synaesthesia

Staff are trained not to do it, so it's not allowed by policy. Can't stop them of course, but at least with those limited sites we can some semblance of control over said data.

Gemini & related, plus Copilot & related, Canva and a couple from the KeyGPT etc. ChatGPT is a very specific no-no. Limits reach of what can be done with the data even with staff being trained not to send any PII, and MS & Google can be told not to do anything with your data. ChatGPT can't.

You need to be dragging a BBC Micro/Master along next year and show the kids how it used to be done, properly!

Aye, I've set up our new hyperV host as 2025 as well as a couple of other servers (file server & impero hosts) and they seem OK but I keep seeing these niggles with, as you say, no concrete information to go on!

would that have been related to the update which made 2025 unusable as a DC?

Awaiting the follow-up YouTube video "How to make an omelette with SCCM" and a related Github repository providing you the DNA strands for the egg, instructions for a biologist to compile them and no discernable method of just simply purchasing an egg.

I'm a fan of DIY and getting in a couple of spares if you can - PSUs and drives will be the things that go if they do. You might even be able to pick up a near identical twin server for less than a year's warranty. Our last warranty was just a shade under £800. Worth getting quotes, might those prices also increase if they have the cover the idea of failed RAM? Even if you spent £X on a warranty, the quickest they will respond is usually 4 hours with a fix in 24. If you've the likely culprits to hand, that could be a 2 minute fix for a hot swap drive or supply or 10 minutes for most else. Bit of an insurance gamble like everything else really though.

Indeed a shame. Been a staple for a long time, because it generally Just Works without having to go through a degree in technobabble to get around SCCM's ever evolving mess or for those not using Intune at all/heavily.

Wonder if it would be difficult to adjust the story in this film to mirror current events involving greenland

HP elitebook here. Given a choice between the two, I'd buy a Dynabook DfE Special over anything Apple branded - that's the engineer in me. If I had carte-blance though, it'd be a framework device as there's not really much else out there that tickles the fancy any more. Give me a decent old Thinkpad any day. (My home laptop is an x240, awesome little beast but the battery lasts about 10 minutes )

Happy New Year folks! (for when it happens! ) One thing that's been irritating me constantly, other than it just being Adobe (please can we kill this off? Awful software). - Adobe is constantly firing up a browser window for students upon login prompting them to log in. It does so in Edge, ignoring the default browser settings. Device based licensing currently but we'll be getting rid of that later in the year. No reason for it to be doing this at login, it's beyond a pain in the backside. Disabled a couple of services I can see are starting up in the background but not having any effect - and hoping it's not something we have to do as part of the built-in-1999 "package build process" as the idea of pushing out 20 gig to each machine again is just ugh.... Any handy hints?

The moment someone is described as a "tsar" or "champion" is the moment you know to get the hell out of there

I was more concerned about the Romesh Ranganathan santa!

Ah, fair enough. Far from me to say, but it sounds like it might be being overcomplicated over and above an IT responsibility Handy when things are customisable however. We've quite an odd setup thanks to a link with another local school for our 6th form, but they were happy to advise on solutions for syncing those groups separately from MIS. One was indeed via a UDF but they were able to do this within a couple of days of requesting it. Was about this time last year, hopefully they're not going down the "growing too quick without expanding their capability" trap so many other service providers fall into Simplifying it outside of tech might be worth a look though - what we had in place with Inventry was a complete shambles and suprisingly most of that was down to school procedure than their laughable tech.

I'll echo the above - check the resolution settings and force them to the resolution you need, I'd strongly suggest not 1080 as those projectors will just try and (badly) scale it. Are the X49's XGA native? 1024x768 native if so. I'd check, but I'm thankful to have removed the last of our apple TV's, colossal waste of money!

Why's that an issue? You can just go into manage groups for that group, even when synced and select who needs access to what regarding evacuations, access levels etc?

Aye, I've already blocked it from WSUS just in case. One of those niggles though that'll remain - will it also still be a part of the next update or rollup? Joys of transparency (or lack thereof)

I actually used an AI thing yesterday for the first time - what would have been hours of searching took seconds with Gemini. Needed a powershell script to list all users in a particular OU along with their home drive and profile path. I'm crap at Powershell, and that would have taken a good hour or so finding 5-10 sites with NEARLY the right information and trying to find the one workable solution from it - which then usually results in getting a CSV file with just about everything then manually removing the crap from Excel to get what I need. Impressed that I got the command and a full breakdown of each part of the syntax!

Just waiting for the next one to come in to try a couple of bits including that, the other is disabling audio enhancements

Hi all, Got a confusing one that's hurting my brain. Over the last couple of days we've been getting reports of audio not working on laptops. Started 2 days ago with our music laptops, older Lenovo V15's. No output to speakers from MuseScore on the laptop or via the browser on Bandlab or Youtube. Bandlab and Musescore mixers both showed "output" levels, as did the Windows mixer. Restarting fixed one temporarily. Logged on as an admin, worked perfectly fine. Logged on as test student, worked perfectly fine. Took it back down, they logged onto it, did not work. Colleague asked "is it the drivers?" "No, drivers are not related to the user account logged on...." Maybe impero groups with a mute policy? Nope, stopped the service, restarted, no effect. Logged back on as admin - hang on, it's no longer working? Rinse and repeat several times. Gave in and reinstalled drivers. Works. Confused.com! Hopefully just a windows update glitch for that model of laptop, not the end of the world as we don't have many of them left. Nope. Staff laptop, more modern HP Probook comes in this morning with the same problem. Awaiting more.... I've got the same model however as the one that came in - exactly same driver versions, exactly same windows update build, but mine works. Output to HDMI seems to generally work, USB output reliably works. Is anyone else getting similar? Googling around shows a few ideas that date back as far as January this year which I'll try with the next one that comes in but we're way beyond January updates - currently 24H2 7171

Did you get anywhere with this? We're getting audio issues across the board, HP & Lenovo laptops, but intermittently.

Get a couple in and test - as you hit the more modern tech the signal range drops massively, with even stud walls providing a meaningful barrier. Going from AP5s up to 7s I suspect you'll find noticeable where clients pick up 5G as high preference and might need to improve AP density. (I sound like our unifi cloud key dashboard saying that )

Do you not have an account manager as your school or trust?

This isn't correct - shout louder at your Google account manager. I had to shout VERY loud when I was replacing failed devices with identical ones. Support just kept saying no, it's policy and even "no, the device UUID is too different" despite being from the exact same manufacturing batch of devices. Whether it's a Chrome device or Flex makes no difference. Account manager was incredulous, overruled them immediately and credited us with licenses with no questions.

Gone Christmas Fishing will be worth a watch, as is the main show (Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing). Even if you don't like fishing, it's absolute comfort telly with good clean (usually) humour, fantastic videography and beautiful settings. Particularly good I think for men of a certain age, as the banter often approaches some more serious topics. Literally the only show I'll watch.