simpsonj

Shutting down Windows 7 has been a bit of a bug bear, with some PCs refusing to shut down, or settings not quite working the way I wanted them to. In an ideal world, I wanted a situation where computers would attempt to shutdown at 3.15, and only stay on if someone was using it. The PC would then wait until 10 minutes after it had gone Idle, then shut itself down. In reality, the first part usually worked fine, the second part, not so much. My preferred method of shutting down is though Group Policy Preferences - Scheduled tasks. I set a scheduled task to run the inbuilt shutdown command within Windows 7 to run a 15.15, with various settings to wait for idle for 15 minutes, and only shut down if the PC had been idle for 10 minutes. It was this second part that didn't seem to kick into gear, no matter how much I tinkered with the settings. It appears, from my experience, that if the inital command can't run, the scheduled task is then set as 'Queued' and then refuse to run, even after the set idle time had elapsed. I had set this task to run again at 16.15 and again at 20.00. However, by this point the scheduled task had become a touch unwieldly in size, and was having a negative impact on boot up times. Also, if PCs missed the 16.15 shutdown time, PCs were left on for a long time before finally shutting themselves off. A better way was needed. My settings are now as follows: Boot up Group Policy Management Create new GPO Computer Configuration - Preferences - Control Panel Settings - Scheduled tasks - Scheduled task (Windows Vista) Name the task I would strongly recommend using a domain admin as the user to run the task as, but I leave it up to your own security procedures as to whether you do this or not. Triggers - New... Set for every weekday at 15:15 then Repeat task every 1 hour for the duration of 12 hours. Actions - New - Start a program "C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe" Add arguments /s /t 90 /d p:04:01 (Arguments are shutdown, after 90 seconds, with a reason - I find the later prevents 'This computer shutdown unexpectedly' errors for students first thing in the morning'). Conditions - Start the task only if idle for 10 minutes - wait for idle 15 minutes - stop if computer ceases to be idle and restart if the idle state resumes (I keep the wait for idle time and restart if idle state resumes more out of hope than any knowledge that they will actually work) - Wake the computer to run this task (not really useful as I turned off sleep mode as I found Windows 7 wasn't always 100% reliable in waking up again). Settings - Can leave blank, I've ticked if the running task does not end when requested, force it to stop as it seemed like a good idea. Common - Remove this item when it is no longer applied - I find this very helpful should I want to change the settings later, but again YMMV. Once all this is set up, click on OK and apply to relevent OUs. What this will do is run the shutdown script at 15:15 and then quarter past the hour every hour until 04:15. If the machine is in use, then it will wait until the next time to try and shutdown again. I believe it will also pick up on machines that have been turned back on after being shutdown, but I haven't 100% tested this. So there we have it, I hope someone finds this useful!

Worked perfectly here on my virtual test machine, rolled out to desktops to face trial by students!

After reading last months PC Pro, I wanted to investigate http://www.codeacademy.com and see if it would work with our teaching. First issue with codeacademy is that it doesn't like IE and flatly refuses to play ball with it. One option is to install Chrome across the site, but I'd had issues getting Chrome to play ball with my network before, and wasn't too keen on trying again. So I choose option 2, install Google Frame. Installing it locally was easy, but a network install could prove a bit trickier. This is when I found an old gaming friend's website, with a handy guide to network installing Google Chrome Frame on a school network. http://lofi-gaming.org.uk/blog/2012/01/25/managed-network-install-of-google-chrome-frame/ Very useful, and I'm about to test to see if it works!

I would look into creating a Forest Level Trust relationship between your two domains. Once you've set this up, you should be able to give 'admin' users permissions on 'classroom' shares.

Raising this thread from the dead... I've set a GPP to copy the file into %Windir\Fonts\fontname.otf and set the registry key to match. The file copies into the folder, but doesn't appear with a name. Refresh the font folder and the file disappears entirely. However, if I manually copy the font into the folder, it says the font is already installed and do I want to overwrite it. But the font doesn't appear in Word or anywhere useful. Slowly giving up the will to live with this!

Begs the question are we legally/morally allowed to torrent the American version as we've paid for the European one...

Already preloaded on Steam As a bonus for preordering, Steam also gave me Civ5, which has kept me nicely occupied the past week or so...

To be honest, I'd start with the absolute basics: 1, Find out what the administrator password is (and who knows it/uses it) 2, Set up your PC how you want it, and make any mental notes on what might need improving (I would need a dual screen setup ASAP) 3, Find out what email system is used, whether you administrate it, and get yourself an email account setup 4, You'll want to get a SIMS (or whatever MIS system your school uses) login with full system permissions so you can help troubleshoot with that 5, Check out the general 'feel' of the network. How long does it take to log into a student machine? Does DHCP and DNS look okay (Find out what your allocated IP range is)? Can you remote onto the servers from your desk? Have back ups been taken? What state are the computers in, do they need replacement keyboards/mice/monitors? Is the software up to date? From that, you can start to build your own priority list. Then talk to people and find out their needs (which I guess you'll be forced to if you're based in the staff room! Not sure if that is such a good idea, no one will use a help desk if they see you every break and lunch...) 6, Find out if there is any documentation about the network, or if you can contact your predecessor in case of an emergency - especially useful for usernames and passwords that were setup years ago that nobody else knows. Similarly, see if you can get a copy of last years budget, that will give you a good indication of what's expected. And finally, my advice would be to not sweat the big stuff initally, concentrate on the small problems that you can tackle there and then, whilst keeping an eye out for the bigger picture. Don't be afraid to say 'I'm sorry, I can't help with that right now, but I'll look into it and get right back to you when I've got an answer.' should you not be able to fix a problem right there and then. Would certainly help to have a reference book on hand (I really relied upon Mastering Windows Server 2003 my first few years!) to help troubleshoot. Good luck!

Ignore me, DNS issue which I solved yesterday has solved this issue too

I've got Hyper V running on my KMS server, but any virtual machine I create cannot see/ping the Server it's hosted on, so therefore cannot authenticate it's licence via KMS. It's a small annoyance, but if there was a quick fix I'd be interested in knowing! I suspect it's to do with the server only having one Network card, and it may not be fixable, but worth a question. Thanks in advance.

Can't help with the other 2 (GIMP works fine on Windows 7 here), but for this you might want to check the Scheduled tasks as Google Update tends to create itself in there. Get rid of that and disable the service and that might work.

Try this: log on as a local admin regedit HKEY_Local_Machine Software Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion ProfileList Then delete the folders named s-1-5-21, be careful not to wipe the local admin account reg entry. Try logging in with a student and seeing if that works.

If you do, remember to keep the holographic seal on your toners, that was a bit of a shock last time I tried to use this scheme.

Any reason why you're not connecting the devices to live@edu through the Mail or equivalent program? That way, the calendar will appear in the Calendars app... Another way would be to install a different web browser onto the ipad/ iphone/ android which can spoof being a full desktop or IE.

Not often I get to publise my one and only blog post, but it might help you out a little: Adding printers to Windows 7 machines via GPO - Blogs - EduGeek.net If nothing else, the link in that blog post should help...

That would be a good solution JMB, however from what I understand it's 200 roaming iPads, that can be booked like a laptop trolley and will be used in different classes across the school, and not assigned to individual students.

Perhaps I should qualify my statement to say that it can't be done easily or seemlessly. From what I understand, you would need to set up a dropbox (or similar) account for each laptop (so 200 dropbox accounts), or would there be a single dropbox account for all iPads? Then when any work of importance is done, the teacher would need to move the files from the dropbox account into a folder on their computer that is stored on the school servers. Then when work is needed, the files would need to be moved back into the dropbox folder for students to continue working on. Would that be correct? I'm not sure how many teachers would be prepared to do that, or for how long, especially if these are going to be used as laptop trollies. At the very least, a fair amount of training is going to be required!

On the internet access and accountability side of things, I would advise that you do not install Opera onto the iPads, or allow it to be installed. I know it bypasses my web filtering (Netsweeper), and I think there's a thread around which shows it bypasses a lot of others too. Otherwise good luck! Sounds like a mighty challenge to me...

As long as management realise that no work can be saved onto the iPad, and that it can't be used for coursework, or anything that will stretch across multiple lessons, then it should be fine. I was asked by our music teacher whether this was a possibility. Once I mentioned that any year 11 coursework saved in garageband would be at the mercy of a year 7 student who used it, she rapidly cooled on the idea. Is there anyway you could get them to hold off until the Microsoft Surface is released? Whilst completely untested and new, it would at least have the benefit of being able to link to an Active Directory...

If you want a non-reg hack way of disabling Windows Mail, it can be achieved through group policy (CPU Config - Admin Templates - Windows Components - Windows Mail - Turn off windows mail application - enabled) Otherwise it would be worth looking at the default profile on your machine and ensuring that it is as clean as possible. From my own experience, I know that Browser Customization tends to take a fair while to run through...

Just a final update, to achieve this in Windows 7, remove the NullFile Reg_SZ Data Value instead of the COMMAND data value. *EDIT* Please note I have only tested this on a virtualised machine, and have not rolled it out across my network, so ensure to test this thoroughly as I do not know what else this might have an impact on! And, you know, you're messing with the registry, so ensure you've got a back up somewhere

Best answer I've found so far: Disable Context Menu (New-Create Shortcut) Requires a reg hack, which isn't my favourite method of fixing anything, but trying it to see if it works.

Seems it's all or nothing to remove the context menu, which I don't think is really a viable option. Interestingly, the running of shortcuts should be blocked by my Software Restrictions GPO, but it doesn't seem to want to block .lnk files, but will happily block .exes.

My advice would be to get a seperate domain running on a seperate server and run the two networks in parrallel, and create your new active directory and group policy on the new domain, and assign your Vanilla desktops to that domain. Once you're happy with your new setup, unplug the CC3 servers and start to shift things over. Did this very thing 2 1/2 years ago and haven't looked back!

I'll have a word with the ICT Teacher. Maybe I can just prevent access to Right Click - New. If they need a shortcut ot anything they can just right click on the icon they want to shortcut to, and create it that way. Thanks for the ideas!