RobC

You can also use Terminal Services Manager (can't remember the 2008 R2 name for it) to see which sessions are active, disconnected, etc and log off or reconnect to any old sessions that are lingering around. RobC

Adding a 2008 R2 server as an additional domain controller alongside an SBS box is perfectly fine - I've got a couple of customers who have this sort of setup. The common misconception with SBS is that you cannot have any additional DCs in an SBS domain but this is untrue - the truth is that you can have as many additional domain controllers as you want, the SBS box just has to be the PDC and have all of the FSMO roles. RobC.

I would agree with Geoff here and suggest looking at your drivers - in particular, the graphics adaptor, motherboard chipset and storage controller drivers. I've been running 7 on one of my laptops since the beta was released, and I've since upgraded it to RC (using the hack that allows you to actually upgrade) and everything runs fine. I've also run it on a second laptop since RC release and it too runs fantastic (apart from needing a bit more RAM, but that's not a 7 problem). Synack, I would also suggest for yourself to look at either your M/B chipset drivers or your storage controller drivers as it sounds like a 'read from hard drive' issue. Hope that helps guys. Rob.

Interestingly, NT4 is one that Technet doesn't have! (I've just checked...)

You can also try the Exchange Best Practice Analyser which should ensure that your Exchange box is configured correctly. When you say that e-mails are bouncing back, it could be antispam measures that are causing it. Do you route through an external mailhost or direct to the recipient's mail server? If the latter, do you have your reverse DNS (rDNS) configured correctly to match your sending domain/MX record?

MossJ - check your Graphics driver - I'm running the RC on a Sat Pro as well (one of the Celeron M models) and I've got a 3.0 score: Processor - 3.5 RAM, 1Gb - 4.5 Graphics - 3.1 Gaming Graphics - 3.0 Primary HD - 4.1 I'm still running the Beta on my other laptop & can't remember what its score is right now.

Russ, Are you sure? I've never seen that on a Technet or MSDN license. Rob.

I had a funny feeling you were going to tell us that you'd done a fresh install... In that instance, it is still most likely a patch playing up, but as to which one who knows.

When you purchased your laptop, it may have had the OEM version of Home & Student already pre-installed. If so, you may find that having overwritten it with Enterprise will have worked fine but some update may have brought the "Non-commercial Use" banner back through.

One thing to consider is that many of the Dell resellers I know continually find that the pricing available to the public on the Dell website is cheaper than the reseller pricing that they get from their account managers!

If you add the -f switch, it won't hang up on applications not closing properly either.

Gatt, Is it the Update Stage 3 of 3 issue with Vista? If so, try rebooting into the recovery console via the Vista DVD. Once in there, rename the pending.xml file to pending.old (I think it's in the Windows\system32 folder) and reboot. That should sort it out & let you in again. Rob.

Synack is correct. It is only when licensing the desktop OS (Vista, XP) through VL that you need an existing, qualifying OS on the system. The server OSs are not included and a VL version of server can be installed on a bare metal box.

Nope, you definately can't hack it to reduce the collection time - 15 minutes is your shortest period. If you want an alternative, check this page on MSExchange.org POP 3 Downloaders for Exchange. I would echo powdarrmonkey's suggestion though and look at moving to direct delivery to Exchange. In order to do this, you need a domain name (schoolname.co.uk or something like that), then you need to ask your hosting provider/registrar to create a subdomain, something like mail.schoolname.co.uk and point it to IP address of your internet connection. You then ask them to create an MX record for your domain, pointing to your subdomain (you can't point an MX record to an IP address which is why we use the subdomain). The last things you need to do are redirect port 25 from your router to your server, and tell Exchange that it is authoritive for your particular domain. I can't remember the steps for that off the top of my head, but if you need to know I'll hunt them out. If you need any help with this, let me know and we can talk.

But it's not really. If you wanted to use that analogy, then WIndows 98 would be classed as a bug fix of Windows 95 and therefore should have been free. At the end of the day, both 95 & 98 were the same code-base, were released around 3 years apart and used the same driver model, etc. Sounds remarkably similar to Vista/Windows 7. Another thing that irks me about peoples opinions of Vista are to blame a lot of the initial driver issues on Microsoft. In reality it was the hardware manufacturers who didn't get their act together to release suitable drivers on time. God knows they had long enough to test the new driver model!

We're having problems here - trying to run Microsoft Update to update an XP laptop we've got in for repair and it's just giving us either an error or a "page cannot be displayed" page. Rob.

I'd agree with David - Pretty much anything in the OfficeJet Pro L series is going to fit your needs. I've never really looked at Canon MFPs, but I've worked with the HP stuff before and it is great quality & reliability.

That seems a strange one to me as I've done loads of rebuilds on the 300 N100's and I've never once had an issue with the audio drivers. It's possible that there could be a hardware issue at play here.

Well, my new PC pro arrived yesterday and I got a round to reading some of it today. There's a VERY interesting column on the state of the ICT GCSE. I'm not going to rewrite the column for you, but suffice to say that the PC Pro team attempted the Higher 2007 paper from the AQA website and the results make interesting reading! The past-papers can be found here. The web-article detailing the scores, etc can be found here. Regards, Rob Cowan Carrobes IT

I would agree with Kesomir's suggestion regarding the switches. However, if money isn't a huge concern, I would recommend some IBM kit for the main system - specifically the EXP 3000 SAS drive array. This gives you 12 drives within a cabinet and you can use either SAS or SATA drives. In choosing which though, bear in mind that although SAS drives are more reliable and have the higher seek times, they have an upper limit of 300Gb/drive at the moment, whereas SATA drives go up to 1Tb/drive. I also believe (although I may be mistaken) that this array can handle RAID6 (N+2 redundancy) which would give you more tolerance of disk failures as you will be looking at LTO4 or greater I think to back all of this up! Cheers, Rob.

Hi Michael. I can sympathise with your experiences of the old KM-C830s. Those machines, and in fact all of Kyocera's older colour equipment, were absolute dogs. However, with the newer machines Kyocera have basically scrapped everything about the older designs and rebuilt pretty much from scratch. Both the current range of printers and the new Voyager range of colour copiers are fantastic machines which are a world away from the likes of the C830. As a testiment to this, the company I contract to has roughly 100 Kyoceras of varying models in the field, as well as five in their own office, and I am called out to roughly one problem every three months over the whole fleet. Obviously me putting this on the forum isn't necessarily going to win you back to Kyocera after your previous experiences - once bitten, twice shy as they say - however I would urge you to at least take a look again. Try & get in touch with some companies, etc locally who use Kyocera if you get a chance and just see how they feel about them now. Hopefully you'll be pleasantly surprised. Rob.

Simon, They are very simple to set up. I've worked with a few now and they really do just install like they are supposed to and are usually up & running in a couple of minutes from taking them out of the box. And if you do have any problems (which you most likely wont...), I'm a Kyocera engineer so I can help you out. Regards, Rob.

If you want cheap, reliable and very good quality, get yourself a Kyocera FS-5015. Piece of cake to set up, built in USB/network and Kyocera have some of the lowest running costs on the market. Can't say for certain about the HP 3600N, but the last time I did a comparison with HP (a couple of months ago), the cost per page was far lower, mainly due to the cartridge yields - HP is around 2000 pages/cartridge where as kyocera are normally either 4000 or 7000 depending. Also, the machine and drum are both rated to 100,000 pages so no maintenance kits required. If you want, the rest of the range are 200,000 page rated and have a maintenance kit for after 100,000 pages.

Ok, just downloaded Allwaysync to take a look again. It does have have a feature to watch for changes and replicate them, although it does insist on a delay of a minute from the last change before replicating. Not sure if that is of any use to you...

R1 to R2 is a new license, but other than that if it is anything other than OEM, then it is transferrable as long as the other machine is permanently decommissioned. Only OEM (system builder) licenses are tied to the machine they are originally installed on. Even then, there is a small quirk to that though, as if you add Software Assurance to an OEM license within 90 days of purchasing the OEM license, you gain all the benefits of volume licensing with regards to transfers. Hope that helps.