Win 2000 Pro questions

[iadom]

My brother who is a Captain in the Church Army has made a flying visit from Cornwall this weekend. He brought his laptop with him and I was appalled with the state of his PC. a Dell laptop he has had for 12 months. It was supplied to him by the Church Army and to be honest he is not very well clued up on IT. It has Win 2000 Pro installed. It came with MaCafee AV, but it has never had any update facility activated. It was missing 37 MS critical updates. He accessed his e-mails and "wondered why" even though he downloaded 10 messages, it was telling him that he had 985 messages. Due to the fact that we where at our mums house I didn't want to download all the stuff he needs to sort out his PC via her phoneline. It has no firewall or adaware protection either. I have burned copies of several utilities such as Adaware, Z Alarm, Spybot, Spywareblaster etc onto a CD for him.
However I have a couple of questions. I am not familiar with Win2000 Pro, how do you enable auto update for the Microsoft critical updates.
Also is there a quick and easy way to purge his mailbox of the 985 messages, I know how to prevent messages being saved and have activated this for him.

[Chris W]

start -> settings -> control panel -> automatic updates.

[Paul K]

Originally Posted by iadom

My brother who is a Captain in the Church Army has made a flying visit from Cornwall this weekend. He brought his laptop with him and I was appalled with the state of his PC. a Dell laptop he has had for 12 months. It was supplied to him by the Church Army and to be honest he is not very well clued up on IT. It has Win 2000 Pro installed. It came with MaCafee AV, but it has never had any update facility activated. It was missing 37 MS critical updates. He accessed his e-mails and "wondered why" even though he downloaded 10 messages, it was telling him that he had 985 messages. Due to the fact that we where at our mums house I didn't want to download all the stuff he needs to sort out his PC via her phoneline. It has no firewall or adaware protection either. I have burned copies of several utilities such as Adaware, Z Alarm, Spybot, Spywareblaster etc onto a CD for him.
However I have a couple of questions. I am not familiar with Win2000 Pro, how do you enable auto update for the Microsoft critical updates.
Also is there a quick and easy way to purge his mailbox of the 985 messages, I know how to prevent messages being saved and have activated this for him.

What software is he using to access his email? If its outlook express you can tell it to only download the headers of the email and when its done that you can CTRL+A and then hit delete to clear them all. Might be an easier way but it would depepnd on the ISP and software.

[iadom]

Thanks for the answers guys.
Paul, he is using Outlook 2000. not to sure of his ISP, his e-mail address that I use is Churcharmy.org but I noticed last night that his connection seems to go through fish.co.uk, not sure if you can get at them via webmail.

[Paul K]

In outlook, tools, email accounts, view or change existing email settings.
You can choose the email account in question and select change,
go into more settings (in the botom right (ish) corner),
select advanced, click on the "advanced" tab and on that tab you can put a check in the delivery tick box to leave a copy on the server and then tell it to delete the emails from the server after X numbers of days. If you reduce that to 1 day that may do the job if they are old emails.
Is the ISP these:
http://www.fish.co.uk/
as they do webmail interface on the portal page
http://www.fish.co.uk/about_surefish/get_webmail.htm
This page may help you sort out the email probs as it tells you how to manage the inbox folders etc.

[iadom]

Thanks again Paul, that should do the trick, now he has to go home and sort out the other two PC's he has that are riddled with pop ups.

[Paul K]

Let us know if it works If not we will try again.

[iadom]

Originally Posted by Paul

Let us know if it works If not we will try again.

Just a quick update Paul/MB.

There is no auto update in the Control Panel on his PC. I have advised him how to manually check for these, but with 37 to catch up on I'm glad I won't be paying his phone bill. Also told him to contact the Church Army to give hime the details needed to allow MacAFee to auto update.

In his version of Outlook (2000) and also in my Outlook 97 there are no "e mail accounts" in the Tools menu, you have to access them via Tools/Services.

I am not to sure how he has managed to get his e-mail set up the way it is, but suspect that the CD Rom from Fish.co.uk that he used may have altered his POP/SMTP settings automatically, to allow him to receive mail at his original e-mail address, he would have no idea how to do this himself.
He tells me that when the Chuch Army supplied him with the PC he could access e-mail, his e-mail addy is still *****@churcharmy.org but had no internet access.

He used Fish.co.uk to gain web access because they make a donation to Christian Aid every time you logon.

I could not alter the Settings in Outlook for either Fish.co.uk or CA Sidcup the Church Army address. He has also forgotton his login details. so I couldn't use webmail.

I opened Outlook Express and found that he had used that at some time, it had e-mails in the Inbox/Outbox/Deleted folders that he was unaware of.
I was able to set the Advanced settings to delete mails after one day on both the Fish.co.uk and the Church army accounts and told him to use Outlook Express a couple of times to see if that will clear it, because I could not access his webmail I do not know if it was his Church Army or his Fish.co.uk mailbox that was bunged up.

He is now on his way to Sheffield this morning for a conference, no doubt with his head spinning with all the info I attempted to instill in him.

[Chris W]

Originally Posted by iadom

Just a quick update Paul/MB.

There is no auto update in the Control Panel on his PC. I have advised him how to manually check for these, but with 37 to catch up on I'm glad I won't be paying his phone bill. Also told him to contact the Church Army to give hime the details needed to allow MacAFee to auto update.

Hmm... it may perhaps have appeared with one of the service packs then...

I gather the guy is on a dialup connection; if so downloading all the updates will be a nightmare! if it is easier i can send you a cd with them on so he can install from there. I always keep a copy, so when i reformat my pc, i don't have to wait for all the updates to download again

MB

[Stu038]

Originally Posted by monkeybreath

I gather the guy is on a dialup connection; if so downloading all the updates will be a nightmare! if it is easier i can send you a cd with them on so he can install from there. I always keep a copy, so when i reformat my pc, i don't have to wait for all the updates to download again MB

Someone posted the link on here a while back to the M/S site where you can order the CD direct. Mine took about a week to come through and had everything upto Feb on it.

Found it here

[SOSAGES]

yeah the cd's are pretty cool they scan ur system install and Service packs and then any hotfixes.

[iadom]

Thanks for the link Stu, I have e-mailed him that.

[Millay]

Yea Auto Update, was automatically installed and enabled in SP4, 138mb download.... Really worth making sure he is running it though.. with windows 2000pro sp4, theres no reason to move to XP its so stable!

(ok yes there is, but you know what i mean)

[Stu038]

Originally Posted by Millay

with windows 2000pro sp4, theres no reason to move to XP its so stable!

(ok yes there is, but you know what i mean)

Almost The issue that the Sonic game my 5 yo loves, works on every other Windows OS (even 3.11 when I tried it for the laugh) execpt 2K is the main reason I'm gonna have to cough up for Xp home to put on his machine eventually.

I suspect though that it won't run on an AMD 333 with 64M RAM

[Shaun]

Also try auto-patcher here: http://www.autopatcher.com/index.html