The following are some tips and tricks I've picked up over the years I've been working with Windows 2000.
Q: What is driver.cab?
A: Driver.cab (compressed binary) file which contains around 3400 files. This cab file occupies 51mb of space and lives in %systemroot%\\Driver Cache\i386\driver.cab. The various files are device drivers (and related files) for devices supported by Windows 2000. If Windows 2000 detects that you have added new hardware to your system, by defautl it it will search driver.cab for a driver. This is fantastic for the road warrior which his laptop. But most desktop users can probably delete this file. If Windows 2000 can not find the file, it will put up a dialog box to ask for the files it needs.
Q: Is there a simple way to have to different
TCP/IP settings for different locations when using a portable computer and
Windows 2000 Professional?
A: You have two alternatives:
1. DHCP. This is what I use, and it works pretty well, at least for the places I go to. I just plug in, and boot up my laptop and away it goes.
2. DIY - manually change the IP address yourself each time you move to a
different site.
3. If you are using a laptop with cardbus support,
and your network card is a carbbus card, you can wwap
the NIC into the other slot and it will get a new PNP ID - to this you can bind a new network configuration. So swap the NIC into the bottom slot for home, and the top slot for
work. It's a bit of a kludge, but it works mostly.
This was brought up during the beta but MS did not provide a mechanism to fix it. What I'd like is the ability to have multiple local area
connectoids (ala RAS) and enable and disable them as needed. And none of
these methods address the need for the machine to be a member of different Windows
NT or Windows 2000 domains.
I'd really like to have one connectoid that represents my laptop when
it's at home (ie my laptop being kapoho\kapoho10), and the other being my MS address
(\redmond\v-tholee10). But sadly, this is not possible with Windows 2000. I
am reliably informed that this is high on the agenda for the next version of
Windows 2000.
You can use netshEexe to replumb your IP addresses though.
Q: How do you set a description for your computer?
A: In common with other versions of Windows, Windows 2000 allows you to set a comment which can be seen i the browser list. There are two ways to set this comment.
The easiest is to use the command prompt and use
the net config server
command, specifying the /srvcomment. For
example:
net config server /srvcomment:"Thomas's Main Desktop"
You can also set the server comment from the GUI, as follows:
Personally, I find using the command line easier!
Q: Is there a fast way I can lock my computer?
There are times when you might want to lock your workstation quickly – to dash out of the office for example. One cool way to do this is to create a shortcut with the following command line:
rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation
After creating this shortcut, just launch it and your computer is locked! This beats pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, and waiting for the Windows security dialog to come up before you can hit the K (for Lock Computer).
Last Updated 09/06/01 16:23:56 +0100
