Once again, Windows spazzed out on my laptop, so I spend ages reinstalling it. I found out why it crashed in the 1st place and kept coming up with Blue Screen of Death. This was because some how, the BIOS decided to switch on the SATA Controller, even though there is no SATA Device on this laptop. I know, it seems very odd, but it happened :( So I spent all night sterilizing the hard drive. (At this point, I was convinced that another virus had got onto the network. After sterlizing, I then used my Windows Emergency Boot CD and repartitioned the hard disk, by using the Fdisk command. I then tried to do another reinstall, but the hard drive was not showing up at the screen for partitioning. Suddenly, I remembered that you need to switch off SATA to make this work, as I have had this problem before. So, I quickly went into the BIOS and disabled the SATA support and rebooted. This time, when I ran setup, everything went smoothly and this time the laptop picked up the hard drives on IDE not SATA. I managed to get to the drives setup portion of setup and create a new partition and format the C:\ Drive. Windows setup ran perfectly and now I have my custom copy of XP back on my laptop :XD

Also, I've been working on my network again! Sadly, there seems to be a problem with RRAS. (Routing and Remote Access) It seems that some client computers cannot VPN into the network at present, which is something I am looking into. I've also been working on Group Policy as well, making sure that everything is working as it should. I've also been working on Folder Redirection, which will redirect a user's My Documents Folder, Favorites and Desktop folders to a location on the server. At the moment, I have it set so that My Documents is redirected to: \\IS-10131\Home\Username\My Documents. Favorites is redirected to: \\IS-10131\Home\Username\Favorites, while the desktop is redirected to: \\IS-10131\Home\Username\Desktop. This means that the user's folders, such as favorites, My Documents and Desktop do not get lost if the computer fails. Also I now have Acronis True Imaging server, which will allow me to reinstall a machine from "Bare Metal State" (No Operating System installed) and re-provision a machine on the Network, quickly and easily. By using PXE Boot on the machines, I can quickly redeploy and provision machines to a pre-configured state, before any problems started. Acronis is much easier to use that some of the leading brands, such as Ghost. Acronis allows me to image entire disks quickly and easily, without any worries. Acronis makes my job as Network Administrator 100% easier and a million times quicker than wacking in CD's reloading drivers and installing Hotfixes. The good thing is, I can put this image on more than one workstation and not have to worry about configuration, as they are all setup for the end user! However, I will be reconfiguring a bit, as we will be getting a better server here soon, but once again, Acronis to the rescue and I can image the server and away we go! However, I will proberbly do a clean installation on the new server, as it's less messy and we should not have the problems with RRAS again, even though it is not needed, once deployment begins :)