djones

That's made me chuckle!! I didn't even notice! :-) How much would The Sun pay for that one?!

Would like to know this too. We (primary school) have just moved to electronic registers and fire procedures are a hot topic. We too, print off completed registers morning and afternoon and classes have a board displayed by the main fire exit showing numbers of children in class and anyone absent. Dave

Offline files? That's how we work it (2003 domain though).

I'm confused! I haven't bought any new servers for a couple of years now and have kind of lost touch with models and specs. However, I am now in the position of trying to develop an upgrade strategy and would appreciate a few pointers. I have been reading everything I possibly can and searching through recent 'which server' type posts but... I work in a primary school with: x1 Dell PowerEdge 2800 (Win 2003) Server - Bought and setup circa. 2005/6 2Gb RAM ~100Gb total storage (SCSI - RAID5 I think) All roles WDS, WSUS, OCS/GLPI, ... Tape drive (but beginning to fail) x50 Dell Desktops x60 Dell Laptops x1 ReadyNAS (Backup and Media/Photo storage) Obviously with this setup there isn't a lot of redundancy and we are now at the absolute extent of storage. I could just upgrade the drives in the server to provide more storage but as the warranty has now run out I'm leaning towards new and I don't like the cost of SCSI drives! We also have a separate building on site which has a fibre connected cabinet already installed. I would like to utilise this for a second (rackmount) DC to provide some form of redundancy. I would also like to utilise VMs to remove some of the reliance on hardware but not sure if this is really worth bothering with or not. My ideas are changing daily at the moment which is why I'm asking for opinions and ideas! I'm looking at buying a new tower server to replace the current one and then a second (lower specced) rackmount server for the external building. Would it be worth using Hyper-V (or similar) on these and virtualising the DCs on both? How would this effect the specs needed? The budget is a bit of a moveable feast at the moment. However, I was loosely thinking of sub £1000 for the second (rackmount) DC and sub £2000 for the main tower server. How feasable is this? Any advice is much appreciated. Dave

AFAIR, Store.exe will allocate as much memory as it thinks it may need (since Exchange 5.5) to avoid having to use the page file so high memory usage is not usually an issue. When other apps/processes need a bit extra, Store.exe should release it as and when. Having said that, if you get any "out of memory" errors then there is something causing a problem. Dave.

Any updates? Just about to look into implementing this and wondered whether you had a later version before giving it a whirl.

To answer the original question, it depends on what version of outlook you are using. IIRC, pre-2003 Outlook uses a Welcome.msg file, which can be edited (html), located here: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office. However for 2003 upwards, the message is hard coded and cannot be altered unfortunately. I wanted to be able to do the same but couldn't find a way around I'm afraid. I'm sure some clever person could script an email to be sent on first logon but that is beyond my capabilities! Dave.

Not if the OP is using a custom profile as part of his/her install - all settings can be preset which saves a lot of hassle. Customizing Outlook Profiles by Using PRF Files

Ok... I didn't get the chance to try anything different today, however, I have taken a legacy Ghost image and restored that to another machine - during mini-setup, when trying to join the domain (with "domain.local" pre-entered), it refusing to join saying invalid domain specified. When I manually change the domain to simply "domain" (without ".local") it works. I wonder if anything (server updates) have altered anything with this and is there anything in WDS that could be affected by this? Long shot maybe. Haven't had the chance to look through config myself yet! The client machine I'm trying to capture from has 1024MB installed.

Image Capture The system cannot find the file specified.

Yeah, already tried that and still get the same error!

I think it has 512MB but I could be wrong. I seem to remember running into this issue a couple of years ago when I set up WDS in the first place. I have always used the same physical machine to build images on so I would have thought I'd have already had this one sorted - could be wrong though! Will check this again tomorrow, thanks. I have a thread about this issue open here... http://www.edugeek.net/forums/o-s-deployment/40705-sp3-cannot-find-file-specified.html

That's about it I'm afraid. I can post the exact message tomorrow but there really isn't much more. I last captured an image (Windows XP SP2 based) a year ago - WDS is currently setup with the Windows AIK for Vista (Pre-SP1) (vista_6000.16386.061101-2205-LRMAIK_EN.img) and the boot.wim from a Pre-SP1 Vista DVD. Would putting SP3 on the XP install cause problems with this? I am thinking my next plan of action will be to use the latest AIK (will the Windows 7 one still support XP? Doesn't mention XP on list) and boot.wim and try again. Was so close with automated installs! Ho Hum.

Did you get this fixed?

Yes I am... Thanks anyway.

Have just updated our generic image with SP3 and some minor additions and have tried to capture it but am now getting this error. Never had it before capturing SP2 images. Plenty of space on server - moved the TEMP environment settings just in case... Stumped now! Any ideas?

AFAIK you will only see and be able to edit the settings from Vista. 2003 won't even show as them having been set to WPA2 - despite the schema changes. PITA!

Does anyone know of a way to get a column of dates converted automatically, using a formula, into standard numbers but preserving the date numbers - sorry, sounds a tad confusing! e.g. date shown: 21 May 2009 or 21/05/09 etc CONVERTED TO: 210509 Thanks, Dave.

Can anyone recommend a place to buy new projector bulbs from? Mitsubishi - if that makes a difference. Thanks, Dave.

Me two...or three, or four..... ;-)

Another from me...however...the fact that it cannot wake up from standby to shutdown is a major PITA at the moment (it is my preferred scheduled shutdown option otherwise). All my machines are set to standby after a short idle time but of course then fail to shutdown when they get to the scheduled time. :-( Any idea of when this might be addressed in Shutdownertron? I think it was mentioned as in the pipeline a while ago ;-) Dave.

Any update on your progress with this? I have deployed v1.3 and am very happy with it - great job - however, I would love to see forced shutdown, resume from standby and then shutdown as well as multiple shutdown times implemented. Not many requests then! ;-) Dave

So if it just runs the cmd.exe, do I really need it? If not then I might as well simplify things again and just use this... '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Set Environment Variables ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dim filesys Set filesys = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set objShell = CreateObject("Wscript.Shell") strApp = "\\server\applications$\Office 2k3\MAINTWIZ.EXE" strCfgFile = "\\server\applications$\Office 2k3\UpdateOutlook.CMW" strLogFile = "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\CMW_Dec08.txt" '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Build Run Command ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CMDLine=Chr(34) & strApp & Chr(34) & " /c " & Chr(34) & strCfgFile & Chr(34) & " /qb-" & " /l " & Chr(34) & strLogFile & Chr(34) '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Check Previous Run State ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If Not filesys.FileExists(strLogFile) Then '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Run Command If Necessary ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ objShell.Run CMDLine, True End If

It appears to work fine - I did copy that part from another example somewhere in Internet land when trying to find ways of using variables to make future editing and explaining to others easier. I have no idea what it actually means though!! ;-) Edit: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King!"

Just reread it and had a thought... I could, presumably, replace the path in this line... '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Check Previous Run State ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If Not filesys.FileExists("C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\CMW_Dec08.txt") Then ...with the variable set for the log file... '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Check Previous Run State ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If Not filesys.FileExists(strLogFile) Then