ajbritton

Don't think wrapping an MSI based install inside a WIWW MSI will work.

Have you deployed the right ISSCRIPT.MSI to PCs? EDIT: Also, googling for 'ISSETUPDRIVEN' produces a few useful looking hits.

It's still somewhere on my long list of things to do, but at the moment I'm afraid it's not very high.

I've managed to trash the BIOS for an ASUS A7A133 rev 1.00 The chip is a Winbond W49F002U12BN. Does anyone out there have either the exact motherboard, or an EPROM programmer which could reflash this for me? My other possibility is to use BiosFlashUK. Has anyone used them? Are there any other such services? Thanks...

Aren't we all supposed to have a program that generates a daily excuse to give to callers who say "well what was wrong?". Our call tracking system generates a 'scapegoat of the day' to whom all blame is automatically assigned. I would love to say that the selection is based on some complex algorithm using the call stats, but sadly it's just random.

All I want for xmas is a 4Gb USB key that says EduGeek on it!

Yup, PSTools will do everything that you need. If find the following PSLIST command particularly useful; pslist \\remotepcname -s -t This will give you a very basic but dynamically updated process list for the remote PC.

Fair point Geoff. I've never had much joy trying to get Linux running on VPC. Tell me; does VMWare server emulate a sound card? MS Virtual Server 2005 R2 does not have this functionality sadly.

What is your beef with Virtual PC Webman? I use it (and even the Connectix version) on a daily basis and it has never let me down!

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Geoff: How would I go about creating self-signed certificates without a Window s PKI. Oh, BTW, I got not *nix boxes either!

Has anyone configured OMA on Exchange 2003 and got it to work with mobile clients coming in over the Internet? Further, have you used SSL with it? Please tell me I don't need to set up a full Windows PKI or buy a ridiculously expensive certificate...

I would advise keeping the mandatory profile as simple as possible. I use a mandatory profile not to provide a customized end user environment, but simply to prevent them from customizing it. Any customization should be done with logon scripts (as ChrisH says). I only update mandatory profiles when I have added new software (eg MS Office) to one or more PCs which causes a Windows Installer update of the user registry or profile.

I have two points; First of all, your test needs to be based around the person specification for the job. You cannot really discriminate against one applicant that cannot build a PC from scratch if the person spec does not ask for it. Secondly, try to base your tests around what the technician is likely to be doing day to day. It's no use employing someone who can solve some ingenious puzzle that you set up if they can't do the more menial stuff. Having said that, one nast thing I have done in the past is to swap two keys on the keyboard around. One of the keys swapped should be for a letter of a password which the applicant should try to use.

That seems to be the default case when I installed the software on my PC. So it's actually worse than I thought.

Doing my first installation of this software soon. The 'Installation and Technical guide' states that users need "create, modify and delete" access to a number of folders that, by default, are installed under the Program Files structure. This shoots a big hole through the Software Restriction Policy in at least one school that I know of. Where the rights to execute software are limited to only a few locations, Program Files being one of them. Obviously programs writing data into the Program Files structure is a big no-no. Microsofts guidelines for developers explicitly rules against this behaviour. I could modify the SRP to explicity deny executables in the specific folders, but at least one of them contains program executables!!! Yuck. The KS3 ICT support people suggested that manual installations of the software could be redirected away from Program Files but that they would not support 'transformed' installations deployed via AD. I'm not happy Bob. NOT HAPPY. What's my best way around all this?

Have a look on AppDeploy.com.

You could try using the Document Object Model (DOM) API to directly access the contents.

Where is the problem? Assuming your software has installed shortcuts either on the 'All Users' Desktop and/or the 'All Users' Start Menu, then these shortcuts will appear only on the relevant PCs. You can still use the same mandatory profile across all the PCs.

Symptoms? Error messages? What kind of profiles are you using? Roaming? Mandatory?

SVCHOST.EXE is used to host certain services. Get SysInternals Process Explorer. This will show you which services the SVCHOST.EXE is hosting. That might give some clues.

FlexProfiles will do that for you. A FlexProfile is basically a Mandatory Profile but with certain resources redirected our made to roam. The FPK (FlexProfile Kit) makes use of the Office customization wizard to essentially make portions of the registry that you define roam with the user. It's clever stuff and apparently it's the de-facto standard in the Citrix/TS world.

I had to reinstall a Win 98 PC for someone recently and I could not believe how much I had forgotten! It took me the best part of a day to do what I could have done on XP in a couple of hours.

Then assuming you are assigning software to computers, not to users, you should be seeing the type of screen that fooby described.

Sysprep? On Windows 98??????