BraytonAK

I could turn off the Welcome screen, but I don't know how my parents would react to that. My mom gets confused between left and right clicking. I have to wonder if Alt-Tabbing might make it appear. I've had Windows sit there at the login waiting for a response that was hidden.

Umm, my parents. :roll:

I have a system with a weird quirk that I'm trying to resolve. For the past couple of weeks it has randomly decided not to let anyone enter their user account password at the login screen. This is on a system running WinXP SP2 using Fast User Switching. Here's what happens: Windows is at the login screen with no one currently logged in. A user can click their account name, windows will display the password entry field...but you can't type on it. If you click a different account (which doesn't require a password), Windows will log in. If you immediately log out of that account and click the first account again, you can type the password. Any ideas?

Look for your iTunes music folder. Rename it. See if iTunes will open after doing that. If it does, it will be empty. You can then close iTunes and copy the contents of your old iTunes music library to the new one. If I make the mistake of moving the network location of the "My Music" folder, which is what iTunes looks for on my machine, the program will just refuse to open. That's highly stupid programming, in my opinion, because you don't even get the chance to tell iTunes where the folder went. It also has a habit of duplicating songs here and there. I just cleaned that up on my system last night. Some songs were in triplicate. Has to have something to do with the other computer that I have using the same folder for the iTunes library.

Interesting. Ours are yellow, unless they're trying to match the neighborhood, in which case they're usually forest green, silver, black, etc.

You, sir, are fortunate. My boyfriend didn't like it because of the tabs and some other petty differences. My mom didn't like it because Firefox handles saved passwords a bit differently. My aunt doesn't use Firefox, even though I've set up her computer to make it harder to find IE. I actually would use IE a lot more if the few plug-ins that I use were available for it. I'm not a fanboy of any brand or version of any item. I go for what fits and works. At least IE7 makes things a lot more familiar when using machines that don't have Firefox.

Did you try it in Opera? No, because I didn't want to. Some things, especially at work, are designed specifically for IE. Trying to get your family to use something different just isn't going to happen, no matter how you sugar coat it. I've had to turn off the tabs on one machine already, if that gives you a clue about how picky they are.

I want IE7 installed on all three of my machines for two reasons. First, there are some sites that occasionally don't render or function correctly under Firefox. I can also have both open to log in to my site with on, yet be anonymously viewing on the other, to see what things look like. For those times where I'm using IE because of rendering or functionality issues, I'd prefer to have an up-to-date browser. The second reason is because not everyone is convinced that Firefox is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Personally, I love it, but I'm not here to tell people what they should use based on my preference. There are people in my family that simply don't like Firefox. It doesn't do things the way they're used to. That doesn't make either browser 'wrong'. It's their preference. Now, aside from Firefox plug-ins, is there any particular place where people seem to be congregating to troubleshoot these issue publicly? I'm backing up my other notebook right now so I can continue to try to get it to work. I'm using a Dell-installed version of Windows MCE. None of my computers are running pirated software. Sorry to disappoint.

Anyone else have %($(@*& issues installing IE7? RC1 wouldn't install on my first notebook. RC2 wouldn't install on my desktop. Now the released version won't install on my other notebook. What the? The released version is now on my first notebook, but it nearly hosed my other one. First the install failed, so it tries to self-uninstall, which hosed IE6. Rebooting hosed Windows Explorer completely. Had to resort to System Restore in Safe Mode. I tried installing IE7 in safe mode, but it won't get beyond the Windows Genuine check. The error in the IE7.log doesn't match anything listed on the Troubleshooting page at Microsoft's site. The computer is already really sluggish at booting after a year of use, so I may just re-install Windows, add IE7 and then all the patches again. That's a lot of work, though, since Vista will be out in February. Thoughts?

Wow, the (hot) cable guy just left and I can say that I feel like I'm part of the rest of the world now! See... :D The price difference? $10 less per month.

Great info, Ethan. I think it goes without saying that as soon as you get IIS running on your system, you should go to Microsoft Update to grab all the latest patches. I can't help but think that your system could be easily compromised with this method, even if it were totally patched.

DSL in Alaska is 2 inch e.penis with shrinkage! You guys are so lucky. The comeptition among communication companies has given you all some nice options. I'm on a supposedly 1Mbit DSL connection, which is changing this morning to 3Mbit cable modem. I'll do another test later to see if there's much change. The companies you're using aren't allowed to do business in this state because we have protected monopolies. :(

Couldn't be much because for me to test with Seattle and then NYC only resulted in a 2kbps difference.

hehe Oops, I forgot to mention that it's a pure Win2k Server and WinXP client environment.

Looking for a suggestion for work. We have three campus locations, and thus, three servers. On each server there is a shared folder for all employees to access things such as forms, policies and templates. We're trying to set things up so that the main server, Server A, is the one that everyone uses, regardless of their campus location. We'd like to keep the shares on servers B and C in synch as a fallback for those locations in the event the VPN goes down. This means that we'd 1) Need to synch those remote shares frequently enough to keep things accurate, and 2) If the VPN goes down and those shares are updated, their updated contents are copied back to the main share. Since my employer is a non-profit and we strictly adhere to licensing, I was thinking of looking at Microsoft's SyncToy to do this. (I use SyncToy at home, but haven't ready the license for business-use terms.) Anyone have any other suggestions for this scenario?

Maybe when they perfect a way for a computer to understand slang and bad grammar? I have a hard enough time trying to figure out what some people are saying as it is, much less trying to teach a computer how to understand that and translate it. Without bad translations, would we have been given the old, "All your base are belong to us" phrase?

I thought that, too, until I read up on them. Apparently Compact Fluorescents are more efficient at higher lumens than an LED. Apparently LEDs are efficient only at low power. Feed them more power and they don't get much brighter. The way I understand it is that (not technically, but this is how I remember it) you can feed an LED more and more power, but the brightness does not increase on a linear scale with energy input. However, a compact fluorescent will get brghter with more energy input, I believe almost exponentially. CF's seem to give waste energy at high power, though, at least in my experience. I have a bunch of 96 Watt CF's that light my fish tank. Too hot to touch. The 13 Watt CF' that light my bathroom and laundry room are cool to the touch, but they don't have to spread light through 130 gallons of water. LED nightlights are a good invention, if they have have efficient power supplies. Did you know that you waste more electricity with those things that you think are off? TV, VCR, DVD Player, Ink Jet printers, telephone chargers, microwaves, cable boxes, etc. If many of these things were truly off, they'd require an actual switch to turn them on. Apparently that's the next line of attack for energy wasters.

P.S. What would be even better is an LED bulb. That would save the most energy, last the longest and (if they make them this way) could have different colors built-in!

These bulbs are Compact Fluorescent, and they do save you money in the long run. With ordinary light bulbs you buy them by wattage. (Say, a 60 Watt bulb for a table lamp.) If you look at the lumens that one of these incandescent bulbs is rated at, you can then find an equally bright Compact Fluorescent bulb. (Many Compacts will say, "Same light as a 75 watt bulb!" Read the Lumens rating, not the wattage!) Something that can cause people to not like Compacts is that they "look funny", as in their color. Bulbs labeled as Cool, Daylight or Full Spectrum will have a color that leans towards the Blue end of the spectrum. The blue tint causes things to appear brighter than they are due to the way your eyes work. Bulbs labeled as Warm have a color leaning towards the red spectrum. This is most similar to the nice glow that regular light bulbs. See this link for a nice scale to show you the color temperature scale. (3,000° Kelvin is the warm end, 6,700° Kelvin is more towards the daylight color.) http://www.optomahometheater.com/howto/d3_9.asp In terms of saving energy, I recently saw a presentation on these at a state agency. Including the cost of the bulbs, factoring in the number of hours that they're on multiplied by the KWH fee from the utility company, they would save a ton of money. The ones I use are 13 Watts and are better than the 60-watt halogen bulbs I used to use. 60 watts or 13 watts? Since they save money, last longer than ordinary bulbs and come in colors similar to regular bulbs (meaning, same comfort level), there's really no reason not to use them.

Wow, some seriously useful info there, Kickarse. Thanks!

My workaround so far is to use the Image that I made, then repair and redownload the Windows Updates. This saves the time of installing Office 2000, InfoPath 2003, misc junk applets and all their updates. :P

Is there a way to strip Windows dependence on particular hardware? One thought that crossed my mind was to get everything installed and patched and then delete as many entries as possible from Device Manager. That would force a re-detect upon restart. But the basic files that get Windows going are still customized to that computer, such as the flavor of the chipset and IDE controller. I was actually expecting Windows to complain about a bad NTLDR. Instead it freezes on MUP.sys, so I'll also investigate what that is. Maybe it's something small and Windows can continue.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to speed the deployment of systems in an environment where there are all different kinds of systems. AMD systems, Intel systems, new systems, old systems. We're using Windows XP Pro on the systems. I've used Microsoft's "Sysprep" tool to prepare a system for imaging. I've even tried without using Sysprep. What happens is that we can make a Ghost image that works on identical systems (chipset, etc). If the image is taken to any other machine, even those that would appear to be identical, the system will not boot. Even in safe mode, they appear to stop on MUP.sys, whatever that is. If I do a repair install of Windows, it removes all the Windows Updates, meaning you have to apply those all over again, defeating the purpose of imaging. Is there some kind of fail-safe way to image them, even safer than safe mode? As it stands, it can take 8 hours to get a system ready to deploy. Argh!

This thread smacks of Brand Whoring. Dell and Apple aren't the only companies that are using Sony batteries. The people who publicize and complain about their computers are going to be more noticable these days, and due to the percentage of Dell products out there, it's more likely that the complaint will be about Dell. The products that Dell makes are pretty damn nice. When a product is made of so many products from other companies, a problem like this is bound to make things difficult. But I don't see how it justifies sumarily ranking an entire company as 'crap'.

That's just scary. It took 72 hours to download one update, which was required before being able to enter the game. The patches seem to go for weeks before being required, so their servers shouldn't be flooded. And trying to use their support forum is useless. It's more of a closed forum for searching. The logical answer has always been bandwidth throttling by the server, but damn....1KBps? I could probably speak the code over the phone faster. ;) I guess I'll have to continue hearing the whining when the downloads are horific.