nLite = Windows Deployment

nlite

Well it has been a couple of years since I did any real System Administration work but if I were to have the duty of deploying multiple machines again… nLite would be the first piece of software I would turn to.

It has saved me hours, virtually everything can be pre-configured before the OS is installed allowing an “unattended” install like no other.

I did run into two errors that I would like to mention.

1) If you pre-configured the display options, ie your theme… it will not be the labeled “yourTheme” as desired, but it’ll be “nLiteTheme”. And it could possible be all messed up as mine came out. And the problem wasn’t easy solved as setting the display to another theme. You actually have to go into the system folder and delete that “nLiteTheme” to fix the problem.

2) If you are installing the OS onto a machine that requires a 3rd party SCSI adapter (F6 Method), you might run into problems. For me, I kept getting an error saying that I was missing the required SCSI driver, but in fact the driver was installed.

Needless to say, other than those two errors. This piece of software has same me much time. So if you’re looking for a stress-free install, give it a consideration. And there’s a Vista version… vLite.Oh, one more thing… they are both free!

Making Media Player Always Show Song Title…

I needed a way of making Windows Media Player 11 always show the current song’s title while in toolbar/mini-player mode. This isn’t an option when it should be, so if you want this done you’ll have to go into it’s registry and add an entry. And I quote…

You [fix] this in v11 by creating REG_DWORD value named “DeskbandFlyoutTimeout” under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\P references . If you set it to 0x0, it’ll never show up. If you set it to 0xFFFFFFFF it’ll always show up. Anything in between it’ll show up for that many milliseconds. The normal setting is I believe 3000ms. If that value is not present, the default is used.”

I found this method here… in one of the anonymous comments. I didn’t reference the original forum thread because it is no longer valid.