Laptop issues

[Callum]

Does anybody else experience either of the very common issues we have below, when using domain laptops (Windows 7)?

 

1. Laptops randomly decide to forget about the WiFi policy, resulting in a "There are no logon servers available ..." error when somebody tries to login. The solution is to connect Ethernet and run gpupdate, but it is an annoyingly common problem.

 

2. It seems to correlate to students forcing off the laptops at the power button, but randomly Windows will decide it is no longer genuine. Despite manually running the KMS activation again as an administrator, it still says Windows is not genuine. In this case we always have to spend an hour or two completely imaging the laptop.

[witch]

I get this quite often, even on the pcs. I am sure it is because the computers are not logged off or switched off properly and then they try and go into repair mode.

Re the "no logon servers" though, I usually find that restarting the machine works or if not, then rejoining to the domain. I don't normally have to GP update.

The windows is not genuine thing usually goes away on a reboot if connected by cable

[Callum]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try rebooting the laptop next time it doesn't have genuine windows. The first few times it happened I ran the batch script again which registers Windows with the KMS server, but then after logging off and in as a student user, it would still not be genuine.

[cooka]

I had a couple of machines do this when they weren't being turned off properly - they were in a school library and the children preferred to just turn them off at the wall without shutting down. I disabled windows start up repair and this seemed to sort the issue. If not, you could just run the Network ID wizard which will rejoin it your domain without having to delete it from AD first

[Callum]

I've found a simple trick to rejoining a domain is to add or remove the suffix. So if you're joined to "domain.tld", change it to "domain".