gnarlyc

Check out - http://xpcreate.com/ also. Alan

Try the settings under - HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop That is the 'user account' for when no one is actually logged in. I have not tried setting a screensaver there before, but we set wallpaper in there on all of our PCs... Alan

As FN-Greatermanchester says, in the past, we would just select all users and configure the path for that field. You can also take a look at ADmodify - http://www.msexchange.org/articles/ADModify-Change-Exchange-Specific-AD-User-Attributes.html. Dos_Box - Thanks for the link to another cool, free tool! I really like to have as many options as possible. They all seem to do things a little differently, so some are more appropriate for different tasks.

It really surprises me that so many of you do not use more secure passwords. I understand that you have to compromise some, because younger kids do have trouble with passwords... I guess that I have read too many instances of older students who have cracked passwords and changed grades or just messed with people. We have only had a few attempts at these things, as far as I know. I just don't want to be quoted in the newspaper one day saying, "Well, you know the younger kids have trouble remember more complex passwords, so we didn't make them complex. I guess that we will have to change now that we have this issue..." I'm trying to get it through to the staff's heads that you can integrate password creation into learning. You can use their street name and year of birth for instance or even just 'grover-1' is a little harder to crack than '8459'. I'm trying to compromise while still getting a little more security. It's a tough road... We don't really have the funding to add more servers for multiple domains, but even then - I wouldn't be happy with a super simple password complexity requirement.

Anytime we have had this problem it has been due to one or more flaky NICs. We usually break the group down into smaller groups, and we usually find the 'bad' NICs about the time we finish... But, then we know which PC gets a new NIC! Alan

What I found was that an image built on a uniprocessor PC (no hyperthreading or multiple cores) works fine on both uniprocessor PCs and multiprocessor PCs. We do lose some speed on the newer PCs, but the non-hyperthreading PCs are almost all gone now. We will rebuild the images soon. We have basically no problems with different hardware other than that. Using sysprep.ini to add paths to more drivers works really well for us. There's also a neat little program called Sysprep Driver Scanner - http://www.vernalex.com/tools/spdrvscn/index.shtml. This will inject driver paths into the registry. We have started using this to inject the paths for a network share that holds all non-network card drivers. (The NIC drivers work better if they are on the local drive. ) Alan

In the past, our students just used the last four digits of their state ID number, which all of the teachers and staff can look up. This worked ok, except as the kids get older, they tend to 'find' each other's passwords and start logging in with other student's accounts. (Teachers tend to leave lists of students and ID numbers lying around...) It's also not a very secure password system if someone tried to crack the passwords. This year, we are starting them off with a three-letter school abbreviation (first letter in caps), followed by the last four digits of the ID. They will then have to change their passwords at first login. We are also implementing password complexity requirements for the first time! I hope this goes ok. We are allowing all of the staff to reset student passwords, so there will be plenty of people who are able to help with that. We are also implementing the limitlogin.vbs script that I found here. We already had a very similar script to track who logged into which PC, so this was failry easy for our developer to do - although testing has not been completed. This forum has been a great help so far! Thanks. Alan

You can also try - http://renegadetech.blogspot.com/2006/07/how-to-convert-bat-file-or-vbs-file.html Alan

Since I recently twisted an existing post into this topic, I figured that I woud start another thread. We have over 1700 PCs/laptops and 4000 users. Only a handful of them run with local admin rights. The reason that these few do is... We have not taken the time to work out the problems that some software has with a limited user account. It's really just a time thing. That's not a good reason, but school systems aren't known for being over staffed, so you understand. Limiting our users rights has been wonderful. Our systems are very stable, and we have very few spyware and virus issues. If you think this sounds crazy, then login as root to a Linux box to check your mail and surf the web everyday. No Peguin-head that I know would ever do that, but they'll login to Windows XP as the administrator without thinking twice. But that's a whole 'nother thread! Well, the real reason that I stated the thread was to point you to this - http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2005/04/18/TableOfContents.aspx

Seriously, you should try the WPA/802.1x via GPOs. It works great. My techs can crack your WEP key in 15 minutes or less. Move on. WEP should not be an option anymore, especially if you have any confidential data on your network. Alan

We have found that just not allowing users to have local admin rights solves most of these issues. We have 1700+ workstations, and maybe two or three spyware issues per year. (There are a handful of people with local admin rights due to us not having the time to work out issues with some poorly written software.) We never use Adware, Spybot, or registry cleaners. Our systems are much more stable than machines that I used to see before working here. No one even in IT has local admin rights to their PCs with their normal accounts. We all have admin accounts to install stuff, etc. If you are not doing this, I highly recommend that you start! Alan

It has been several years since I have migrated from one Exchange server to another, but here's how I did it. 1) Setup/install a new Exchange server 2) Move mailboxes from the current one to the new one 3) Decommision the old server That's obviously an overview, but you get the idea. Alan

You might also look at NetReg - http://netreg.sourceforge.net/ This is another thing that we have looked at for our guest VLAN, but have not implemented yet. Alan

I would also look at - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/915160 (which we use now) and http://www.dennisbabkin.com/php/download.php?what=WOSB (which I have not tried yet, but looks useful) Alan

I have not tried it, but you might want to look at - http://wpkg.org/

I do believe that this line - OEMPNPDriversPath=\Drivers\NIC should point to each and every folder that has an .inf file... It should be more like - OEMPNPDriversPath=\Drivers\NIC1;\Drivers\NIC2;\Drivers\NIC3 That's the way that I have always done it, and it seems to work fine with the 10 or more different NICs that we have. Alan