simpsonj

Exporting and importing cookies didn't work and no reply from the lock safe search company. Back to the drawing board... PS Love the fact that next to my last post is an advert for a Palo Alto firewall, the very thing that is causing the grief in the first place!

We already have the DNS redirection to the nosslsearch.google.com in place, though that doesn't stop students turning off safe search. Instead, we block all Google searches that don't have Filter Explicit content ticked, but as we use mandatory profiles, this means students have to tick the box everytime if they want to use Google, thus Dogpile. I've got a few things I want to try tomorrow, first of all is properly exporting cookies and importing them into a profile and seeing if that sticks. Secondary plan is to try INSTANT, SIMPLE, UNIVERSAL SAFE SEARCH ACTIVATION & LOCKING for Google, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo & more! and, depending on cost, roll that out across the network. More than open to other ideas...

Smoothwall is a little expensive to crack this. If anyone could let me know how to force safe search via a Mandatory profile, that would be most appreciated. Otherwise, is there software out there which can enforce safe search? Obviously parental control software will do this, but they tend to work on single or family licences, so educational software would be preferred. My students would be eternally grateful as I'm forcing them to use dogpile at present, and they're not enjoying it too much despite the fact it's just a re-skinned Google...

Apologies for the thread necromancy, but I'm looking to enforce safe search as the default settings for our students, and having no joy down the mandatory profile route as it only works for the profile it was made from. I have blocked students from searching in an unfiltered way, but as the default is unsafe image searches, they are going to face the block page everytime they login and conduct a search. Any ideas?

When it announces that it's going to restart in 15 minutes to complete windows updates. at 10:15. And it's the server that hosts the virtual server with SIMS installed. I had thought I had prevented disaster using this guide: http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-stop-windows-8-updates-from-force-restarting-your-pc/ and then running gpupdate /force However, this turned out to be a false hope, as a phone call from reception to tell me that SIMS wasn't accessible lead to a cold sweat and realisation that, yep, the server had decided to restart itself. After many promises of violence against the person at Microsoft who thought it was a really fantastic idea to take control of a server's restart time away from the administrator of the system, 20 minutes later all is back up and running. For future reference, this would appear to be a better bet to prevent Microsoft from ruining your day: http://blog.powerbiz.net.au/fixes/stop-windows-server-2012-and-windows-8-from-automatically-rebooting-the-server-after-logging-in/

VGA connection? A bent pin on the vga lead has caused all sorts of errors for me in the past. Also worth checking the vga wall socket, or at least, remove it as a suspect.

You have to sign up for a free account, but otherwise this will do the job: Password Control Just remember to give the staff delegate control in AD for the OU the students reside in so they have permission to change passwords.

Wouldn't it be goto C:\Windows\System32\Shutdown.exe /r ? Or have you moved the Shutdown.exe?

Very strange, I might try reinstalling using the method @Ghostgame posted once results day has passed!

It short, it didn't work. So I tried making the Exams Officer account a domain admin, and it still didn't work. Next step, I copied the Exams Officer account in AD, added a 2 to username and surname, logged in and SIMS Examinations module is now working. Copied over relevant Desktop, documents, favourites and A2C Migration settings and we're good to go. However, I would like to know, where does SIMS store local user information? If I can find and delete that folder, then hopefully I can reuse the old account again. Still, I've got a working solution, thank you @vikpaw for your help, most appreciated!

If i log in as a domain admin on the workstation, but log in to SIMS as the Exams Officer, SIMS Examinations works absolutely fine. Trouble is, A2C migration isn't setup on that account. One step forward, one step back. Just changed permissions to give the Exams Office explicit full control over C:\WINDOWS and C:\Program Files\SIMS\ as well as being a local admin to see if that fixes the issue.

We use trusted logins, though I purposely left myself and the Exams Office off for added security, so we both still need to login to SIMS using a SIMS user account rather than a linked AD account. I'll try some different logins, I've just started the third reinstall from solus 3 (easy enough to do, just find the lastest update in deployment history and redeploy to the affected workstation). I'm also waiting on 153 Windows updates, which could be causing the issue as well. Thanks again for the pointers!

Thanks for the help vikpaw, most appreciated. I've tried to follow the instructions found here: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/79762-exams-organiser-automation-error.html However as the SIMS infrastructure isn't appearing on the Add/Remove programs list, I don't think I properly uninstalled SIMS before trying to reinstall it, as a result, I'm getting the same error message. Any idea on how to uninstall SIMS when it's been installed using Solus 3?

We've just shifted to a locally hosted SIMS server, and things had gone reasonable well, until I found out today that our Exams Officer can no longer access the Examinations module in SIMS. She gets a log box stating Login Using Trusted User or SQL Server User, rather than logging in automatically. Any attempt to login brings up the following error message: "Multiple-step OLE DB operation generated errors. Check each OLE DB status value, if available. No work was done." I know this is PC specific, as the Examinations module works fine on my machine, and the data manager's PC. Any help on this would be much appreciated, I'm not really sure where to even start looking...

I'll throw in OneLan, used their system for a number of years now and have found it it pretty easy to use and update.

Unfortunately we can't buy from eBay, which makes sourcing screens that much harder! We're generally talking old RM machines, or screens that are user damaged, or just old machines in general that aren't covered by the warranty.

Just wondered whether anyone knew a reputable laptop repair company? We've got a fair few broken screens on laptops we'd like repaired, and we've used Cambridge Laptop Repair a few times, and they're good, if you can get hold of anyone! Ideally would like someone to pick up laptops, fix them, return them and can do invoices!

Is 'Move the contents of Documents to the new location' Enabled on the GPO? Might cause a bit of slowdown...

At a guess, I would check the Windows 7 Libraries, it can be a real pain and can't be turned off by GPO. Try removing any extra folders in the libraries (C:\Users\Username\Music etc) and see if that improves anything.

I rarely buy hardware as a complete package, preferring to build my own PCs, however when it comes to Laptops, I felt I ought to play it safe and buy from a brand. I wanted a laptop that was powerful enough to handle the odd game (think UFO: Enemy Unknown rather than Crysis) and wasn't going to break the bank. After much deliberating, I decided on the GE60 by MSI. On paper, it had the right specs, a decent graphics card, fast processor combined with 8GB RAM. The only drawback was the hard drive, a pretty slow 5400RPM SATA drive, not the SSD drive I would prefer. No matter, I thought, it can' be too bad. A bit of a mistake. My first piece of advice if considering this laptop is either to buy an mSATA SSD drive and fit it yourself and clone the C: drive onto it, or buy the next model up with a SSD drive. This alone will save you a lot of grief. However, if, like me, you've bought the £750 model with standard drive, and have found a fair few issues with the GE60, then let me explain what the problems are, and how to fix them. The first problem is Windows 8, indeed most problems with this laptop stem from having Windows 8 as an OS. This isn't to bemoan Windows 8 as a whole, but on this laptop, and the MSI configuration of Windows 8 on this laptop, has made the performance woeful. So my second piece of advice is to either reinstall Windows 8 from scratch, or downgrade to Windows 7 if possible. Again, this will save you a lot of time, sweat and tears. All drivers for Windows 7 can be found on the MSI website (apparently, I didn't go down this route). Again, if the above isn't an option, then read on. Windows 8 likes to do something called 'Write-caching'. In theory, this speeds up performance of your machine, and prevent data loss in the event of a power outage. All very sensible. The problem is, the data loss part of the equation absolutely kills the performance as the hard drive is in near 100% usage all the time. From the moment I turned the laptop on, disk usage was at 100%. After around 5-10 minutes, it would dip to 90% or so, and the laptop became usable.I had come to accept this as part of the laptop usual routine, blaming the slow speed of the hard drive. However, this does not need to be the case! After my laptop became slow and unresponsive loading up the basic Mail client, I started to look around and noticed something in the system tray called 'Intel Rapid Storage Technology'. Thinking that my storage wasn't being particularly rapid, I loaded up the application. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, however there was a message talking about the Windows write-cache buffer flushing policy, and that disabling it can improve performance. Thinking anything is worth a try, I followed the instructions, written below for your convenience: Right click the bottom left hand corner of your screen, this should open a drop down menu, choose Device Manager. From Device manager, expand Disk drives. Right click your disk drive, and open properties. Choose the Policies Tab. Tick the tick box next to "Turn off Windows write cache buffer flushing on this device." Click OK. All of a sudden, my disk usage dropped to 5% and my laptop has never felt so fast and responsive. Seriously, it's finally performing like it should have from the start. A word of warning, should your laptop suddenly lose power, then you are far more likely to lose anything you were working on. But, I figured this is a gaming laptop with a battery life of two hours tops. Most of the time, it's going to be plugged in anyway, and the performance gain is well worth the price. There are other issues with this laptop, primarily the fact that MSI in their wisdom decided to install every language display language as standard. This means that every update you download from windows update has to be configured for each language, meaning every update takes an incredible long time to install and configure. In addition, Windows 8 is clever enough to realise you're not likely to use these extra language packs, so tries to uninstall them every once and awhile after a reboot. Sadly, this process can also take hours, leaving your machine with the "configuring windows features" with either 15% or 100%. I have successfully removed all language packs, and my laptop was still chugging (primarily due to the above write-caching issue), though windows updates weren't quite so painful. So to sum up, if you've bought this laptop and are just a little bit disappointed with it's speed, then do the following: Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on your hard drive Remove all the extra display languages from the laptop (http://techmell.net/how-to/uninstall-language-packs-windows-8/) I hope this helps someone, somewhere, as the laptop itself is a fine bit of kit, and with the above tweaking, can be the laptop it should be.

We've put in a file association by year group, so for years 7 and 8, .sb opens Scratch, for year 9 it opens Small basic.

Have you considered install a TV instead? A big 55" TV on the wall looks pretty good, and could/should last longer than a projector, especially if protected by a case.

Hmm, might be worth reading through this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-server-2008/82394-tip-delete-those-pesky-files-windows-refuses-delete-filename-too-long-ect.html

Could try using the Unlocker program to rename the file, then delete it? I think that's worked for me in the past. Or try changing the file extension. This used to happen a lot when I ran RM CC3 and I'm sure I had a program that would delete such files, if I remember what it's called, I'll post it up.

Sent to our Science department, see if they can do it over the summer holidays!