PiqueABoo

OK, then I disagree. MS called it "feature incomplete". RTM wasn't finished and I think it's a good idea not to spend £££s until you know what you have to live with. Especially when it's tax-payers money. MS tell us about all the thought & effort that went into simplifying the GUI management, but couldn't get the screamingly obvious and relatively trivial to implement bulk-mailbox creation into the RTM GUI? Why ever not? That lack of PST import/export was the final nail: Exmerge has been useful to me for other scenarios in addition to initial config/migration. It was definitely prudent to wait. That the world hasn't ended for people who put RTM in production the week it hit the streets doesn't change that.

That used to mean "easy", do you mean "stupid"?

It's close to a year now since RTM. Late compared to NT4 (six SPs in about 3 1/2 years).

Just noticed they finally got around to releasing this. Amongst other things it's supposed to rectify the feature-incompleteness of the original RTM. We'll see... http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=44C66AD6-F185-4A1D-A9AB-473C1188954C&displaylang=en&mdc_uxref=sl [in other bink.nu news techs are apparently not that interested in Server 2008. I am, but yup, can't spot a "have to use it eventually" a la Vista forum anywhere.]

Sorry to uhh.. play hardball.. there's lots of lurve but I've yet to see anyone produce anything like a rational "business case". Ultimately it's tax payers money isn't it? Which I think more or less amounts to: Like a PDA but without being so frustratingly fiddly. And? OK this is the nix forum, but surely typical users don't care too much about the OS compared to what they need to click to: a) run an application that does something useful for them, b) get a photo of their kids/cats set as the desktop wallpaper? Well <£200 is clearly more affordable than an OKish entry level Vista laptop at £400, but I don't know how you judge that first sum to be universally affordable - certainly isn't for anyone on JSA or whatever they call that this week. And they have figures to prove it? If I spent say 60% of my time doing word-processing, spreadsheets and presentations I really would want to do it with a bigger keyboard and monitor. Back to the classroom, do people think they really will be effective as word processors et al for kids? And if they do have credible things to do on the net, will they be especially pleasant to use given the rather common requirement for a min resolution of 800x600 on sites?

32-bit Windows Enterprise OS supports 64GB unless you're trying to run it on CPUs that predate the Pentium Pro i.e. don't support PAE. Standard definitely supports 4GB, you just can't play with it all because of reservations for hardware I/O et al, but you'll typically get more than 3GB on a decent server. [Just in case, I am not talking about anything to do with the /3GB switch which is a different concept/issue] IME that's the only reasonably reliable version of 10D (there's also an an elusive SP4 which adds a couple of arcane fixes and is probably also OK). Not so sure about 11D yet, the initial release was definitely flaky, the current one seems OK but I wouldn't rush to install it if 10D is doing everything you need.

I unexpectedly bumped in to & got my hands on one of these for a bit today and they're clearly very seductive for both tech-gadget-freaks and random normal folk. But I've got some doubts to settle... For instance I can think of schools with pile of those cute mini tablet thingies that didn't quite work out in bits and pieces on shelves and can't help wondering if the same thing might happen with these. Chances are they'll get thrown about and dropped a lot more than regular laptops (where the size/weight demands a bit more respect). What does anyone think about how robust they are? How useful will they really be for a lot of schools considering they're clearly not going to be running all that Windows curriculum software on them? And how well is that future XP version going to work? If they push up the spec to make XP really comfortable, what's going to happen to the price? And 450 lines might be much nicer than a PDA but will be a bit of a show stopper for a lot of apps whether you're running them locally, locally in a broswer or via RDP. And the maintenance. Factory reset might be relatively quick and easy but how easy is it to automate a custom config? Wireless, browser settings, whatever you end up doing to lock-down bits that need it, hook a user up with their home directory on some server etc.? Can't shake the "it's a nice toy" feeling. All comments to the contrary are welcome.

You can write your own e.g. KB317680. Otherwise QS Disclaimer seems to work for ~ £50 (easy to use and copes with all the mail formats).

Do the drivers included with the OS or from the drive vendor not work then? I've yet to see any issue/performance difference using those with Backup Exec.. and of course they work with Removable Storage/NTBackup unlike the Veritas ones.

Yes. I wouldn't get too focused on this, but do you have anything that might be getting in the way of that e.g. remote control software (which typically hooks some GDI calls)?

I think that's correct, although the next version of netdom (for W2K8) definitely will rename a non-domain machine.

I spotted dotNet 3.5 and the new SPs for dotNets 2 & 3 (gulp), but have just noticed the VS 2008 Express Editions were also released last week - there's a downloadable ISO with the lot which is about 1GB.

Wait for 2K8, run a Remote Application or two with RDP over TLS (SSL) through that tiny hole in some ACL to the box with the crown jewels on it... maybe even splash out for smartcards to help authenticate them. Still doesn't really solve whose fingers are on the keyboard though. It's overwhelmingly ancient/run-of-the-mill talk about router ACLs/firewalls on a joined up network though i.e. not "isolated" networks.

It's raining. This should work without dotNet on XP. It should also work on 2K, but on that OS if you don't already have it, you need the gdiplus dll from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a63ab9c-df12-4d41-933c-be590feaa05a&displaylang=en dswin32.7z

::sob:: I spent nearly FIVE WHOLE MINUTES on that!! Two of which were figuring out you can't attach an EXE file to a post on these forums. It doesn't take many lines of code. A win32, not-dotNet, version would be more economical e.g. a dozen lines total and maybe three minutes. But you'd have to put the MS redistributable gdiplus.dll somewhere in the path on W2K boxes (it's already there on XP).

You typically change this bit (not the database name): /SERVER=server\SIMS2005

See if you can break this (needs dotNet2 & makes jpegs). Usage: dumpscreen dumpscreen.7z

If BadGuy is in a position to do that it's already <> But I suppose it does help train your users in good habits they might apply elsewhere.

I'm just teasing.. it's a nice enough util to justify a new thread every now and again in here.

OUCH! I did a password filter a long time ago (as usual) which tested them against a memory mapped dictionary file and definitely wasn't hard. Multiple password policies is more complex because you need to need get hold of an OU or group membership from an account name in order to pick and test their proposed password against the right policy. That means talking to AD and in this context I'm currently not sure which of several userland approaches to that might work or be be safe, but it can't be that hard! Anyway at that price I'd probably hold fire on a solution now and start considering whether it might be an idea to just upgrade DCs to Server 2008 next summer. Well not me personally, I'm actually wondering whether to have a quick look at this and knock one out at a bargain basement price.

Mmm.. but here's what I said in July (Downloads) ;b "Ok there's LDAP Browser and ADSIEdit but this new util from sysinternals is teensy (160K after UPX), runs from a penstick, doesn't need you to fiddle with scary things in order to view the entire schema, presents many of the types in human readable form, you can edit things and it *takes and compares AD snapshots*." I regularly have cause to grope around in ADs but if you don't, it is still one to put in your toolbox. In fact, just grab that relatively new innovation, the Sysinternals Suite, which is all their good stuff in a single zip file.

But 32bit XP/Vista already support 4GB RAM.

Unsuprisingly yes.. buying certificates when someone's willing to give them to you, or at least Education, for free is silly. Pragmatically no one is going to care where it came from provided their browser trusts the CA. The new (rip-off?) EV stuff is irrelevant unless you're a business taking credit card details off visitors etc. If all you want is to stop scary pop-ups in IE & Firefox for staff then an ipsCA freebie should be fine. [And if you're bothered about the security angle you probably ought to be giving your users client certificates in order to access your site, but that's another argument and a lot of work]

And mine sounds a bit the same (except having done NT since version 3.1 I did the exams relatively quickly). Decided a single demonstration of jumping through the MCSE hoop was likely enough and didn't bother with the 2K3 upgrade. Likely won't bother with any exams for 2K8 either, but I did sign up for the (currently freebie) MS E-learning course though and will work through that "as and when" looking for gaps to fill. See Collection 5934 link here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcse/windowsserver2008/ Whether I'll remember any useful fillers by the time 2K8 starts turning up in significant numbers is another matter.

You can do this all day... on some collection MSDN says it's not immutable (=mutable=might change while you're trying to do things with it) so you should NOT iterate it with a for loop. The code examples below that advice iterate it with a for loop.