derekmeister

We have a Windows 2000 box with Office 2000 on it and want to uninstall it. However, we no longer have the original CD-Rom, which the setup program looks for to bring up the uninstaller. Any suggestions?

I had a similiar problem, that of the infamous "Unhandled Exception" upon starting it. What fixed it for me was loading up the latest beta drivers for my ATI Radeon, instead of using the default drivers. I seem to recall that most, if not all, of the default drivers for video cards take any OpenGL calls and send them through Direct3D, due to licensing problems ( not to mention that Microsoft is going to be a bit biased in D3D's direction. )

With PCI network cards available for under $30 USD at local stores like Best Buy, your best bet would be to purchase a second NIC, just to make things easier.

Well, by 'firewall' what you're really asking is about the software firewalls for individual PC's. If I was reduced to only having one computer, with nothing between it and the Internet, then I would install at the least one of the available software firewalls. I do this knowing that a software firewall on the machine itself isn't much in the way of protection compared to a seperate machine between me and the Net, but it's better than nothing. My parents have DSL, and what is essentially an old computer cobbled together from parts left over when I upgraded my own machines. There's really nothing that important on there, and most of what there is good be reinstalled with ease. However, they are 252 miles away from me, so I don't get physical access to the machine often. I installed the free personal version of Tiny Personal Firewall ( http://www.tinysoftware.com/pwall.php ) on their machine because while it's not much, I feel that the cost in terms of hardware resources was well worth the small sense of protection it offers me, not being able to watch over the machine personally. Normally, on my personal network here at University (yeah, I'm a computer freak) I have an OpenBSD firewall between me and the school's always on network. Currently, that machine is down, however, so on the Linux machine I setup some IPChain rules and on the MS Windows 2000 machine I have Tiny Personal Firewall running, along with McAffee VirusScan. Together they take up less than 1% of my CPU time in normal operation, and the only difference I can notice when running them is when one or the other catches activity that I'm glad they did. So, yeah, it's pretty much a personal thing in the end. Chances are, your average user on a modem can get away without noticing attacks. But at the same time it really doesn't cost me much to run them, and is there for an extra bit of insurance in case something goes wrong. It's certainly cheaper than my auto insurance, that's for sure.

It's kind of funny that I came across this topic today, because I'm kind of bummed about not having my firewall up right now. I live in a university residence hall, which is directly connected to the campus network. Since I'm paying for electricity only through my standard housing bill, I tend to leave my computers on 24/7. Working for the school's network tech support center, I have come across enough horror stories about computers connected to permanent connections such as mine to want to add to my protection. So, being the computer geek that I am, I took all the extra parts from upgrades that had been building up and put them together in another box, and installed OpenBSD and two ethernet NICs, after reading through the book "Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls". Quite frankly, it's the best thing I've ever done. I've noticed absolutely no performance drop in my network performance, and even a slight rise as my Win2k machine doesn't have to deal with all the misceleaneous network traffic that goes across a dorm's noisy network. And I've caught enough probes and script kiddy attacks in my logs that I don't regret for a second the extra effort I put into this project. Sadly, the power supply died on my firewall, so I need to get another one. Rest in piece, little guy ...

I recently installed System Commander 2000 on my machine so that I could more easily triple boot (Win2k, Win98SE, Linux). After doing so and installing the other OSs, the SC recognized the Win2k partition and automagically put it into it's boot list. However, when I select it, everything goes fine until I recieve a message that says my paging files are too small, blah, blah. No problem, I think to myself, just jot in and fix that... The problem is, once I log in, the message pops up with the usual "retrieving personal settings" stuff, then goes back to the log in screen. I've tried all the accounts, including the admin with no luck. I've also tried safe mode, again with no luck. Any suggestions on places to look?