srochford

Pretty sure you need to copy the template; it's a pretty small file so it won't take long. Only downside is that by doing this you'll stamp over any customisations a user has made. I'd guess that won't affect many people but if you overwrite mine, I'll be very dischuffed :-)

I think this might be a case of RTFM :-) If I run setup for Office 2007, it gives me 3 choices "add or remove features" "repair" "remove" - I reckon option 1 is the best choice ... Worth remembering also, that Office 2007 caches everything to the local drive - that means you can just go to control panel, find Office 2007 and pick the "change" option; again, it's pretty difficult to get it wrong there. I don't have Office 2003 installed at the moment to check but I'm sure that when I first setup 2007, you get to choose which bits to keep/remove (with the proviso that you can't have 2 versions of Outlook and the default is to remove the earlier version)

Loads of good advice on the technology to use but try to make sure that whoever comes up with the questions doesn't go over the top! There are some people who think more means better; it almost never does. KISS applies to surveys but with the first S meaning "short and simple" :-)

Don't think you can blame the firewall; I think you'd find it very difficult to get a firewall rule to block this kind of infection. AV ought to pick it up but I've seen it get past Symantec (definitely up to date when it happened)

Don't know where the registry key is, but if you use sysinternals process explorer it can capture all registry changes in real time. It's probably going to be explorer making the change and it's likely to be a section of the registry with Microsoft in the name so that should help narrow down the search (process explorer can be a bit verbose ...)

Socket Secure Digital Scan Card Series 3 - Barcode, Bar code, Scanner, SD Scan Card, SDSC Scan Card Series 3, SD Scanner but they're expensive! (Had one at my last place and I don't think we paid hundreds for it; it just plugged into the SD slot on a Dell Axim PDA)

Agreed! The first time I personally bought RAM was in about 1981; it was 8k (yes, kilobytes!) for a Nascom 2. Can't remember exactly how much it cost but I had to save up to buy it; it was serious money! Just bought 4Gb of RAM for my own laptop (mainly because I want to be able to run multiple VMs on it) and it was cheaper than that 8k!

I love the fact that all those .gif files are on a web site called "textfiles.com" :-)

yes to the first bit but a big fat NO to the second. You never, ever, ever, ever put the external DNS to be given out by your DHCP; that's a sure recipe for getting failed logins. All DNS lookups on a client need to go to the AD DNS server; that will then either answer directly if you're looking up an internal name or it will fetch the info from an external server and return it to a client. When a workstation goes to log on, it needs to find a global catalog server. It does this by asking DNS for the IP address of _gc._msdcs. If it doesn't get an answer then the machine won't log on (you can watch this with Wireshark; it's useful when you're trying to troubleshoot this sort of problem) If you ask an internal server then you should get the address of the global catalog server - something's very broken if you don't. if you ask an external DNS server it won't know anything about your internal names, you won't find a GC and you've got no chance of logging on.

Basic authentication will always prompt for username and password; it's the most flexible in that it will "just work" with pretty much any browser. It really needs to be done with https (because the password is in clear text - watch it with Wireshark if you want to see!) Integrated/Windows auth uses NTLM challenge/response. It's good for intranets because you know what browsers are being used and can control their settings (so if IE is standard it will "just work") In theory, if you have a web site setup to use Windows and basic auth, the browser should use the most secure one (ie Windows auth) and fall back to basic if it can't do that. In reality, I've had problems with this (but it's a while since I've tried so it could be better now)

Not just for fixing passwords after the sysprep stage but for anything else you might want to happen, have a look at cmdlines.txt there's quite a good description of what it does here MSFN's Unattended Windows : CMDLINES.TXT Explained but you could have the file containing: [COMMANDS] "net user administrator MySecretPassword!" and that would set the admin password.

Given your signature, I think that the answer is "you can't" If you're using Internet Explorer rather than Firefox then turn on windows authentication for the web site and IE will pass the username to the site; I've not done this with PHP but a quick google suggests that $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] will give you the info.

This is why you need old fogeys around who remember that this used to be the only way of doing network printing :-)

vbscript has more facilities available (particularly when you start working with COM objects like the filesystem, network, shell, active directory and so on) than batch language and I find it way more readable batch language used to be good because you could be sure that a command interpreter was always available but given that vbscript has been standard on Windows since IE4 came out you can be pretty sure it's going to be available on most machines. There are arguments for doing it all in something like Perl - you've then got a pretty cross platform language. I'm afraid I don't accept those arguments; Perl is a nightmare language for people with brains far bigger than me :-)

You mention FSMO roles but you don't mention global catalogs; the only servers which process user logons are GCs. Make all your DCs into GCs and I suspect your problems will go.

Is BartPE actually saying "password protected" or is it just denying access? If it's the former then I've no idea what's going on but if it's the latter then you should just be able to take ownership in BartPE. I think the ACL format has changed in Vista; with an XP disc, you could put it in any other machine or boot from Bart etc and you would have access. With Vista this isn't the case but it's perfectly possible to take ownership and then (if necessary) give yourself rights to the files.

If they can't use Vista after XP as the button (which is in exactly the same place and has much the same function) doesn't say "start" on it, do you really think they'll cope with the change to a Mac??? I think many people move quite smoothly between OS versions and machines. Of course there are niggles - I still want to press R to run an app instead of just pressing Windows, typing the name and letting search find it. The new method is better (the Windows R only works for programs on the path; search works for any program, document, folder, email etc) but I still find myself getting it wrong :-) Part of the difficulty is how much help the OS should give the user. Many people will remember the *&^!"ing paperclip in Word saying "I think you're writing a letter; do you need any help" and don't want that sort of thing. Do we need "I think you're trying to find a spreadsheet - let me show you how"??

That's a brilliant expression! In computer terms, page faults are kind of bad but people who can "page fault on knowledge" are showing advanced skills :-)

The change from 8 to 16 etc wasn't just about memory. Remember, there are two important sets of "numbers" in a CPU - the width of the address bus (controls the maximum RAM you can address) and the width of the data bus (controls the size of numbers you can process). On 8 bit CPUs you were stuck with numbers no bigger than 2^8 (256 decimal). This meant that to do maths with "real" numbers meant lots of complex fiddling around (eg the Z80 CPU allowed you to use pairs of registers so you could deal with numbers up to 2^16 but that still doesn't allow you to handle decimal numbers with any precision) Anything involving real maths needs more bits (eg true colour graphics need 24 bit numbers for each pixel). If you want to be able to process graphics reasonably quickly, you want to be able to do more than 1 pixel at a time. Some developers will get annoyed; many will be excited at the prospect of what they can do now they don't have "stupid" restrictions. Of course, not everyone needs the extra - there's loads of software which is 16 or 32 bit today even though we've had 64 bit CPUs in common use for ages. I've no doubt that 128 bit CPUs will happily run 64 bit software and there's no reason why we couldn't have VMs on "Windows 8" just like we can have on Windows 7 so you could run your old app in a seamless VM.

Used to be true that Windows search was rubbish; not true any longer - it works well and is pretty much essential if you have much Outlook email. the only thing which I'd say against it is that it doesn't want to index network drives - this could be a show stopper if all your work is on a network drive!

Can't see why it should annoy people? We've pretty much got 64 bit Windows working well (I've got 64 bit Windows 7 on 3 machines; no problems with drivers or the software I use) so I'd hope that by the time 128bit chips are commodity items there'll be no problems getting stuff working. For people who do serious maths (ie games players :-)), having big number crunching ought to be a good thing

You can set a group policy to specify where the PST file could be stored (or it could be done in a login script) When the user logs on to the laptop, are they logging on with domain account or a local account? If domain, is it the curriculum domain? If so, then I suspect that's the problem - the curriculum network is saying "save your PST files here" and the laptop is picking up those settings

And that's why you have an accession number :-) (I taught SQL to librarians ...)

Unless you're really being pressured by management to add a disclaimer, please don't do it! They have pretty much no value in law and just upset anyone with a modicum of common sense :-)

Don't have contact with Dell sales but yesterday's contact with tech supp was excellent. We've got a machine with a faulty hard disc (run diagnostics which say so). Call the support line, give the service tag and the diagnostic code and the guy says "new disc with you tomorow". couple of hours later I get a confirmation call that the disc has been dispatched and to make sure the old one is ready for collection New disc arrived about 1000 this morning and all is well. Can't really fault service like that - well done Dell :-)