Reich Consulting

A YouTube member who watched my video about Finding Your Network Settings on Windows XP requested that someone make a similar video for Windows Vista. This video is quick and dirty, but it walks users through each step of finding their network connection settings both through the Windows user interface as well as through the command prompt.

After switching to Windows Vista and experiencing just how poor Symantec Ghost is at imaging Microsoft’s latest operating system I decided that it was high time I give Windows Deployment Services a chance. After a few months of exclusive use of WDS for imaging, these are my initial reactions.

Over the weekend my boss replaced the server which holds all of our student’s user data. Though the operating system version, server name, domain membership, share names, and permissions all stayed identical from the old server to the new server none of our students could access their data when they came to school this morning. After a few hours of troubleshooting I realized that an nslookup of the server wasn’t getting beyond our Extreme Network switches. Five minutes after rebooting our switches everyone was back up and running, and the users were able to access their data. Has anyone else experienced this? And if so, can someone explain to me why this has happened so I know when to expect it in the future?

Today I learned in my Microsoft certification courses how to use and secure Windows Media Center, only to come home and realize that none of the computers on my network have it. Needless to say, I was not pleased.

This problem is related to the previous article I wrote about loading text-mode drivers into a Windows XP installation source added to a Windows Deployment Toolkit (formerly called BDD) distribution share.  Because of an incompatibility between Windows XP and the way that Windows PE formats the hard drive by default, many users will find that, [...]

This video is a visual guide through my previous tutorial about locating your network settings in Windows XP. It also happens to be my first attempt at creating a video on my PC. The video discusses some of the reasons you might need to find your network settings, then guides you through each click in [...]

Eventually while using your computer a situation will arise when you may need to know a little information about your network connection. You may need this information for a tech support call, to configure a networked video game system, or to add a new PC to your home network. This article will explain how to determine view your network configuration on a PC running Windows XP.

Since Vista’s release Microsoft has provided a variety of tools for deploying their operating systems. One such tool is Business Deployment Desktop which Microsoft describes as ” the best-practice set of comprehensive guidance and tools from Microsoft to optimally deploy Windows Vista and the 2007 Office system.” Though BDD certainly makes OS and application deployment to a variety of hardware platforms simpler than ghosting, eventually you’ll run into a problem: some critical hardware may not be natively supported by WinPE, the preinstallation environment used to load the OS onto a new system. This article will explain how to inject LAN drivers into WinPE, allowing you to deploy installations to a larger variety of hardware.

In a previous post I talked about the importance of keeping your software current by installing patches and updates. Microsoft, in an effort to make this process as painless as possible, has made updating an integrated part of their operating systems. This article will explain how to turn on automatic updating in Windows XP and Vista and discuss best practices about it’s configuration.