googlemad

So basically we've ripped out about 15 iDesks from one of our sites that is closing down and have relocated them to a new location. At the moment they're in bits, but when we put them back together does anyone know how to wire up the power? As there are some tranformer units in the back of the desks that I seem to be recall can be daisy chained together to reduce the amount of cabling but I don't want to make everything go bang when we switch on the juice!

I would be interested to know if anyone has used the Tadpole thin client laptops and has managed to get the 'tap to click' function to work, because we haven't! (The option is there and set to enabled but does nothing, which is really annoying when you take it for granted!)

We currently have a ESXi infrastructure in place, on a production license of VMWare. I was on a VMWare training course yesterday and they mentioned VMWare offered a free academic licensing program for research purposes: VMware Academic Program Facts a)Can we obtain one of these considering we also have the production license b)Will we have to purchase a full Workstation license if I start using it to create base images and rolling them out to physical machines? c)Does the license cover me installing VMWare Workstation / Fusion etc on my personal home machines? Thanks

Is this a dedicated server for this program? If so grab a copy of VMWare Workstation (Even the trial should work), build the server and install / activate the software on there since it has USB support then you can just send it up to the ESX server You can also download the server off the ESX, import it into Workstation, activate it etc then upload it back up but it is a more complicated process and would probably involve some downtime.

Sorry if this is a duplicate post, but it outweighs the school giving a few people some iPhones. 900. Nine Hundred. iPod Touches 100. One Hundred. Wireless Access Points BBC News - Bolton school equips every pupil with iPod Touch Wonder if there is some sort of management utility for centrally pushing out new apps etc to them?!

Got a piece of Capita software that has suddenly stopped running on my office PC! It does work on other PCs so just linked to my client. (See attachment for error!) Just wondered if anyone had any ideas before Capita have another go tomorrow. Don't suggest a NET framework uninstall / reinstall though, been through that several times already!!! uniteerror.doc

FYI this was resolved by downloading the PCL 5e driver from HP website.

Got a couple of new network printers, HP Laserjet P1505N Got one set up on the network and created a PCounter queue as normal. Added the queue to a standard XP workstation and installed the basic driver set provided on the CD-ROM that came with the printer. Every time I try to print a test page it thinks about it for a bit then crashes Windows Explorer HOWEVER if I add a new TCP/IP based port printer it does print! Any ideas? Really starting to get fed up with how much hassle new HP printers are becoming!

In my garage at home I have a 2003 Server. Been planning to 'upgrade' it to 2008 Server for a while so I can also take advantage of 64 bit but it has several mirrored drives in it. (Using the built in 2003 software mirroring) If I wipe the server drive (Not mirrored) and install 2008 will it pick up the fact the drives were in a mirror configuration before? Or will I just see all the drives with 2 copies of my data and have to link them back up again?

We have got 2 suites of thin clients (One thin client based one laptop thin client based). We have just got a printer for each suite and have set them both up as queues on PCounter but we now need to deploy the print objects on the thin client server in such a way that they're linked to the rooms (If that makes sense?) Any ideas how to do this?! We do have Active Directory group policy but don't use Active Directory for the network as such.

On a side note I must say I like the way BES reports last contact time with the devices - So I can peek at which SMT members have basically left their Blackberry in their drawer gathering dust for months

Yep it was down to Orange not activating the Blackberry APN services on the SIM! Typically they had to choose one of our more important users for that to happen to!!!

One of our Blackberry devices has a bit of a problem Connected it up to BES manager client with a USB on my local machine as server is virtual, no problems. Synced user email etc. Soon as it is disconnected from the USB link it won't sync, i.e. over the mobile data network. On trying to use the web browser just get the 'insufficient coverage' message even with full signal, removing battery, restarting device, factory reset of device etc. Which I assume is why the emails aren't coming through either. Is this a SIM card / provider issue? I think it is myself!

Some staff still use 1.8GHZ P4 Stone machines with 256mb RAM and 20 / 30 / 40 GB hard drives. The trouble with our older machines (Including the earlier 2.8GHZ P4s) is the hard drives are crap and therefore slow the entire systems down! They can quite happily run XP, but then stick on network client, AV, office suite, email client, updates etc etc and they go like treacle! Our Finance team were over the moon when their new machines went in! I'm over the moon at how compact base units are getting as they're easy to transport between buildings now without feeling like I'm lifting weights at the gym

Stick the Windows 7 CD in and let it get to the screen where you get to partition disk etc (Don't partition / format it obviously!!!). Then restart your PC. Think the setup can do some magic with system files, but might be wrong.

Due to whacky licensing we need to upgrade 2 of our media workstations to 3D Studio Max 2010 from 2008. Any ideas how easy this is? (Local installs). The thing I'm worried about is the media students did the 2008 install with custom plug ins etc and I don't want to wipe any changes they may have made!

The problem is we use Novell (i.e. no AD) so the share is on a standalone Windows 2003 Server. We use the share for some staff so they can write images etc to it, but now we have a new system in place where some staff need to view these photos but not modify anything in the shared folder. So I was hoping to create the secondary 'read only' user and then stick a batch file on the network so staff can run it when they need to to map and store the network drive mapping with the correct user credentials stored.

I would like to create a batch file to map a Windows share as a network drive, and need to provide a set of login credentials and set it so 'Remember my password' is enabled. Any way to do this through a batch file?

So at home the parents have got a HP LaserJet 6P printer connected to a XP machine and shared using Windows built in printer sharing. Which works great with XP and Vista clients. A few days ago I upgraded my Mum's laptop to Windows 7 and tonight attempted to try and set up the printer link on her laptop. Windows 7 automatically detected the share on the network, but then complained it couldn't find a driver on the network. So I did what one site suggested and download the Novell print driver extraction utility on the XP box to extract the XP drivers and copied them across to the laptop then pointed Windows 7 to the drivers folder on the laptop. Still no joy, just a weird error. In the end I had to add a local LPT1 'dummy' printer, at the drivers screen select 'Windows Update' which luckily picked up the HP 6P driver series (Why oh why have they removed drivers like these from the default Windows 7 install when these sort of printers are probably still in heavy use particulary in business due to their tank like build quality!!), installed the driver then added a network printer again which luckily detected I now have a HP 6P driver and installed without a hitch! Unless somebody could tell me otherwise, I could not manually select a driver and do Windows Update when trying to connect to the network share printer which is totally crazy as XP / Vista allowed this!

There was a computer technician on Millionaire tonight. I found it very ironic he lost on a question where 'Tron' was the correct answer

Ah yes I am getting in the 6-7-800mb region when restoring the image, just the slower speed when uploading an image (Which I can understand)

Well they do come with the wireless keyboard bundled now, which is a lot more useful

Also updated : Mac Mini (Anyone fancy a Mac Mini server for their school? ) MacBook Apple Keyboard Magic Mouse (With new multi touch scroll wheel pad thingy, might be getting myself one of those!)

I'm surprised I haven't seen "The thinnest iMac ever" line somewhere yet. I wish I had time to get into using my iMac more.

For laptops etc to be imaged in batches we have now set up an extra 3Com 10/100 NIC in our Ghostcast server (OK, an old PC stuck on the floor in our office knocked together by yours truly ) and connected that card up to a basic Netgear 10/100 mini switch. So basically an internal network for Ghostcasting without putting heavy traffic on the main network. Anyway got one laptop uploading an image now which is going at around 325 - 350 MB/Min. Is this about the best we'll get for a 10/100 config and will there be a big benefit in upgrading to Gigabit hardware for the internal LAN? (Assuming the laptops have Gigabit capable NICs). Not too fussed really if we can just sit them on a desk and let them get on with it! Also can a DHCP server be set up on the Ghostcast server but only attached to the internal LAN NIC? Hopefully then we can get PXE etc on the internal LAN