I would like to know if anybody knows of a tool that would help me locate machines in our network. I am thinking of something like the ping utility but aside from pinging the machine it would also make the machine in looking for BEEP its speakers.

You could if you had a programme running on the machine that could respond to incoming Ping packets. There is nothing built into the system that would make the computer respond and even if there was, I think most users would turn it of. Having a machine constantly bleeping would soon drive you crazy. Stuart

I was thinking of something like the net send utility of Windows....if only there is something that would beep if I were to send a message to it. I does not have to be pinging all the time.....would u know of anything like this?

you can use WhatsUp to locate the machines but as far as sending an actual beep...well I dont know about that. is your network really that big and you don't know where the computer is located?

networks not really that big just around 60-70 computers....but it is such a hassle having to log into each one just to look for a particular computer...can't do it by looking up the ips as the network is on DHCP so ips change...also people here tend to rename their machines from time to time...even move the machines to a different location with in the office so this makes it the more harder to look for a machine.

You can do that but, unless the other client is on the other side of the country, the roundtrip time is so short it's less than your computer's clock can measure. The best you can do is assign a specific IP Address to each port on your server and, using a packet sniffer tool, go around to all the network ports and see which connects to which IP address and number it accordingly. Assuming you can't locate that network port for some reason what you can do is disconnect it at the server and see who comes complaining that his computer is broken. If no one complains, problem solved; you have a spare port to play with in the server room.

Sounds like you need to use Group Policies to restrict people from renaming computers. Then attach a printed name to each computer as well. As for the beeping, the program Remote Control Panel states that: With Remote Control Panel you can: start/stop programs on the remote computer, list all running programs, logoff current user, synchronize time on the remote computer with your computer time, beep, includes Remote Snap Shot (pcAnywhere type program), lock/unlock remote computer mouse, run system commands, determine OS type, monitor mouse use, shutdown/restart remote computer, list device drivers, display messages, run user defined batch files, retrieve drive information, find files, transfer files, system information (CPU, memory, BIOS), periodic operations, logging operations to file and much more. You can find it here: http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?1401 It will probably require a client to be installed on all the PCs though. Michael J