Microsoft is making its updates to IE only available for Windows XP.

To which I say, what about all of those servers out there?

Microsoft has released its Virtual Server product, aimed at VMWare. Price is an aggressive $499.

I have mixed feelings about it.

Old servers never die. That's part of the reason I share responsibility with two other people for administering 125 of the wretched things. And "wretched" is a nice way of describing the state of an NT server that's almost old enough to drive.

How about two free tools for moving at least the shares and print queues off old servers and onto a new one? Moving the applications is still up to you, but moving file shares, either manually or via a batch file, is tedious work, so these are still welcome tools for the weary sysadmin.

My name is Dave, and I'm a Microsoft junkie. So are the people I hang out with every day at work. We're all junkies. We're addicted to the glamor drug of Microsoft SQL Server 7.

I run this Web site without a static IP address. I registered an address at DynDNS.org which, as long as I keep it updated, keeps me on the 'Net.

We talked earlier this week about servers, and undoubtedly some more questions will come up, but let's go ahead and talk about small-office network infrastructure.

Here's a good question: What should a small operation do when it gets fed up with its network and is tempted to just chuck it all and start over?

Steve DeLassus reminded me that NICs are dirt-cheap at Buy.com right now. A Netgear FA311 runs $10.50 after rebate. (Hint: these cards use the NatSemi module in Linux, and yes, you have to have a pretty recent distribution to have that module, though you can certainly download the source and compile it if you want.)