jamesfed

Its the 840 Pros that we are looking at however they are being a little irksome about giving them to us in the first place! Crazy but hey

Trying to get a managed service provider to get us some decent PCs for a mahoosive refresh we are running but are running up across an interesting barrier over SSDs....they still don't think they last that long! (by that long I'm meaning 4+ years). So what I need is some fellow edugeekers to say if they have any PCs with SSD in that are going for 4 yrs+ to post below mentioning what model they are going with and how many of the little drives they have out there which will hopefully add some support behind my good word Been dragging as much out of the net as I can on the matter as well but if anyone else knows of any good resources that prove the long life as well (and I do mean prove not just synthetic testing) it would be great! Cheers, James

Who are you buying the PCs from? You would get more of a step up from a SSD than anything else (would add to the long life of the PC as well) although again it might not be necessary anyway.

A basic RDP/VDI setup is the simple solution here. But................Surface RT also supports any of the normal Microsoft VPNs (SSTP as part of RAS on Windows Server) and considering you can map network drives....it all falls into place (or at least that is how I have mine setup).

By chance did you screw up your DNS on your PCs? I did the same (well only on my testing rig) either way there is a fix here (although it is a manual one) - The F5 Guy » Direct Access – Corrupt NRPT Fix

After doing a revamp at my last place I can say I prefer Sony cameras to the Axis cameras (except the Axis PTZ-212 which has a crazily big viewing angle) as far as picture quality goes. I built a custom server to run the cameras - a AMD Quad Core 2U rack mount using desktop PC parts, wish I had used smaller drives since we put in place the 30 day recording policy but have the details up here - Inside a new Storage Server | my world of IT Milestone XProtect Xpress was the software that it ran off. It chewed through a lot of the server side CPU (about 60%) with 18 HD cameras running off it (but that is only due to the motion detection). For the first batch of cameras we got the supplier to do the physical install and our cabling company to put in the cables (using PoE injectors in most places) but after that we did the camera installs in house as its little more than drilling some holes (site team did this for us) and putting up a mount.

Tell him to stop using a 3,200rpm hard drive and upgrade to a SSD

Are you using Lync or any other software that might want to talk to Outlook?

Star Trek online

Got auditing turned on?

Turning off protected mode has fixed no end of problems for me as well - you can even do it using a reg change (a quick google will find which one) that can be deployed by group policy.

Take a look at Visual Studio Lightswitch - built into most of the 2012 VS packages now. Its a rapid database/form creation tool that ties into AD very nicely Just host it on a IIS server and there is even a version of it which runs on HTML instead of Silverlight for the user end.

I did a guide on how to App-V Adobe CS6 a while back and have a few other bits and bobs on my blog - App-V | my world of IT Best thing you can do though is hit Youtube there are lots of good guides up there especially for things like App-Ving Office.

Are they HP printers by chance? If so and you are using the Universal Printing Driver there is a kown problem where you have to change from TCP/IP to LPR.

Could you just replace the faulty HDD?

Have another check under 'All systems' that the PC isn't there (and if so right click/delete). The chaps here used to do a reset of the motherboards BIOS as well...

You could setup a NIC on your virtual host that goes directly out to the web (if that’s still the option you want to go for) - as the host and the VM can't communicate then there would never be any traffic from it reaching your internal network (without going via the web).

Why not just turn it into a virtual machine?

Citrix VDI-in-a-box at my last place - very easy to setup Used App-V extensively as well, took me a while (about 4 days solid work) but in the end I had 90+ applications in it after which I never had to worry about if an application was going to be installed/ready on a PC. Even had things like the full Adobe CS6 suite in it.

This should fix your permissions problems in no time - NTFSFix

I use SCCM to push out the updates - no need to remove the older versions as they just overwrite the previous one. A little while back I put together these guides (although for GPO) that you might find useful - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/enterprise-software/111305-deploying-adobe-reader-adobe-flash-java-msi-gpo-guides.html I do the Adobe and Java updates every time these days (although I sometimes let Adobe reader slip) and since I've already got the transforms/config files in place its become second nature. Edit: I also have a test group which I deploy the updates to first (about 20 PCs in locations where people would pickup on and report any issues) before rolling out to the site.

IMO guides (of any kind) rarely do anything but collect (digital) dust when issued to most members of staff. Better training (small groups and one to one) seems to yield more results. However something like Expression Encoder 4 (built-in screen capture) a basic headset with a mic and a YouTube channel could go a way to helping you out.

Put it in their little suggestions box

Cheers

Only thing is I'm no longer at the school where we did business before so I wouldn't be a very good person to call I do start at my new place in a few weeks time though and know that before the end of the year I will have quite a lot of kit to scrap....