Here's how to make Firefox work on an SBS network.
1. Obviously, you want to first install Firefox on your workstation. Here's where to download the latest version of Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
2. After installing Firefox, click on Tools > Options > General > Connection Settings. Then click on the radio button for 'Manual Proxy Configuration', and then click on 'Use the same proxy for all protocols'. Enter the IP address of your server, and set the port number to 8080.
When running 'Disk Cleanup' on a Windows 2000 or XP workstations, you may have notice that it pauses for a long time when checking for files to be compressed. One of things on my regular to do list is to edit the registry file to automatically bypass this step in Disk Cleanup.
First, here's how to do it manually (at the end of the article I provide a one line registry file to do it automatically):
1. Click on Start > Run > Regedit (or Regedt32.exe)
2. Backup your current registry. To do this, click on File > Export and enter a name. (I suggest using the date as part of your name, as in backup-reg-mar-3-2003)
3. After you have backed up your registry, drill down as follows:
HKey Local Machine > Software > Microsoft > Windows > Current Version > Explorer > Volume Caches > Compress Old Files
4. In the right hand pane, double click on the REG_SZ (default) variable to edit it
5. A window pops up that will have a long string of characters in the Value Data field:
B50F5260-0C21-11D2-AB56-00A0C9082678
6. Press DEL to remove (clear out) the value data field, then click OK and then exit the RegEdit program. Note: we are NOT deleting the actual key, just the value assigned to the key!
7. That's it, and you don't even have to reboot!
Or, you can paste the following text into a file named skipcompressedfiles.reg, and then double click on the file to run it:
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files]