Posts by chanto!

Thank you for such quick response. We do not have an IT Department. what I'm tyring to do is reach another computer whom we share files with. Thank you for the concern.

Given your example. Kissy can not access any other computer in the domain with out a password. Brian can share kissy's files without a password. Brian Everione in the domain can share brians files with out a password exept for kissy.

My first problem started when I installed Norton Internet Security on my laptop. Once installed I was not able to see the other computers in the domain and they were not able to see me. I disable it and I was able to see the comps in the domain but not access there files.

Why is it asking me for a password. And if it requires one where can I change that or at least set one up.

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Kissy Martinez

Are you logging into your laptop with your domain user account and not a local account? Also, is this laptop joined into a domain?

Try to open the SMB/CIFS ports on Norton.....I think they're ports 139 and 445.

Hi,
I have one ASP.NET page which allows users to upload their files which are stored in another system (file server) through simple network share. The code is as simple as
FileUpload.PostedFile.SaveAs(strPath)

Here this page gets "access denied" to save the file. I know the application is running under ASPNET local user account. So i even can't give privileges to save file for this local account in another target system.

I solved this problem by using impersonation tags as below in the web.config :

<identity impersonate="true" userid=xxx password=yyyy />

But i have to specify user id and password explicitly in plain text here....
Is there anyway i avoid specifying user id and password like this?

turn off anonymous access to the website and use the integrated nt security...

:sad: hi,

I've made an update to my bios with wrong version. I've tried more and more to repair that bios with boot block feature but no result. I brouhgt it a technician, I wondered how he reprogramed the bios with correct version. Please can you tell me the best ways to do that, ( methods, links, tutorials, anything).

What brand and model of motherboard do you have? If it's an Intel branded board, I can help...there's a recovery mode...

I have a feeling that I havent been able to explain my problem clearly, and a misunderstanding might have occured. See, my pc works fine while its copying or moving files. The computer halts only when I press the copy BUTTON on the toolbar, or use ctrl+C .(same for cut, paste and delete buttons and their shortcut keys) . After a while when the computer starts executing the copy/cut commands it does it in normal speed. So the problems with my computer actually are:

1. It freezes about 20 seconds when I select a file and press copy/cut/paste or delete buttons.
2. It freezes when I select a file and use ctrl+c /ctrl+v /ctrl+x or delete keys.
3. It also freezes when i try to bring up the pop-up menu by rightclicking on a file.

Well that's where my problems are.

Stop Norton Antvirus and see if the delay goes away or not.
Are you mapping any network shares? If so, disconnect them and check.

Also...defrag your hard drive if you haven't lately.

My $0.02:

I just got a new IBM Thinkpad T-41 which just about fits those specs, and I love it- I've hardly touched my desktop systems since it arrived. I've used a few T-40s in the past, which is what prompted me to check out the T-41.

Thinkpads aren't the prettiest things in the world, but they're very well-built and comfortable to use.

Right on... I was gonna suggest the ThinkPad X31. Battery is amazing on this thing... I get 4 - 4.5 hours wifi-surfing on a full charge. The X31 is light, only 2.9lb. My 4.9lb PowerBook feels like a brick in comparison. Yeah it doesn't have a builtin cd/dvd drive, but how often do you use it anyway? The only thing that sucks on the X31 is the builtin 802.11b wifi..but then again, that's part of the reason for the long battery life.

Flashed bios and got "Error Loading Operating System." Okay when reflashed back to previous level. I post I saw (another group?) suggested that XP should be set (before the flash) to generic ide drivers. Does that make any sense? How?

Open up "IDE ATA/ATPI controllers" in Device Manager. Check if you're using an Intel or Microsoft driver. Based on the suggestion you read, if it's using an Intel driver you can roll back to the Microsoft driver.

web server is tomcat & programming is done thru jsp, servlet & other java technology. So which database is best?

Oracle has tighter java integration... and if licensing is not an issue, Oracle sounds like the logical choice. However, I'm sure it'll take a person of more technical knowledge to maintain an Oracle db...

Hello

I am making a shopping cart where database I like to use is oracle but there are other projects which are already made with sqlserver2000 database & maybe I have to link from shopping cart to sqlserver2000 database where lots of contents are stored so what happens if I use oracle. Is there going to be any clash?

Awaiting reply at the earliest.

Thanking in advance.

Regards
Paresh

What web server are you running? If it's IIS on Windows, life will be much simplier if you go with SQL 2000.

Isn't licensing a concern? Sounds to me that Oracle would cost more. MSDE is free...if you don't anticipate your DB growing bigger than 2GB, it's a good alternative to SQL2000.

looked through the manuals and nothing.
can you suggest a router?
I want my static IPs pointing at different servers.
I am paying for 5 IPs.

You can only assign 1 static IP to the router. If you need to put additional systems on the net, you can port-forward to your internal machines.
i.e.

1.2.3.4 port 80 --> 192.168.1.10 port 80 (web server)
1.2.3.4 port 22 --> 192.168.1.11 port 22 (linux box)
etc.

If you want your systems to all have external IP's, you can run your dsl modem straight to a switch and connect your systems with static ip's to the switch.

Hey Chanto,

thankyou very much you are a legend - I tried what you said and it worked.

If you could post what those switches do to help me better understand what it was that i did.

I'd also like to thank everyone else who tried to help

thanks again.

thanks!

/s:\dir_name specify source installation files' path (the i386 folder), ie. if it's on D:\i386, you'd use /s:d:\i386

/t:drive: temp drive used during windows installation

there's a few more switches, like /u for unattended mode, etc. run winnt.exe /? from your c:\i386 folder to find a list of switches.

The nice thing with having the \i386 content on your hard drive is that if you reset some registry keys you'll never get prompted for the Win XP CD again... if you happen to add/remove any windows component, service packs, etc.

To do this, run regedit and change the values these registry keys to C:\\

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup]
"SourcePath"="C:\\"
"ServicePackSourcePath"="C:\\"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion]
"SourcePath"="C:\\"

Whenever I have problems connecting to the net, I do check my IP address - if it's 169 etc I do release and renew it. With a 169 number I cannot access anything at all - and as I said when the browser goes down I can still chat on msn messenger and get the mail in and send it out.
Thanks so much for this help Chanto

Does your web browser connect thru a web proxy server or are you running some sort of web caching software? firewall software? Check the proxy setting under Tools --> Advanced --> Connection. If haven't yet, click off all proxy settings to see if that'll fix it or not.

Yes all updates are current.
It did this after reformatting, before the updates were done, and still did the same thing after the updates were completed.
Thanks

Maybe your DHCP server is not renewing your lease? Next time you get the DNS error, open up a DOS box and type in ipconfig /all
to see if you still have an IP...or anything other than 169.254.x.x

One suggestion is to hard code with static IP and DNS servers instead of relying on DHCP.

i've a 80G seagate barracuda 7200.7 which was installed with win xp pro and the master drive. i reformatted it recently n now i can't reinstall my windows xp for some reason. i didn't think of it as a problem as i thought i could use it as a SLAVE drive to my 30G seagate hdd. that's when the problems arose. my bios only recognises the 80G hdd as 33G when it is in slave mode. however when it is master mode, it recognises it as 80G because of the dynamic driver overlay (DDO) software inbuilt in the hdd.
i updated my bios, to no effect.
I've downloaded the seagate disc starter edition to install the dynamic drive overlay (DDO) on the 30G seagate, even then it stil does not work. even worse, i updated the DDO of the 80G hdd n now it does not recognise the 80G even in master mode! so basically i'm screwed!
reason y i can't format my 80G hdd is because i have 2 partitions, one containing data i rele need. n i doubt that it would solve any problems anyway.
Pls help. i'm just between a rock and a hard place now, and i've totally run out of ideas.
any help appreciated, thanks.

Kenny

athlon xp1800. 512ddram. shuttle ak35gt.

You MB looks to be pretty recent so it shouldn't have any BIOS limitation.
Are you jumpering the drive correctly as slave? There should be no shunt for …

Okay... I'm fixing a computer for my father's co-worker. The XP box started rebooting for no reason at all when he was running some programs a couple weeks ago. He approached me at work a few times to try to get some tips on what to do. Apparently, from the sounds of it, his box would reboot at random times, no matter what program is running. I suggested to him to try testing each of his RAM one by one. The problem still persisted. He bought a new hard drive and reinstalled WinXP on it, still the same problem. He tried reinstalling, and WinXP started giving errors during the installation. He tried going back to Win98 and got error messages during the installation of it as well. Since I was not present during each installation, I did not know which messages they were. However, I suggested to him that he try upgrading his mobo, proc, and RAM, since it might be his mobo. He ordered some stuff in, and got me to do the installation.

Specs are:
Asus A7N8X-X (NForce2 chipset)
Athlon XP 2000+
512 MB Kingston

Retained Hardware:
ATI Radeon 7200 64 MB
Plextor DVD+-RW Drive
LG CD-RW Drive
SoundBlaster Live Value
DLink DFE-530TX 10/100 NIC
AOpen 56K Modem

Put everything together, did a clean install of WinXP. After repartitioning the drive with one partition and formatting ini NTFS, the setup came up with an error in some DLL file …

Sorry dude, assuming you copied everything from the CDROM's i386 folder to C:\i386 (copy the folders inside i386 also.. so that \i386\SYSTEM32 on the CDROM also exists in C:\i386\SYSTEM32...don't need these folders: WIN9XMIG, WIN9XUPG, and WINNTUPG... )

you'll want to run winnt.exe with these switches:

C:
cd \i386

winnt.exe /s:\i386 /t:c:

Hi Chanto,

I tried what you said above - I created a folder called temp and copied all the files from i386 to that folder ( i did not copy the folder aswell just the files) and when i run winnt.exe it starts the install and asks where it can find the files. It defaults to the temp folder that it is in and when i hit enter it says it cant find the first file, choose ignore then cant find the second etc etc for all the files. At this point it doesn't give you an option to locate the file manually.

Am i doing this correctly or should i call the temp folder i386 or something.

It seems to be hardware incompatibility - the only thing i haven't been able to change is the cpu - is that capable of storing information in its cache which could be causing the problem.

Another idea i had was to use the mother board cd to install the drivers using win 98 then try upgrading to XP - does anyone know if this is a step forward or back.

I used 2 versions of XP thinking that might be the prob (one was legit and new version)

2 of the HDD are ntfs format with XP installed

I cant boot from the xp cd ( it doesn't get to the install options) unless I use another machine - and I tried doing that aswell ( removing partitions - create new ones and install in ntfs format ( not using quick format) )

I am trying to eliminate hardware compatibility by replacing items one at a time - the only thing i haven't changed is the cpu - but i cant understand how that could store info which would make it blue screen a XP HDD or setup cd.

Any other ideas - I exhausted my own

legit cd or not, it's not up to us to judge...we're here to help...

anyway, don't do what you're currently doing...that is, install xp on another system and take that hd to your system... it will blue screen.

have you checked out your memory? if not, get memtest86 either on cd or floppy and test them out...

if your xp cd does not boot, what you can do is...

1) boot up with a floppy with cdrom support (the 98 floppy/cd will do)
2) fdisk, format your hard drive
3) make a temp folder on the hard drive and copy all the files in the i386 folder from your xp into this temp folder
…

It's not my neighbor that has the router; it's my housemate who lives upstairs. He has checked out everything for me, and even he's mystified. Tonight, I could not even get a signal from the adapter. I did a complete virus scan, but nothing unusual was found. I also installed AdAware a few nights ago.

If my computer is still under warranty, I'll probably just exchange it or have it repaired.

If the wireless access point / router has MAC filtering turned on, try turning it off... it just might speed up your connection... mine did.

The CMOS is set to boot the cd-drive...I tried the instal again today it froze at 77%. I do not have the optional floppy drive........

Does that mean 77% for the format process and not the total installation process? When it's "froze", do you see and hear any hard drive activity? If you do hear the hard drive head banging or re-seeking, then you'll need to replace the hard drive.

Try disabling XP's ACPI support during installation, some of older BIOS's do cause lockups. Hit F8 as your computer boots up from the XP cd...about the same time you see the message "Hit F6..."... or maybe just keep hitting F8 for about 20 seconds as the XP cd boots. Also make sure that the XP cd is not scratched.

Did you find any answer for that? I'm also facing a similar problem. My monitor goes into standby mode the moment I boot up. I had rectified it once from a technician & ended up paying huge amount. After 20 -25 days, the problem again started (I didn't operate my PC for a week).

Now I feel I should do it myself than empty my pocket. There is no beep & the monitor light just blinks. I tested my monitor in other system & it works well.
I also opened up my cpu to figure out about motherboard, bios et al but was scared to do anything wrong. I'm not a hardware person but wish to know the details of this problem.

Please help!!

Thanks,
Jas

You might want to boot your system up in Safe Mode to see if the video will come on or not. Sometimes when the resolution or refresh rate is set too high, the monitor will go out of sync and into standby mode.

I TRIED to do a clean install using XP, it froze at 15% during the formatting process, and I havent been able to continue instal or even boot the old tecra 8100:sad:

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHELP PLEASE
Tbeckstr

Is it consistently freezing at 15%? In other word, have you tried the install process more than once? You can still boot to the CDROM drive, can't you? If not, get into the CMOS setup and set the CDROM drive to boot before the hard drive.

If the format is freezing everytime, your problem is much greater than getting XP installed. You certainly don't want to experience data corruption later on.

What about getting ahold of a DOS boot disk and use it to create a bootable partition and format it with a FAT32 filesystem. Then try the XP installation again, except select the option to leave the filesystem alone.

Doh!No Luck - it must be cursed.

Tried the battery thing and the "cmos error" came up - continued with hdd that has XP on it and same stop screen. Rebooted with CD and gets to "Starting windows setup" screen and BSOD.

Also downloaded the bios update from the MB website and updated it and BSOD. Can't f' n beleive it.

Thanks for that chanto - but that is where i got most of my original info from - load of crap wasted a whole week going through those solutions. Still haven't been able to try the mass storage driver thing that you were talking about as there is no HDD driver on the giga website. There is Intel chipset drivers - INF and IIA ( i think ) but i dont know what they are.

I got a option menu at one stage which gave me safe mode options etc. I selected safe mode and it shows the drivers as they are loading - it gets to mup.sys and that is when the bsod comes up - dont know if it is mup.sys or the next driver making it crash.

Any new ideas will save me from throwing this computer into a wall

Well, you won't need the mass storage driver since XP has native support for the ATA-100 controller on the ICH4 chipset.

Have you checked the condition of the IDE cable? Any signs of damage? Try another IDE cable...

If all fails, let's try try …

Thanks BSM,

I pulled the battery out once before but i didn't wait thinking it would be reset straight away. I have pulled it out now and am waiting - another forum suggested 15min to 60 min depending on MB. I couldn't care how long it takes i just want it fixed.

I'll post back and let you know how it goes

Check out this KB article, it seems to have a fix for your problem:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297185

Thanks Chanto

the error is correct
I have also received the error
"inaccessible boot device" which comes up on another blue screen when trying to install XP or W2K.

The drive is not RAID ed or SATA

I would like to try what you mentioned but what is/how do i create a driver floppy ( what drivers am I looking for) where do i get them from.

So I'm assuming this is a normal IDE hard drive connected to the motherboard's IDE connector? What is the motherboard's brand and model? You can usually find the correct driver from the motherboard manufacturer's website. Normally IDE controllers do not require drivers if it's part of the chipset. Intel chipset only supports ATA-100 devices so if your motherboard claims to support ATA-133 devices then the controller might be from HighPoint, Promise, or another company...in which case you will need a driver for.

Background - Friend has a p4 based system which had XP working fine, until he tried to reinstall windows.

Problem - He got a BSOD - unmountable boot volume when trying to reinstall

He gave to me to try and fix and thisd is a list of what I have done

Since blue screen - I am not even able to get windows xp cd to get to the menu screen.
I tried taking the HDD out putting it in another machine - worked - formatted it and reinstalled windows Xp on that machine - then moved hdd back to original machine - still nothing.

tried hdd from my computer ( with XP) and same error occurs when booting.

Most forums (including MS help) suggest recovery console, but cant actually get that far.

I put the hdd in another computer and ran RC from there
I used fixboot and fixmbr ( seperate occasions)
I even tried bootcfg
I deleted bootlog
I swapped DDR as well to check mem was not the problem
tried chksdsk and scan disk no errors

The bios settings are all correct ( as they were working before) - I have checked them , changed them and removed all non essentials.

I am completely lost as to what can be done besides getting a new motherboard. Any help is greatly appreciated as i have spent 40 hours in the last week swapping drives up and down, formatting, etc

Is that error …

A coworker showed me this, it's quite amusing...

go to google.com and do a search for "weapons of mass destruction" and click on "I'm Feeling Lucky"

hehe:lol:

Hai
--I have HP PCs,IBM PCs,IBM Servers Of 21 Nos. Those are networked and working on 10 Mbps Switch with builtin LAN Card from a longtime normally. But Yesterday i changed the connections to 100 Mbps Switch, from that time some Of the LAN Connections (Systems)are working normally and remaining are not working.

--PCs are running Under Win2k Professional and Servers are Win2k Server OS.

Pls give the Solution.

Are any of the systems equipped with 10Mbps network cards? Does your 100Mbps switch support auto-negotiation? If it doesn't then you have a speed mismatch.

1. Use the Windows 98 boot disk and boot to command prompt
2. fdisk the hard drive and create a primary partition, reboot
3. Boot up with the same Windows 98 floppy and go to command prompt
4. format c:
5. Insert your XP/98 cd in the cdrom drive, reboot with your "USB DOS CD-ROM BOOT DISK"
6. C: is your hard drive, and your CDROM drive most likely will be mapped as D:
7. C:
8. D:\i386\winnt.exe to start the xp install. D:\setup.exe for 98, I think.

If you don't want to see the "Insert diskette for drive..." message, then go edit autoexec.bat on your USB DOS CD-ROM BOOT DISK
Between the lines
duseldr a:\duse.exe and MSCDEX /D:USBCDROM /S /M:15 /V
there is a B: line to change drive, REM it out.

~Hi Friends

In my computer, installed with win 2000 (adv. server), with 40 Gb H.D.D. I can see the 20 Gb space free in my harddrive under Disk Admin. (primary partion and rest is free allocated to another partition.

Last day i have added new 2 H.D.D of 40 GB each. I went to Disk Admin but can see Total free space equals to 50 GB but it should be 76+ GB , i don;t knw why i m not seeing the total free disk space as both H.D.D are new.

Let me how i can get my disk space back....

Regards
Harmeet :rolleyes:

Is this a Samsung SpinPoint 40GB HD? If so, check the jumper carefully. You might have jumpered it to clip off the capacity at 32GB instead of jumpering it master/slave.

Hi everyone first time post, but it seems to be a pretty difficult problem. I have two computers, the first is a AMD Desktop with two NIC cards (both Netgear 10 Mb). One of the netgear cards is configured to connect to the school's T3 connection, the other is meant to connect to my laptop. Both my pc and my laptop are on XP Home SP1.

I've configured my desktop to have a user defined private IP address of 10.0.0.1 with the usual mask.

I've configured my laptop to have an address of 10.0.0.2, usual mask and entered the gateway as 10.0.0.1.

I don't want to share Internet through the two PC's, but I would like to share files. If the internet is an option I'll do it, but thats not a priority. I have Internet connection firewall off on both pc's. The PC's can detect one another in network neighbourhood and ping each other, although they can't see which folders are shared and also can't be accessed. Now usually I'm pretty good with computers so I don't like asking for help, but networking isn't really my thing and this has me stumped. Help Please!

Just create the same user and password on both machines. When you're browsing resources, the browser service will try to authenticate with the local user on the other machine. Since you're in a workgroup, accounts created are local to just that machine... have to repeat on other machines also.

Integrate Microsoft Project 2003 in Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Server ???

Hi!

Know someone if an integration of Microsoft Project 2003 is
possible in Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Server ???

regards,

gicio

I think your question is... is it possible to integrate Project 2003 Server into your SharePoint portal site right? If so, then yes. Just create a webpart to link to your Project server. Both can exist on the same machine, just don't use sharepoint to extend Project's website.

umm...don't betas normally time-out in 90 or 150 days? Well, anyway, I just don't see how you can get high windows uptime when critical patches comes out weekly...maybe possible for an isolated server.

There is console based uptime tool, which I use at work also:
http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/management/uptime/default.asp

It's not real hard to do an In-place upgrade, and you don't have to sit there watching!

Here's the Microsoft info:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341&Product=winxp

Why get too technical when it's not necessary?

Check the related KB articles for your listed article... I dunno, but I think the possiblity of losing data sounds complicated to me. Sysprep is not a toughie, all it does is strips away the registeration info and forces you to do an activation (if the bootlegged xp is not the volume license edition), more or less. No re-installation, no regedit.

312369 You May Lose Data or Program Settings After Reinstalling, Repairing, or Upgrading Windows XP

312368 Data Loss May Occur After Reinstalling, Repairing, or Upgrading Windows XP

Does someone have a clue?

I've tried to burn an audio cd with nero and with cd creator 5, but neither one works. When I click burn or record I get this message saying......
Nero says"Sorry, your compilation cannot be written on this kind of disc. Please insert a disc of the correct type or modify the settings of your compilation settings to make it compatible with the current disc".
Cd creator 5 says please insert a blank cd.
The same thing happens when burning a data cd.
I've tried different brand of cd's expensive ones cheaper ones but its always the same thing. The weird thing is that if I use a cd rw it will work no problem.

Any idea what the problem could be?

I'm using a Matshita CW-7585

Thank you!

Is your blank CDR's 650MB/74Mins, but your CD-RW's are actually 700MB/80Mins? Try burning fewer songs to see if that solves it.

This is an area that I am not entirely familiar with, hence the following question.

I have a service customer some of whose problems can be traced to a bootleg Windows XP Pro install. When I apprised her of this, she "did the right thing" and obtained a legal OEM copy of XP Pro.

What I would like to do is an in-place reinstall to pick up the new, legal key and a new activation -- while losing as little of the current install as possible. Can anybody give me some quick pointers? Are there instructions somewhere for doing this?

As always, any help is appreciated.

Might be easier and faster to run sysprep -factory and then reseal the system without generating new SID.
sysprep is in the deploy.cab on the xp cd. Read the included .chm files first before using sysprep :)

I had this problem as well. I was able to correct it by disabling the firewall on both machines. Apparently the delay was because when a connection was initially established, it was necessary for both machines to make sure that the connection could be allowed and find an open port to work with. Once a connection was successfully established, TCP/IP took over :) If you try again a few hours later, a new TCP/IP connection between the machines needs to be reestablished ;)

I'll still stick with my slow browser theory ;)

given the fact that

-since both machines are connected via a x-over cable, there's no need for a firewall and most likely he didn't install one or turned Windows personal firewall on.

-XP is set to use DHCP by default and there's no DHCP server between the 2 systems. Not quite sure if the Windows auto assigned IP's are on the same subnet or not after the initial DHCP request times out.

or goto www.dslreports.com and see what is the best rated for your buck. Have fun and ajax I agree with what you said.

PPoA (Point-to-Point over ATM) and possibly PPoE via DSL is actually a "dialup" protocol, so he's right in that sense. If your provider uses PPoA/PPoE, your router might be automating the authentication process.

I get this error message when I try accessing my floppy drive from windows xp

"A:\is not accessible. The floppy disk controller reported an error that is not recognized by the floppy disk driver"

and when I try to boot from a floppy i get
"please insert system disk" or something like that

any ideas? I have changed the floppy drive about 3 times, I put 2 different cables in. It's driving me crazy I have to reload my computer and I need the floppy. is my disk controller shot ? i have an asus p2b-f mobo

Some of the new floppy drives are pretty wacky, they have the pin orientation reversed.
If your floppy cable is not keyed and the floppy activity light is on constantly, try flipping the floppy cable over at the end closest to the drive.

Does your floppy cable have a twist in it? If not, the floppy drive could be B:\

hi, i wondered if i could bother you all for some help, i haven't got much knowledge in this field although it's something i seem to need at the moment.

basically i was wondering if you could make me some suggestions on hardware/software/retailers

ok first off, i'm in need of a server, the server will be based in an office and will be used to share/serve files (Word Documents, Spreadsheets, etc) as well as serve the internet connection, i also need to make sure that the afforementioned files can be remotely accessed off-site. so i guess my first question would be what sort of/what server should i go for? and what sort of configuration am i looking for?

the second part is really software based, i would like to run on the above server a database for tracking members, liason with said members and all related information, this will also need to be remotely accessed and i would like to have as simple an interface as possible, as not everyone in the office is very computer literate, especially when it comes to collating, searching through and printing the information that will be stored. so i'm wondering if you could recommend some software that would cater to my needs.

I maintain a couple of servers where I work, so here's what I would recommend:

Hardware:

Try to get redundant components; redundant power supplies, redundant hard drives, etc. The level of redundancy will be determined by your budget.

Memory.... …

Make sure these services are enabled under network connections, local area connection:

File and printer sharing
QoS packet scheduler
Client for Microsoft Networks
Internet Protocol TCP/IP

If you have all of those running you should be set...otherwise it could be a bad cable.

He stated that it eventually connects, so the services must be running. My guesses are (1) either the NIC's power management feature has been turned on or (2) slow browser service.

For (1), check your Local Area Connection and click off "allow the computer to turn off this device to save power"

For (2), try mapping network shares using ip addresses instead of NetBIOS names... i.e. \\myserver\myshare --> \\192.168.1.1\myshare