Steve08

Well, I've tried turning the firewall off and disabling the AV program. No help. My suspicion is it's some service or profile that is corrupted, hence the thought to reinstall - but yes, I am loathe to do that really.....

Well, I've got it all set - my old PC now with 4 hard drives, 3 of them 6TB each... and all working great across the network - by "sharing" them they can be accessed by any of the other computers .. except for one, which steadfastly refuses to see it. The computer is listed in the Network locations, but as soon as I click on it I get a message saying it can't be accessed because the network path is invalid. ??? Both computers are (still) running Windows 7, and the offending machine has the same settings as others that are behaving perfectly (one other W7 machine and a W10 one.) I've Googled this and tried all sorts of suggestions to no avail... unless someone here has some bright ideas it looks like I may have to resort to reinstalling Windows on it altogether... :( I can only assume something's got corrupted.

Thanks for that - but I think I am going to go the "old PC" route - it will serve my needs, is far cheaper, and will put an under-used resource to better use!

I am leaning towards your idea..... partly because it's cheaper and, as you say, it utilises an otherwise underused resource, but also because think it will actually suit my needs better. From what I can make out, NAS systems come with their own OS, and so rather than show up within Windows Explorer as extra drives, are accessed via a browser interface, and tasks are carried out via various apps launched from that. I really would prefer the simplicity of drag-and-drop within Windows Explorer. But perhaps I've misunderstood - I wish I could find a simple, clear explanatory introduction to these systems. All one comes across are specs that kind of assume you know what you're looking for/at already....

(^_^;) Yes, was a little quick off the mark there! Who reads dates, anyway?

Thanks! That's really helpful advice.. I'll mull things over....

HI - I know it was 9 months ago you asked about this, so probably a bit late to the party, but I did this extensively with my old tape collection using a Sound Blaster box similar to (now discontinued) this one and the bundled software that came with it. Great results.

Your post doesn't match the title! You say passwords aren't expiring in the title, but in the post say they are, but that users aren't being notified/ Whichever the case, I can't offer much help except to say that nowadays many security experts are recommending that you do NOT force users to change their passwords regularly. See here for an interesting article about it from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre.

I am wondering if anyone can offer any advice / recommendations re NAS backup systems? I have an ever-expanding collection of videos, currently standing at about 3TB (and I want backups of everything too) and I am having to back up between USB connected external hard drives. I am looking at something along the lines of a 4-bay NAS system which will allow hot-swapping of drives, and don’t need anything in the way of encryption or RAID setups. So nothing fancy – just an expandable home networked file system, I guess…. Trouble is, I don’t really understand the blurb and am spoilt for choice – Google it, or look on Amazon, and I am presented with a thousand options and have no idea really of how to choose between them. Would be grateful for any advice that can help me choose...

Thank you! Funnily enough, ElasticSearch is exactly what I'm looking at....

Yes, sorry, I do appreciate the time people take, but it's frustrating because all I'm getting is "download and install it" and if it was really that simple I wouldn't need to ask the question. I have provided links and explained why it isn't that simple (to me, anyway) - maybe I'm just dumb. Anyway, I apologise again - I really don't want to be rude.

Blimey - sorry, but does anyone read the question? I know this - it's where I got the package from ,and if you follow the links from that to installation instructions, at the bottom of this page they are decidedly unhelpful. They just say unzip it to a folder of your choice. But there must be more to it than that. How are applications requiring the JRE supposed to know where I've unzipped the files to?

Yes, but.... unless I am mistaken, that is a full install, including (specifically) browser plugins. The reason I went for the download I did is because, as it says on the page I linked to, "Server JRE A new Server JRE package, with tools commonly required for server deployments but without the Java plug-in, auto-update or installer found in the regular JRE package, is available starting from this release. The Server JRE is specifically targeted for deploying Java in server environments... "

Yes, I have uncompressed and extracted it - my question is HOW do I now install it?

Hi - no, there isn't. The Server JRE is specifically without an installer.