Ripping & Media Player

Don't install Media Player and you'll not have a problem on those 200 users workstations.

If you are going to be using this for LAN parties you can chose what you actually share and even associate passwords with certain files/Folders buy you'll have to individually chose what it is you want to share and not just share the entire drive or folder. So you could share all other folders in your My Documents folder but not My Music. That way at least you could prevent anyone removing or even deleting your personal music files.

I'm actually at a bit of a loss on exactly what it is that you want to do here as your question is a bit vague on what it is that you actually want to try to do. You can not have XP working as a Domain Controller or for that matter have more than 10 concurrent connections in a work-group environment and that is for the Pro version it's less for the home version which you can not join to a domain.

If these are work computers do not install Media Player it's not a standard install with XP and you need not bother to install it. If however this is for something else you'll need to set the permissions on your personal files and protect them with a password and you can use different passwords for different folders or if you are working from a Server you can configure sharing policies with different levels of passwords for different users.

If you would like to expand on your original question I might be better able to answer your question.

Col

Hi Col-

I'm in a corporate domain environment--I have my 2 DC's. We're looking to implement Folder Redirection (My Documents), but I'm finding many users have gigabytes of data in their "My Music" folder.

A large portion of my users use Media Player to view company movies that are embedded into PowerPoint files. Removing Media Player isn't really an option for us.

There should be a way I can disable the Ripping feature in Media Player without having to visit 200 workstations, but can't find it... that's where my quandry is.

I don't know what your company's policy is on music. Would it be acceptable to redirect the My Docs folders, let it move everything, search the relocated documents for the appropriate file extension (I don't rip music so I don't know what the file extensions are), and then delete the search results that are in the new My Music folders?

Regardless, don't forget to rate the answers to this question.

I haven't found the key yet, or a policy for it, but if this is Media Player 10 you can turn it off on the local machine. Under tool|options|player you can deselect the Add Music Files to Media Library.

Good Luck

Well while you can RIP Cd's from within Media Player it doesn't mean that you do it automatically whenever you insert a CD mostly they just play the music so it should be an easy option to place a Computer use policy to stop people bringing in their own Cd's and playing them when they should be working.

Do you have the available Bandwidth to only install Media Player on the Servers and allow the end users to access the required files and play them from there? Are the Servers powerful enough to handle this?

I've just looked up Media Services on the MS Web Page and found the following which may be of some help or at least a starting point

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/9series/server.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/DMdistribution.aspx

Even if those are of no use to you there are numerous other links that may be of some assistance.

Col

I am using roaming profiles, as well as file redirection, and this was one of my biggest concerns. I fixed it with the following.

You can specify folders for exclusion in Group Policy with the: UserConfiguration\Administrative Templates\System\User Profiles setting.

Maybe this will help you.