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Your app seems to have been written in an insecure way that hasn’t been appropriate since the introduction of Server 2003. It should be writing data to the %appdata% path (Documents and Settings%usename%Application Data for 2003 or Users%username%AppDataRoaming for 2008). Is it an internal app or third party? If third party, you may be using an old version and should be looking for an upgrade.

In principle, if the user has permissions to change system time, then an app they run should be able to do the same, if that is one of its functions; but there might be an issue with how the app is trying to do it. If it doesn’t conform to current application security standards, it might also be using an outdated method to access system time.

The ‘run as administrator’ option in Windows 2008 can be misleading. It will run something in an admin context if you have admin privileges, but makes no difference if you don’t. It won’t prompt you for admin credentials.

When you say ‘OS is fresh installed’, do you mean you are installing Windows from scratch each time, or are you deploying an image/snapshot/clone etc. with a clean Windows installation?

Why not create a trust between the two domains and add secondary/stub DNS zones? You could then give users access to the resources of both.

The HDD is more than likely dead, from that result. If the rest of the hardware seems up to the task and you can find a suitable replacement for the hard drive, you could try adding the original drive as a secondary drive to recover the data.

The laptop may just be showing age, but it could have another issue. Run Task Manager, select show processes from all users and post a screenshot and one of us might spot something amiss. Otherwise, if the Dell diagnostic partition is installled, hit F12 as it boots up and run that to see if there is a hardware problem.

Does the printer have it’s own network connection or is it shared from the Vista PC? If the latter, the problem is likely to do with the Windows Firewall settings of the Vista PC, which tend not to play well with earlier versions of Windows. Alternatively, a share from the Vista PC may use a driver not compatible with XP. It should be possible to add the XP driver to the share, but without a Vista machine to hand and after more than a bottle of wine, I’m not going to try to tell you how to do that right now!

For many manufacturers, a workstation may have a server type CPU (Xeon, Opteron, etc.) and ECC (error checking) memory. Whether or not those features would have any benefit will depend on what you are doing and what O/S you want to run. they will definitely cost more.

Do you have a reason to stick with SP2? Otherwise, a newer USB drive drive may work better with SP3. Unless you need (for example) to manage a Creative Zen Jukebox Xtra, there are plenty of good reasons to go to SP3.

I enjoy France in September. Usually (but not guaranteed) still good weather, school terms have started which cuts down the crowds and hotel/travel rates start going down. Spain and Italy will be getting that little bit cooler (and cheaper). If you’re heading for the sea, it will still have retained a fair bit of heat – but if a warm sea is what you’re after, I suggest that the colour should be Red.

Joe,

Thanks for the response. I could put in a delay, but users are already complaining at how long the logon scripts take to run! I would like to avoid that if I can. If I knew what the process or component was that is missing, I could have a routine to check it and then wait or kick it off.

The only other thing I can think of is to install a dummy printer to all PCs and check for it before going on to set the default, but it’s not a very elegant solution.

Cheers,

When the connection to the shared printer is lost, the HP looks like it doesn’t automatically re-establish it when it becomes available again. Vista seems to respond differently to the same thing when it sees it appear as new versus it already being there when it boots up, in my limited experience (of Vista).

Of course, that could just be me pointing the finger of blame because of my pathological loathing of Vista!

A search function would suggest to me some sort of active content. Do both machines have the same versions of Java and Flash? I would also look at ActiveX security settings and see if any of them are different.

Unpowered USB hubs do not pass through any power at all, so can only be used to connect devices that have their own power supply. Otherwise, you could have four devices drawing power off a single USB port on the box, which would blow it (and possibly your motherboard). A powered hub is able to supply power to all its ports from its own power supply, but may not require this to connect a device that has its own power supply. If the documentation doesn’t tell you this, then you can find out through trial and error. It should either work or not without risking the device, the hub or the PC, as long as you are not attaching devices that seek to draw their power from USB.

Does it specifically look for a floppy device or default to drive A:? In a machine with no floppy controller (maybe even just no drive), would the cd rom be installed as A:? In which case you could load the driver from CD. Failng that, you would need a bootable CD that mounted a CD-ROM or USB/Flash drive as A: before starting the windows installation.

Floppies have until now had the benefit of being cheap and almost universally usable – but I can’t remember the last time I wanted to share a file that would fit on one!

According to the instructor of the Server 2003 course I am on at this very moment, the most likely cause of slow logons is a problem with DNS. There could be a problem between DHCP and DNS. Setting the IP address of the client would ensure that it is able to find its DNS server, but how practical that would be depends on the number of clients you have to deal with. Setting the IP address of one client manually and seeing if that gives an improvement would be a useful test in any case.

You could try checking DNS for redundant entries.

There might be a problem with replication of DNS if there is more than one DNS server on the network.