Programs I found of Interest

[Curtis8]

Uh ternarybit, you make life seem a tad hard...
Download the Floppy Version, make the floppy, then image the floppy. There is no need to use a Win98 boot disk when they do all that for you on their own image...

[ternarybit]

@curtis: thanks, I have a bad tendency to over-complicate matters. I'm getting better tho! I suppose I crave the "elite" factor of doing things like Rube Goldberg would, but this is much easier. Thanks again!

@natan: who said anything about a 5-MB HDD? I just want to use manufacturer's apps to diag their own hard drives so I can say "your drive failed YOUR test, so it's bad. Give me a new one." It works very well that way. Thanks to you both!

Edit: also, I generally have <10 mins per day to hack away at my own personal projects at work (like this one) so I often don't have much time to really understand my situation properly. Consequently I overlook things like this. cheers!

[cghamm]

Hi!

I'm using WSUS-offline for reviving a batch of identical machines for a school PC pool. They're getting a new XP installation using sysprep ... which is why I'm using PING.
I hate waiting for automatic updates to decide it's time for something new. It's especially irksome when you're installing XP-SP2. The WSUS-offline is a big help!
For those who haven't had a look: you can tell the program to download all updates from Win XP onwards, including servers and also for Office. Just start the whole shebang, then go for a long coffee break.
When applying the updates, you can tell the program to automatically handle the rebooting for you, so go have another coffee break