maniac

Must admit I'm not sure how to deploy it as I don't personally use it, mainly because I have lots of machines with memory card readers in where all sorts of different drive letters are in use, so I just let them pick the first available one when they plug them in at my school. Mike.

The Sale of goods act etc. that people have comment on only applies to private individuals as end consumers, a school is classed as a business for the purposes of the act, and transactions and sales that take place as business to business transactions. You'll find the guidence here much more relevant Buyers' terms and conditions and unfair contract terms | Business Link Mike.

That will be active Desktop getting in the way. If your wallpaper is a BMP and is set manually, but then you enable active desktop, you'll find active desktop will display over the top of your BMP wallpaper. What happens at login is the BMP wallpaper is displayed at the very start for a few seconds until active desktop kicks in. Solution - Turn off actrive desktop or set the wallpaper with active desktop turned on to the required one. Mike.

Taaa Daaaaa . . . . . USB drive letter manager - USBDLM

I throughly recommend spending a bit of time to get RADIUS authentication working on your wireless system, then you can distribute the settings via GPO, and the network will be more secure as a result, not to mention easier to manage. Once you have it setup it just works. Mike.

The only system which we are required to retain the information in is SIMS and the finance system as far as I know, both of which deal with their own archiving inside the program, so as long as you have up-to-date backups should the worst happen, as far as retaining data is concerned you're covered (as far as I'm aware.) All the rest is merely a service that is provided to the student or staff member while they are in attendance at the school so we don't retain anything network wise for that long. We keep Students work on the network for 6 months after they leave, and it will be available on backup tapes for a further 12 months until the last monthly backup with it on gets over written. Same for staff home folders and e-mail accounts. Please someone correct me if I'm wrong. Mike.

I have loads of restore discs from HP TC1100 tablet PCs which will load on other machines as well, although you'll need a valid license key if it's not HP. One of those any use to you? Mike.

I don't have a home network, I just have - 1 PC which is getting on a bit, Duel core 2.4GHz, 2GB ram and 2 x 120GB HDD in RAID1 for the OS, with a 750GB External E-SATA drive for all my storage needs. 1 very old phillips 17 inch TFT monitor. (manufactured 2003 - owned since new) 1 Router, BT home hub thingy. 1 Dell laptop, quite old, hardly used. That's it! I spend all day working with PCs, I really can't be bothered with them at home. This PC does everything I need it to do, including running a few virtual machines for testing. It's badly maintained, and badly in need of a re-format as it keeps crashing at the moment and it's driving me nuts! Mike.

Personally I've not seen any installations done by Promethean themselves, so I'm not sure what kit they use, but there's a high chance it's just a universal security cage of some sort. Thing to do really is get one down if you can and have a look at it in more detail. Mike.

We don't cut it off completely, just the long tail. If you look at them carefully, you can see the bit which actually clips it into the socket, cut it down to this and it still clips in firmly, but you can't get it out without a small screwdriver. It actually makes them less likely to be broken off completely as well, as they don't stick out so much. Mike.

We have webcams on out latest batch of laptops. Originally they defaulted to save on the HDD of the machine, but with a very simple reg hack this was re-directed to the users home area. The security permissions stopped the files being saved anyway, but it wasn't hard to re-direct the default location to somewhere else. I think webcams are very useful, and with more and more emphasis on multimedia technologies in teaching, and the use of learning platforms for video conferencing etc. it won't be long until we're expected to have them on all PCs. Mike.

With a registry hack, it's possible to change the power options to only turn the screen off when the lid is closed and not put the laptop into standby mode. We then use the fog client on our network, which logs the user off after 30 mins of inactivity and closes the machines down automatically at 6:00pm in our school. If you don't have FOG, it is possible to add a simple scheduled task using a startup script which will call the shutdown command at whatever time you want, I did this at a previous school and it worked well. Mike.

If you cut the little tab shorter on the RJ45 plugs, they can't get them out. Sure it means you need a little screwdriver in order to do it yourself, but it saves a lot of hassle - we do that on some of our PCs here. But has been said, it's a classroom control and discipline problem, and not a technical one, raise it with you line manager and make it quite clear that you won't be going out of your way to rescue kids work if they do this. Mike.

Actually funny enough it's 4.15 I'm using, it must have been out for a while as I downloaded it quite a while back so I kinda assumed it would be an older version. Mike.

That's a good point, the version I'm using is an older one that I had already downloaded a while back - it does the job so I stuck with it. That may be the difference. Mike.

This is actually affecting all staff at my school, I had no idea it was so wide spread until I went round today and looked at most of the laptops, and sure enough in offline mode, every single document is just a blank file. Windows knows the size of it, it's just they open up as blank documents. The only solution I've found so far is to copy the users files onto a portable HDD, remove them from the server then copy them back to their home share through the laptop - then they work properly. Obviously this isn't really a solution more of a work around. I've tried: Resetting the offline file cache - no change Unticking the encrypt offline file cache option that we had switched on, then resetting the offline files cache - no change Putting the user in the generic 'users' group incase it was a GPO messing things up - No change Resetting the users profile - no change Putting the laptop into the generic computers container and updating group policies - no change creating a brand new user with no roaming profile, just a re-direction on my documents - no change It leads me to thinking that it's a server configuration problem, but the permissions are exactly the same as I've used before when setting up offline files. Staff have read only access to the root of the share, and full rights to their user area. This should work, I know it should because I've done it before. Can anyone suggest anything else I can try before I lose what little amount of hair I have left through pulling it out in frustration, as this problem really has got me well and truly stumped at the moment. Thanks in anticipation Mike.

Check the permissions on the root share if you're using offline files. If the user does not have read permissions to this share, then offlines files will not work even if they have the correct permissions further up the tree. This knowledge base article may help Users may receive an "Access is denied" error message if you make files and folders available for offline use this caught me out when setting my new system up, as I had permissions in place to stop users browsing the root share, but still allow them direct access to their own folder - this arrangement does not work with offline files. Mike.

My UPS's are wired directly in to fused spurs after one or two incidents of them being un-plugged. Infact we had a brand new sub main put up to the server room just for the server rack after we had so many issues around power up there it became silly. I would definitely advise against an extension lead, that's just one more link in the chain to fail. I have had servers running from extension leads before, but it wasn't the best solution and we soon had an additional plug socket put in where it was needed. As for the high AC voltage, we get this from time-to-time and also get it going the other way, low incoming voltage in the evenings sometimes. We have spoken to the electricity company regarding this, and essentially they say because we're in a residential area, the supply will fluctuate with supply and demand on the system. Apparently the tolerances they work between are 210-250 volts - I had no idea it was a wide as that! Mike.

No way, you're kidding right?

I wish you the best of luck, but without sounding too harsh only applying for 4 jobs and not getting an interview is not that many really, I applied for probably over 50 jobs before I got my current position, probably got interview for about half of them (and a few job offers that I actually turned down for various reasons, mainly because they were worse than the place I was working at the time) before I got the position I have now. The secret is to broaden the sort of job you're applying for as much as possible, apply for jobs even if you think you might not get them - sometimes you'll be surprised and just keep at it, something will come along eventually. People over analyse job adverts and won't apply for some positions if there's just one thing on the ad that they don't have, I do it the opposite way round when I'm job hunting and if there's one thing on the ad that I can do, then I apply for the job. Mike.

If they're the locks I'm thinking of then they're called Tubular cylinder locks and you can get them cut but it's a specialist job. If you know where to go, you can get any sort of key cut you need to. I've used these guys once before to duplicate master keys for a lock system where the manufacturer no longer exists, and they did it for me with no hassle (kinda worrying, but at the same time quality service) They may well be able to do the Tubular type locks as well. http://www.metrolocks.co.uk/key-cutting Mike.

Mine is doing machine name, username and time and date of logon. It is slower on wireless laptops, but on my cabled machines it's literally half a second or less for it to run. Mike.

I thought you would have done, hence the apology in case it had been as I wasn't going to go through the whole forum to look for it.

Apologies if it's been posted before, this is nuts - I want one! [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs]YouTube - Samsung SSD Awesomeness[/ame] Mike.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that was quite astounded the CS4 silent install was so strangely packaged, and only appeared to like running manually. Luckily I had this setup in time to include it on my build, so it got put onto the machines as part of the imaging process. Just as well really, as we've brought a site license for it (well 500 workstations anyway) although we're only running it on about 120 of our better machines at the moment. Mike.