Hoyt

Thanks for the tip it looks like setting that option to Disabled in Intune corrected the problem. We went that route since it was every machine at this particular school. To get the taskbar back though I did have to delete the local profile, just like sometimes in AD.

Thanks for that info, I'll have to relay it to the "intune guy" and hope he knows where that option is. Could you post a screenshot if you are handy to your console? Thanks again.

Howdy all, got a weird one for you. We are just now working with Intune and starting to change PCs over from hybrid to Entra. I have to say the Windows Vista rollout went better than our experiences with Intune, especially Entra. I'll tell y'all a little bit about our situation to give some context. When someone decided we were going to go with Intune they got one of our vendors to give some pointers to one of our guys at the NOC. That is the closest thing to "training" we have had regarding this system. I do not have access to the Intune system, I have to relay stuff to this one guy. It's been a sluggish, painful, and buggy process. Now on to the description of this weird problem. I got a work order from one of my Entra schools that the task bar was missing on the secondary display, which causes all sorts of problems when that display is a panel mounted on the wall and the teacher is using the touch function to move things along. I checked with most of the teachers in this particular school and they all had the problem. We just installed these new PCs a few weeks ago. When I log in as an administrator the task bar is present on the extended display and works properly. Now here's the weird part. If I log in using an account from another school the task bar is present. The crazy thing is my "Intune guy" tells me that the logins for all schools are in the same policy. Well, something is different but I have no idea what. Any info I find will have to be relayed to "the guy" so I realize I'm not going to be the easiest guy to help troubleshoot a problem like this. Also I should mention that the task bar isn't hidden, it's just not present at all on the secondary display, but it is on the primary. Anyone encountered anything remotely like this before?

Brings back a memory... Always read the fine print.

One thing I didn't think to mention that I see y'all talk about is part time or work from home scenarios. Basically here we all work five days a week (four ten hour days in the summer). It seems a lot of folks in your area have different work schedules/environments. That being said, it tends to guarantee a full paycheck. In my district the teachers salary is spread out over twelve months, so they still get paid even in the summer when school is out. I don't know how they do it in other districts though. Another thing I will mention is we have a lot more open and free space over here once you get outside the big cities. It took me a while to realize that folks in other parts of the world do not truly understand how big the U.S. is. We have states larger than some countries, and there are fifty of them. A lot of folks in the world make fun of us because we only speak one language, but we can drive for days and never encounter another language or currency. I don't know if any of these things may matter to you, but I thought I'd mention them just in case.

I am in a rural U.S. district, so I don't know what they pay in the bigger cities. Entry level IT jobs which still require some experience start at about $40,000 and go up. Top pay for my role in my department is around $60,000. I have to maintain eight sites (seven schools and one support site). The cost of living isn't too bad in the rural areas yet, but it is going up like it is everywhere. As mentioned different districts will have different technology levels. I am thankful that we finally got away from all Apple products. The management just isn't as good as with Windows and Chrome devices. They are also still very overpriced. Except for vocational programs our students get by just fine with chrome OS devices. Teachers have a wired desktop that is hardwired to a display panel or projector and a chromebook for whatever they want to use it for. As far as employee qualifications they can vary wildly as well. Most of y'all are head and shoulders above myself and my peers knowledge wise. Basically our administration doesn't believe anyone in the IT department should be making as much money as teachers or Administrators. That keeps experienced and certified I.T. applicants from applying here. That being said, it seems to be a more relaxed environment than what y'all are in, which isn't lost on me at all. The more conservative areas tend to be less hassle, so that may be something that can help you decide. As far as benefits go they will vary as well. When it's convenient for the county, they claim we are state employees. When it's convenient for the state, we are county employees. Fortunately we are covered by the state pension system. A lot of other states have better benefits than mine does, but some aren't as good. In my district they are very generous with time off. In IT we are twelve month employees, but we get a decent smattering of holidays off here and there. They also let us accumulate paid days off and they let us use them pretty much whenever we want. They know the pay isn't great compared to other districts in the U.S., so that is something they can give us that doesn't cost them a lot. My joints appreciate being able to mark off when they need rest. I have a very small view of the big picture, but these are some things I thought of off the top of my head.

On Playstation they have "remastered" versions of the original Black Ops (my favorite of all time - especially the multiplayer) and Black Ops 2. They are on sale now for $20 each and the DLC (which was four individual releases back in the day) for $10. The graphics are definitely improved, but I wouldn't say it is a complete rework from the ground up. I love the original Black Ops because you can play the multiplayer component offline and it has the same progression and unlocks as the online section, they are just tracked separately. I think the sale lasts until Aug 8.

Never let a bald man borrow your comb...

I've got both of those games backlogged. I tried the first one for a little bit but got sidetracked. Finally gave Cyberbug 2077 a decent shot lately and have been playing that.

This tool here works: SetDPI So if anyone is at a complete loss that could be used. I'll try the registry settings but I've read they may not work with current builds.

Howdy all, Found a weird deal yesterday I wanted to run by y'all. I had to replace an all in one PC with a workstation with a dedicated GPU for a vocational teacher to run AutoCAD. He has a SMART display panel as his secondary display. GPU is an Nvidia Quadro. When he is in extended mode or PC only scaling is at 100% as it should be. For some reason when he selects duplicate mode stupid Windows 11 thinks the panel is a TV and sets scaling for both his monitor and the SMART panel to 150%. Since teachers do not have admin rights he cannot adjust this. I can log in as myself and set it to 100% but that setting does not appear to be global. As soon as another user logs in and selects the duplicate display mode it bounces to 150% scaling and nothing fits on the screen properly. AutoCAD refuses to launch (rightly so) because the scaling is messed up. His old PC was an all in one with integrated video and this problem did not exist (that machine was Windows 11 also, but had just recently been upgraded from Windows 10). I have found an open source utility called Set DPI that will force anyone's login session to 100%, but I was hoping to find an "officially supported" method to ease the stress on my superiors. What say y'all? Anyone encountered this before?

Engine Falls Out of 'Bigol' Airplane

Found a GPO here that fixes the problem, just gotta figure out where to put it in our twenty year old policy structure. Blank Network Icons: Enable Group Policy: Open gpedit.msc, navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > File Explorer, and enable "Allow the use of remote paths in file shortcut icons". Run gpupdate /force in CMD afterward.

I say when they tear stuff up to this degree there really should be a "badge of shame" for them to carry around to let folks know to stay far away from them.

Just a follow up when I uninstalled the security update listed as KB5083769 the icons on the shortcuts came back. I have no idea why this one server is the only one affected though.

Interesting. So you basically recreated the root share folder and copied the shortcuts and subfolders back into it? I hope this is the case, because we have forty or fifty subfolders with one folder each (Desktop) in each one, and a couple of dozen root shares. I'm hoping that maybe recreating and re-sharing the root share and copying everything back into them will do it. I'll have to break a lot of connections because most of our staff never log off, but it'll be worth a shot. Thanks for your explanation!

We've had similar happenings like Rob said. Had to add a group to the security tab of the share and all has been well for ages. I tried recreating the shortcuts but no joy so far.

They are and have been working fine until today. I forgot to mention that we have other areas set up the same way and they are working fine. It's only one area that has the shortcuts redirected to a specific server that is having the issue. I'm thinking of requesting permission to reboot the file server, but usually a power outage is about the only approved time for the servers to reboot. Do you recall when this change happened? Thanks for your reply.

Howdy all, Got a weird one for you. Our staff all have redirected Desktops with shortcuts on them and basically no start menus other than the bare necessities. It's worked great for us for almost twenty years. Of course Windows 11 is doing all it can to torpedo that. All of a sudden all the shortcuts on the Windows 11 PCs redirected Desktops have no icons on them. The shortcuts still work, but it makes it awful hard to find what you are looking for without the icons. The few Windows 10 PCs we still have do not have this problem, even when logged into the same accounts that we use on the Windows 11 PCs. As a test I copied new shortcuts to the redirected Desktops and the icons never showed up. If I view that redirected Desktop from a Windows 10 PC the icons are there. I did copy new shortcuts from a Windows 11 PC. I even went to the properties of a shortcut and went to change the icon and selected the specific .dll file that the original referenced and picked the proper icon but it still shows up as blank. Has anyone out there experienced this? I realize not everyone uses redirected Desktops but I thought I'd ask.

For many years we have had Desktops (read only with basic shortcuts that users need), Documents (with Videos, Pictures, and Music nestled inside) and Downloads redirected to our file servers. This keeps the local profiles from getting too big. Users do not have access to the C drive at all. So far so good.

Correct. From what we have seen so far we are less than impressed with Intune. We just don't need all that fancy stuff they are pushing. Some school systems in our area have abandoned Windows completely. I guess they figured if they had to migrate their data to the cloud, they'd pick what they thought was the lesser of two evils. Most schools are already using chromebooks so it sounded like a simpler transition.

We are just starting out with Intune, so these new machines need to be able to exist in our current structure. Just my opinion, but there are tons of reasons folks would not want to store their data on someone else's computer (cloud), but I know Microsoft wants to force it so they can browse through their data. Just nosing around I wonder if something like this would work: https://call4cloud.nl/intune-drive-mappings-admx-drive-letters/

Howdy all, I work in a small rural school district that has been AD only until just recently. We don't have anyone on staff familiar with Intune so se have contracted with an outside source to guide us. I myself am not involved with Intune at the moment because we are just now starting to use it. One thing one of the techs working with it told me was that Intune could not map a network share to a specific user login like AD does. He said it can only be mapped to a machine name, and anyone who logs into that machine will see that mapped drive regardless of their security level in AD. To me this just doesn't sound right. Seems like it would be a huge security hole, but I admit lately Microsoft doesn't seem to concerned with security. What do you Intune gurus say? Thanks for your time.

And as usual I seem to be coming back to Outriders. I don't know what it is about that game but it just scratches an itch. They haven't released any additional content for it and it can be played online as well (especially the end game leveling), but with so many different classes and the biggest loot pool since Borderlands it seems to have endless replay ability for me to play alone. You think you've seen everything it has to offer until you try a new gear combination and a big enemy explodes when you barely wing him and there goes another rabbit hole. I think what made me stick with it was you can transfer some loot from your higher level characters to lower level ones to help boost them. When you do that the end game leveling really gets wild. If your new character is a different class you can sell or deconstruct that high level gear for currency and materials. They made the level cap so high I still haven't hit it after over two years on PC. I tried it on console and at first thought it just wouldn't play right with a controller because I was used to precision shooting on the PC. Then I realized that investing more in gear and skills instead of weapons made the console version play just as well but slightly different. I think the thing that may keep me from going as hard on console is those little gamepads cramp my hands terribly after a while. I wish some company would make larger controller shells for adult sized hands. I always though Microsoft had it right with their original "Duke" gamepads for the original Xbox. An adult sized controller for sure.

Last night I bit the bullet and got Clair Obscur Expedition 33 for the PS5. That seems like it'll keep me busy for a while if I can learn the combat. I have never been good at dodging or parrying anything in any game (was mostly an FPS player) so I'm still wandering around in the first area trying to figure it out. I can't remember if I mentioned it or not but the original Dragon Age Origins for PC is one of the best games I've ever played with tons of replay value. You can get the complete edition on gog.com cheap and nexus mods has some groovy graphical enhancements that are nice but not necessary. GOG.com is heavy into the preservation of old games so if you are thinking of any old DOS/early Windows games you'd like to pick up to keep they are the go to place. None of their games have any DRM in them and they have complete offline installers if that's what you want so you can back them up for safe keeping. Some of the better cheap surprises I've gotten over the years were from browsing https://www.loaded.com/ (formerly CDkeys.com) and sorting PC games by lowest price. Most keys are Steam or GOG and I've been amazed at how many great games I've gotten for less than five bucks. They have console games as well but the biggest and best savings are on PC. I got Outriders dirt cheap from them and probably put over 700 hours into it over the years (I think there are five different classes you can play).