maniac

Just reaslised you're using the /i option. I didn't bother with that and it worked fine for me without it - it may be worth giving it a try without the /i and just the .BGI file immediatly after bginfo.exe just as a possibility. Mike.

It takes a split second to run on my system. I've got it setup to customise the wallpaper for students with their user name and logon time in the top right hand corner, and also customise the logon screen with some text that says who the last user to logon to that machine was, trying out the psychology that the users might be less inclined to damage the computers if they know their name's going to be on the front screen when they logoff. Both of these are called from a VBS logon script, although I worked out BGinfo doesn't like it if more than one instance of it is running, so I had to put a delay in the script before it called the second one, but that's only about 2 seconds to allow the first one to complete. You have to put the /timer:0 in the command or it will take a while, as by default it does have a 15 second delay when you run it with no switches. Mike.

Ahhh, yes sorry miss-read your origenal post. That is a login script to modify the student desktop background. However, I also have it working on a startup script to modify the background before login, but I couldn't get it to work like you are trying to, so I cheated and got it to generate the .BMP file into a folder, and used a Registry hack to get it to display on the logon screen, that works fine but does require a restart of the workstation before it displays. Startup script runs the BGI file in the same way your script does, but also calls regedit to apply some settings - In the full script there's a marker file placed on the HDD to indicate if this has been run, so it only runs once. VB script to call registry file WshShell.Run "regedt32.exe /s \\DOMAIN\NETLOGON\STUDENTLOGONSETTINGS.REG" Content of Registry file STUDENTLOGONSETTINGS.REG Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop] "Wallpaper"="c:\\bginfo\\system.bmp" Then get BGinfo to generate its BMP file as C:\BGinfo\system.bmp and that will be your background at the login prompt, works well for me. Mike

I am using BG info sucessfully with VBS script. I have a startup script which copies down the correct wallpapers and the BGinfo program locally to the machine in the same locations for every workstation, but the BGI file is on the netlogon share so I can make clobal changes to it easily. I then use the lines; Set objWshShell = CreateObject( "WScript.Shell" ) objWshShell.Run "C:\bginfo\bginfo.exe \\DOMAIN\NETLOGON\BGINFO\Students.bgi /timer:0 /NOLICPROMPT" To run the program from my student login script. Works like a charm for me Mike.

Just when you think you've seen everything off-line files can possibly do, yet another weird one I've not seen before raises its head. All Staff members my documents area (N:\ on our system) is automatically made available off-line on laptops, exactly the same as it was on the old system. I've got some staff however that are experiencing a very weird problem. When using the files off line they all open as blank documents - every single one of them. if put the laptop on-line it's all OK again. The strange thing is if you create a new file in off-line mode, that file is then OK both off-line and on-line. I've tried resetting the off-line files cache and re-synchronising the laptop without any luck, it still does the same thing, and I've checked permissions on various things and can't see anything wrong. I've set this up exactly the same as I've done many times before on networks, and I've never seen this behaviour before, has anyone else? Mike.

Secondary school with about 410 students, and around 80 staff. We have around 550 machines - yes that's more machines than we have students. We have an extremely large quantity of laptops - about 2/3 of our machines are laptops, only around 130 desktop PCs. There's 3 of us - myself as Network Manager and 2 very good techs. Very hard work at the moment, as we've just rebuilt the domain and moved away from RMCC3 as well as setting up our new Business and enterprise area at the same time. We are now at the troubleshooting stage where the kids have come back and nothing's working quite the way it was planned to, although so far no major problems which is good Mike.

I love Tim Minchin, saw him live earlier this year or late last year - can't remember exactly when - genius!

The ownership is irrelevant. All ownership of files and folders dictates is who can control the NTFS security permissions on that file or folder. It's the NTFS permissions which control who has access to it. It's perfectally possible to have a folder that a user can't access, but that user can still be the owner of the object - being the owner does not dictate access rights. Mike.

I use Kaspersky internet security 2009, and was so impressed with the way it worked I brought the enterprise version for the school. Just sits there and does it's job, no intrusive popups or reminders and doesn't noticeably slow the machine down either - I like it. of course it's not free like some of them, but it's worth buying. If you want a free one, Avast! is getting pretty good reviews at the moment, I use that on an old Dell laptop I use every now and then and it seems to do it's job pretty well. Mike.

The way Ric describes is how we do it, I have a security group called 'Change Student Passwords' which has the rights to do this delegated on the correct OU, and I use my easy password change tool - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/23952-easy-password-reset-software.html - to let them actually change the passwords - works a treat. Mike.

I've been running SP3 for ages thou, and I've never noticed this issue before, unless somehow I had the patch installed without my knowledge or I just didn't notice the problems.

How the hell did you find that so quickly! At least it's a known problem, I can fix it now @Oxide54 It won't go away I don't think, it's very consistent when the change password at login option is ticked. For your information, the profile is owned by Administrator but AFAIK it makes no difference, as the students are only reading the profile and nothing else. I think DMcCoy has hit the nail on the head.

This one has really got me. Normally I'm pretty good at figuring out problems like this, but I just can't work out what the hell is going on with this one. We run a mandatory profile for all our students now, I've worked with them before and am quite familiar with the ins and outs of setting one up. I set it up weeks ago, and tested a handful of students with it on various machine, and it worked brilliantly, everything as it should be no worries. Come to today, first ICT lesson of the day and I get called to the new Enterprise area which I was kind of expecting. If I hadn't been so busy I'd have been there anyway regardless, but I needed to get on with other jobs if I wasn't actually needed. Students were able to logon, but it was logging them on with a local profile, and half the settings wern't working properly. I watched a couple of students logon, and it wasn't even attempting to load the profile, it was skipping past the 'loading your settings' screen. I've spent all afternoon on this one, and eventually narrowed it down to a specific set of circumstances. If the box for 'change password at logon' is ticked then the logon behaves in the way described above. If it is not ticked then the logon is normal and the profile behaves as it was designed to. Why does it make any difference if the user changes their password at logon? It works fine this way for roaming profiles that staff use, so what's different about the students mandatory one? I've got 5-6 weeks to try and solve it (because I've unticked the box for forcing the password change for now, and the students will just have to change their password manually when they logon) but in 6 weeks time it will prompt all the students to change their password and if they do it at login, it will log them on incorrectly and cause all sorts of problems. Can any help with this? I've never come across it before and I've googled and can't find anything like this mentioned anywhere - it's completely stumped me. (Before anyone suggests it, all the permissions are correct I've double and triple checked this!) Cheers, Mike.

Have you imported the user.man file into regedit and checked the permissions within the file itself? I find that's the most common reason for mandatory profiles overriding GPOs, that the permissions within the actual file are set so only the original user the profile was created with can read and write to it. Mike.

That's what I've done, but directed it to the users home area as we want the students to have the ability to have their own favourites list, but I also want the ability to add global ones to the list and preferably pin them at the top of the list. GPO has a way to do this, but it doesn't seem to work with mandatory profiles. @sted I had thought of using a script, but we already have a lot of scripts running on our domain, I was trying to avoid adding even more to the mix if possible. Mike.

We run a mandatory profile on our new network, which I've edited to re-direct the favourites folder to the students 'my documents' area. I want to add some global favourites like a link to the webmail service, learning platform etc. but I can't get it to work. I add them in the right area of Group Policy, but they just fail to appear on the favourites, presumably because I've re-directed it to a different folder. Anyone got any ideas what I could do to get this working? It works for staff who use Roaming profiles, just not on our students mandatory profile. Mike.

I have to say FOG as well, as it made the process of imaging nearly 600 machines over the last few weeks pretty near painless, and it does user tracking . . . . . . and it shuts our machines down at the end of the day . . . . . . and it logs off the kids if they leave a machine logged in . . . . . . and it multicasts. . . . . . . and it lets me remotely rename machines. Fog is a bloody brilliant tool, it just keeps getting better and better with every release.

SLT have been warned that the chairs won't last, but they wanted it to look as business like as possible. I talked them out of getting wheely ones however and we got the ones with the 'glides' on instead. I'm hoping they will respect it, as it's a really nice space, and literally everything is brand new (apart from the interactive boards and the Wireless Access Points!) Time will tell! Mike.

Well this is how it ended up. Photos taken on my phone as I didn't have my camera with me today. Just haven't had the chance to take any more in-between, but what a transformation, we're very pleased with it. http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/DSC00543.jpg http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/DSC00544.jpg http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/DSC00545.jpg http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/DSC00546.jpg There's 2 other rooms as well, but there were meetings going on in those at the time. Mike.

We've just purged a lot of our old machines, so there's going to be areas of our school which formerly had desktops which will no longer have them, and the staff don't know that yet. They were grossly under used and just sat there gathering dust most of the time. If they insist on wanting to keep hold of the older machines, providing it's not adding too much to your workload, then I'd let them be on the understanding that if/when they go wrong you won't be wasting your time fixing them and they will be going in the bin. Most staff members will understand this approach and take to it fairly well. Mike.

I must admit I rarely use windows key shortcuts, it's always CTRL-ALT-DEL and then K or just hit the space bar (as it's the first option.) I've always done it like that, dunno why just habit I suppose. Mike.

Ahhhh, interesting. We've just brought into KAV as well this year, and we are also seeing a slowdown on Applying Computer Settings, although I put it down to there being a glitch on our new network as everything is totally new, but maybe I was chasing the wrong thing. If anyone can shed more light on this I'd be very interested. Mike.

Considering both me and one of my techs were in Saturday and Sunday this week, I think we deserve today off. I think we managed to catch up enough so that our new Business and Enterprise area is going to be finished on time, although only just - we've still got 40 PCs to put out and wire up as well as some AV work still to do and the whole place still looks like a bomb site!

You would have to do it the way Ric suggests, as FOG stores it's images in a totally different format to ghost. It shouldn't take too long - just ghost a machine as normal, but before it re-boots send the image to fog and you've got a fog version of the same image We took the opportunity to renew all our machine images when we transferred them to Fog. Mike.

Fed up with less that satisfactory sound solutions with tones of wires everywhere, or speakers with the sound controls on the back of them etc. - when we were shopping for bits for our new business and enterprise area, I thought I'd give these a try. Vision CS1300 ceiling speakers & Techconnect AMP - Misco.co.uk Installed them all today (yes I know it's a Sunday, but we were running behind time) and the sound from that little amp is absolutely amazing! We're running 4 speakers from each one (2 per channel) and it really does work as well as they show in the video. The only draw back is when you're on channel 1 and there's a source playing into channel 2, you can hear it faintly in the background, but we can live with that - I've only wired it up to one source anyway. It's not quite as full a sound as you'd get from a bigger amplifier, and there's obviously no bass, treble or balance adjustments, but for classroom use it's absolutely perfect. Just thought I'd share that. Mike.