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Machine Configuration Notes

    It would appear that some amount of spurious network traffic on the building wire can be reduced, noise related to the microsoft networking browsing information (the network neighborhood in the explorer).
    Each machine that has the service "File and Printer sharing for microsoft networks" (not the client for the ms networks) broadcasts to every other machine on the building wire every 12 minutes information regarding the resources it has, even if it does not have any resources to share. Therefore all machines that don't share resources should NOT have this service installed -- DMDX boxes should never provide resources for other machines to share and should never have the service "File and Printer sharing for microsoft networks" installed.
    For each work group there must be one machine with "File and Printer sharing for microsoft networks" installed that is the browse master, meaning it collates information from all other servers on the wire and serves as a repository of information for other machines -- otherwise you get the infamous cannot browse network message. Under the properties of file and printer sharing there is a setting labeled "Browse Master". Normally this is set to "auto" (properties of "File and Printer sharing" / "advanced") meaning any number of machines are possibly going to be browse masters when only one needs to be. By default with all servers set to auto when the previous master browser disappears (is turned off) all machines set to auto hold an election as to which is going to be the master browser, generating a storm of network traffic -- so one machine per work group needs to be have the File and Printer sharing Browse Master specifically set to Enabled, all others should be disabled.
    This also means that if a workgroup's browse master is turned off and no other machine in the work group has the file and printer sharing service installed other machines will suddenly have trouble browsing the network.

    While it might have been the case with Windows 98 it's certainly been the case for years that multimon systems should have the desktop extended onto the secondary display.  Some dialogs might have been displayed there in the past but it's certainly not the case now (as of version 0.25 I think only job errors, but it used to be the Abort and Save dialogs too).



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