googlemad

I've got a tutor machine which I recently imaged and need to install the Catalyst Control Centre suite so I can clone the display onto both the VGA and DVI ports (So the interactive whiteboard has a display other than a blue screen) The software appears to install fine, however when I try to launch the control centre it flashes up and then instantly closes again as if it has crashed! Tried the latest Internet driver and the included CD driver with no luck now. ATI Radeon / Sapphire X1550 Series Any ideas? For now I have it working with no drivers but I don't think 3D Studio Max will approve of that!!

They do? Thanks for the pointer, I'll have a look at that as having a nightmare trying to get it running under VMWare Server

Our machines from last year boot in 30 seconds from cold - Which I wasn't even able to beat with the new machines from this year with an extra GB of RAM (Processors are similar C2D E2180) I suppose even if you get better and better hardware, XP will eventually come to a point where it can't take advantage of it all. My system at home boots Vista much quicker than XP. Log on times vary throughout the day, one minute it is instant and the next it takes up to 3 minutes! But I'm not the network man here

Argh! Every time I wander past a classroom I spot the odd machine doing this now! It is concerning me quite a bit as surely random machines from random batches from random years can all have hardware failure at the same time?! Is it Friday yet?!

Any ideas why we're suddenly getting the above blue screen when certain machines are trying to load XP? They were initially working fine and have Deep Freeze on them so it is unlikely the students could have buggered them up, running memory checks on them now but so far the memory seems to be fine. Don't fancy having to image them if there is a deeper problem!

Well I found out Autodesk are doing website maintenance until 5am tomorrow, so I'm guessing it may be doing some work on the activation servers too. Or I hope anyway.

Great Got in this morning after imaging the room over the weekend and the first machine I try: 0.1.0010 Activation Error. What does that mean?! It says the serial number is invalid if I then request a code but it isn't invalid at all

There is a Windows XP PC : \\WinXPPC (Example) It has a folder which is shared : SharedFolder (Example) There is a local user on the machine : Sharer (Example) with a password. On my machine I can connect to \\WinXPPC\SharedFolder and get asked for a username and password to connect to it. Which is what I want. However, on the staff machine I keep getting 'Access is denied' and I can't kill certain shares they have had open in the past as an active process is using them, even though I can't see anything on the machine that would be using them! Any help? The other machines in the same room seem to work fine!

I believe LanSchool Client 'disables' the Task Manager. I know there is a registry setting which I changed but it seemed to come back disabled after reboot. The media rooms do have a genuine use for the Task Manager, is there any way to enable it permanently if LanSchool is installed? I know it opens up the risk of students killing Student.exe but it is quite a decent group of students up there.

We have around 30 licenses for 3D Studio Max education edition and need to reimage all the media machines. I've done a few and once run on the fresh image the software 'Checks license information' and then just launches, but I'm worried it will lock out after all the licenses have been 'allocated' even if they were 'allocated' to the past image! Is this how it operates or are the licenses linked to hardware in some way?

Fantastic. They had stored it on the secondary partition as a hidden file. No wonder I couldn't find it!!!

I'm trying to fix a problem we're having with a media suite computer before I roll it out to 30+ other machines! Basically when someone logs out / shuts down the desktop closes fine, but the start menu remains and then Explorer.exe Not Responding comes up. Click End Now and the log off process completes as normal. See the attached screenshot... Any ideas what is going on?

We have a suite of machines that a previous technician was setting up before they suddenly left. Anyway they designed a cracking XP wallpaper, only problem is they didn't seem to save the JPG anywhere and it just seems to be 'cached' by Windows in some wacky manner. Is there any way to grab the cached wallpaper and save it back into a JPG file?

If you know of a store called 'Home Bargains', ye may find pretty decent black/silver USB optical mice for £1.99 a piece. Certainly decent enough for the kids er students to mess around with

The problem with Virtual PC is no USB support (Or certainly none the last time I checked). Which means buying VMWare. Standalone machine probably the best idea, set it up and get a ghost image. We had the exact same request last year but the classroom in question now uses Deep Freeze so no problems there.

I've gone up around £1k in the year I've been with my current employer! Something to do with Unison and FE/Public Sector more than 'Hey we can't afford to lose this guy' though

We have some HTC Shifts which we would like to downgrade to XP. We have a corporate/education license for XP Pro, the devices were supplied with Vista Business. I have a pack that converts XP Pro into XP Tablet. With the licenses mentioned above, is it legal to perform this conversion?

I made a personal attack alarm which in the end turned into something so huge it could have been a house alarm! Still got a C or something though

I have a poorly AMD 3000+ 64 rig. Crammed full of hard drives etc in fact it could not be maxed out much more. The tech that just left had a quad core system with all the bells and whistles. I might swap it with mine at some point, I mean the temp doesn't need it as much as I do these days

Yesterday we had an interesting problem. In a certain room, the screens were 'blanking' after someone logged into the machine. Suddenly they worked fine - I'm thinking there is a tutor clash somewhere but I can't think where off the top of my head. More so the question is if I had my admin console on Channel 0, why couldn't I unblank the screens?

This may make very little sense, but on several iDesks a previous technician (Well it can't have been many other people!) has unlocked several iDesks and then somehow forced the key out of the lock (They're designed to stay in until locked again) - So now the desks can no longer be locked! There are 2 'keyed' bits which are supposed to line up i.e. | | But at the moment they are like -- | And it seems impossible to make it budge! Any suggestions?

Our maintenance team have a supply of chilled alcoholic beverages I left work today, got on the train and suddenly realized where my travel card was ... Luckily the caretaker was still there so I didn't have to pay several travel fares over the weekend!!

Don't you love the decent caretakers that will chat to you for hours on end! I was quite stressed out this afternoon but bumped into a caretaker and he gave me a pat on the back and reminded me to chill out and just try my best. It really put a smile on my face Nice to know some staff are so supportive! Funnily enough I never expect to get such words from a teachers mouth!

Oh FFS Work tomorrow Oh FFS September tomorrow Oh FFS The staff are back Oh FFS Only a week or so until the students are back Can see the FFS forum getting a bit busier somehow

I've attached the guide I followed to put ESXi on a USB drive, I had to set the BIOS emulation for the drive to act as a hard drive to get it working.ESXi-extract.doc