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Has anyone here made the jump to SSDs in class / staff rooms? This year I have put a proposal forward that for one classroom which currently has Pentium D machines in (About 4/5 years old) rather than replace all the systems at a cost of around £300 each (15 PCs so £4500) we buy 64GB Crucial M4 SSD drives at a cost of approx £60 each (£900). Theoretically this should extend the life of the base hardware by at least 2 years, just trying to see if anyone else has gone down a similar route!

Are there are Group Policies or similar methods that allow for workstations to automatically lock after a period of inactivity? (And will it be intelligent enough to not lock if there is something such as a PowerPoint being displayed!)

Thanks, I'll look into that Hapara stuff as if it works as simple as it claims I'm sure the $1 per user hit can be taken by the powers that be!

We have a Google Apps domain and a Active Directory domain Been asked to look into making them link together in some way so a person can login to Active Directory, then when they visit Google they're automatically signed in. Any ideas or has anyone done this? The ability to keep passwords in sync too would be incredibly useful!

Many thanks, I'll give FSRM a try

Is there a way to set up email notifications so that staff can be alerted when they are starting to run low on their network drive space so they're not ringing up going 'OMG I need more disk space now!!!'?

Well I tried everything, all the software suggested above and even a Toshiba laptop from work which did prompt for the password but wouldn't accept the correct password! In the end I just ended up driving like mad back home at lunch to stick it back in my laptop and cleared the password!

Bought my laptop hard drive to work yesterday, I've sold it and wanted to wipe it. So plugged it in a spare machine, it is picked up fine in the BIOS but no DOS programs seem to pick it up, Windows does see it in disk management as a uninitialized disk but comes up with a I/O error if I try to initialize it. However I took it home last night and plugged it into my laptop again and it all worked fine! The only thing I can think of therefore is the password I set in the BIOS on my laptop that has to be typed in before the system will boot has put some kind of lock on the hard drive and I can't seem to find a way to remove it? Any ideas as I now won't be at home until after the weekend!

Is there a network version of Thunderbird that can be accessed by more than one user at a time without complaining? For some exams the students are required to produce screenshots of using an email client (Don't actually have to *send* anything) and Thunderbird works well for this purpose but the portable version I have moans if more than one user attempts to access the client at the same time. So is there a network version anywhere as at the moment the students have to copy the folder to their individual areas which is taking up a huge amount of disk space!

A member of staff (external careers advisor) has a Deny permission set on a shared folder root (Let's call it Staff Info) which is inherited by all sub folders There is a sub folder which they now require access to (*sigh*!). Is there an easy way to give them access to this folder without having to remove the Deny permission from the shared folder root?

After a major headache with a computer this morning I want offline files to burn in hell! (Someone must have accidentally clicked the 'Work offline' button in Windows Explorer meaning anybody who logged on could not access their network drive and hence their desktop). Anyway, since we don't have any need for the functionality in the first place what can be done to turn it off? On the file server I noticed the shares 'Offline settings' currently says 'Only the files and programs that users specify are available offline' is it just as simple as selecting the option 'No files or programs from the shared folder are available offline'? I did try several of the group policy items to turn the functionality off but they seem to have had no effect!

Are there any 'killer' features in LogMeInPro that aren't in LogMeInFree? I've been trying to find out but more difficult than it sounds! Basically on my days off / when I'm sick I would like to leave my office PC running just in case there is an emergency that nobody else can resolve and wondering if it worth getting the college to shell out for a yearly Pro license or just to stick to the free one...

Is there a quick way to force 1024x768 when one user logs in? Need to do it for our exams login as the stupid software doesn't resize properly for widescreen monitors!

Here is the product we were quoted around £8k for (I think this is the one anyway) : http://www.altman.co.uk/files/prineochameleon.pdf

Has anyone here fully integrated their MIS with their network system so that when a new student is enrolled / put on the MIS system they are automatically created a network login at the same time? Not exporting data into a CSV file! Obviously this would involve enrolment staff having extra access to AD etc but it would be a lot more streamlined than a huge text file every morning!

Thanks - We have one of their sales guys coming in tomorrow...but I should have mentioned we already have PCounter in place for the general printing / copying so just looking for a 'print room management' sort of thing standalone as we're tied down to PCounter for the next couple of years.

Does anyone here have any ideas how to implement a reprographics management solution? In that users can submit their jobs (electronically - file attachments or send to print queue but reprographics staff must be able to view the documents on their screen before printing them) and the users can track their 'progress' in the queue etc? We got quoted nearly £8000 (not including the yearly maintenance charge!) for one solution which seems absolutely ridiculous considering it isn't the most complicated in the world to develop...

On Windows 7 students can tell if someone takes control of their machine using LanSchool because the screen 'flickers' (Seems to be due to LanSchool not being able to handle the Aero effects properly) Any solutions? Used to be fine with XP!

Does anyone know any decent software that will allow certain staff to send out broadcast messages (e.g. 'Please inform reception of any visitors') to all the other staff? Ideally with some sort of Active Directory integration and the facility to send out the same 'daily' messages once a day but also allow one off messages to be sent. Hope this makes sense?! I've seen it in another place in the past, think it was from their MIS system?

We restarted the secondary AD controller which seemed to sort the problem out - One of those post Christmas mysteries I suppose!

Getting a weird message this morning with LanSchool Teacher about how it cannot connect to AD controller...working fine before Christmas! Any ideas?

Not yet resolved this, no. Having other issues with H:\ drives though at the minute - For example yesterday a student was working on their document, then suddenly they had a H:\ drive but there was nothing there! (Although the files still existed on the file server). Also I've had reports of a 'red cross' on network drives from time to time but there is no consistent pattern and it is driving me crazy!

Is there a way to stick an Outlook profile on a machine containing settings for a particular Gmail account etc so that any user that logs on to the machine using their roaming profile can just run Outlook and it looks for the profile on the C:\ drive rather than their profile? If that makes sense. So we have 10 Gmail accounts and 10 machines

Windows 7 clients Server 2008 R2 server A number of users are reporting when they try saving documents on their H:\ drive they are getting 'H:\document.doc is currently in use. Try again later' Apparently it only seems to happen with Word documents Any ideas as I'm baffled!

We are trying to set up a hibernation policy in our Active Directory Server 2008 R2 / Windows 7 enviroment. I have set the following options: Computer configuration - Policies - Administrative Templates - System - Sleep Settings Specify the system hibernate timeout (Plugged in) : 3600 (60 minutes) Require a Password when a computer wakes (Plugged in) : Enabled However when looking at the clients under the power settings I noticed they seem to have their hibernate settings disabled / not visible by default which prevented the above from working - Once I ran the following command from a cmd prompt: powercfg -h on The policy worked as expected. Are there any policy settings available so that the hibernate options can be enabled on all PCs without having to go to them all manually? (Did try putting that command in a batch file and sticking it in the policy as a startup script but it didn't seem too happy). Also with regards to the require a password option, this works for staff accounts but not for student accounts as we have disabled the lock workstation functionality for them. Can we enable the lock workstation functionality in such a way that students cannot perform the locking but this hibernation process can? Thanks!