Aesthetic

thats what i expected, thanks for confirming. if only i could force people to use Pro, dear god that would make my job so much easier.

yeah.. can i connect to a computer running XP Home through remote desktop? or do i basically need 3rd party software? if so, what are the best options? UltraVNC? i really just need to be able to transfer files, and update one program, on a series of XP Home machines which cannot join my domain. is something like Cisco VPN a good idea? any help is greatly appreciated.

I have streamed movies from PC to PC through a basic home router with 100Mb/s connections and it worked just fine. If you run into any issues with stuttering and such i would think they would arise from hardware issues as opposed to network speed. Gigabit is still really nice for file transfers and such though, and jumbo frames definitely helps the speed a decent amount. You wont get true 1000Mb/s speeds either way though, your hdd becomes the bottleneck(RAID5 will help). Its still extremely fast though, consider getting a router with one or two 1000Mb/s ports and a few 10/100's and just connect your server to your media PC and any other PC you transfer significant amounts of data to/from through the 1000Mb/s connections. Should save you some money, and still give you what youre looking for.

No, the computers are not all on the same network. The "home" network runs a mixed 2003/2000 server environment with local XP clients. The computers i need connectivity with are not a part of any network, rather their own small office workgroups. The client computers are not part of our company, they are customer computers in multiple non-server environments in varying locations. Hope that cleared things up a little better.

basically i need the simplist way possible to allow both: A) me to access clients desktop computers (in multiple distant locations) to troubleshoot software, apply updates, and exchange files between their pc and a file server on my network; and B) allow them to remotely connect to our file server to upload/download data files. all file sizes would be no more than 50MB. This would all be in a Windows environment. 2003/2000 on the server side, XP Home and Professional on the client-side. i know that VPN access combined with AD and security features is a fairly simple way to achieve B using 2003 server. what are advantages/disadvantages to using Windows VPN as opposed to, say, Cisco VPN Client or similar options? What would be the best way to go about achieving A without forcing them to be a part of my network? All Client-side computers would be Running Windows XP Home or Professional and would already be part of a small, office based workgroup. Is it possible for the VPN server to initiate a session? forgive me if this is a stupid question, and thanks in advance for your help.