mikes

I have had a call from our repro person complaining of slow speeds in outlook (onsite exchange), just as you described it (hanging, wheel of doom etc). This was with cached mode off - I turned cached mode off as she was having a problem with synchronization - out of memory e-mails flooding her inbox with it enabled. Everyone else uses the default cached mode with no problems, no idea why she was getting these exchange synchronization error e-mails. (her mailbox was not in the top 10) I never had a problem disabling cached mode on Office 2013 and below; it seemed to function fine. Why doesn't it work properly now? If it is not meant to operate thus then why have the option? Sounds like another MS bug to me. Our DNS etc is fine

I had to set up relaying for our SIMS server's IP address in exchange. Haven't had anyone sending out spam from our systems. Do you have a spam solution as you might need to enable relaying in that. I use ASSP as an SMTP proxy. FMS was a pain as it kept on forgetting that I'd entered the mailserver details, and the next friday batch no mail would go out

Yeah I didn't really like OneDrive for this same reason, it would cache many GB worth of files in a silly location (the users profile, maybe even roaming?). I would be wary about moving all of our users home folders to the cloud just at this stage (for our school that is) We use Google Docs here. I'm not sure if you could force staff to change over, for us we just let them choose, and now they see the benefits of the cloud solution they all changed over to that. E.G. they can go onto Google Docs, easily find a powerpoint that has been shared with them, and show it to the class. One thing to ask, do you have single sign on / password sync? I find that helps a lot. When we first started using Google Docs for Daily Worship, the staff did not like it so much; we were running on ancient Intel Pentium laptops that were garbage when they were new; and it ran terrible. (100% CPU) But we upgraded our machines, the staff are slowly getting used to it, and most of them don't mind it at all now. They like how easy it is to only grant certain people write access to a file. More than one person can work on a document at a time, without file lock errors and all the other nastiness you get in a fileshare. Plus it is a lot easier to share documents with non domain clients. Plus staff are able to comprehend you can copy/paste a URL; not many here can comprehend a directory tree. Another plus for us is instant save and restore that is easy to manage. I can see our staff using their home folders less and less as there becomes less need for them, so I am happy to wait for now. If it wasn't for SIMS, we could look at moving away from Microsoft entirely. The only thing I wish I'd set up is single sign on, or at least password synchronization. Having another layer of passwords to remember was a big stumbling block for our staff. They would forget their password and the staff would revert back to fileshares.

For £110, I personally could not purchase the motherboard and CPU I would want; you may end up buying a motherboard and CPU that does not offer that much more performance than what you have now. My friend managed to pick up an NVidia 970 on ebay for £100. It's a solid card for the price and would last a while. If you can pick up something similar it would be a nice upgrade, plus you can carry it over if you ever upgrade the motherboard in future. Sadly on Amazon prices for the 970 seem to fluctuate wildly. I'm seeing them being sold for £160 on one hand, and £400 on another. No idea why I have a Core i7 with a 1070. My friend (who is more into bikes than computers) bought an AMD Ryzen and the ebay 970; and got a computer that is only really 10-20% slower than mine; for much less cash.

We upgraded to Windows 10 this summer. We waited until this long partly due to budgets (our laptops and equipment were EOL about 3 - 4 years ago, but were still usable until this summer) - and partly due to Microsoft Software. It typically takes about 2-3 years after they release an OS for that OS to become usable. People who deploy a Microsoft OS as soon as it comes out are masochists IMHO. Our old NM deployed RM CC4 along with Windows 7 as soon as they both came out - I vehemently disagreed with that decision. As a result, when the software was deployed, it barely worked, ran like a dog, and crashed all the time. He lost the respect of the staff and ended up resigning. Our deployment this summer has been OK, we haven't had any disasters and the system is usable (unlike the problems I heard about in scotland with one council?). The only problems are the usual Microsoft shoddy software "reboot fixes it" issues. (sound will stop working, spooler service locks up, laptop won't project externally, reboot fixes them) Our mail server is still on 2008 with exchange 2010. Am moving it to O365 shortly. We got shafted on our upgrade as we went into debt for the next 3 years. Our council now has a big IT grant but they won't give us anything as we are up to date. Meanwhile the school that bought loads of switches they didn't need get a huge payout.

you don't have any form of USB storage security set on the lenovo BIOS do you? what do other USB sticks come up as?

I've deployed it this summer too and am having intermittent issues with the start menu layout, some staff will get the correct one; others will get a default one - others will get the correct menu but icons will be missing or will do nothing (Even though you can run the program from the links location). I haven't heard any complaints regarding students missing start menu icons; the students use a different .xml but they are otherwise set up identically; not sure if perhaps wireless is the cause for me?

Having a problem recycling polystyrine in work, it has the recyclable symbol on it but everyone I speak to says it can't be recycled. It's enough to fill 1.5 biffa bins. What's the point of this recycling symbol then? Only certain places can recycle it? I have one type that has no recycling symbol on it, which I put in general waste as not recyclable. I have another type that looks and feels exactly like the previous type; only it has a recyclable symbol on it. I then have another, black type that feels different, that also has the recyclable symbol on it. I guess our council just won't do take it? Finding someone there to speak to was an odysee worthy of Homer

Reminds me of that old tale about this notorious speeder and law-breaker "Prawo Jazdy", who nobody could find, until the police found out Prawo Jazdy was Polish for "Driving License" Or the protagonist in "Idiocracy" who gets accidentally renamed "Not Sure" by bad voice recognition software; he is known by "Mr Not Sure" for the rest of the film - I mean, the computer says his name is "Not Sure" so that's what it must be, right? :bowl:

Ordered some Lenovo thinkpads/thinkboxes, 280 in total, plus 100 chromeboxes/displays. the amount of packaging probably would fill up a large transit van (even crushed down). The chromeboxes weren't so bad but with Lenovo, I guess every item is manufacturered separately in its own factory, they are then shipped to be packed together as a final unit. That means the mouse, keyboard, 3 different bags for different screws, power etc are all individually wrapped in cardboard and plastic. Plus I now have 100 VGA, DVI and power cables I've got no idea what to do with I guess the admin work of finding out which customers want VGA cables and which don't, would actually be more expensive than just bundling one in every box anyway. The thing is some companies seem to be making a change just for the sake of being visible. MickeyD's changed to paper straws, but these straws are now being sent to general waste as they can't be processed for recycling; the old plastic straws were recycled. Same with these Bags for Life - doing worse for the environment, as people just buy and treat them as disposable - and because they are so much thicker and contain a lot more plastic - they are much worse when it comes to recycling. A large part of my general waste is crisp packets / food packaging. Why is it we can't recycle crisp packets?

Are you using roaming profiles? Have you checked the profile sizes as they can build up quickly. Ours weren't configured very well so they were growing to multi-gigabyte sizes; with temp files, OneDrive; outlook attachments etc. Other than that, I have actually just let space get to 5-10% remaining; once staff see that red bar they tend to go through what they don't need. I made the mistake before of just keeping expanding the storage drives every time they went red, it looked like we had plenty of free space but we ended up completely filling our SAN and grinding the network to a halt... We also use DeDup here, never had any big problems with it but it can be finicky when you are trying to clean up space. We ran out of space and I needed to quickly clean 50 gigabytes; of course deleting that much data did not free up any space until the next Dedup cycle actually ran (which you can force via commandline) A problem I have regarding staff managing their own space, is that the vast majority of them don't seem to understand the concept of file size. They will see a folder that has 50 word documents in it, totalling about 30MB; they will think this folder is much much bigger than a different folder that only has 2 powerpoints in it (ppt's with images and videos totalling 270MB). So they are good at reducing the number of files they have, but not the amount of data they have.

Chrome has in the past year been really finicky with flash in my experience, even with the PPAPI plugin; setting flash GPO's or enabling it in the config etc; I ended up advising staff to go back to using IE for that old educational web-based garbage that uses a Flash navigational system...

yeah I am sure we just run a SIMS tally of all positive / negative points and those students who are above a certain threshold are eligible for the prom / lower year reward trips

We are trialling both google and O365 here, currently we run in house exchange / servers etc. Our only issue with moving full-time to cloud services is we are on a PBSA link administered by our LEA and on average it will go down for half a day every month, and it'll go down for 20 minutes once a week. (each side blames the other etc etc...)

Sitting on my ass infront of a screen makes me a superhero now?

Nothing you can do about it in my experience, we ended up buying crates of cheapo input devices. Our classrooms now tend to have 50% more mice and keyboards in them than their are computers. Kids love moving around keyboards and mice for some reason

great weather for ebiking

sorry this is a necropost too. we had this with a user but that user had not altered or changed anything in her Sims Documents folder. There was a lot of items in there however. I ended up renaming the folder, so when she loaded SIMS it would create a new one, and it got her back on; but I am nervous this will cause undefined behavior or lose her access to things. Does anyone know a real fix? She could access the XML files etc and all permissions were fine. It was working in the morning, we had a powerfailure and she couldn't log back on afterwards though other users were fine. (though the power failure may have just been co-incidence if there is a max file amount limit?)

We have more students now requesting quiet single rooms, than we have rooms to put them all... over half of our students have an exam need one way or another.

In a way I prefer the secure client to anything webbased; as it downloads the test and runs it locally. We have an LEA provided internet connection, proxy, and a really terrible gateway that should scan each webpage for viruses but instead just breaks them. We have had a nightmare with web based Hwb (Welsh Assembly platform) tests that used Surpass technology. Some pupils it would just load a white screen with nothing inside. Others, it would not accept their passcode. Others would just display the "spinning wheel" forever. This was with a year 8 class who weren't used to tests and it made some of the children very anxious. With the Surpass Secure Client, I deployed the .MSI using SCCM, set up a custom user for it (so no using students own profiles), applocker etc and it did work OK. We did have problems on the mock again logging into the actual website to release the exam / get the logon PINs. I'm not sure if our LEA provided internet connection/proxy just really sucks bad, or if these surpass platforms perform very badly under load. I did not alter any settings when I deployed surpass - I never changed the default install location; I let it install to c:\users\default. I find some really badly written software often has hardcoded references to where it thinks the install location is; if you change the MSI to deploy to c:\Program Files\surpass but Surpass.exe has a hardcoded reference to c:\users\default, undefined behavior can result.

I see you are from Wales, are you a LEA school? have you been pressured into signing up with your LEA for a PBSA (public sector broadband aggregate) link including their filtering? We were told to use it; we pay £6 per user per 3 years (introductory offer, it will then be per year I think) - this includes their smoothwall. Unfortunately the smoothwall is very basic making it hard to do diagnostics when sites aren't loading; and the uptime is very hit and miss. Our connection was completely down until 9:30am this morning; we then ran a Surpass online maths test with 30 pupils, and it kept timing out for over half of them. Our LEA blame PBSA and vice versa. Really wish we could get an actual third party link as we are expected to run computerised GSCEs now.

For us (again in the UK) setting up remote access for the police would just introduce a security hole. It would be a nightmare with firewall rules, authentication etc. If the police want footage (occasionally they do) they just visit us, and we usually give it to them on a DVD-R. If the police wanted remote access to our security cameras they are welcome to install (and pay for) their own solution. We use Hikvision units, they do have web access so it would be possible to set up a user for the police if the firewall rules were configured to allow the police HQ's IP address access to the system via the webinterface - or the Hikvision client software can be configured to allow remote devices to be viewable - no idea how it would work over a remote link though as it is HD footage. Don't US high schools have their own on site police anyway?

Technicians Anonymous "Hello everybody, My name is Michael and I'm a school technician. I carry this burden on me wherever I go"

We are on Win 7, we did our live GSCE this morning and it did work out OK. When we Finished the exam, it did have a Flash settings dialogue in the background; as well as a browser open with Adobe Flash information - checking the Surpass log file there were error messages about an incorrect Flash method being called - this worried me at first but checking the invigilation portal, it showed the exam as "finished". The other students had the same thing but they all Finished the exam fine. The two staff members who were with me kept having trouble logging into their Surpass accounts; it kept saying invalid user/pass. However, my user account always worked fine first time, so it might just have been our staff members (they are over 40 years old) My worry is this, if we start doing a lot more of these exams - our LEA provided internet connection is not very reliable. It will go down for 30 minutes a week on average. What happens if it goes down during one of these tests? Another thing for the school is I am the only technician here, if I had called in sick, this exam would have failed.

Not sure exactly how dedup works but I always had trouble running space analyzers on drives with dedup on, it seemed to confuse them. I think I remember it counting more storage taken up than the drive volume actually contained. I'm not sure why dedup would have two copies of everything in WSUS, I would think it would be smarter than that, is VSS on for your WSUS? I probably wouldn't have Dedup enabled on my WSUS drive anyway as I don't think any of the WSUS packages are identical? You can run a dedup cycle by doing start-dedupjob, I always found I needed to do that after trying to free up space to see what I'd actually managed. I think if you do get-dedupjob (or a similar PS command) it will tell you exactly what it is doing?