maniac

Well it's definitely turned on on my network, and BGinfo sets the wallapaper with no problems at all. I think if you define a wallapaper in the policy, then it does display in front of the BGinfo Bitmap wallpaper, but you can still have active desktop turned on as long as there's no wallpaper specified. Mike.

Where did you read that BGinfo needs active desktop disabled? We have it enabled here and it works fine, and we simply set the GPO option "Users\Administrative Templates\control panel\display\prevent changing wallpaper" Which stops the wallapaper being changed. That works a treat for us. Mike.

Yeah, see my edit to my origenal post. I tried that as well, but didn't get on with it, it didn't seem to work as well as Robocopy does missing out a lot more files and folders when I tried it out.

Never tried using robocopy before I've always used Xcopy or various other command line utilities, but as we have over 250GB of data to migrate over from our old servers to our nice shiny new one this year I thought I'd use it - particularly as I discovered someone's written a GUI to control it with - genius! So if like me you hate typing in lines of text to get programs like robocopy to work, try downloading the Robocopy GUI written by a guy on technet. Utility Spotlight: Robocopy GUI you still need the utility its self, but this makes things a whole lot easier. There's also a relatively new file copying utility called Richcopy http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.utilityspotlight.aspx but I didn't get on with that so well. Oh and it does work, but I think there's a small bug in it that puts the task complete message box up straight away, and to the casual observer the program doesn't appear to do anything, but look at the log file and the folder its copying to, and you'll see it's working in the background doing its job. At the end you can scan through the log files for any errors. (It's at this point that everyone tells me they already know about this already ) Mike.

One thing that annoys me as well that it, TFT screens being set to anything except their native resolution always looks rubbish.

It was relatively easy to break Windows 3.1. Our old school network (when I used to be at school) was based on it using RM NET LM 2.0. You could circumnavigate a lot of the restrictions by putting an .EXE file in your home folder that was named PROGMAN.EXE which it then used as the shell, and there was another program used used for the quotaing, which again you could circumnavigate by putting a .EXE program named the same as the quota program in your home folder. The genius thing was they gave us Visual Basic 3.0 to play with, which I prompty used to write a live chat program much to the annoyance of the ICT teacher - only because he tried to do the same thing himself, and didn't ever get his to work - mine worked a treat and I believe it carried on circulating around amongst students for another couple of years after I left. Those were the days!

I have a friend who no word of a lie has 7 middle names, one of which is McClean. Apparently his dad only wanted one son, so he got all the possible names. Always makes me laugh if he ever has to give his full name for anything. Mike.

Natural selection at play if ever I've seen it. Always makes me smile when I see that again.

Funny this thread should come up. I found this at the back of a cupboard we were clearing out the other day; http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/DSC00375.jpg Which I then promptly installed onto a virtual machine, anyone remember this . . . . http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j29/mredman/Misc/DSC00376.jpg I also still have stored up in my loft Widows 3.1 and 3.11 on floppy discs, along with loads of old programs like Micrografx Draw, Word 2, Excel 4, Powerpoint 3 etc. and about 6 different version of DOS. The first network I managed was a Viglen one based on NT4 server, which was amazingly stable really, soo migrated onto a Server 2003 based network thou. We still have some servers running server 2000 on our system, although not for much longer! Mike.

I was looking at that very site earlier, guess it depends exactly what you type in the search box as to what comes up - Nonsense in, Nonsense out. Mike.

Thanks for that mac_shinobi Just out of interest where did you find it or did you just happen to know the code? I've searched for ages and the only codes I found were for ASP web pages, or used really complex methods to grab the data. And yes srochford you're right, stretching it is not an option for this background - we've got pre-defined boxes on one side of it which BG info will populate with info for us (Specifically logged on username and logon time) and these need to be the same size and in exactly the same place on each background for BGinfo to put the text in the correct place. Also stretching it just distorts it all and makes text look naff, and I want our system to be top notch in all respects. Thanks all Maniac.

Any ideas on how to achieve this? Google isn't helping much, and I've not tracked down a single script that works. Is it even possible? What we want to do is host the background for student desktops locally on each machine to save on network traffic, so I want to write a VBS script to copy down the correct version from the server the first time the workstation is started up after imaging, but to copy down a different version depending on screen resolution as we have a nice wallpaper designed by one of my techs that works well with BG info, but it needs to be displayed at the correct resolution to work. Can anyone help! Thanks in anticipation, Mike.

Look at E-buyer, they are selling Pro for £80 on preorder unlike most places which seem to be charging £89 or £99. http://www.ebuyer.com/cat/Retail-Boxed-Software/subcat/Windows-7

As long as it's not harming the system, we couldn't care less what's on the students memory sticks, that is their responsibility and the responsibility of the parents. As long as the material doesn't originate from within the school, as far as we're concerned it's not our responsibility. You have to draw the line somewhere, and that is where it is drawn in our school. Mike. EDIT: I will add that if we do find 'unsuitable material' the school does take action, but we don't pro-actively go looking for it like we might in their home areas.

"There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, Damned lies and Statistics."

In theory a lot of compressed files puts more overheads on the server decompressing and compresing them again, and also can cause problems with backups in by experience because of the decompression it can slow it down. Also it gives the kids one less thing to fiddle with. I've done it now by re-formatting that partition on my storage server which has had the desired result, and the compress these files tick box is no longer available. Mike.

It's 15 metres, and I can quite believe it's real. However what they don't take into account is when there's more than 1 machine on a circuit, as then the information gets all muddled up surely, which as you said makes it useless in the real world! Mike.

I'm assuming here that you're not employed by said company, but are contracted in every now and then to sort out their IT? If I'm wrong, please excuse, but from my experience setting up networks for small businesses and assuming the above I'd recommend the following; Firstly forget the full versions of server 2008, exchange etc, What you want to run on it is Microsoft Small Business Server, which comes with cut down versions of programs like exchange so you have a solution out of the box which does everything most small businesses want. Windows Small Business Server: Overview Buy servers from a reputable company like HP or Dell, who will sell a server pre-installed with small business server and will provide support for it as well. I always go massively over spec when pricing one up for a small business, as most of them expect to get 5-6 years or more out of an investment like that, and it's perfectly achievable if you buy the right hardware to start with. I concentrate on storage and buy servers populated with plenty of discs, and try and set them up with a 'hot spare' drive to provide maximum resilience when a drive fails (which will happen, it always does) If you've only got a small number of clients then you won't need a massively powerful server, although I would buy with at least 4GB of RAM as it will be running a lot of processes if you go down the SBS route. Take advantage of most servers ability to send out automatic notifications if there are problems, and set it up so it e-mails the companies office address and the boss (and also yourself if the company are happy for you to do that). HP's server monitoring is particularly notable and will e-mail you at the slightest problem which is pretty handy, sometimes even notifying you of a part that is failing before it becomes a real problem. One area a lot of small businesses over look is a UPS device. It is absolutely essential if you're running server to include one of these in your recommendation, and set it up so it shuts everything down properly if the power fails, and also more importantly starts it all back up again when the power is restored. Small businesses just want an ICT solution that works with little to no maintenance, something they can stuff in the back room and forget about so everything should be able to look after its self with little to no user intervention - it is achievable. Another area is backup solutions, I would avoid tape backups - they are too clunky for most small businesses with no dedicated ICT personal and require regular cleaning and monitoring to make sure they are working. I would recommend signing up to a remote backup services of some sort (assuming the business has a broadband no-limits internet connection) there are many who specialise in backing up small business server, and it doesn't cost the earth either. Failing that, you can buy a fireproof/waterproof USB or Network attachable storage device, and use that for your backups and set the backup software to automatically overwrite the older backups, then it can just be left doing its job with no tapes to change etc. This isn't ideal, as hard drives are notoriously fragile and are not ideal backup devices, but I know from experience that most small businesses will forget to change tapes, or not put any in there to start with. If the backup software is setup properly, it should notify the business or yourself of any problems. I've set up networks for a quite a number of businesses in the last few years, and I've seen some shocking installations that I've had to sort out! One business I helped was in a similar situation to where you are at the moment, they had about 5 clients all networked to one file server which was just running windows 2000 (The rest of them were running windows 98 at the time!) there was no backup strategy, and no fail safe devices on the server. The business owner was blissfully unaware of the risks to his expanding business of the set-up he had, and most are. Once you make people aware of the risks of doing things the way they are, they are usually more than willing to spend the cash on sorting it out. I guess the final piece of advice is don't try and do it on the cheap, it's an 'all or nothing' type affair in my opinion. If you're going down the road of introducing a proper server, then you really should encourage the business owner to do it properly and not cut corners, they will thank you in the long run. Mike.

I though Nortel Networks were a subsidiary of BT, or the two were closely associated with each other at one point. The SEGFL network used to use Nortel routers for schools on 2Gb copper about 4 or 5 years ago. Great big things they were, but they worked well. Then everyone got upgraded to fibre. Mike.

Rather than cloneing the screen, run the projector as a second screen as if they were side by side. The teacher can then drag powerpoint or whatever program is it into the second window, and carry on working in the first. It can be a little confusing to the staff at first, but we've got one or two at this school who do things this way, and actually prefer it now to the normal method. Only drawback, some IWB's won't work properly in this configuration. Mike.

I've never managed to get this to work either, gave up in the end as it was easier to keep moving them around AD manually! Mike.

Also if you set the 'delete profiles at logoff' option (can't tell you where it is off hand) and make sure that the number of cached logins to be saved is set to zero on the security settings, this will stop them from logging in without the network cable plugged in even if they have just logged in a few seconds ago, they'll be no details saved. It's an old trick that students have been using for years in the schools I've worked in. We have a super mandatory profile on our new network (going live from september) which won't let them login unless the network is connected. Changing to mandatory profiles is surprisingly easy and I recommend it for anyone running a vanilla type windows network. Mike.

Yes, I've just been reading about this - seems the only reasonably easy fix. Was hoping to avoid having to reformat that drive, as I've just sorted out all my permissions, but it'll be easier to do it now than later I suppose. Mike.

If you remove the option to read attributes, it denies them access to the folder. Denying them access to Read extended attributes, and write attributes and extended attributes still allows them to compress the folder. I'm determind to find a solution to this one, not because I need to so much as I really want to now!

That's almost precisely what is happening. What you need to do is turn the option on in Active directory that deletes cached profiles at logoff, that way you won't get profiles littering the machines. You can also script the DELPROF program to run at machine startup if needs be this will remove all user profiles off the machine. Of course be careful not to do this on their own laptops, or staff won't be able to use them oustside the building. The best thing you can do to reduce profile size is to redirect the teachers desktop, and possibly also their Application Data folder. Teachers love saving anything and everything to their desktop, so by redirecting this to their homefolder, you stop all this clogging up the user profile. We direct it to a folder called Desktop inside their home area. Application data isn't so bad, unless there's a lot of programs installed on the machines. Be warned, re-directing application data can have repercussions if you're using off-line files, as it won't syncronise properly if any of the files are in use, which they quite often will be in this folder. In my opinion best left where it is. Mike.