mikes

I never played much mods but a remastered Generals would be great, playing on a modern 4K screen it is far too zoomed in (AOE2 and Starcraft remastered you can now zoom out far). Remember me and my friends playing 4 of us vs 4 brutal computer enemies

Yeah that sucks, we are lucky when we did our big hardware refresh in 2018 or whenever it was, it happened to fall on 8th Gen Intel, so all of our stuff is supported luckily. Our 8th Gen laptops from then are falling apart though, CMOS batteries starting to go, specs getting bad (8GB RAM), so I wouldn't really want Win 11 on anything below that anyway - we have 2 computers on Gen 6 or so with old rotational HDD's and they are very slow (will trash these and replace)

We had an issue with our Administrator account caused by DHCP trying to update DNS every hour with the wrong password, but I doubt this would affect any other user unless DHCP had been set up very strange!

We have shared mailboxes that automatically open when I assign those users permissions in o365 - this works fine in old outlook, doesn't work at all in new outlook. Why remove this - what to use instead? can't see the point in this new Outlook myself it seems worse in every way

We use Chromebook 100e 3rd and 4th Gen here - but unfortunately the screens are not as robust as the Gen 1 and 2 - I have many broken screens with the Gen3/4 just from students having them in their backpacks whereas the Gen 1/2 a broken screen was extremely rare. So if the students have them in their packs with all their books etc it might be worth looking at something else. Screens are about £30 each and easy to replace but they shouldn't be that fragile IMO I get 1 a month broken. (this is in a comp school mind)

Yeah CC4 was such a disaster for us we moved vanilla. CC3 while clunky did what it said on the tin at least - it would build PC's, install software, was easy to understand, wasn't too bloated. CC4 I remember it slowed our computers down so much they were barely usable (moving to Vista was a big part of this). It was such a disaster it pretty much cost our NM (who chose to have it) his credibility as an NM here. Surprised there would be schools still on CC4 after all this time; there's no way in hell I'd put cc5 on for free let alone pay for it!

Yeah MS have been doing this since at least Vista. I actually quit a job half due to Vista - XP with dialup would give specific error codes for specific errors e.g. Error 691 would be an invalid U/P, a different code for no dial tone. So a user could phone up "I have Error 691" and we'd know straight away. MS thought it would be a great idea to replace this with a generic "We could not connect to the Internet" and then offer a troubleshooter that of course would never work if there was no dial tone or an invalid U/P - and even at the end of this troubleshooter you'd still not know the error code. So it went from a simple call a lot of the times to being an absolute nightmare getting customers over the phone to check leads, passwords, customers getting more frustrated, I was already sick of the place and this new OS making things 10 times harder just pushed me over the edge. So they've been doing it for years But of course MS design their OS for their benefit not ours, they don't care about our usability, that's why we have to put in place all these reg hacks and scripts and why more places are choosing to not even bother with MS software at all. I'm on Windows 10 and randomly without pushing out a WSUS update I noticed my computer now randomly chooses pretty desktop backgrounds - not a problem but of course they have to have a "more info" button so they can sell you holidays. And last night I fell asleep to a Youtube stream, and was woken up nicely at 3am by an MS toast notification saying they recommend I try out some new video game! I thought for a moment I was infected with adware until of course I realised, no, MS are more concerned with pushing ads than making their OS usable. This "Internet Check" wouldn't be a huge bother if it worked - how hard can it be for MS to make their OS ping an external site? and for it to be reliable? This is why I always say in work over and over "bear in mind it is Microsoft software so you can never be 100% sure you can rely on it for anything"

yeah we had the opposite - disabling IPV4 checksum offload on our LAN cards advanced properties fixed it for us, had to do it 1 by 1 - but unfortunately I don't see this option on our machines wifi NIC's so not sure if it will help you

Sorry to bump this thread was there a way to get in? Just heard about this now we need to reset the SIMS Options password, clearing PASSWORD.DAT doesn't work, our password is from 2010 and the staff member is looong gone now!

Never liked them myself but I used to love BBQ flavoured wotsits then all of a sudden they were gone ! Then Sprite reformulated their full fat Sprite to be half sweetener and ruined that. Then TikTak orange and lime got reformulated to be bland and tasteless. It's the fall of Rome I tell you !

We've been sending our attendance details to our LEA for years but that's maybe due to Wales - we are on the same network as our LEA so they have access to our SIMS even. But they require us to format it the way they want and send it on. I've noticed now though it's changed and we have a Wonde link but we are moving to Arbor. So Arbor aren't following the law ? That document even says schools should "work with the community to improve attendance" ?? should I get the town crier to shout out a message?

We are moving to Arbor Easter, my plan was just to shut down the VM but keep it on our storage for a while. Maybe keep it for a year and then get rid of it. We used to use Lysol and I did a similar thing and forgot to delete it, and we had an SAR (or some other request for Lysol data, can't remember) so I had to power it back up again to try and get data off of it but after the 5 years or so we couldn't get into Lysol any more - not sure if something went wrong with it or our U/P knowledge was outdated. Thing is not sure how much of the data transfers from SIMS to Arbor and isn't there a legal requirement to keep some data? I can keep a copy of the sims DB in backup but that would be useless without the server itself so maybe I'll archive off the server VM as a file and keep that on backup? But yes when we go live on Arbor I'll prob shut down our SIMS server after a month or so - luckily for us our LEA are doing it so they'll hopefully instruct me. As for the clients not going to worry about that. Might re-image the laptops in summer anyway for Win 11 rather than WSUS it so that would get rid of it

We are moving over to it this Easter but our LEA is handling it for our entire county, so I'm guessing they are busy. Our lunch/canteen is separate however so we won't use that bit. It is being handled by our LEA so it's not on our head at least. Hope they can sort your problems out. I remember Schoolcloud obviously had a lot more business with online parents evenings as the first 2 we tried to run stopped working half way through as they were overloaded

for me our computers luckily support Win 11 (apart from a few old ones that I'll replace) - I can push it out via WSUS and let them upgrade. Got a test fleet of Win 11 computers in 2 classrooms build over the half term, and I pushed out the WSUS upgrade to a few test laptops to test that out too - seems OK. We will move over either in Easter or Summer (haven't decided yet - we are getting a new MIS circa Easter so I think that and Win 11 might be a bit much for our staff yes the start button being in the middle and not on the left has actually resulted in a few calls!)

Yeah the old "technological solution to a societal problem"

It was on the news this morning about teachers + headteachers (this story was mainly a focus on primaries) being subject to verbal abuse and even physical violence by parents of all things - not sure if this was a BBC Wales story as it was in the Rhondda - but perhaps we will be seeing body cams sooner than we know. Agree about how will they manage them - will teachers agree to wear them? will all the info be stored on SD card if so how do you control all that data? And I also hear about teachers maybe not wanting CCTV in their rooms like you said due to politics - it might be used against them if they make a minor mistake - same reason airliners only have voice recorders not CCTV - the airline unions apparently didn't want CCTV as it can be used for politics.

Yeah it's a pain - the password on the ivms 4200 is just any password you may have entered when you installed it - not the NVR password itself. The password for the NVR's will be stored in the config of ivms 4200 for the cctv to work but I've no idea if you can get it to show it to you. Each NVR can have its own password depending on who set it up

Interestingly I had this with Windows 10 wired clients - they all showed the no globe, o365/adobe would refuse to sign in citing no internet etc. It came out of nowhere and I blamed our LEA ran firewall or switches as I couldn't find any other cause, as I could get to all the MSFT test websites etc. Even the reg keys to turn off the tests didn't work - all it did was change the globe icon back into a network icon but it still said No Internet and o365 still wouldn't work. I had to disable IPV4 Checksum Offloading 1 by 1 on the network cards of every desktop to fix the problem. But we've just bought new computers and I've imaged them with Win 11 and they detect Internet fine, so who knows what that was all about. I still see the odd wireless laptop say No Internet but it seems to go away after a minute or two on those (the wired ones stayed forever No Internet)

We haven't investigated body cams but I'm sure I've read about it either in the news or on here very recently - back in 2017 I didn't touch our CCTV system but now I'm doing it daily so usage has exploded - we have the same accusations issues, luckily our school is blanketed with cameras now. It doesn't improve behaviour however, the pupils who will be naughty will be openly naughty in front of the cameras - e.g. vape in front of them then when walking out do a nice middle finger to the camera as a show of contempt. But for accusations it works well. If schools ended up needing body cams honestly it would be another push to just get out of education as I don't need this close a seat of watching our society decay in front of me

I'm reading "The Memoirs of Hadrian" - not actually written by Hadrian (apparently he did write memoirs but they are now lost which is a massive shame) but by a writer in the 1950's (kind of similar to I Claudius) - it's really well written and makes you wonder what being Hadrian (one of the few thinking Emperors) must have been like. Didn't know Kenneth Williams wrote memoirs, I'll give those a read - apparently despite his success he wasn't a very happy man - of course that may well be due to the times he was living in (as with Alan Turing I bet they'd be amazed had they been transported to our times)

lmao that's less than I'm on now as a basic IT Tech where I technically have no responsibility (no Manager title)

We in our semi-rural LEA are moving to Arbor, I stayed out of the politics but I remember my boss having many zoom calls with the LEA and other schools as they decided which to choose, I'm sure I saw each of the big MIS show demos etc, so I can't see how Bromcom could argue proper contract choosing procedure hasn't been followed. Anyway for me all I'm concerned about is how easy it is to make users, how secure is it, and what the uptime is like.

it's the gen AI co-pilot on ours - but just the basic version - it allows writing text prompts but if you ask it to make an image or video it asks you to buy credits. We have A1 license, but it actually loads not signed in - if you try and sign in with your o365 credentials it just asks if you want home or enterprise - enterprise takes you to a page (copilot.cloud.microsoft) that says "coming soon". It seems the signed out version is just a preview. Seems to me like this is part of an AppX app - can you not try Get-AppXPackage *pilot* | Remove-AppXPackage -AllUsers to remove it? Not sure if this would break any other part of Windows though so use caution! I haven't been asked to remove it from our build here

I tried using a 29" monitor in portrait mode as it fit better on my desk that way, but I found a lot of things just didn't quite fit - I'm sure I could have re-arranged things but in the end I just flipped it back to landscape. It's interesting watching all the 1970's "science-fiction infomercials" that technology companies put out showing what computers will look like in the far off year of 1999 - they all had portrait screens in them - one had this awesome wrap around desk that had the screen built in as part of it!

Well they are 3 redundant vhosts so if one goes down nobody even notices as the VM's are automatically moved to the 2 that still work - if they were physical servers like it was 2002 still then an individual servers' uptime might matter - one did fail and I got it fixed and not even my boss would have noticed had I not told her. If it had totally failed we'd just buy a new one (2 servers doesn't provide enough redundancy) - the money saved not having warranties for the past 2-3 years would probably be the cost of a new server anyhow. Even our contractor (who would have made money) recommended against server warranties as the price vs what you get is just not worth it for older servers Does anyone even have physical servers anymore? I know some recommend SIMS runs on one, our old NM bought a standalone server for SIMS 10 years ago but he couldn't get the .net framework installed on Windows Server so he just gave up and the expensive server sat idle never used for 10 years until we got rid of it as it was obsolete by then...