'll just have to unblock it. Simple as that. I'm not familiar with the firewall you mention, but basically if a firewall lets you configure the ports, then it will support UPnP.

If you're using IPSec to create an encrypted transport, there's no reason at all to use WEP or WPA over that. In a home environment, you're probably better off using WEP or WPA rather than farting around with IPSec. If you'd like to pull your hair out, then by all means go ahead with implementing IPSec.

If you're running XP SP2, you already have native support for UPnP. You just need to make sure that the SSDP service is also enabled and set to Automatic. Unless you have a specific need to run these services though, I would recommend disabling them. On another note. You may wish to check the Linksys web site for any firmware updates. With some routers and APs they have fixed some issues with UPnP through updates.

You'll need to delete the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PCHealth from the .msi file. I've found this necessary with other installers as well. Some examples are Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint, MSN Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger. If an application supports Application Error Reporting, you'll need to find the registry key with "PCHealth" in it, and delete it from the .msi file.

On the contrary, I would love to have a CD-ROM with all of the hofixes on it and an accompanying utility that would install all of the ones not already installed. I sometimes get called to an office where things are obviously FUBAR, and to run 20 workstations through a Windows Update routine would just take too long. Sure it would line my pockets pretty nice with the hourly rate I charge, but I don't operate like that. I like to get in and get out with the customer up, running, and smiling as quickly as possible. The other point. There TONS of smaller outfits where running WSUS is simply not an option. I simply cringe everytime I enter one of these offices, but there are indeed still a lot of small offices running on an NT4 domain. Or a small outfit that has one single server that does everything (usually SBS) and adding one more thing to the server would not be a great idea.

Update - 20060118 Added Spybot - Search & Destroy V1.4 Updated SpywareBlater V3.5.1 (refresh update, see below) Fixed broken links for the .msi file downloads of Audacity, Powertoy - Color Control Panel, Powertoy - Image Resizer, and QuickPar. I had made an installer for Spybot V1.4 before I even made this thread but it had issues with the windows installer popping up. Hopefully these problems have been taken care of, but I won't know for certain until the next time they release detection updates. The SpywareBlaster installer not only includes the most recent definition update, but I also integrated the ActiveX block list found at spywareguide.com. My apologies to those who tried to download the .msi file downloads for the four titles mentioned above, but nobody bothered to tell me the links were bad. I only discovered the issue from looking over the report generated by my host. Regarding requests. I am not going to be taking requests at this time. I have far too much on my plate right now as it is. And frankly, some of these requests baffle me. PuTTY is one single executable file. If you need an installer made for that, there are more serious issues you should be addressing. In case anyone hasn't looked over my Update Pack, PuTTY is a part of that package. I already made an installer for QuickPar and I'm quite satisfied with that utility, so I won't be making an installer for hkSFV anytime soon.