Space_Munkey

Hi All, Anybody else struggling with the sheer size of the recent CU's? I understand it's because they now come bulk loaded with AI / Copilot features? We have 60 x Lenovo 100e's with only 64GB storage. They're only used for word processing and web browsing and maybe a bit of python. We didn't budget to refresh them this year because I recommended that they would have gone again for another year, had the updates stayed within a reasonable size... (they had around 7-10Gb free storage). The last few updates seem to be many GB's each which has now put this devices in a constant state of without storage space. We have some 300e's which we use for some TA's and by some stroke of luck, they have an extra unfilled m.2 slot - This was going to be my fixed, only i have just this second found out that the 100e's do not 😭.

Afternoon All, I've been asked to review a draft AI Risk Assessment (which itself has been AI'd), but doesn't seem too bad. I've made a few points about plagerism and age of data consent etc. Does anybody else have a seperate risk assessment document or is it all contained with your AI policy? Cheers!

Agreed! Thankfully I've had an email back already so hopefully we can resolve quickly.

Thanks @andy_b I'll chuck them over an email and see if they are able to help!

Afternoon lovely people! Has anybody had any luck hearing back from Canva regarding their free for education program? - https://www.canva.com/en_gb/education/ I've submitted maybe 3 different applications now, completed an internal DPIA, configured SSO, all in preparation and I've still yet to hear back from them after 2 months or so now.. The idea was so that staff and students can use the premium features and one-click login rather than needing to sign up individually, but I'm struggling to get a response!

This makes me so happy, great job Liam.

I believe you have to be apart of the RISE programme to be eligable as I looked into this as an option for extra funding recently -

Sorry to necro this thread - but we have been having similar issues with these models! Out of about 120, we've had roughly 6 or so at this point end up doing this. The model reports back as GLK-SOC_ and it's impossible to get to the BIOS. Thankfully we have refreshed a trolley of these so we have loads of spares to backfill with now, but I'd love to be able to sort this. I will have a look into the CMOS battery situation you metnioned @Fazza, although I'm sure I am sure we checked this before!

OMG! I just saw a student load EWP in seconds since I opened all the .jsons with the config editor! I'll have to test some more, but that's honestly the quickest I've ever seen it load in the last year!

Hey Rob, It will only upgrade the local version of the file installed on the device. .jsons stored on a network share are separate and ususally only referenced via the launching shortcut. That does raise a very interesting point though, in that I haven't done done this once in many upgrades!

We're running one of the latest builds 25.4.2? We had an exam this morning, frustratingly we don't look after the exams laptops and they're kept locked away in the exams office and the officer was off over the holidays... meaning they hadn't been turned on since the update was deployed out or in the lead up to the exams.. Queue all the devices (thankfully only 6), suddenly pulling down the update mid-exam, breaking saving, PDFs and printing 😂. Some chaos ensued, but we got it sorted... the REALLY interesting this was that prior to the upgrade, the version 24.xxx still froze for a minute or two inititally, but soon loaded. 25.4.2 however literally took about 10 minutes of the exam to sort itself out... Very very interestingly, if you open a saved EWP file, it will load INSTANTLY. I'm now wondering whether I might just create a template save file and save this to all exam folder areas so that the invigilators can load these and leave it on the candidate details page... I'm going to report it over to texthelp-everway-whoever-owns-it-now anyway.

To add to this, I spoke with support also and they advised that it could be due to Printers not being able to be contacted properly OR the networked permissions may be applying differently now because of Windows 11. Which is frustrating to hear because we are having issues with printers not being found (been an on going problem ever since the drivers install cve years ago) and I have seen some funny network drive problems that only occur now due to the upgrade to W11... I assume you guys have confirmed all of these things for your environments however and the issue perists?

Our IT Governor said that the standards aren't statutory after I recently pushed to refresh our server estate due to expiring warranties and that specifically being mentioned in the standards... 👀

That fix doesn't seem to work for me :(... Only just getting round to looking at this issue. I would contact everway / texthelp / whoever owns it in 2026 and see if they can help, but figured I would check trusty ol' edugeek first!

Out of interest, those of you who saw / see the issues - does it perform okay after the reboot?

Really appreciate all the points of view. @DrBeaker I knew there was some compliance caveat floating around somewhere that meant we couldn't just do this (officially... 👀😅) The current equipment doesn't feel or seem slow in anyway, in that we don't feel or notice any bottle necking really. So definitely will raise going with third-party warranty to our govs. These are the current estate specs: 2 x ProLiant DL380 Gen 10 CTO Intel Xeon Silver 4208 2.10Gz x 2 192Gb 3200Mhz 8TB S2D Storage I've also been comparing the quote we've been provided this morning and noticed that it's a quote for 2 hosts and a SAN. The SAN alone is almost £10k so now I'm wondering whether we might be able to save quite a bit by just sticking with S2D... I'm going to wait until our provider gets back to us with news from their HPE account manager to see whether a quote for S2D would be considerably cheaper. Our L3-L4 support is provided by MSP which is why they're essentially providing the spec (they'll be supporting it). I've read some concerns about S2D and having only 2 nodes, but the reality is that we have been using it for the past 5 years without any real issues. Only frustration is that patching can be a ballache as waiting for the storage to sync up again can take a bit of time ~40mins

Morning All, The warranty on our servers expire May of this year. We're in a predicament now that with the exorbitant ram pricing, half of the cost of the quote is literally just ram (absolutely bonkers) and has put us a little over 10K over what we budgeted for. We're now discussing options and one thing being floated is maybe just hold off until after april / new financial year or longer if needed.. However this leaves us in a situaton where if something does break, we're not covered in terms of replacement hardware. Obviously It's fairly unlikely that something will break immediately after the warranty runs out but not impossible. We do have redundnacy in that we have 2 host servers that will be able to run the bulk of our VM's should something on one fail. I'm just dubious and also interested to see what others would choose to do (or are doing) in this scenario. Cheers!

I just got off a call with these folks! It all sounds very interesting and feels a bit why not! We're just trying to understand the timings and how it will effect the working week.

I think after writing it out, reading your comment and a bit of thinking, I realise this may actually be two completely seperate issues. Your comment makes sense for inventry as it is it's own unit and not actually part of our domain, but the EWP issue may just be misconfigured NTFS permissions which worked somehow for W10 but now doesn't for W11? IDK - going to have a bit more of a play and see if anything makes more sense!

Not an answer, but may help! From google - AAD Cloud AP plugin call GenericCallPkg returned error: 0xC0048512 – most likely you are looking at the token acquisition events for the local account, that are not related to the sign ins of the user you are trying to troubleshoot. Keep searching for relevant events. https://s4erka.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/azure-ad-conditional-access-policies-troubleshooting-device-state-unregistered/

Morning All! So this is in relation to our ExamWritePad installation and setup but have been experiencing it across the wider W11 estate and pretty sure it's to do with some W11 security changes. Essentially our EWP Json files and backups are located in a hidden folder on a shared drive all student accounts can read (I'd like to do it differently at some point but this is how it was setup initially and we've just ran with it ever since). Since W11 we have noticed that network shares are no longer just connecting - quite the opposite. We have InVentry which is used by some admin staff and we have had to apply the following in order to get them to be able to read / connect to the inventry share after a rebuild: Browse to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters Right click on empty space. New>DWORD (32Bit) Value Call it AllowInsecureGuestAuth Double click on it and set Value Data to 1 And then from an elevated terminal set-smbclientconfiguration -requiresecuritysignature $false This gets it all working, but I'm dubious about the security of this - it's only been roughly 8 devices that I've had to do this one, so I want to make sure that I'm on the right track and whether it's safe to do for student devices accessing our shared network drive. Any info on other methods or discussion welcome!

How good is this converter - we're looking at pulling the trigger but just wondering whether the resulting word documents keep the layouts intact etc.

Do you have policies set for OneDrive? This is ours:

When you say first login works, what do you mean? We have seamless sign-on working... dare I say, perfectly. The issue you're describing feels like it could be related to part 6 of the link above not being configured: User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Internet Control Panel > Security Page > Intranet Zone. Select Allow updates to status bar via script.

Might just go back to the old free version at this rate 😂