RobC

You can also use Terminal Services Manager (can't remember the 2008 R2 name for it) to see which sessions are active, disconnected, etc and log off or reconnect to any old sessions that are lingering around. RobC

Adding a 2008 R2 server as an additional domain controller alongside an SBS box is perfectly fine - I've got a couple of customers who have this sort of setup. The common misconception with SBS is that you cannot have any additional DCs in an SBS domain but this is untrue - the truth is that you can have as many additional domain controllers as you want, the SBS box just has to be the PDC and have all of the FSMO roles. RobC.

I would agree with Geoff here and suggest looking at your drivers - in particular, the graphics adaptor, motherboard chipset and storage controller drivers. I've been running 7 on one of my laptops since the beta was released, and I've since upgraded it to RC (using the hack that allows you to actually upgrade) and everything runs fine. I've also run it on a second laptop since RC release and it too runs fantastic (apart from needing a bit more RAM, but that's not a 7 problem). Synack, I would also suggest for yourself to look at either your M/B chipset drivers or your storage controller drivers as it sounds like a 'read from hard drive' issue. Hope that helps guys. Rob.

Interestingly, NT4 is one that Technet doesn't have! (I've just checked...)

You can also try the Exchange Best Practice Analyser which should ensure that your Exchange box is configured correctly. When you say that e-mails are bouncing back, it could be antispam measures that are causing it. Do you route through an external mailhost or direct to the recipient's mail server? If the latter, do you have your reverse DNS (rDNS) configured correctly to match your sending domain/MX record?

MossJ - check your Graphics driver - I'm running the RC on a Sat Pro as well (one of the Celeron M models) and I've got a 3.0 score: Processor - 3.5 RAM, 1Gb - 4.5 Graphics - 3.1 Gaming Graphics - 3.0 Primary HD - 4.1 I'm still running the Beta on my other laptop & can't remember what its score is right now.

Russ, Are you sure? I've never seen that on a Technet or MSDN license. Rob.

I had a funny feeling you were going to tell us that you'd done a fresh install... In that instance, it is still most likely a patch playing up, but as to which one who knows.

When you purchased your laptop, it may have had the OEM version of Home & Student already pre-installed. If so, you may find that having overwritten it with Enterprise will have worked fine but some update may have brought the "Non-commercial Use" banner back through.

One thing to consider is that many of the Dell resellers I know continually find that the pricing available to the public on the Dell website is cheaper than the reseller pricing that they get from their account managers!

If you add the -f switch, it won't hang up on applications not closing properly either.

Gatt, Is it the Update Stage 3 of 3 issue with Vista? If so, try rebooting into the recovery console via the Vista DVD. Once in there, rename the pending.xml file to pending.old (I think it's in the Windows\system32 folder) and reboot. That should sort it out & let you in again. Rob.

Synack is correct. It is only when licensing the desktop OS (Vista, XP) through VL that you need an existing, qualifying OS on the system. The server OSs are not included and a VL version of server can be installed on a bare metal box.

Nope, you definately can't hack it to reduce the collection time - 15 minutes is your shortest period. If you want an alternative, check this page on MSExchange.org POP 3 Downloaders for Exchange. I would echo powdarrmonkey's suggestion though and look at moving to direct delivery to Exchange. In order to do this, you need a domain name (schoolname.co.uk or something like that), then you need to ask your hosting provider/registrar to create a subdomain, something like mail.schoolname.co.uk and point it to IP address of your internet connection. You then ask them to create an MX record for your domain, pointing to your subdomain (you can't point an MX record to an IP address which is why we use the subdomain). The last things you need to do are redirect port 25 from your router to your server, and tell Exchange that it is authoritive for your particular domain. I can't remember the steps for that off the top of my head, but if you need to know I'll hunt them out. If you need any help with this, let me know and we can talk.

But it's not really. If you wanted to use that analogy, then WIndows 98 would be classed as a bug fix of Windows 95 and therefore should have been free. At the end of the day, both 95 & 98 were the same code-base, were released around 3 years apart and used the same driver model, etc. Sounds remarkably similar to Vista/Windows 7. Another thing that irks me about peoples opinions of Vista are to blame a lot of the initial driver issues on Microsoft. In reality it was the hardware manufacturers who didn't get their act together to release suitable drivers on time. God knows they had long enough to test the new driver model!