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I've just been looking at this - it looks really good. They link to a project to code a game using Scratch and give instructions on how to create the code. I fancy setting this up at my kids' school!

Brilliant! I have a love-hate with these things though. I love the creativity but hate the fact that parents always seem to become uber-competitive and end up doing the task rather than letting the kids have a go.

Yeah, so much for my natural curiosity, I really should have left well alone. I was wondering whether there was anything I could salvage from that build but you're right, it isn't fit for anything. What I'm trying to work out is whether it was the way I ran sysprep that stripped all the drivers out - I expected some to go like the network and wireless adapters and the graphics card drivers, but I didn't expect most of them to go including the USB drivers. Am going to rebuild the netbook, probably with a fresh install of Windows 7 (groan), but need to know where I went wrong to stop this happening next time. I want to strip out the computer name, SID etc so that I can copy the image to other netbooks. But I want to keep the drivers as the netbooks are all identical hardware. Is there a way of doing this?

I don't get it either. In Derbyshire, quite a few schools closed at lunchtime and there was really no need because by the afternoon the snow was thawing and the roads were fine. Fortunately my kids school has a hard-core head who will open if at all possible and stay open all day.

Oh great. Pretty much all the drivers have been stripped out. I obviously did something very wrong! Any pointers on how better to run Sysprep - next time should I try from a command prompt and use an answer file with "PersistAllDeviceInstalls" in?

Phew! No idea what I did wrong, but I have found this article and followed the advice on how to edit the registry and got back in! Error message "The Computer Restarted unexpectedly or encountered - Microsoft Community I might need to sysprep the machine again but at least it's working. Would love to know if I did anything wrong but I will just have to take it on trial and error I guess. Nice to see the sysprep work I did is prompting me for settings on startup anyway.

Have upgraded a machine to Windows 7 Professional, installed all the drivers, installed all the apps and made sure everything was OK. First time using sysprep so I ran it from Windows Explorer with the options for OOBE, "Generalise" ticked (I want to deploy the image to other machines and don't want the machine name, SID etc to cause conflicts) and When Finished, set to "Quit". Sysprep ran OK and created a file to say it had done. I thought I'd have a look to see what it had done on the computer, but very quickly ran into some RPC error messages (I was trying to look for the machine name but guess that sysprep had wiped it out). Then I shut the PC down and booted up Clonezilla to take an image of the netbook. Going through it transpired that Clonezilla could only see the wireless LAN card not the network card. As it doesn't work over wireless (it hasn't for me anyway), I aborted that and booted the machine back up normally. Because that booted off a portable DVD drive, it didn't interfere with the Windows bootup at all. Now the machine has come up with a "Setup is starting services" file which I guess means the Sysprep has worked. But now I've got an "Install Windows" error message and "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install Windows, click "OK" to restart the computer and then restart the installation." When I do that, I get "Setup will continue after restarting your computer", the machine restarts and then the same thing happens again in a loop. I can't get back into it at all. I must have done something wrong, but not sure what and now looking for ideas on how to resolve this! Aaaargh!

We currently renew EES's on a 1-year basis, so I'd be interested to see if we could tie into a 3-year deal and reduce year-on-year costs. My next renewal isn't due till July though, so I've a while to sort that out!

I came across this article on the Dept of Education's website: New deal with Microsoft. It's all very vague and doesn't mention what the licensing model is that they're talking about! I clicked through and also found this article: Microsoft Procurement information Does anyone know what the actual "significant pricing discounts and savings, together with enhanced licensing terms" are that they are referring to? Some of my schools are on EES agreements but others are not and I'd like to be up-to-date on the information to see if we can get the best deals possible.

Yeah it was wordpress.com, had been working OK until that Friday. It being the last day of term, I kind of went off to have Christmas dinner and decided to leave this one until New Year. I could update the website with what I needed by refreshing the page to workaround it for a while. I'll have another look this week when I'm on that site on Friday.

Sorry about the wrong forum post, please feel free to move this. To be honest I've never had any problems in primary schools using Windows 7 Pro so I've never encountered Enterprise and had a look at what additional features it has.... I'll take a look though. Thanks for the sysprep information as well, sounds like I may or may not need to go down that route. The bit I want to sort out is the device name on the network, as usually I have to unjoin it from the domain, rename and rejoin back to the domain once I've cloned. This never usually causes any problems but I've also heard that the SSID can sometimes be duplicated and therefore conflict by doing it this way, hence my being on the look out for best practice.

Mmmmm, I've registered but the new dates mean that the Saturday falls on my youngest's birthday this year (and although she'd be in tech heaven with me, I'm not sure I'd get much done in terms of working my way round the stands). Might have to see if I can go on the Friday.... but the 6hr round trip is going to be a killer, the trip there won't be too bad but coming out of London on a Friday night could be travelling hell!

That sounds just the thing then. I will probably spend all week thinking about this and building up to doing this now and then finally sort it at the weekend when I have a bit more time. Being back at work is such a pain!

One of the schools I work at has all kinds of passwords set up by a Leeds United fan. As a Sheffield Wednesday fan I find this very disturbing!

I've worked with banks of netbooks for some time now. I've got 90 in one school which a third-party company cloned from a master image that I created (and considering I wasn't sure what I was doing and googled / used common sense) that went OK and I've since used Clonezilla to reimage some of them successfully. In another school I support, 16 netbooks have arrived today for me to set up over the next couple of weeks. With it being a clean start, I want to do it right. And also with it being a New Year and all that ... I'm less jaded than normal :-) They all came with Windows 7 Home Premium on so need upgrading to Windows 7 Professional under the EES agreement terms. I've got the master netbook running this now. What I'm thinking of then is setting up the rest of that netbook, getting all the drivers back, making sure all the Toshiba bloatware is off, setting things like the local Admin password, defrag and UAC settings etc. and then cloning the other netbooks off this master. It'll save me having to upgrade them all to WIndows 7 Pro individually I guess and will mean they are all stable. What I've never fathomed out is the use of Sysprep with cloning and whether it needs to be run on the master image, the cloned devices or what? I've found guides on the internet which I'm going to have a look at - but is this the best way of preparing a machine for cloning?

That sounds useful, I'll check that link out and look for an UNROOT option there or wherever I end up getting the info from.

Yeah I've done a bit of searching online too and the recommendation to root the phone is coming up again and again. Where would I stand on the phone warranty if I did this though? Fortunately I've got this phone on a one year contract so it only has 11 months to go :-) What I find weird though is that my daughter has a Galaxy Y and my fella has the same phone but the some of the pre-installed apps are different sizes, e.g. Google Maps which is 4Mb on a Galaxy Y, 6-7Mb on his Galaxy Ace but nearly 12Mb on my Galaxy Ace - and this is the app size, not the data or the cache either. Good to hear that Facebook will move over eventually though ... I've just got to do some thinking now as everything I read on rooting makes it sound like a serious step to take.

Well I got me a Samsung Galaxy Ace for my birthday. I was running a Blackberry Curve before which handled Whatsapp, Facebook and Twitter reasonably well. Not so with my Galaxy Ace. It has a phone memory of about 200Mb and although I have a 2Gb SD card in it too, I can't get any of the aforementioned apps to move over to it. I've installed SDK Manager and "hacked" the phone and tried to move them to the SD card but they say there's not enough memory. I've uninstalled them and set the default install location to the SD card but get a message saying they can't be installed to this media. Has anyone got these three apps working well on a Galaxy Ace? At the moment I'm getting daily messages saying my internal storage is almost full and then I have to clear the data on Facebook and Twitter (about 10Mb) to free up enough space to carry on. Which is frustrating to say the least!!

Thanks, at the moment now I am getting a "blocked site" page on the first try and then getting through on the second try. Which is workable with but slightly annoying!

Just gone back to try again and it's not blocked now. I'll chalk this down to another strange happening on the last day .... or blame it on the end of the world!

I'm off to see the Hobbit tonight too, though not till the 8.30 showing so it's currently touch and go whether I'll stay awake through it all! :-)

Am trying to log onto our school website in Wordpress and do some last changes before Christmas ... it worked fine last week but now I'm getting a message "Access denied - your policy (staff) does not allow you to access this resource. Before I phone it into Capita, would someone mind just checking for me to see if it's the same elsewhere - it being the last day, I'm running entirely on caffeine and not entirely sure whether I'm just doing something stupid!

Cheers, some great ideas here for me to go on. Advanced IP scanner is being blocked from download by the proxy server here, but assigning it an IP address via the arp command sounds like a good route - I'll have another look at it when I'm at that school this afternoon. I may have to hard reset it as well anyway, as there's no documentation in the school about the credentials to log in and manage the AP (and the other netgear one they have) and I'm running out of good guesses to try. Then again, if both appear to be working fine, I might leave this well alone for now.

I'm at a school with various unmanaged Wireless Access Points and am tidying up the existing set up (reserving IP addresses etc) One is a Netgear 802.11g ProSafe Wireless Access Point and I am trying to work out what IP address it has. I know the MAC address from the device but it's not showing up on DHCP - so I thought maybe it had a fixed IP address outside of the DHCP scope, but the MAC address is not showing up on arp -a either. It's clearly working as there are laptops in the same room getting a strong signal from it, and I've run Wifi Analyser from my phone and it's picking up a device with that MAC address and getting a good signal. It's not the default address (192.168.0.229) either. I'm trying to figure out how the heck it's been set up. Does anyone have any ideas of how I can find out?

Well I found the 6 APs, 3 had lights on, three didn't. They were POE so in the end, I powered the switch off and on that they were plugged into (big thumbs up to the installers for using purple CAT-5 cables which were easily identifiable). Went back into ZoneDirector and watched all the APs come up one by one and show as connected. Am very happy with that for an initial result for today! It's on 9.3 so I'll do updates to 9.4 (and possible 9.5) at some point once I know how stable it's all running. I still need to look at the policies, scripts, redirects etc for the netbooks, but at least if the wireless is working and I can analyse that performance then it's the first step to being able see how the performance pans out. The school is very happy at this stage as well, and I've learned loads about Ruckus so all in all, a useful day.