I guess that most people know that there is no technical problem to hide IE in Windows, as MS does with Outlook, MSN Explorer and WinMessenger as well.

In the eon of modems, there had been a phone number (toll-free if I remember correctly), one could download lots of settings for various internet providers from. MS could setup such thing easily today. Remember, is the http-stuff cut off Windows, too? No more automatic Windows-Updates?? The render machine is still there, too.

But I were MS and would battle with the EU commission again and again, I would probably do the same, in order to have the EU residents get angry over the EU this time and hate themselves for cheering in times ago, the EU sued me.

I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.

We had plenty of templates for Word 95, all of them had to be recreated for Office 2000. All of them had to be recreated for Office 2007. None of them could be just used.

There is no compatible .DOC file.

This is also true for OpenOffice 2.4, no .DOC template could be just used; but any templates I made for OpenOffice1 or StarOffice 4,5,&7 look the same in OpenOffice 2.4, if the same fonts are available.

quote of the side:

Does somebody has (pointers to) measurements about the efficiency of solar panels at the vertical walls?

I've read an article of an architect, who built a house in 2007 with panels on all outside walls and the roof. He argued that:

1. the lower angel in the Winter hits the walls and not the roof.
2. the panels do count as thermal insulation, break wind a.s.o.
3. any light hitting the wall can be transformed into electricity - regardless how less.

I don't remember if he also covered the windows with something "panel-like".

The picture of the house did look fine, however, you cannot paint the walls ;-) what can be an opportunity for some houses, but the individually is very limited.

The startup process is automated so far that the machine name is derived from its IP address, the box joins the domain, some programs get re-installed in order to get adjusted to the new name or SID, finally the install files are cleaned up and the machine powers down. This part is working well.

The part that's wrong is:

whenever I finally sysprep -reseal , in order to have the image perform a rescan of the hardware and regenerate the SID, the booted machine does not perform the hardware rescan and eventually logon as the local admin and performs the RunOnceEx keys, but gets interactive.

Therefore I currently use newSID from Systernals to generate a new SID -- which fails in one of five cases, sometimes even more, but only when ran automatically in this scenario, newSID never fails when run interactively from command line?! -- and have one image per hardware configuraton.

I guess I haven't read the doc for sysprep well enough, yet. :-(