lowfwyr

You will have to reinstall twice. Vista does not prompt you for your full version disc, it only checks for a previous install on the hard drive. What this means is you will end up having to install XP first and then install Vista upgrade on top of it. It's kind of clunky, but that's why don't recommend upgrade versions. If it came as a free upgrade to your system, then I'd accept it for what it is: A free way to get Vista, but it takes a little extra work.

With modern hard drives low level format means write 0's to the entire hard drive. On old hard drives low level format would mean actually changing some of the magnetic surface of the drive and restructuring it. Trying that with a modern drive would render it dead. As for the "full format" option, the only difference between that and the quick format is that the full format tries to check the surface of the disk for errors. Personal recommendations: I don't usually worry about doing a low level format unless I suspect a virus or other infection that I want to make sure is gone (i.e. old school boot sector virus) or if you want to keep your average user from browsing files (it won't keep determined people from accessing your data). If your reasoning behind doing a full format is to make sure your disk is healthy before doing a clean install, I recommend using the manufacturers diagnostic tool and/or Spinrite. The checking that is done during the full format really isn't all that great and I've had many drives that had bad sectors or massive amounts of read/write errors pass that. To sum it up: If your drive is suspect, there are more effective ways to take care of whatever your problem may be than trying to rely on the full format option. If your drive is not suspect, save yourself the time and just do a quick format. For the record, any used drive is suspect as far as I'm concerned until I check it out personally as I know it's possible for a drive to appear to be functioning just fine and still have a lot of problems and be near failure. Hope some of this helps you out.

I had the same problem as the original poster. I had the exact same missing files, and the SP2.cab file was gone. I did some backtracking and found that (at least in my case) the SP2.cab disappeared after running the RVM Integrator (v1.4.1). I redid the disc using nlite to integrate the RVM Update Pack (2.1.0) and everything ran fine. So maybe it's a problem with the RVM Integrator and Windows discs that were upgraded to SP2 from SP1, rather than a gold disc.

After doing quite a bit of comparing different options I elected to go with SmoothWall. This combined with ClamAV and DansGuardian seem to give me good performance, both from a security and a network throughput standpoint. I have removed the default content filtering settings from DansGuardian and have added the domains of many known spyware sources and banner ads so they never get to the systems behind the firewall. I have also enabled webcaching so things are quite speedy. I'm only running it on a Pentium 3 1ghz machine with 512MB of RAM (the content filtering stuff takes up alot of memory when I have many connections or alot of downloading going on at the same time). It may just be my perception, but this seems faster than my Linksys router ever was. No problems whatsoever. To anybody looking for a similar solution I'd deffinetly recomend SmoothWall. Also, keep in mind that most of the people on their forums are only running it on a 300mhz CPU with less than 256MB of RAM so you don't have to have a terribly powerful system, if you're only gonna have a couple of computers using it, though at least 128MB of RAM is recomended.

One of the things I ran into while hunting for possible solutions is http://www.efw.it/wiki/index.php/Main_Page. Apparently it's based on IPCop and uses ClamAV to scan HTTP and FTP traffic. It also uses Spam Assassin to scan SMTP traffic. So far this looks like the most attractive option but I'm always open to new and interesting ideas. Maybe it would help if I clarified my original question. I currently have 6 computers on a gigabit network which is being fed it's internet connection from a Linksys BEFSX41 router. I'm working on uncluttering the appartment as I have plans for a few more machines and I'm going to rackmount the whole lot of them, with the exception of 2 desktop computers. I have some older computers (i.e. AthlonXP 2000+) that I could fairly easily retask as a firewall appliance of some kind. I've found quite a few solutions (linux and otherwise) that are very good firewalls but not many that will scan the traffic for viruses. So far only the one I've mentioned here has done it in a package that appears fairly easy to work with. The eventual end of the plan is to be able to put the hardware into a 1U rack and mount it out of the way with everything else and get rid of my current router (which is not designed for a rack). I appreciate the suggestion and I'll check it out. At this point I'm just creating a list of options before I decide exactly what I'm going to do. Whenever I figure out what I'm going to use and have it set up, I'll post my experience here. I'm kind of surprised that nobody has asked about this kind of solution before on this forum.

I'm interested in setting up a gateway server that will act as a firewall as well as scan incoming/outgoing HTTP/FTP traffic for viruses. I've looked at a few comercial solutions, however, they seem to be very expensive to use for securing a home network. Just like everybody else I'd prefer that the solution be cheap and headache free but I know that reality doesn't always work the way we want. Anywho, does anybody know of any piece of software that would allow scanning of HTTP/FTP for viruses?