simpsonj

Got a particularly nasty variant of Vista Antivirus 2011 running on a laptop here. I think I've removed the main part of the problem, but now the laptop blue screens on a normal boot. I've tried disabling drivers in Device manager, and turning off the automatic reboot through regedit, but as soon as the PC reboots, these changes aren't saved. In all likelyhood it has probably latched onto System Restore, but I'm loathe to turn that off. Any other ideas?

Using my old 26" TV as a monitor for my servers at the moment, maybe I should sell it instead...

Worrying times. It's not as if Apple exactly need the money now is it?

As much as I hate self promoting, you might want to read my blog entry (found here: EduGeek.net - simpsonj - Blogs), whilst it says for Windows 7, you only need to install Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for that method to work with XP clients as well.

I'm sure if I looked I could find a Dell Inspiron laptop still running somewhere, thankfully upgraded to Windows XP, although built for Windows 2000...

No ties. Ever. Last thing I need to worry about if I'm hauling a printer around, or changing a projector bulb, is a tie being caught in something unneccesary. That and I hate ties. So I tend to dress in jeans, shirt and suit/blazer top, nothing too expensive, last thing I want is to ruin a good shirt with ink toner.

I smashed my head against this for a long time (too many SQL servers, and it got itself confused). My advice is to not upgrade the current installation, but to install from fresh if possible, then it became a very easy install. The fact that SOPHOS has added a minute to my login times is another issue entirely!

Definately my mistake, the MACList.txt can either be a Allow list, in which only the machines specified on the list are allowed a IP address, or a block list, which blocks all machines specified on the list. First time I tried this, I had both, which didn't work at all well!

Doesn't sound like any of the issues I had are relevant then! The only other potential issue is the amount of GPOs you have assigned to these notebooks. I've read that the fewer GPOs you have, the better, even if it means combining multiple GPOs into one, larger, GPO. I can't see that adding more than a few seconds onto a login time myself, but there you are. Of course, an obvious thing to look at is drivers. Are you using the drivers that Windows 7 found, or the ones which the manufacturer issued? Might be worth swapping from one ot the other?

Ah, long login times, wireless and Windows 7, are you sure you're not working here? A couple of things that I've noticed since I swapped over to Windows 7 last summer which might help you. 1, The wireless system you used with Windows XP might not cut it with Windows 7. We've had to improve our WAPs from a £40-50 Dlink with a 100mbs cat5 connection to a £200 Cisco that has a 1000mbs CAT5e connection to cope with 16 laptops logging on simulataneously. This drastically helped improve our login times in one area. 2, If you're using mandatory profiles, cut the size down to as small as possible. If you've created a mandatory profile, there may well be a .jpg file that has been copied over as a background file which is over a 1meg in size and is (usually) completely unnecessary. 3, The amount of RAM is critical for a speedy windows login, as I've just discovered. A normal windows 7 installation takes about 30 seconds to login (on our machines with 512 RAM). A normal windows 7 login with an antivirus installed takes over 1 minute 30 seconds to login. Add another 256 or 512 RAM and the login time reduces dramatically. 4, As Willott mentioned, printer mapping can increase login time as well. Adding the printer as a share printer, rather than installing it on each login, can save valuable seconds. 5, I'm about to try having the profile stored on the local hard drive, and redirecting student logins to that profile to see if that speeds anything up, though I have my doubts. Might be worth a try though! 6, I have students redirecting to their Home Drives, which is their own hidden share on the server, and that hasn't noticable affected login times for me... Hope something there helps!

Extremely difficult without using some XP theme magic program was my experience when I researched this subject a year or two back. Lots of pieces of software will do it, but I wasn't comfortable doing that over a network, and I didn't fancy a registry hack for something purely aesthetic either. I'm sure its possible (afterall, RM CC3 has its own Gina), and with Windows 7 it was reasonable easy...

Chilled OUt Euphoria - Red Version (Chilled Out Euphoria: Digitally Mixed By Solar Stone: Various Artists: Amazon.co.uk: Music) That, and Pink Floyds Echoes always helped me get to sleep when I suffered from Migraines. Bon Iver and Peter Bradley Adams is pretty chilled out too.

Just implemented the same system here (or our county have anyway). So far it has been relatively painless, once we worked out that double clicking opened a larger window anyhow, and it is an improvment on our last in house system. However, the killer for us is that you can't print a complete marksheet. You can print the page, but that rarely includes an entire class. This drives teachers crazy when they want to print off their marksheets for Parents Evenings or meetings. Generally means I have to print off the marksheets from full fat SIMS...

As I've just spent a few hours getting this sorted, I thought I would share my experience in blog form in the hope that someone finds it useful. First up, I should point out that much of this blog can be found at the following link, and it also adds a cool way of adding printeres to specific Active Directory components, such as Groups, OUs or even specific users... http://www.msserveradmin.com/the-one-reason-you-should-use-group-policy-preferences/ In any case, my goal was to fire out our network printers, and to be able to set up a default printer. The Printer Management function in Server 2008 could do the first, but not the latter. With a bit of searching I found the above link, and all was well. Until it came across my Canon printer in one of our ICT suites, which refused to play ball. Checking the event viewer, it turned out the Canon really wanted to install its drivers before printing, and even when logging in as an Admin, wouldn't install via GPO. Another quick google search found the answer, disable Point and Print Restrictions via GPO. This, I think, can only be done by a Server 2008 R2 machine, although I'm sure there is a GPO template around somewhere. In any event, that Printer now works with a student account, the PCs are named something obvious for all the students (as my printer naming convention got a little convuluted) and all is a success (so far). So a quick step by step on how to achieve this, bearing in mind I'm untrained and all this is from google, so attempt at your own risk! Also, all GPOs were created with Server 2008 R2. First of all, we need to enable loopback processing, as we will be using User preferences to set up the printers. The reason for this is because only by setting printers by users can we set a printer as default. A pain, but there you go. To do this, create a GPO and go to Computer-> Policy -> Admin Templates -> System -> Group Policy -> User Group Policy loopback processing mode = enabled mode = merge Then, in the same or different GPO, we need to make sure that the workstations use the server drivers, rather than try and pull down the printer driver to each machine. This step may not be necessary for all printers, but I don't think it does any harm either. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!). Go to Computer -> Admin Templates -> Printers -> Point and Print Restrictions = Disabled. Finally, we go to User -> Preferences -> Control Panel -> Printers -> Add TCP/IP Printer Enter the Printers IP Address Give it a local name, I prefer BW Printer or Colour Printer, but whatever you want to students to see the printer as You can then set it as a default printer if you desire In Common setting, tick "Remove this item when it is no longer applied" This is optional, but will mean the printer is removed should the PC move OU. If you want to target the printer to specific AD objects, use the targetting tick box and options. Fairly self explanatory, but I would read the link above just in case. Once completed, assign the GPO to the OU of choice. ---------------------- Update ---------------------- As a general rule, I now assign printers to machines rather than students, as the above method means that printers are installed each time a student logs on, adding arounf 10 seconds to each logon. If I assign it to the PC, it installs on boot, so will only increase login time once, or not at all if the computers are set to wake up automatically before the school day. The downside to this method is not being able to set a default printer, but there's an easy script that will allow for that: wmic printer where name='PRINTERNAME' call setdefaultprinter All you need to know is the printer name (the friendly printer name the PC knows it as, so if you installed it via GPO calling it Colour Laser, put 'Colour Laser' in the script), and assign the script to apply to all students logging onto computers in that OU.

Just to go back to your original point about what you would use the slate/iPad for. My personal take on this is that the device should replace textbooks in terms of research, and be a portal to any cloud system you have running in the school (VLE, Email, Google Docs, Live@edu, MIS for staff). That way the slate has a dual purpose, to allow students access to google, wikipedia, and school bought electronic resources and software on the one hand, and access to the cloud on the other. With the benefit of being possible to access from within school or at home. I don't think a handheld device can replace a desktop computer in terms of speed and ease of use, and I don't think that we should look to replace handwriting into exercise books yet either. An example (because I don't think I'm making as much sense as I would like!) would be if Johnny has his device, he takes it to English where he uses it to read Romeo and Juliet. Takes it to Maths, and uses the VLE to access some Maths resources, and Maths Textbook, handwriting his answers to paper. In ICT it isn't used, but his My Documents are synced with the school network and his device via the cloud, so any work can be followed up at home if he needs to. Maybe they are using Pivot Stick to create an animation in ICT, and the homework is to add 5 frames to his animation, which he can do from home because his device has Pivot Stick installed. He then takes it to History where he uses the device to research The Abolition of Slavery, finding some website he can look at when he gets home. Thats what I would expect a device like a slate or iPad to do, but that's just my opinion! I won't touch the (many) issues that would have to be tackled to get that to work...

Sophos will do what you want too. I don't particularly like it, but I don't particularly like any Ant-Virus...

"To play this game you need a good browser like..." Hmm, ever so slightly pretentious! I might give it a go at home, but I can't really advertise this to students and parents as at least 90% will be using a "not so good" browser... I wonder if it works on IE9.

Worth checking the scheduled tasks to see if anything has popped up there? Or Tak manager to see if any errant applcations or processes are running? The fact it shuts down gracefully seems to be a software issue rather than hardware, as hardware is rarely graceful when it fails! Sorry I can't be of more help...

Funny video, useful software, just recommended it to friends who have just got new laptops/phones for christmas

I don't know, the crate of Red Bull I got from the Reception staff was pretty good too!

My guess would be its your ISP firewall. Windows uses port 1935 to stream video, however I'm 99% certain that iOS 4 and Mac OS X uses a different port, but I know not which one. If anyone finds out which port it is, I would be very grateful as it would mean my iPad wouldn't be crippled in school

An interesting read, and I'll be showing this to my Head as an example of how much work would be involved to implement such a scheme. If you don't mind me asking, how much did this scheme cost and what was the percentage you expected parents to pay? Just looking for rough ballpark figures

@matt40k I'm not sure I would like to manage 125 slates. Just building them seems a complete pain without an ethernet connection, unless you can build an image using WDS and wireless? Otherwise building them one by one with a DVD would not be a fun task, not that the iPad would be a picnic either! Perhaps RM would be prepared to do the donkey work if you provided them with an image? Or at the very least, be made CC4 ready? Just checking my maths though £399 + VAT (£468.83) + £30 for licences = £498, albeit with Office, so you'd need to add an extra £30 to the iPad (at least). I guess my point is that I don't think this slate is a much cheaper option, only an alternative. If I were to be pendantic, I would point out that you're likely to lose out on around 7-10gig of disk space on the slate just because of the Windows 7 footprint.However, I strongly suspect that students wouldn't use up much disk space, as files would be stored on a cloud, so the size of the hard drive becomes largely irrelevant. Still, any Android tablets we can compare this to?

@matt40k at £399 ex VAT, if it doesn't have 3G, surely that makes it the same price as an iPad, indeed more expensive than the 16gb model, and roughly on par with the 32gb non 3G models. If the slate does have 3G, then it will be cheaper than the iPad equivalent. However, throw in the price of Office, Windows and CAL licencing if you're planning to network them and it would be interesting to see a price comparison after that. Mind you, with the new licensing announcement by Microsoft, maybe that wouldn't be so much of an issue. I'm hoping that there will now be a drive for touch screen friendly, educational, apps for Windows 7 and Android, to make slates a true alternative to netbooks.

Thanks for your replies @Dos_box and @ZeroHour. I fear imaging slates could be a royal pain, but I'm not closed to the idea if prices go down, and the money becomes available. I wonder how similar the experience is to using an iPad with Remote Desktop software, which can definately be a bit fiddly. As regards to battery life, I charge my iPad once every three days, although I haven't really tried a stress test yet. I'll see if I can find you at BETT to have a proper look