Like many of us, I'm planning an upgrade to the base image used across the site. Whilst I know that Windows 10 2004 is having a slightly shaky start to life, I'm going with the latest version, and hoping that any issues are patched.
So, I downloaded the latest ISO from Microsoft, stuck it into MDT, added some tasks into the Task Sequence, and attempted to build a VM. This is where the problems began. To cut a long story short:
1, You'll need to upgrade MDT and ADK, along with the Windows
I couldn't get Scratch to work direct from a network share, so I used a method similar to @FudgeyBear, and used a script to copy the files onto the local drive, seems to work fine.
1, Download Scratch
2, Unzip the .exe file
3, From the $PLUGINSDIR, unzip the app-32.7z file
4, Copy the contents of the app-32 file into a shared network folder
5, Create a script
Robocopy /copyall /s /e "\\SERVER\NETWORKSHARE\Scratch3.6" "C:\Program Files\Scratch3.6"
6, Create a GPO to create the folder S
This is probably more for my benefit than anyone else's, but who knows, it might help someone!
So, it's been a little while since I rolled out Windows 10 to staff, and needed a new image, for both staff and students. I'll use this blog to note my successes and inevitable failures on the journey to getting a working, student safe Windows 10 image.
Getting Windows 10 without inBuilt Apps
First up, we need a Windows 10 image, and since the latest one seems to not delete My Documents on a w
Just a quick blog post about an issue that has taken me 2-3 hours to research, and about 10 seconds to fix!
In a nutshell, tried to rebuild some laptops using MDT/WDS. Kept failing to load the boot image, kicking to Boot manager with the error message: A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed.
Tried rebuilding the deployment share - No dice.
Deleted and readded the boot wims into WDS - No dice.
Went through various drivers (we have FAR too many) and removed a great swathe -
A few years back HP released a small notebook that was designed with the cloud in mind, the HP Stream 11. It's lightweight, good battery and looks pretty stylish. However, 'designed for the cloud' was a justification to put in a tiny 32GB hard drive. As Windows is generally quite a hungry beast for HDD space, the HP Stream rapidly filled up, becoming little more than a paperweight.
However, it's a perfect candidate for Chromebooks, so a quick install of Neverware and its good to go. That is,
For awhile I'd avoided using Gen2 Hyper-V disks as I couldn't get them to PXE Boot. No problem with Gen 1 disks, PXE booted absolutely fine. However, with new servers ready to go, I felt compelled to finally fix the issue so that everything on the new servers was the best that Server 2012R2 could provide.
So, the initial issue was that I was getting the error PXE E23 when trying to PXE boot a Gen 2 VHD with Server 2012r2 and MDT 2013. Helpfully, @l15ard had pointed me in the right direction
Backstory
I spent some time reading around http://www.edugeek.net/forums/internet-related-filtering-firewall/145867-google-moving-ssl-searches.html and Google's enforced moving all searches to SSL and the issues this was causing for Web Filtering. Fearing that our web setup would again force me to block Google searches, I read through and found, to my relief, that all would be well.
Or so I thought.
I have redirected our Google searches to enforce Google safe search, using the Google VI
Background info
Wireless has, for the most part, been the bane of my existence as a Network Manager. It's flaky, it's unreliable and it can ruin your otherwise lovely day. Combined with some odd behaviour with Windows 7 and domains, student logins tend to be a bit of a lottery, with around a 1% chance of getting an error "there are no logon servers available..." and another 1% chance of logging in fine, but having no My Documents or Start Menu as they haven't mapped properly on login.
Thi
If you've worked with Windows 7 for any length of time, you're sure to have come across this error sooner or later. Most of the time it's relatively easy fix involving the registry, which you can find here (this works for Vista, windows 7 and 8:
User Profile Service failed the sign-in - Fix in Windows 8
However this one laptop was not playing ball. I'd ran through all of the above steps, and nothing, no new accounts could be created, the guest account wasn't working and I was in a state of
When it announces that it's going to restart in 15 minutes to complete windows updates. at 10:15. And it's the server that hosts the virtual server with SIMS installed.
I had thought I had prevented disaster using this guide:
http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-stop-windows-8-updates-from-force-restarting-your-pc/
and then running gpupdate /force
However, this turned out to be a false hope, as a phone call from reception to tell me that SIMS wasn't accessible lead to a cold sweat and re
I rarely buy hardware as a complete package, preferring to build my own PCs, however when it comes to Laptops, I felt I ought to play it safe and buy from a brand. I wanted a laptop that was powerful enough to handle the odd game (think UFO: Enemy Unknown rather than Crysis) and wasn't going to break the bank. After much deliberating, I decided on the GE60 by MSI. On paper, it had the right specs, a decent graphics card, fast processor combined with 8GB RAM. The only drawback was the hard drive,
It's that time of the year again when I have to start looking at disabling spell check on Word for various Mock Exams. If only Wordpad had headers and footers, I wouldn't need to go through this every year...
Anyway, having updated to Office 2010 over the summer, my previous group policy objects aren't going to work with Office 2010, so time for a new way of doing things.
First of all, I'll credit the website where I got the info, and feel free to follow them rather than my ramblings! This
Shutting down Windows 7 has been a bit of a bug bear, with some PCs refusing to shut down, or settings not quite working the way I wanted them to. In an ideal world, I wanted a situation where computers would attempt to shutdown at 3.15, and only stay on if someone was using it. The PC would then wait until 10 minutes after it had gone Idle, then shut itself down. In reality, the first part usually worked fine, the second part, not so much.
My preferred method of shutting down is though Grou
After reading last months PC Pro, I wanted to investigate http://www.codeacademy.com and see if it would work with our teaching.
First issue with codeacademy is that it doesn't like IE and flatly refuses to play ball with it. One option is to install Chrome across the site, but I'd had issues getting Chrome to play ball with my network before, and wasn't too keen on trying again. So I choose option 2, install Google Frame. Installing it locally was easy, but a network install could prove a bi
As I've just spent a few hours getting this sorted, I thought I would share my experience in blog form in the hope that someone finds it useful.
First up, I should point out that much of this blog can be found at the following link, and it also adds a cool way of adding printeres to specific Active Directory components, such as Groups, OUs or even specific users...
http://www.msserveradmin.com/the-one-reason-you-should-use-group-policy-preferences/
In any case, my goal was to fire out o
