stingwray

2003 is designed to be used in an Active Directory Network, either running it or joined to it. If its not then it can be a bitch, lots of features become almost hidden without using the Active Directory software.

I'll second trying Omega drivers, I've had similar problems with ATi 9200 Mobile. ATi really need to work on their drivers esp for laptops.

ComputerShopper magazine here in the UK does those sort of labs testing with software. Personally I find Spybot does the job fine and regular formats and re-installs of my windows computers.

That machine is powerful enough to run VMware server so load that up and start playing with some linux/bsd. Best of both worlds until hopefully you are ready to make the full transition.

Simple. 1. Create your windows partion(s) and leave the amount of space that you want to use for linux un-partitioned and free. 2. Insert your choosen "new-to-linux-friendy" distro and if it is a good one will find the free space and ask you to use that. Done.

Anything more than 320GB HDD become un-economical unless you are limited for space, like 1U racks or SFF. 320GB HDD costs about £62.50 now, were a 500GB costs about £130. Its easy to see that the 2x 320GB HDDs would be better value. Also has added benefits of if left un-raided then if one drive dies you'll only loose half of your data.

Linux support for NTFS is getting better but I know the feeling of not being able to move my stuff about. If your willing to risk it (i say this as NTFS support is final yet) then buy a cheap ~20GB hard drive to add and put linux on there, then you can also trial it by leaving 2k3 on the NTFS partitions. I'm not saying 2k3 is a bad server OS, microsoft can do somethings very well, however it is slightly unaffordable to most people for home use. This is simply were linux/bsd wins hands down.

All I can say is that try and find someone nearby that you can test mobo+cpu out with if that link doesn't help. The voice feature on Asus motherboards gets very annoying as it stops booting to play the voice so it adds on to the boot length.

Take the time to install and set up a linux distro of your choice for the job with Samba shares, you'll recieve much better transfers rates this way as FreeNAS is painfully slow in comparison. You'll also find that you'll have better hardware support as FreeNAS is fairly limited due to its size. Also that machine your talking about would be wasted on FreeNAS, running a full distro will give you the oppotunity to run other services from it such as DNS, DHCP, HTTP etc.

Looking good, I'm liking the blue. I think its always fun to install everything you want from scratch, you don't repeat errors that you did last time.

Do you have any firewalls about or other obstacles?

You'll need to turn the computer into a wireless access point for multiple machine to connect, you also need to check whether your wlan card is happy being put into AP mode, otherwise you will have lots of problems. I think Linux/BSD would be best with this, although tutorial I have not got.

Perhaps if your question made more sense then we would be able to give you a better answer. Simple solution, install ubuntu if you like it. Live CDs are really only for trying out the OS and for fixing OSs installed on a computer that are broken.

Its easy to make a decent media player. Just allow it to play as many formats as possible with and without DRM. Then its up to the content provider to justify the use of DRM. But adding DRM to un-DRMed music is a bit over the top.

Check out the other topics about School networks on the forum.

Now that the trial has finished you have a couple of options: 1) Buy the software because you liked it and need to use it. 2) Find alternative software because you didn't like it and didn't use it. Sorry, but there isn't another option.

If your lazy then you shouldn't run an e-mail server. You'll probably end up contributing to the billions of bits of spam out there and get your domain/IP blackholed (hopefully not intentionally).

Wait and get the Beta edition of VMware server when it becomes available for the Mac, install it and create a VMware machine to do all your surfing from.

It also inspires competition, hopefully now AMD will speed up their development of their next architecture which will whip the Core 2's ass.

bvlaar, for ubuntu check out the program 'Automatix' it'll give you a long list of programs, codecs and other things to select from and install them all at once for you. Can certainly recommend it to someone new.

I don't think the Spam is too much of a problem and your doing an excellent job VaKo (and Cooper). I don't think blocking proxies will help that much though, there are hundreds of proxies out their and to be effective then you would need to block all of them.

Its just that Intel now has a better CPU, before that AMD did, then Intel did and then AMD did. PC manufacturers won't sell less AMD CPUs because the average consumer doesn't know anything about the difference, and now that AMD have slashed their prices so their CPUs are in performace+price line with the Intel ones, for all but the people who spend £1000's on a new system AMD is still in my opinion a better platform. AMD have 4x4 coming out to bridge the gap until their 4-core CPU, then theirs a revision to the current architecture possibly coming out with AM3 which will support DDR3. The more interesting stuff will happen in 2/3 years when the AMD+ATi ideas kick in, hopefully with GPU on the CPU die. I think Intel are the ones that are and should be worrying. Their already rushing their 4-core CPU and brought it forward 6 months.

You not likely to get this to work. Laptop LCDs usually are working on propreitry connections already and use different technologies to VGA and DVI which means your GFX card is unlikely to be able to support the Laptop LCD. You can get around this but it is individual to each screen sometimes and not an easy process. You can get GFX cards that support them sometimes but they usually carry a premium because it is a limited market base. You would be better getting a cheap screen of ebay which used VGA probably then try and get a laptop screen to work. If you've got more money to spend then go for a touch-screen one which takes 12V in as standard, you won't regret it.

You don't really need a 4GB one though, if I was ever going to make one of those then i'd use something smaller that I wouldn't care about destroying etc. if it came it to it.

Sorry to hear that you have come to this conclusion. Perhaps its people like you that just bring the bad side of me out. Must resist the temptation to flame, I apologiese to all regular members of the forum.