stickzilla

Tell me how much a 56" monitor would cost, to be comparable ! = P But yeah, it all comes down to your specific needs and desires. I just find it foolish for one to assume a console is junk , just because their PC already satisfies their personal gaming needs.

Consoles aren't made to cater towards having the absolute best graphics available. Y'all are just finding reasons to complain and be proud of your oh so leet home machines. For people who don't have gaming PCs (or just prefer to play on their tv), it's a bit of a deal to get a 360, extra controller, and play with a friend in the living room on a game they like, compared to both of them buying gaming PCs. I enjoy gaming on my PC at times, but it suuuuure is nice playing my 360 on my roommate's 56" HDtv. I'll take it this way.

As an addendum to what Fizban said - To make sure you are receiving your GPOs, once you have logged in, go to your command prompt and enter gpresult it will then display what GPOs are applied as well as other information that will let you know if you are properly talking with your DC or not

Perhaps he was referring to the Acronis Secure Zone that is available to use in the 9.1 version.

Corporate Workstation 9.1 comes with the trueimagecmddos.exe, which allows you to run the meat of the program via scripting, from dos, and is small enough to fit on a floppy. I don't know if all of the other versions have this, but just thought I"d share. Also, Acronis is supposed to be releasing more flexibility with their scripting very soon. Straight from them in a meeting last week, a representative mentioned an SDK to come out with mentioning javascript and VBscript capabilities to automate their product. I guess their current scripting methods weren't working out so well

This is incredibly vague. How many workstations are you hoping to image ? Many simultaneously via a multicast ? Over time with a need be basis ? Many products are capable of creating an image file etc, but your deployment methods should also be considered in your inquiry.

I'm not talking about his registry at all, I"m speaking of the source of his reg files c:\Documents and Settings\Local_Machine\Initial_setup\

Ahh ok, pretty much as I figured. I may just splurge and opt for a big bad Go 7900 then when the time comes. Is there any upcoming release of a next generation of notebook class cards ?

I don't do unattended installs like this, so if I'm wildly incorrect , blah But i see you are accessing reg files as part of the Local_Machine profile. Is this directory existent yet ? I'm guessing Local_machine is a local account you have - but until that user logs in, I do not believe that Windows creates the directory in /Documents and Settings/.

Your standard image built to accomodate a Multiprocessor HAL ?

I'm not going to be making the purchase just yet, but I'm hoping to get a Dell Notebook in the next few months. I'm definately waiting for the next line of Duo Cores to be released, plus as it draws closer to christmas I"m hoping prices drop nicely. Anyways - I'm considering an E1705, but the E1505 really looks good also. I've done some light internetting on the cards they list with these, but was wondering if anybody here can give some quality info on them. I'm not looking to make the notebook a gaming box persay, however I definately want to have my options open if I do decide to pick up a recent FPS and go to town. The top video cards offered in these models (note: I'm not interested in the XPS, way too much money) are the : Nvidia Go 7300 Nvidia Go 7900 ATI X1400 The Go 7300 and X1400 are closish in price, while the Go 7900 is quite expensive. What I"m wanting to know is, how do these actually perform ? My current desktop is over 3 years old now, and I have a Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB that has treated me well. I was able to play Doom 3 fine enough, Far Cry, and UT 2k3. I'd like to possibly be able to play America's Army, Quake 4 ? and who knows what else possibly on a notebook. I play a lot of WC3 but no question if that would run fine B) Anybody have experience with these cards and able to give a realistic comparison to the 9800 pro / tell me the limitations of these notebook video cards ?

Thanks ! My current server Bart PE build can access multiple SCSI RAIDS successfully. If I have any luck I'll document my procedure and post it.

Cool cool, I'm following you so far - just another question : I'm doing this with SCSI RAID Controllers, if I know exactly what controller im going from/to in my attempt to image to new hardware, is my procedure going to be the same ? I'm assuming the boot procedure server2k3 is similar as well ? I'll start looking into what you've said and see what I can come up with.

Wow, I can't imagine the trouble of servicing machines that aren't even ACPI. The real tragedy of it all is that y'all are working hard to come up with a fix for this, spending company time, for hardware that is completely outdated !

I thought I was working with old hardware with some Compaqs that are from 00/01 ! I'm guessing you guys are working with imaging boxes so old that the sysprep line : UpdateUPHAL="ACPIAPIC_UP,%WINDIR%\Inf\Hal.inf" to go from MP ACPI to Uniprocessor ACPI isn't helpful ?

If you could go into more details on this, I'd much appreciate it ! I'm currently trying to see if I can image older servers to newer hardware. The older servers are using the same HAL (halmacpi) and always Intel CPUs, so I"m hoping that isn't an issue as much as the RAID controllers being different. I'm guessing you've experimented with this in the past and had success, and your knowledge would be much appreciated.

No specific role - we have a lot of various kinds of servers...over 200. Just at a generic level I'm trying to see if this is possible. If it really matters, think of my first test servers as being just an install of 2k3 and nothin else.

At this point it is more along the lines of us finding out if this is even possible. We toyed with a repair the other day and still had no luck.

I'm not having any luck with searching up on this topic, so lets see ! My ultimate goal is to be able to image a server that is on old hardware, and then restore that image into newer hardware. It seems that we want to avoid using sysprep, as I believe Microsoft does not support machines that have been sysprep'd after playing a production role. And I know Acronis offers this feature as an add on to the latest line of 9.1 True Image Server software, but we are trying to avoid paying for that feature (not too price friendly !). So I'm taking this one step at a time. Let's say I'm using an older server, and he has an HP5x series RAID controller, and I want to upgrade that RAID controller up to a more current 6402. How can I install/have the new drivers present so that the machine will even boot up after placing the new card in ? I have a Bart PE disk created that I'm able to boot into and access the drives of my server if need be. EDIT: Forgot to mention, this is for 2000 and 2003 servers (not R2). Thanks !

Who knows how big the final release will be, but the first thing that got my attention was the obvious : size. Workstation imaging is going to take a wee bit longer in the future.

This is quite the dedication to trolling.

I may be way off, and you could be looking for much more detail, but would using the free tool PSInfo from www.sysinternals.com get the job done ? With the switches it can read tons of information about a remote PC.

Just to be completely sure, when you say the original XP cd, do you mean a normal Retail Windows XP cd - or the exact cd that came with that laptop ?

I'm with jaclaz on the suggestion of using a virtual floppy. However I have never used the tools he recommended. I have access to some Virtual Floppy tools from Symantec while here at work, and they are incredibly easy to use. I'd say its worth spending some time to research and test with using a virtual floppy. It may be the easiest way to go about this - and you won't have to adjust your partitions or anything.

completely possible. Create your base image, whether its as simple as XP, SP2 + updates till now. Determine your preferred drivers technique...using bashrak's packs, or as we do it in my office, a batch file that is set up to install chipset/video/audio/nic drivers during mini setup. Configure sysprep as need be....and sysprep then ghost ! I know that's a really short and rather vague description, but its a lot of information to go into for details. Just letting you know that it is quite easily possible, in general. Issues will arise if the types of hardware being deployed to vary too greatly (Older non acpi HALs etc etc)