Windows XP

CD Burning (not) in XP.

Needed to burn some software onto CD for a server that I’m rebuilding that will not let me install the network card for. I downloaded a 22mb file onto the laptop and then somehow had to get it onto the server. XP would let me go through the motions of burning the file onto cd but then kept telling me to put a blank disk in (it was a brand new (expensive) one I had purchased from Tesco). Booted into Mandrake and ran through the k3 burn wizard in Gnome. This detected the cd drive and all looked hunkydory until I tried to burn the cd when it decided that I didn’t actually have a cd device available. Logged into KDE and same result. However right clicking on the cdrom icon on the desktop gave me the option to burn to cd – lo and behold that worked. So I’ve now got the Raid software on the server….now to get the network card working. Anyone know how to get round a “parameter not correct” problem when installing an AMD PCnet card into an IBM X-Series 230 and upgrading the box from nt4 to w2k?

Ntbackup on XP

Useful tip for backing up to CD in XP courtesy of WinntMag.
Back up to a CD-ROM—A major limitation of XP’s Ntbackup utility is its inability to select a CD-RW drive as a backup destination. To work around this hurdle, open Ntbackup, select the files to back up, then select C:\documents and settings\username\local settings\application data\microsoft\cd burning\backup.bkf as the backup destination. When the backup finishes, XP will prompt you to write the files to the CD-ROM

Desktop Remote Control

Pieter mentioned UltraVNC which is his preferred method of remote control, even over xp’s Remote Desktop. Now if that is the case then UltraVNC must be very souped up performance wise. We already use VNC (in different guises) for control of remote client desktops and sometimes the performance of the desktop refresh is awful – especially over a dialup connection where we can never get higher than 28.8 out of the office! Remote desktop/Terminal Services has always given us better performance, unfortunately its just limited to xp and W2k machines. I’ll be checking out Ultravnc later today.It certainly looks good with work done on the bandwidth,file transfer ability and integration with nt usernames to control who has access.

PS – Hope your wife (I presume its not the cat) gets better soon Pieter and your comments have disappeared from the site overnight.