[Steve Moore]

Q: Anybody out there have to create their own nic template to run peer to peer? Anybody running peer to peer at all?

After a recent crash wher PTLE trashed hal.ddl, the core file for XP... causing me to have to completely reinstall Windows.... (what's up with that DIGI?) I figured I would use Ghost as so many others do to make reconfiguration relatively painless.

The new version (2003) claims to work across network drives, an important issue for me since I want to be able to back up both system and audio drive images offsite to my servers with large raid arrays.

The advertisements make this sound like a Windows program with an intuitive GUI interface. BS. It's just a shell program that dumps to DOS and requires two reboots of your computer.

What's worse, is that the peer to peeer networking requires a DOS driver for your network card, something not explained up front and not necessarily available for the network adapter card already running in your computer (my card was installed using the XP supplied driver).

The list of accepted network cards recoginized by Ghost is very short... a handful of the many hundreds in use today. What's more, it can't seem to take this information from the OS. You would think with a working nic already installed in the OS it could extract the necessray information. Not so. Instead I am left with a cryptic dialog box asking me to create a template for my nic with little or no help/explantion whatsoever. Multiple attempts to provide Ghost with the OMF files have failed with cryptic error messages that that tell me nothing.

What's worse is I downloaded this pile from Best Buy with zero return policy. I guess I'm left with trying to get symantec on the phone again or spending more dollars still putting another nic in my machine that Ghost recognizes.

IMO, Norton should tell you upfront that the peer to peer feature they are boasting about has limitations.

Just my .02.

So, anybody else out there have to create their own nic template to run peer to peer? Anybody running peer to peer at all?

And for all the hype, it does not even appear to have an automatic scheduler to keep the images up to date..! And since the damn tbing requires two reboots how can I use a Windows scheduler to do this.

Oh and one more thing... the supplied help files won't open (I click on help and nothing happens) and of course there was no printed documentation because I downloaded the program directly from Best Buy.

Arghhh!