Newbie having problems....

Thanks for not telling us something about your computer and operating system. Guesswork and mysteries are so much fun...

Let me guess... You cloned the hard disk and are now wondering why it's complain about duplication. Duh.

If you happen to have XP or W2K, right click on the "My Computah" icon and select "Properties". Select the "Network Identification" tab. Change the system name. Reboot.

If you happen to have W98 or WinME, right click on the the "Network Neighborhood" icon and select "Properties". "Select the "Identification" tab. Change the computah name.

If you did cloned a W2K or XP system, you're about to have a different problem. Windoze distinguishes its network computers by assigning a globally unique system ID code to each machine. It's considered bad form to have two identical machines with identical SID codes. Start reading here:

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you decide to change the SID, you will need to reinstall most of the operating system, IE6, Norton AntiVirus, much of MS Office, and a few others. The system will complain on bootup, demand the original CDROM's, reload some programs, but work when it's all done. What's happening is that MS "brands" each executeable with the SID so it can trace documents created by the OS or MS Office back to the originating computah. If you go this route, be sure to record both the original and changed SID in case you wanna put it back.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
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When i boot up i get the message '!! windows system eror - a duplicate name exists on the network!!'

Tried to set up a small network but got a bit lost and presume this has come from there...How can i delete this message, cancel all the networks 'things' that i've done and start from fresh....Tia

Reply to
Richie

unplug your network and boot up then change the computer name

Reply to
bumtracks

This last part isn't true any more - they had to stop doing that for reasons of invasion of privacy. They even had to provide a free tool to remove SIDs inside Office docs.

Reply to
Mark McIntyre

You mean this thing?

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only works for Office 2003 documents. Nothing for Office 97,

2003 or Office XP. Maybe this?
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removes "personal and hidden information" from Word Documents. Note that the SID is not listed as one of the items removed. It's still in there, somewhere.

I recently had to tweak the SID on a W2K installation. As soon as I changed the SID, and on reboot, it wanted to reinstall the OS, MS Office, a few updates, and Norton AntiVirus. I accidentally created a problem by copying the i386 directory from the install cdrom to the hard disk. The copied files ended up read-only. The W2K reinstall complained that it could not install a short list of file. (Sorry, I forgot to scribble down the name). When I marked the files as read-write, the install succeeded. That's because the install wants to "brand" the binaries with the SID and who knows what else.

I also ran into the same read-only issues with IE6, XP, and MS Office installs. If the files are read-only, the OS can't brand them, and the install fails.

If you need to convince yourself, compare "Hello World" type documents created with Word from two different machines. If MS really did stop branding documents, they should be the same (excluding the creator and revision information). They're not.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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