jamey

This is not a solution to your problem but an alternative suggestion. Why not continue to use Thunderbird as your main email client? If you need calendar functionality, download the Mozilla Sunbird addon for Thunderbird. (Make sure you save the file, don't open it with Firefox.) Then open up Thunderbird, select Extensions from the Tools menu and browse to where you dowloaded the .xpi addon. I've just installed Sunbird for Thunderbird and it's fantastic! Once it's installed select Calendar from the Tools menu. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

To change the password on the Administrator account, login with your account and drop down to the Command Prompt. (Start --> Run --> cmd --> OK). Type this: net user Administrator password It should say something along the lines of "Password changed successfully". Voila. Now just go back to the login prompt (press CTRL + ALT + DEL twice if you are at the Welcome Screen). Type in Administrator as the username and use password as the password. Tell us how it goes, Jamey

You need to enable and start the DCOM Process Launcher service. This works somehow in conjunction with Windows Installer for some strange reason. Only since SP2, AFAIK.

@sven You need to be able to see the Security tag in the Properties dialog of files and folders. There is a workaround for it on this page: Enable the Security Tab in Windows XP Home. Then simply right-click the folder you want to keep private and remove all permissions (including inherited ones, try the Advanced tab), set the owner to yourself and put a permission for all for your username only.

On this page: Which sounds extremely lazy on their part… And then again on another Q&A session (here): It's not just me who thinks this is kinda lazy, right? I would say the "real" reason was perhaps to make it harder for people to exploit machines due to the version of Windows XP they're running. Then again, this is totally stupid because there is hardly any (real) difference between installations of the different versions. Plus, there are probably hundreds of exploits for any version anyway. In other words, there really wasn't much reason to change them.

I recommend you download Mike Lin's freeware Startup Control Panel utility (59KB). It will install an icon in the Control Panel which allows you to view all of the areas where items that startup on boot can hide. I usually delete everything (I have nothing apart from services). Then, as others have said, visit Black Viper's excellent website: http://www.blackviper.com. Go to his Windows XP Services section (make sure you choose the correct one depending on which service pack you have installed), read the guide carefully and try some of the service configurations he suggests. I personally use somthing similar to his "Bare Bones" approach. Bootvis does make a difference to your boot times, despite what some say. Download it here: bootvis.msi. Finally, please read the following Microsoft KnowledgeBase article: Windows XP Welcome Screen Appears to Stop Responding (Hang) During Logon.

@prathapml I removed everything except the following: Drivers Display Adapters ISDN Modems SCSI Sound Controllers Wireless Ethernet (WLAN) Operating System Options Disk Cleanup Services DHCP Client DNS Client Experimental Command-Line Tools In network connections, every protocol/service is removed and I simply added TCP/IP and let it get a dynamic local IP via DHCP. Then I can get on the WWW with Firefox and Apache/PHP work fine. Since I won't be installing/using any other applications apart from the XAMPP ones (which are all in a ZIP anyway) I don't think I will run into any troubles, really. I just can't wait until I have a CD which installs a working web server with all the trimmings without any user intervention.

@tguy Cool, with the suggestion lvlolvlo gave me, I think I'll have it finished soon. Yeah, I'll e-mail you when I've got something interesting enough to use. @lvlolvlo Thanks a lot! Well, I definitely was looking for an easier (and quicker) method of integrating a lot of web technologies into it. XAMPP looks perfect. @brian873 Yeah I was thinking about that. I might write a short manual which explains the difference between my "server" version of Windows 2000 and the normal version.

My friend was having lots of troubles installing Windows 2003 Server on his server. Anyway, I decided to help him out. I grabbed the nearest Windows 2000 CD I could find... Windows 2000 Pro. (Not sure what service packs it had.) So, I downloaded SP4 and integrated it in. Then, using the latest version of the brilliant nLite I managed to rip out the non-essential crap until it was on a 99.1MB bootable ISO. The next step, of course, was to test out the installation on VMware. Installation took in total about 25 minutes until I got onto desktop. Then I proceeded to install my "modified" version of Apache, PHP and MySQL. After testing the server with phpinfo() and my MySQL-based guest book, I was satisfied everything was working. Next, I'm going to include Apache, PHP and MySQL installation in the install, making it a zero-setup unattended installation. And maybe ZPanel and PHPMyAdmin too. For a complete newbie wanting to setup a basic web server, this CD could prove to be awesome, don't you think? (I know... I know... there's always GNU/Linux lol)

Do you seriously mean it when you said the genius part? I honestly read six Fs in that text! Are you supposed to do it really quickly or something? I did it at an average speed.

I reckon you can remove almost everything wth nLite, as MCT said, and nothing should break. I would then recommend updating chipset, graphics, sound, network and any other drivers. Then just disable nearly all services as per Black Viper's recommendations. I bet that will give it a speed boost

It is easiest to specify the following three folders with a winnt.sif file in an unattended installation: C:\Documents and Settings C:\Program Files C:\WINDOWS I change those to the following for the sake of logicality: C:\Users C:\Applications C:\SYSTEM As for the other shell folders, TweakUI is probably the best option. Upon a fresh installation of Windows, start it in Safe Mode when you have just finished the Windows Setup routine. Then run TweakUI and change the folder paths as required. Move or make copies of the folders you changed the paths of and then reboot in Safe Mode again. Then delete the folders of the old locations and reboot normally. That should work properly...

W0W, I jU$+ F0UnD +hI$ @We$0me lee+ $Pe@K +00l Leet Speak Translator And there is a decent article explaining 1337 in the Wikipedia.

Wow rupert86, I didn't know that much went into some people's handles! My nick, Jamey, is actually apparently somewhere on my birth certificate even though my real name is James. I was gonna be called Amy if I was a girl but I wasn't so it was Jamey instead. (Ooh it rhymes... ) I just Googled for it and most sites say its a masculine pet form of James (huraah!) but there was one site that said it's a Scottish pet name for a woman... But, meh, at least it's pretty rare as a name/nick/handle

I'd say, "We need to talk…" and then have a nice chat about the failing areas of his business. And then I'd tell him what I think he could do to improve his company and actually make his employees invent innovative and new, exciting ideas. Oh yeah, then I'd ask for a job.

Well, I use MSN Messenger for nearly all of my instant messaging. I would use any other compatible app, it's just I haven't found one which displays user pictures. Anyone?

Well, here are my most-wanted things for this Christmas: Apple iPod 20GB (4G) Apple iBook 12" Sony Ericsson T630 (white) Logitech Z-640 5.1 speakers Now, if only my parents were that generous to me… …uh, I mean Santa

Hey if anyone is farmiliar with the hilarious comedy series League of Gentlemen, I'd just thought I'd say I am the proud owner of localshop@gmail.com! Admittedly, I don't use the account much.

I would vote for Windows XP, purely because it's the first NT-based OS that was really aimed at the consumer, i.e. home user, market. However, it is still simply a cosmetic upgrade from NT: NT 3.51 → NT 4 → Windows 2000 (NT 5) → Windows XP (NT 5.1) I feel that Microsoft are lazy in this respect. They could have spent the last 3-4 years rebuilding a better, more stable and secure kernel. Or having one team hard at work on the new kernel and another on the future frontend, i.e. GUI. BTW, what makes it worse is when Microsoft "steals" code/coders. For the first initial OS release they hire David Cutler, an ex-employee of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) who had worked with his team to design their VMS OS. This same group of people were then hired on by Microsoft to basically code what they had already done but add a few modifications. (During this time, they also magically created the Win32 API ) And, to begin with, NT was going to be a subset of OS/2—the OS that Microsoft had previously been developing in conjunction with IBM. So, you could say that the NT kernel has a lot of roots in OS/2 and VMS.

Me too I hate seeing websites coded in FrontPage without a thought for the person who might not be using the Wintel/IE combination of computer and Web browser

I was just wondering whether anyone else is as logically-minded as me and does this for their unattended installs. I have specified the relevant folder names in the winnt.sif file and thus producing this structure: C: | \--> Applications | \--> Users | \--> System I absolutely hate allowing M$ to brand my PC by putting the OS in a folder names "Windows". I think this is actually the same structure that Mac OS X uses—correct me if I'm wrong, though. Firstly, does anyone else use this or similar structures? Also, does anyone know how to stop Windows from having a capitilized folder name, i.e. SYSTEM instead of the much preferred System? I think it does this no matter what name you choose; I just wish it didn't.

@MadGutts I would hazard a guess that Firefox only recognizes standard Internet URIs, i.e. those with forward slashes. The backslashed format for a path is strictly a Windows-only thing and quite different from other OSes. So, try changing the path to ../images/image.gif and see if it works then.

Alternatively, if changing the settings of the pop-up blocker doesn't work, you could try going to Set Programs Access and Defaults. You can find it on the Start Menu in most SP2 computers or in the Add/Remove Programs applet in the Control Panel. You then simply set the default Web browser to be IE again. But it's unlikely that the default browser has changed anyway Or, could I possibly recommend you switch to Firefox, a far better and safer browser?

lol thanks In case anyone's interested I think it's called Plastik—a direct port of a theme from KDE itself, apparently.

I found MSFN months back but I forgot completely about it until last week when I was Googling for a config guide, for a winnt.sif unattented setup. I bookmarked it immediately and went straight off and explored the rest of the site. Now I'm sitting here on my younger brother's PC with a fresh installation of my custom unattended Windows XP CD! The CD is 151MB in size thanks to nLite and the tweaking guide you made. It installs with a modified sfc_os.dll and uxtheme.dll (so WFP disabled and unsigned themes available). There are eight services set to 'automatic' and five set to 'manual', while all the rest are disabled in the only hardware profile on this system. Here's just a quick rundown of the system specs for any of you who are interested: AMD Duron 1.8GHz Processor ECS K7S5A Motherboard 256MB PC2700 DDR RAM 32MB NVIDIA TNT2 Riva 64 Graphics Integrated AC'97 & 10/100Mbps LAN 30GB IDE Hard Drive (7200rpm) 52x CD-ROM Drive 3.5in 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive etc. Since the whole point of this post is to introduce myself, here goes. I have approximately 7-8 years computing experience in DOS and M$ Windows. I have dabbled in various GNU/Linux distros over the past few years and I know and appreciate the effort some programmers go through to make sure their code is efficient and fast. (OK, so there is one company which is completely exempt from the previous statement. But, so as not to spark any debates or arguments, I'll just drop it. ) Anyway, just thought I'd say awesome site! And keep up all the good work.