t_h

Have you tried a different USB drive? I usually get around 800MB/minute with CloneZilla on a standard desktop conventional hard drive which would roughly agree with your estimation of 5 minutes to move 6GB with Ghost.

Open Office and MS Office? Personally I'd just stick with MS Office if its all bought and paid for. Anyway in answer to your question we find Picasa very popular.

What kind of software needs domain administrator rights? How were you achieving this with XP?

If I'm understanding you correctly, you can't just 'make up' a domain name - that's not how the Internet works - you need to submit a request through an appropriate agent for a small fee. I'm sure other members could recommend some. As for hosting a website yourself, you could quite easily do this but you'd have to compare the cost of someone hosting it for you against the expense and knowledge/hours needed to maintain your own.

The line that replaced actual "Thinkbook" or whatever they called it are really nice and sturdy. Metal hinges and built like they might survive a decent drop. You just have to be wary of buying the more consumer-oriented line like I did by mistake. I won't mention the model but with XP Pro and a finger print reader you'd think you were getting a business class product but sadly the build quality is fairly average. Anyway in my experience the £400 mark is the sweet spot for a basic teacher laptop, and if there are any deals on you can even squeeze a carry case and mouse out of that budget. As long as you have at least 2GB of RAM you can't really go wrong spec-wise these days so be more selective about build quality. I use mostly HP kit and don't have too many problems.

I don't know if this is still that case, but if you have any Dell machines the recovery disc that comes with them (even though it is branded) is actually a vanilla OEM disc. I've only ever done this with XP a few years ago so I could be miles off, but worth a shot if you know anyone who has bought a Dell recently.

If it's a popular brand in most cases you can contact the manufacturer and get replacement recovery discs for around £40. Cheaper than buying the OS again. You could always try and borrow an OEM Vista disc and use the key you've got, but then obviously you'd have to find the drivers yourself. Aside from that there isn't much you can do if it is borked.

I have the Server 2003 version of the book below, which is quite good, so I can only assume this is the same. [ame=http://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Server-2008-Administrators-Companion/dp/0735625050/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255383386&sr=8-3]Windows Server 2008 Administrator's Companion: Amazon.co.uk: Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford: Books[/ame]

She was pretty lucky not to be standing in the way. If that had happened 10 seconds earlier it might have been a lot worse.

Glad it worked, I do it all the time. I always have a distro or two in my CD wallet.

Never used the Bart PE disc, but provided the drive isn't encrypted I'd use a Linux live CD to mount the filesystem and backup the data.

Yeah this is the thing, it looks like the answer to a few of my problems but there is a lot to consider. This is on my "to-read" list anyway: DirectAccess

I'd also like to know this. It sounded great until I read about IPv6, which kinda put me off as I have too much on my plate at the moment. It's good to know that it is something I could pick up at a later date though.

It's the old "640k ought to be enough" again - people might not see a need for it right now, but why wouldn't Microsoft look into it for future versions of Windows? We already have graphics cards with 128, 256 bit memory buses so for me it hardly seems excessive for a future OS.

The only time I've heard something similar was a problem with HP machines with AMD processors that failed to boot when you applied XP SP3. The issue was down to the fact that they were using an Intel image across the board which XP SP3 didn't like.

I agree with the above - Windows Desktop Search is actually quite good, although I'd only recommend it on fairly modern machines. The initial indexing is quite intensive but you can always pause it. If your users are unlikely to bother with it then there might not be much point but otherwise I've had no trouble with it.

The screenshot looks like Gnome to me.

Enterprise, if only to try out Bitlocker to Go (which is awesome)

I initially though it was a bit silly, but the head and tail of it is: When you consider that i.e. electronic goods with an apple logo on it, you can maybe see their point. At the end of the day you have to defend a trademark.

Thanks for those links. I'm literally just about to (this week) start the process of evaluating Windows 7 for our network. I've been using it at home for a few months and it works very well - now to start testing it properly. In regards to the folder redirection tip that does seem a bit odd. Fortunately I'm not bothered about the Start menu just the Desktop and My Documents folder will do for us. I've decided to go with a phased approach myself as it seems the best way to do it with minimal impact, in my opinion. After evaluation by myself the teacher's laptops will be treated to Windows 7. The theory behind this is that staff will be able to get used to the interface in their own time before it starts appearing on classroom computers. They will be encouraged to have a tinker with it and give me feedback which should be useful to me before I start rolling it out fully. The other advantage of using the laptops is that they are the least tethered to the network - most of them aren't joined to the domain and some are even running Vista Business already. It's all about managing risk... That's my logic anyway and I'm sticking to it!

Would something like a NAS be appropriate for a file server? Might help if you post the amount of users and computers on the network.

Another vote for Smart. The software doesn't cause me any major headaches and I'm always quite impressed with how robust the Smartboards themselves are.

This probably won't help much but we have a very similar setup with a very similar problem, only our finance officer seems to have worked out it's quirk. I can't remember off the top of my head the exact method but it involves the order in which you use the printer after the machines first boot. For example, if you boot machine A (with FMS) & B (with printer attached) and then try to print something from FMS it will just sit there spooling on machine B. Even if you cancel the job and try again it will never work until you reboot machine A. However if you boot both machines, then send a print job (anything, a test page) from machine B first and then try to print FMS stuff from machine A it will work. As bizarre as it sounds it does work for our setup. Suffice to say I'm dreading the day those machines need replacing. If I remember I'll try to find out the exact logic tomorrow. It's one of those things where you sit there thinking about it, then you just decide that nothing about computers surprises you anymore and that you may never get to the bottom of it. At least you know you're not alone.

Won't compile. Anyway it's jokes like this that completely ruined Vista even when it came good after SP1 and third party manufacturers actually delivered decent drivers. A lot of the issues with Vista were beyond the control of Microsoft!

If you had the hashes it wouldn't take much "cracking" - more like comparing it to a table of known hashes. Of course this wouldn't work for good passwords but most are atrocious.