tmcd35

Lol, since the comment was mine I feel compelled to respond, if not only because you've taken it a little out of context. I think @GrumbleDook has articulated my view on this perhaps a bit better than I can. I work quiet closely with much of this data so am reasonably aware of were and how easily much of it can be recaptured. My point in that comment wasn't "so whats the issue", it was that schools can function on paper records in the short term. Paper records exist for key parts of the data. We have paper registers available for times when electronic fails. Get a school up and running, able to function, able to teach shouldn't take long at all. Rebuilding a complete and reliable database - thats what will take time.

Are you using the Win7 default key, a MAK from the VLSC, or an OEM key? (I assume you're using Win7 Pro). The default built in key is for activation via a KMS server. If it's a MAK key then have you checked the number of licenses used in VLSC? Could be your out of installs and need to phone MS to raise the limit. If you're using OEM keys they need to be unique for each machine, so if you've tried using the same key on multiple machine it would explain the message. Hope that helps. FIW, I'm using KMS with Win 7 SP1 and it works fine. Just need to make sure DNS is set up correctly and you have enough clients to pass the activation limit.

Which opens up a whole new can of worms and a major discussion for rUK. As I said above, it's almost worth seeing Scotland go just to see this happen...

Unless OFSTED are already jumping over the SLT/Governing body looking for a reason to close, I'm not sure you do. I reckon in most instances the core data needed to function and teach could be pulled together inside a week. The rest as @GrumbleDook says is many hours of admin time manually re-entering everything. The school should be able to function around the data re-entry.

Falling foul of the law is one thing, I'm sure the SLT, Governors and probably the poor Network Manager/IT guy would come under the firing line pretty quickly, but (using a mid-sized secondary as an example) if you close a school mid-November what do you do with 1000 kids till next September when (hopefully) the new school opens? Closing might not be a sensible option

I feel a Chuck Norris-type joke coming on... Brownie leaders are so tough they wear estate cars as sensible shoes

WDS is the backbone technology that makes everything else work. MDT is, in essence, little more than a bunch of scripts. The scripts tell the clients and WDS what needs to happen when, it's still WDS doing all the hard work in the background. Same goes for Config Manager which is built on top of WDS+MDT.

I saw an interesting tabloid show by Kevin Bridges the other day that explored the Yes/No debate. He interviewed Billy Bragg who had what I thought was a rather interesting take on the debate. Scottish independence could be viewed as whats needed to kickstart proper constitutional reform at Westminster. Add that to the Trident question and as a Englishman I find myself hoping the Scots vote yes today if only to give us down south a bloody nose!

Why? Schools existed before computers. Your LEA could give you a list of who should be on roll, paper registers exist. That's half the battle there. Don't need computers to get kids in and sit them in front of a teacher. If lessons are timetabled then most staff would have paper copies, as would most students - so another bullet dodged there. A trawl of parents can recapture important medical, next of kin, contact, etc data. The biggest problem will be the man hours the admin/it staff would need to take rebuilding the database once a new one is set up. Manual entry is slow. Even then there a few online sources to get some basic data going. CTF imports etc.

Lost the entire MIS, as a secondary - It'd be carnage. Names, addresses, timetables, medical info, the list goes on. Thankfully I'm sure there are paper copies of the most important stuff in the vaults, and some information could be recaptured from the likes of the LEA, Key to Success, School to Schools, etc. It'd be a horrible but doable rebuild, even then there'd be major gaps in the data. As @CAM said, the biggest impact will be in census returns which seriously effects funding. It'd be a frantic few weeks going to every third party imaginable to recapture as much of the data needed to get the census as accurate as possible. Thankfully we're in a situation that if we lost absolutely everything then there are bigger things in this world to worry about than whether or not we can retrieve any data. Attendance, behaviour and progress tracking is now "in the cloud", everything is backed up termly and taken off-site 15 miles away, daily incremental backups are stored in a remote building onsite, the main storage array is designed to cope with multiple drive failure using a combination of RAID50 and hot spares. To take all of that out? At the very least they're rebuilding half of Norfolk!

DVLA sent me a reminder about my Tax Disc. Due October 1. Same day new system goes live, no longer need a disc and can pay by direct debit. Right, thinks I, would love to pay monthly by direct debit. No says DVLA, direct debit option only available for renewals from November 1!!! Got to buy another 6mths/1yr before I can go over to the monthly DD system. Arrggghhhh!!!!!

Lol, I play games to get away from my day job! Happy to pay the Taiwanese Mafia to release access to my laptop, got the monthly DD setup for them and everything

This is your ultimate problem. The way I see it you have 4 choices... DMZ UPNP Give PS3 fixed IP and open every port to that IP Call developer of each game and ask them which ports they've used

We are a school of a similar size, our set up is currently - 3 virtual host servers, 1 physical DC, a 4.5Tb (formatted) bespoke file server. We're looking at replacing/augmenting the file server this year. We use Hyper-V for virtualisation and the file server currently uses SMB v2 shares to host the VHD files in a common shared area for all virtual hosts - allows for easy failover redeployment of virtual machines. We are looking at a few options, including a direct replacement and/or a JBOD connected to two server heads. Using Server 2012R2 and technologies such as Storage Pools and Cluster Shared Volumes, SMB v3, we expect to come in with around 10Tb formatted for under £8k. So - no need for a full blown SAN. Certainly wouldn't use an Enterprise NAS though, Unless I could be reassured that they were using quality SAS and a decent controller. Don't most NAS boxes use SATA drives as standard? Starting completely from scratch? I'd be very tempted by the Dell PowerEdge VRTX - PowerEdge VRTX — Shared Infrastructure Platform | Dell UK

This is how I configure all my HP switches, with the CLI menu. Couldn't be easier. I don't know if it's still the same on new switches but the ones we have here use a buggy Java UI the crashes sooner than give you the port status. Putty + CLI menu is the way to go.

Does your router support UPNP? If so it might be worth making sure it's switched on. The PS3 uses UPNP to ask the router to open ports as required.

If you're not on EES then you really should be buying licences on a Select agreement as this give you imaging rights and would make preparation and setup a whole lot easier. If you buy licenses on such an agreement then the laptop can be supplied with any version of Windows, it really doesn't matter, so long as it is supplied with a version. The cost of licences are less than £10 each (totally from memory, been a long time, could be wrong) so won't add a great deal to the price of any laptop you find. That should open the market up a bit for you. As for AMD processors, very much doubt you'd see a problem. Especially for general day to day office/internet/sims use. Are they doing any processor intensive work such as playing games, rendering 3D or editing videos? Yes SIMS works perfectly on AMD processors!

But the spoon manufacturer isn't just giving you a spoon. They are giving you the latest spoon. With a free upgrade everytime a newer spoon is released. No that's still not right. They are giving you a complete cutlery set with a free upgrade to the latest cutlery set every time a new one is released...

I'm feeling a bit dense here, I'm not sure I actually follow what the issue is. We pay for a 3yr EES sub. We get latest desktop OS, Office, Cals and SCCM on all PC's. We pay extra for MDOP and get App-V as well (more than worth it!). When buying PC's I don't care what OS they come with. Can be Windows 98 for all I care. So long as it comes with a valid OS. If it's a good deal on Win Pro via TAP then I'd call that a bonus. If it's Win 8.1 Home fine, I'll reformat and put Win 7 Pro on regardless. I'm more interested in total price and spec of the machine. If TAP offers the same spec cheaper why complain?

Is it? I doubt U2 are complaining. Apple got some publicity and will make the money back in interest quick enough - this is mere pocket change to them. Users can't really, it's not as if they have to actually pay anything for the album. The worst that comes out of this is a few people will have to select-all right-click delete.

Top Google search suggests 800 million iTunes accounts. Top Google search suggests artists get $1 for every $10 album sold. So, if Apple actually paid for 1 copy for each user direct to U2 (very unlikely) that's $800,000,000. Now, if 3/4 of users keep the album - that's still 200 million users. Apple paid millions not hundreds of thousands. And it was a outstanding success if 1/4 choose to keep the album. When was the last time U2 sold 200 million copies of one album? If I'm not mistaken that eclipses their total combined album sales of all previous albums!

Actually I thought a couple of the tracks where alright, not their best, but I've got a lot worse on my phone already. As for the rest, is right-click delete so difficult they need to release a tool for it?

Interesting development! I know when the story broke about the merger news analyst were surprised it was Carephone Warehouse and not Phone4U that Dixons were merging with. Even more interesting when you consider a large number of Phones4U outlets operate from within Currys/PCWorld stores. It's also interesting when you think the group used to have their own Mobile stores, The Link, which they sold to O2 in 2006.

Non domain joined computer with a shortcut to the root home folder share? Set a Scheduled Task to auto log off after x amount of time?

Carphone Warehouse have just merged with Dixons (Currys/PC-World). Part of Phone-4U's problem was all the major telcos signing agreements with Dixons Carphone - as they are now known.