This sounds more like a Windows Authentication  issue than a SQL Server connectivity issue, possibly the laptop has extra security patches installed?

Map a drive to a share on the SQL...

I think you should move to the UK then start looking for work. Sounds risky but agencies look for an easy life and a fast buck and that doesn't include liaising...

Not sure I'd give up an evening to talk about SQL Server although, with a young family, time is precious.

I agree that net resources from both Microsoft, user groups and others...

The Profiler will be a great help. You will  have to set some  restrictions on the Events and Filters tabs or you will be deluged with data. Experiment and save your...

We use per processor but now I've actually looked at it I think they are poor value for Servers with less than about 15 -20 users per processor (e.g. a licence...

Thanks for this, I reached the same conclusion, the licence costs are a one off.

Interesting lack of interest (if you see what I mean) in this question. Other licence questions on the...

I don't know much about Reporting Services so I guessed  'Yes'  and was v. surprised to get it wrong. The inability to send more than one report per email is a major...

Yeah, SQLServerCentral.com is excellent. A very informative, useful & interesting site. e.g. I'm using a user & permissions generator script obtained from your site when moving a load of databases this...

The system generated code doesn't 'mean' anything, it's just the method SQL Server uses to distinguish this session's temporary table from another session's temporary table.  The source code is owned by Microsoft,...

If the transaction log backups are appended to the existing backup (i.e. there's no 'WITH INIT' paramater in the backup statement) then the backup file will contain several 15 minute 'snapshots'...

Well, I thought this was a good question. It certainly made me think.

Question of the Day is a bit of educational fun, why does everyone get so worked up about...

Rebuilding an index optimises the index structure based on the data in the table at that time. A rebuild is a good idea after signigificant modifications of the kind you mention.

However.....the...

This message is returned when the SQL Server Agent Service is not running on the specified computer - I guess your stored procedure was trying to run an Agent job.

Not sure...

Well the processes may have rolled back by now, 3 days on from the posting. If not then I think you will have to stop & start the SQL Server...

Are you sure the backup is valid? Try

RESTORE VERIFYONLY FROM DISK = 'e:\mssql7\backup\dbtest_backup_device.bak'

This should return 'The backup set is valid'.

Also   confirm you haven't been appending backups by using RESTORE...