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Cartoonite

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Everything posted by Cartoonite

  1. I use an SFX archive with my QuickLaunch icons to "create" them unattended on my CD. I imagine a similar setup would work for your Start Menu icons.
  2. I only looked at this briefly, but unless the installer is making changes beyond simply making the theme available, I think the easiest way to install this would be to just add the theme files to your uA CD. That is how I install the Final Fantasy theme that I use on my uA CD. Once the theme has been installed, you should be able to find the theme file in %windir%\Resources\Themes\. I find that most often all files required for the theme will be stored in a subdirectory found in the same folder, but you can open the theme file with Notepad and check to see if it references files that could be stored elsewhere. Assuming no other files are required, just copy the theme file and the associated subfolder to $OEM$\$$\Resources\Themes on your uA CD. Once this is done, you can also set that theme to be the default, if you want, by adding the following to your WINNT.SIF file: [Shell] CustomDefaultThemeFile="%Windir%\Resources\Themes\Final Fantasy.theme" You will, of course, need to replace "Final Fantasy.theme" with the file name for your own theme. One thing that might help if you are still having trouble with magiciso and tuneup is installing and running a registry monitor before running each app for the first time. Then run the app, input your registration code, and check which registry keys are modified. You may be overlooking some key entries in a part of the registry that's seperate from the keys you have found. Also, some registry monitors will also monitor your Program Files and Windows folders. Some programs will create/modify registration files within these folders rather than creating registry keys when the registration process is completed. Hope this helps. Good luck with your CD.
  3. Another way to do this is to turn the echo feature off at the start of the script. Unless I need echo on for troubleshooting purposes, every batch script i write starts with: @echo off This has the same effect as preceding every line in your script with the @ sign. Just thought I would point that out for people who may be unaware of that option. Thanks to those who provided instructions on setting up a silent install of the new K-lite pack. I have been using this pack for a while now and am quite happy with it. It annoyed me to no end to find out that the latest version has been packaged in a new installer so that I have to re-learn how to install it silently. Oh, and just FYI, 1.51 is out.
  4. This looks like an interesting tool. Since starting my uA project, I have always repackaged the Firefox and Thunderbird installers to silently install them. I have been able to successfully copy across all of my data (I don't currently use any themes or extensions) for Thunderbird, but have yet to find a working solution to copy anything in Firefox save my bookmarks. It's something of an annoyance, since with Firefox I do make use of a few extensions, and thus far I have had to reinstall and reconfigure them each time I run the uA installation. I will test this out and see if it can't help resolve my frustrations. For those who are having difficulty with Thunderbird data, I install mine using a seperate SFX archive of the %appdata%\Thunderbird folder that gets extracted after Thunderbird has installed. The practical upside to this is that I don't have to rebuild the installer every time I re-install Thunderbird, I can just update the data SFX.
  5. There's actually quite a few different ways of accomplishing this. Check out the MSFN Unattended Guide for instructions on using some of them.
  6. Great. Glad to hear it is working for you. I will make that change in the above post right now. Thanks for your feedback.
  7. Sorry if some of my explanation wasn't quite clear, John. I will try another way of explaning. Hopefully it will be easier for the less experienced to understand. I didn't read the whole thread that you linked to, but I think I get the general idea. Having your Setup.iss file inside a rar archive will make the process a little more complicated, but nothing too difficult. As I mentioned before, the problem with unattended InstallShield setups is that InstallShield doesn't recognize system variables. This means that the destination directory is absolute. If you want to install Power DVD in C:\Power DVD\, for example, it will always be installed on the C: drive. Even if you were to install Windows itself onto D: or E: or whatever, Power DVD, and any other InstallShield applications, would be installed onto C: drive. The solution that I've developed (again, a modified version of a solution created by others) gets around this limitation by creating the ISS file after Windows has been installed. To use my solution in combination with the one you linked to, you will need to make some small changes. First, you will need to write a batch file that will be in archive. For simplicity's sake, I will call it PwrDVD.cmd. You will then need to modify your archive so that, instead of executing setup.exe -s, it will execute the batch file. You can do that by replacing Setup=setup.exe -s in your SFX comment with this Setup=PwrDVD.cmd The rest of the comment should remain unchanged. The batch file itself is fairly straight-forward. A small modification to the one I used should work just fine for you. In case you are unfamiliar with batch scripting, or command files, if you prefer, the lines beginning with :: are there for human reference only. The PC ignores these lines when processing the script. The rest of the lines are basic command line commands that will be processed in order. The part in green is the important bit. This is the path where you want your application installed. The example above will install Power DVD in a folder called "Power DVD" on the drive where Windows is installed. (most commonly C:\Power DVD). Edit that line so that it reflects the installation path you want. To use the default installation path as another example, you would replace the green code with %systemdrive%\Program Files\Cyberlink\PowerDVD. The last, and probably most complicated part, is creating your new Setup.iss file. For my example, I will use the one from the thread you linked to, since I don't use Power DVD myself. Open your ISS file and find the line that specifies the installation path. I will use green again to highlight it here: You will notice the 2 blue lines, in addition to the green one. These are the other important lines. You want to move these 3 lines to the end of the file, then delete the destination directory line. Save the result as PwrDVD.iss. You should end up with something that looks like this: There are really only 2 differences between this file and the previous one. The 2 blue lines have been moved to the bottom, and the green line has been removed. Call this new file PwrDVD.iss and save it in the same folder where you currently have Setup.iss. You can now delete Setup.iss if you want to save a few bytes on your CD/DVD. The way the script is written, you can leave the file if you want to. It shouldn't make a difference.When the archive is extracted during your unattended installation and the batch script is run, the first thing it will do is copy the second file to Setup.iss. The echo command then adds the customized installation path to the end of that file. The script then runs Setup.exe -s. Once the installation is done, it deletes the newly created Setup.iss file and then exits. I hope this helps. Please keep in mind that this is untested, so be sure to test it before you permanently delete any known working installations you have. Post back with any results, comments or questions. Appologies to all for the length of the post. Unfortunately CODE and CODEBOX tags don't allow any way to emphasize the code within them, so I had to use QUOTE tags instead. Edit: Spelling and grammar corrections. Edit2: Changed PwrDVD.iss as per comment by JohnS below.
  8. What version of Windows? Although I'm not positive, I'm pretty sure QChain is redundant for some of the most recent versions (Windows XP SP2, at least).
  9. This might sound silly, but your post doesn't really make this clear. When entering your current web address for forwarding, are you entering "http://myip" in the input field, or are you inputting your actual IP address? If you have a static IP address, you want to put that in this field to have the domain redirected to your PC. No. It will prevent your web page from being displayed once the domain is forwarding, though.
  10. In this particular case, I suspect your best option would be to contact the laptop vendor, unless your friend still has the contact information for the person he bought it from. If that fails, you can try contacting Microsoft to see if there is anything your friend can do. Unfortunately, since the laptop was purchased on eBay rather than via an authorized reseller, you may find that your friend is out of luck.
  11. Permissions are set for everyone, including administrators. If your account (or a group of which you are a member, such as the Administrators) group is not granted permissions to a folder and you remove access for "Everyone," you will remove your own access in the process. If you have appropriate (Administrative) permissions, you can take ownership of a file or folder. Right-click on the file or folder and then click on the Security Tab. Click the Advanced button, and then click on the Owner Tab. From here you can set a new owner for the file or folder, as well as, in the case of folders, any sub-folders that may exist. Hope this helps.
  12. That was my interpretation as well, Zxian, and it is one that my communication with the admins here seems to support. It also makes sense to me just from a logical point of view. To continue and expand on your extreme example of Grand Theft Auto (with no appologies to the gaming brand that I, personally, can't stand), if discussing this illegal act where as illegal as the act itself, how many honest citizens would be guilty? From reporters of all mediums to authors of fiction to Joe from two blocks over who has that strange fetish with compiling criminal statistics, all would have to be round up and tossed into the slammer. Not to mention police officers, lawyers, court recorders, etc... who all become involved in the process of trying those offenders that are caught. The point I was more interested in making, however, was that Superlevel did not deserve the overwhelmingly negative response that his question received. As I recall, another of the board's rules revolves around the fact that this is an environment of mutual respect. In my opinion, more harm is done to the board's reputation by having members brutally flame a new-comer (or even a long-time member) for posting something that doesn't belong than any one out-of-place thread ever could. Seems to me that any Microsoft employees wishing to monitor this site could care less if 50 other members were to respond to a suspect question with "Shut the hell up, fool." Far more likely to be of scrutiny is the actions of the administration team. Boards have admins for a reason. It's the same reason you have a manager at work. And the same reason your manager has a manager. If users truely believe that a poster is in violation of this board's rules, or that something they've seen posted will pose some threat to this site's credibility or legal liability, perhaps rather than flaming the offending poster they should consider informing the admin team. Let the administrators deal with administrative issues. They seem to have done a remarkable job thus far; let's not insult them by trying to do their jobs for them. Edit: Seems my original choice for the word "fool" was considered too offensive by the board's sensors. It has been updated and hopefully this choice is safe.
  13. I don't have an answer for you, although I am interested in knowing what you may turn up. Just thought I would point out that you should still be able to test even without having access to that machine. As far as I know all Windows-based machines run power-saving settings of some kind, it is just that laptops have stricter settings due to the fact that they are running on a battery. If you can edit the settings for your test machine, it stands to reason that you would be able to do it on the laptop system that you mentioned as well.
  14. How's this for motivation? No offense, but it is readily apparent that you really don't know much about operating a web server. A word of warning: if you try to run it off your own PC without configuring it properly, you will leave your server vulnerable. In the end, if you don't research this properly, you will end up costing yourself more in time invested in repairing damage you have inadvertantly done than you could possibly save be not paying someone else to host your site for you. Aussiecanuck46 was kind enough to post a link to the basics of Administering the IIS service, and I'm sure there are plenty of getting started guides available in various forms on the internet. All of which are likely free and will serve you much better in the long run than any amount of question and answer on a forum like this will.
  15. Sounds to me like both your errors are IE-related. Ringfinger's suggestions are all good. Follow them and hopefully you will be able to locate the cause of your troubles. If not, the only thing that comes quickly to mind is that there is a problem w/ IE itself. Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way to re-install IE. Since it is such an integral part of Windows, MS doesn't let you simply choose whether or not it should be installed. You could try running the recovery console from your Windows CD if nothing else seems to be working.
  16. Seems strange to think that M$ would include un-signed drivers on their own CD, but that what it sounds like to me. I take it none of the other OS's suffer the same issue when trying to install? Maybe there are different signatures required for the different versions of the OS, and the best match is coming from the driver set of one of the other 2 versions. This is just a guess, though; I'm really not sure why this would happen. An answer file configured to disable driver signing policy and nothing else would look like this: [Unattended] DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore Save this file as WINNT.SIF and put it in the I386 directory. Be aware that the MSFN Unattended guide reports that this doesn't always work. (See here.)
  17. Heh. Fair enough. If you're still having trouble, can try this code in a cmd or bat script. It's what I use and works perfectly. ECHO Deleting Useless Shortcuts... DEL "%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Windows Catalog.lnk" DEL "%allusersprofile%\Start Menu\Set Program Access and Defaults.lnk"
  18. IIS is a part of Windows XP Pro. I'm not sure if it is included with XP Home, but I don't believe so. It can be installed via the Windows Components Wizard.
  19. It's difficult to say without more information. I'm assuming you aren't using VMWare to test an unmodified Windows CD. What have you added to the CD? Have you removed anything? If you've removed anything, you can try putting things back one at a time to see if the prompt goes away. If you've added anything, you can try removing things one at a time until you are no longer being prompted. If you've undone all the changes you have made from the original Windows CD and are still being prompted about the driver signing policy, try installing from the original CD itself. Alternately, you could post a list of the changes you've made here, and maybe somebody will be able to point out a likely cause for you. Hope this helps.
  20. If your IP always stays the same, it is a static IP address. If your IP ever changes, it is a dynamic IP.
  21. Unfortunately, sounds like you've found out the hard way why Microsoft created the Simple File Sharing option. Sounds to me like you've removed your own account from having access to the folder. You will likely need to log in using an Administrator account and "Take ownership" of the folder in order to be able to reset permissions. Hope this helps.
  22. You can always use an answer file to change only a few features of the install, while leaving all the dialog boxes intact. Default Windows behaviour when installing un-signed drivers is to prompt the user for confirmation. If you need to install un-signed drivers then, as far as I know, the only way to avoid this prompt during install is to use an answer file to change to Driver Signing Policy.
  23. Hi, David, welcome to the forum. :welcome: IEXPLORE.exe is the the Internet Explorer executable file, although it could also be another file masquarading as IE. You could try searching your hard drive for all files with that name; if the only result is one in your Windows directory, you are probably safe. As to your shutdown difficulties, I'm affraid I can't shed much light. Are you experiencing any other issues with the PC? Even things that aren't obviously related could ultimately help determine the cause of this one.
  24. This is actually a really good idea, and I bet it would never have occured to many people, myself included. Thanks for the tip! As for the pagefile itself, I have always let Windows manage that on its own. I've never had any problems, and have heard horror stories revolving around people messing with it. While I'm sure it is possible to safely modify and, in certain cases even disable, the pagefile, it seems a project best left to those who know exactly what they are doing. I don't, so I just leave well enough alone. I once sat through a lecture on the pagefile and paged vs. non-paged memory, and I did a lot of smiling and a lot of nodding and not a whole lot of understanding. The basic premise I took away from the lecture, though, was that there is a reason that there is a pagefile, and it is not just a reserved space on your hard drive in case your RAM gets full.
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