Microsoft have brought out a new utility called Tweakomatic that is primarily used for retrieving or configuring Windows and IE settings. It can also be used for configuring various other scripts using WMI interfaces. Although I’ve not used it yet I will be downloading the 258k file.

The best source for a Offline NT password & reg-editor with a link to how to change the password for a Domain Controller

I think I’m getting a bit closer in my hunt to work out why the computer seems to spontaneously combustreboot when I am doing certain things. A lot of the time it seems random but there are certain things I do that make it reboot. Viewing a certain gif file in a certain package, or going to www.merzo.net in Phoenix. The quick answer of course is to stop doing those things. However I logged on as a new user on the w2k box, went to the merzo site and it didn’t reboot. Therefore I think its a corrupt w2k profile that is causing problems. I tried creating a new Phoenix profile in the normal w2k profile but this didn’t solve the problem. Incidentally the Merzo website has some pretty cool artwork on it and when you move the mouse over the pictures something happens.

The fix to the onboard AMD Ethernet adapter fails after upgrading to Microsoft Windows 2000 did the trick.

I’m really struggling to do an inplace upgrade of nt4 to windows2000 (and there *are* good reasons for doing an inplace upgrade as opposed to a clean install) and one of the suggestions to get around a bsod when it boots is to disable the cache on the motherboard. When I did that and booted into nt4, just clicking start and then run took 12 seconds to fire up the run dialog box. As you can imagine the rest of the process is painfully slow which means its going to take even longer to do the upgrade. The difference in speed when you have no cache on the processor is pretty amazing (although I guess I could have cheated by interrupting the reboot process of the upgrade to disable the cache at this point in time instead of at the beginning of the upgrade)

Anyone have any ideas why my w2k machine would just suddenly reboot itself to the bios screen and start backup again? It doesn’t seem to be a windows crash as I’d expect a blue screen if that was the case. Sometimes it will do it at random, but other times its reproducable. I downloaded a gif file this morning and everytime I loaded it into a certain application it would reboot. However loading into paintshoppro, saving as a jpg it was fine. Resizing the itunes app to fit the width of my screen (they don’t have a maximize button strangely) caused it to reboot.
Booting to recovery console and chkdsk of all drives initially said they were ok, but then I did a chkdsk c: /p which forces it to do a chkdsk and it found some errors, so then it was a chkdsk c: /r to repair. Then i’ll have to do f,g,h,i,j and k….. a long afternoon.

With the combination of net time /setsntp:”ntp.demon.co.uk ntp1.demon.co.uk ntp2.demon.co.uk” and w32tm -period 0 -once -v my home pc should now be telling me the correct time which means there won’t be a time warp of 10 minutes from leaving the pc in the morning to getting in the car!