need help class assignment

hey guys im having trouble with an assignment. The instructors main instructions were efficiency is the key to these. if you guys could help with any of the questions, it would be greatly appreciated. I will offer a free cisco 2500 router (you pay shipping) for who ever provides the best answers.

1. A business owner has a xp box at work and a W2K box at home, both
connected via DSL to the internet. How would you suggest to synchronize
outlook at home and work so all correspondence can be reviewed anywhere,
anytime?

2. You have a network of 50 workstations, a handful of shares on an old W2K
box acting as a file server and a Linux box with samba. All employees have
different drive mapping needs. How would you suggest this be setup,
maintained and how much time would you quote the customer to finish the
task?

3. An employee calls and says "I lost the password to my W2K (or XP)
workstation, what can I do?". What do you tell them?

4. A proactive customer wants to backup employees workstations to their file
server. How would you accomplish this?

5. On the phone you need to have a customer find a file on their workstation
and ask them to go into windows explorer. They say they are there and see
the google page. What is the misunderstanding and how do you avoid this in
the future?

6. An employee calls you and says they can't get on the internet. How do you
troubleshoot this?

 

yeah i do too. its worth over 50% of my grade so thats why its worth that router to me. This jerk assigned over 400 questions all in short answer format. Im down to those last 6 or 7 and am just lifeless.

 

5. On the phone you need to have a customer find a file on their workstation
and ask them to go into windows explorer. They say they are there and see
the google page. What is the misunderstanding and how do you avoid this in
the future?
Silly question,but I think it is a confusion between IE and windows explorer.So next time you should tell my computer?Or is he using google desktop search?

 

3. An employee calls and says "I lost the password to my W2K (or XP)
workstation, what can I do?". What do you tell them?
Ask him how many users profiles the computer has and which of them were admins.

 

#1 - http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.htm
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/sync.htm#exssync

#2 I'd say they expect you to use the samba for your shares, run login scripts when they authenticate with the 2k box.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/ch03_02.html

#3 Are they on a domain or active directory.. the admin can reset it. If they lost the local PCs password.. then you could use a password recovery disk (if xp and one was made) or another tool like..http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ with physical access.

#4 Use window backup client - backup to a networked drive - schedule jobs.. or goto acronis and get a server/client back up solution.

#5 Explain "Explorer" vs "Internet Explorer"

#6 - yeah reboot. have them run ipconfig - dhcp is enable? - can they ping the gateway? - have a DNS? What were they doing before they lost Inet? Have a firewall? ... and so on