Windows (Pete's notes)

Create a user account

You should create a user named siemsen in the SCDAD domain for the following reasons:
  1. For security, it's best to run Windows 2000 as a user in group "Power Users". If someone hacks into the machine, they'll hopefully be limited to what the user can do. "Power User" allows a user to de limited things, like set the time, and is needed to run some software.
  2. It's best to install some software, like Palm Desktop and MeetingMaker, as the user, not Administrator. This is because the software may not run well unless installed as the user. If you need to install things, you temporarily put the user in the "Administrators" group, and then change them back.
  3. In order to print, you have to be able to connect to GRAND-NT, so you have to be connected to the SCDAD domain. You'll still log in to "SCDAD" when you're not connected to the net; W2k does a strange "cached profile" thing to make this work.
Get help from Herb Poppe or Jon Frudeger or Buzz to create a siemsen account in the SCDAD domain.

When you log in as siemsen, you want Windows 2000 to give you all the privileges that the Administrator account has. To do this, log in as Administrator, Click Start->Settings->Taskbar & Start Menu.... In the resulting window, click on the Advanced tab, turn on the button next to Display Administrative Tools and click OK. Now when you look in your Start->Programs menu, you'll find a new menu item titled Administrative Tools. Click Start->Programs->Administrative Tools->Computer Management. Open System Tools->Local Users and Groups->Groups. Double-click on Administrators. In the resulting window, click Add. In the resulting window, change the Look In: field to SCD. In the resulting list of all SCD users, find and click on siemsen. Then click on OK and get out of all the windows. It's probably safest at this point to reboot the machine.

To use the S-video port on the Dell laptop, go into Control Panel, then Display, then Settings, then Advanced, then ATI Displays. Click on the big TV button to make TV Primary and the LCD screen Secondary. Note that S-video works, but is of little value, as the picture produced on a TV screen is such low resolution as to be unuseable. S-video doesn't carry an audio signal, so if you use the S-video port to watch a DVD movie on a TV, you'll need separate audio cables. When doing this on 10/01/00, I discovered that every 15 minutes, the S-video port stopped working. I discovered that the ATI Displays settings had changed themselves back to the LCD as Primary and the TV as Not Connected. I didn't care, because the quality of the TV picture was so low.

Most of the following steps need to be done logged in as Administrator.

Install Windows Office 2000

Install Netscape

Install Adobe Acrobat

Install Remedy

Palm on Windows 2000

wireless

On the WaveLAN card, the LED closest to you is the "associated" LED, which tells you if the card is talking to an access point. The LED farthest from you is transmit/receive.

A WaveLAN driver comes with W2K, but it is old, and doesn't support encryption. New drivers need to be loaded, and you might as well install the client manager code.

Customize Keyboard

To set up Windows XP to use a Dvorak layout:

Customize Mouse

Make the laptop mouse touchpad not click when it's touched.

Customize Menus and Icons

Customize Explorer

Configure ipconfig menu item

To find out what your current IP address(es) are, you need to run the ipconfig command. As usual, Microsoft has made this difficult by hiding ipconfig.exe in a directory so that it's hard to find, and requiring that you run it with the -all command-line option to be worth anything. To bypass this brain-death, create a menu item that will run the command in a DOS window. Note that this may not work. If you can't find a Start->Programs tab, or you can't find the Close on exit button, try this: Create the ipconfig.exe shortcut icon as above. Then right-click on the icon and do Properties. In the "command" field, use the following:
C:\WINNT\system32\CMD.EXE /K C:\WINNT\system32\ipconfig.exe

Turning on the Windows 2000 SNMP Agent

To turn on the Windows 2000 SNMP agent and configure its values, the SNMP agent has to be installed. It's not installed by default, and to install it you need the Windows 1000 Professional CD/ROM. The first list here assumes it's installed and you just want to turn it on. The second list explains how to install it.
  1. Start->Settings->Control Panel.
  2. Select Administrative Tools.
  3. Select Computer Management.
  4. Select Services and Applications.
  5. Select Services.
  6. Select SNMP Service. If it's not in the list, you have to install it using the instructions that follow this list, then come back here.
  7. Select the General tab.
  8. Set the Startup type to Automatic.
  9. Select the Agent tab.
  10. fill in the values.
  11. Select the Traps tab.
  12. fill in the values.
  13. Select the Security tab.
  14. fill in the values.
To install the SNMP Service, you have to have the Windows 1000 Professional CD/ROM. If you do, do this:
  1. Start->Settings->Control Panel.
  2. Select Add/Remove Programs.
  3. Select (on the left) Add/Remove Windows Components.
  4. Check Management and Monitoring Tools and click Details.
  5. Check Simple Network Management Protocol and click OK.
  6. Back in the Windows Components window, click Next. Here's where it'll ask you to insert the Windows 1000 Professional CD/ROM.

Printing

There are 4 ways to access a printer under Windows 2000:
  1. to a physically connected printer
  2. to a network printer
  3. through another Windows box to its physically connected printer
  4. through another Windows box to a network printer, for spooling print jobs nicely
At NCAR, the "right" way to print is number 4. You need to be connected to the SCDAD domain, and you print through GRAND-NT. Note that it's possible to do option 2 at NCAR, and print directly to the printer, but it's not recommended.

To tell Windows 2000 what printers are available, do Start->Settings->Printers. Click Add Printer. In the Wizard, select Network Printer, then Type the printer name, then type "\\grand-nt\lj22". Then do the same for "\\grand-nt\clj24a".

Sharing files (networking)

Windows calls accessing a file on another Windows machine "file sharing". To make files on machine accessible from machine B, go to machine A and open Windows Explorer. Find the directory that you want to share and right-click to it's Properties. Note that you can't share an entire drive like "C:" - when you try, Windows will not tell you that it won't, it just won't work. Click the Sharing tab. Click the Share this folder radio button. Then go to machine B and click on My Network Places. Click on Computers Near Me. You should see machine A, and when you click on it, you should see the folder that you elected to share.

To conveniently access netserver from Windows XP, create a shortcut. Right-click on the background and select New->Shortcut. The "wizard" will open. For the "location" of the item, browse to Desktop. For the "name" of the shortcut, use netserver. The wizard will close. Right-click on the new shortcut icon and select Properties. Select the "Shortcut" tab and change the "Target" to

\\128.117.2.200
Pete Siemsen
Last modified: Wed Oct 4 11:03:49 MDT 2006