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Is purchasing some high powerered standard pcmcia cards an option? 4 AP's sharing a 1Gb pipe to the core should be sufficient. The type of switch they are connected to may make a difference. Are you using romaing, madatory profiles, etc...how big is it? I take it when you get your new core switch you are going to utilise the spare fibre that is your 8 other cabinets? The gbic modules are pricey but you will have nearly double the bandwidth available with this change. We're looking at a whole school wireless solution at the moment...this post has helped.

Hi, What is the location of these AP's? Are they connected or within a 100 metre radius of your core switch? If so, do you have 7 spare 10/100/1000 gb ports on your core switch? if you do, you could have them cabled to your core and you would have a connection as fast as it possibly can be for your current set-up. This isn't a massive job at all. If you don't have any spare gigabit ports, you could look into the cost for a module. We have a HP 4108GL and a refurbished 6 port module cost me around £100. A 24 port is £675.00 if on an edge switch, each Ruckus AP is like a 30 port switch. If this is just connected to a port on a switch which as you say has another 47 ports then the bandwidth is limited to the pipe going from that edge switch to the core. Are other switches in the cabinet also sharing this pipe? If it's an edge cabinet, how many actual fibres do you have? 1 x OM1 fibre? total, 1 per switch, etc? Gary

John, If you have just upgraded, you certainly shouldn't need to create new ODB and DSN, that could cause you big problems. As you would have needed to re-name your facility folder to facilityold and create a new folder called facility, it sounds to me like the folder is not shared or the permissions are wrong. This has thew me a couple of times in the past. It should just be a case of sharing with the same name as the shortcut points to and granting the correct permissions. If you can't sort it quickly, I would just call Serco, raise it as a crictical issue and they will sort it for you straight away. If you have remote support, any agent should easily be able to remote in and tell you what is wrong. Hope this helps! Gary

Thanks everyone for all of the posts, much appreciated. It's really good to see what people with set-ups similar to us have done. Our monitoring hasn't been to good, we've recently installed Cacti and Nagios and are trying to get it working. We run a creative and media diploma so there is lots of streaming video, large downloads going across the network. Our media suite was very slow because we had a single 1gb OM1 fibre serving 4 HP Procurve switches, mostly 48 port models. Running 3 CAT5E cables to the other 3 switches in the cabinet has helped significally. Something else we're thinking about is getting a whole school fast wireless solution. I have thought about having all AP's wired straight back to the core switch to provide maximum speed....where within the 100M radius. This does seem a 'messy option' though but would surely provide the fastest speed and no work other than purchasing for example 2 X 24 port GB modules for our HP 4108GL and the actual physical cabling would be required. Dong it the traditional way of just having the AP points wired back the nearest cabs wouldn't be quick enough with our current set up. I need to do some thinking, lots of options, upgrade the core switch, get better links to the feeder cabs, AP's back to the core switch, etc. Thanks again...keep the responses coming!

Hi all, I'd be really interested to know what links schools have from their main cabinet to feeder cabinets. Have you got 1 fibre cable to each cabinet? are you using Ethernet or both, is the fibre OM1 (1gb) or OM3 (10Gb) etc.? We have one main cabinet with 2 X HP 4108GL's connected together via GB stack. Our 7 feeder cabinets all have an OM1 1Gb fibre cable going to one switch in the cabinet. Some cabinets have 1 switch, some 2 and some even 3 or 4. To increase speed quickly and cheaply we have run some CAT5E to a couple of the cabinets close by which have multiple switches. The top switch is already connected via fibre then for the other 2 or 3 switches we have added a CAT5E cable which runs back to a 1GB port on the core switch. It seems to work well and you can pick up 6 or 24 port modules for the 4018GL pretty cheap. All our HP Procurve switches are running at 100/100 but ideally we would like to replace them for GB and look at replacing the core switch. Problem is, if the pipe back is generally just a 1Gb fibre, I really can't see there will be a gain and it seems too messy to be running the amount of Ethernet cable you would need to provide a suitable pipe -I would say you need 4GB per 48 10/100/1000 switch. Are schools using OM3 10Gb fibre or have you done the same as us or have people got GB switches with just one 1Gb fibre cable back to the main cabinet? 10Gb fibre just looks too expensive to me! Thanks very much in advance.

that was so funny i printed it out and have stuck it up on our wall....i'll show that to our slt who are keen for students to have laptops!

Hi, Have you had a search online to see if you could acquire the same brand of motherboard? This would be the easiest fix. If this is not an option, is it a single drive? If so, what type? If it was for example a SATA drive, the first thing I would do is put that in a caddy or another computer and get a copy of all the data. Another option might be to boot from a CD that allows you to access the hard drive. You could then copy all the data to an external drive, etc. If it's a single drive, you could possibly use cloning software to take an image. Once you know you have a copy of the data, you could put that hard drive in a different server and try a Windows repair/install depending on what's best for the situation. Repair/over the top install might be messy but if there lots of software installed and configured on this old server, might be the best way. Hope this helps.

Hi, Yes, I eventually got it working with our mandatory profile. For us, it turned out to be just one setting preventing the Start Menu from redirecting : - User Config\Admin Templates\Start Menu & Taskbar "Remove User's folders from the Start Menu" Hope this helps. Gary

Hi J, Thanks a lot for sending, will try soon. Just checking, do I call the .cmd file joindomain.cmd ? Thanks! Gary

Hi, Thanks for the quick reply and yes, if you could send me the script that would be great. If it can just show me what bits I need to fill in, that would be great! Cheers. Gary

Hi all, We are quite new to using Windows and Sysprep is a different kettle of fish to the XP version I am use to. I have followed Brian Lee Jacksons Sysprep guide and all works well apart from I am not sure how to get a machine to automatically join the domain? Is there a setting in the unattend.xml file or do a need an additional xml file or a vbs script? We are using FOG to capture and deploy the image. Thanks very much in advance for any help/advice. Gary

We only have this problem with user areas on a server 2008 r2 box. user areas on server 2003 are unaffected for us. I don't know why...i'm just glad! I changed the permissions on the desktop.ini file for the user on our server 2008r2 box. We have 100, took an hour or so but no issues sincce.

There is a big post on this here : - http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/53531-windows-7-deleting-users-home-directories.html We have installed Win 7 on 10 machines in 1 of our labs and haven't had user areas deleted but it has renamed user areas to 'Documents' The fix I used was to give Administrator 'deny' on read permission of the desktop.ini file. Deleting the file also fixes the problem (but I wasn't too keen on doing that!) Out of interest, are your user areas located on a server running 2008? We only have around 80 user areas on a server 2008 machine (creative and media diploma students) the rest are on a server 2003 R2 and these have had no issues in 2 weeks. For us, the link seems to be 2008. Hope this helps.

We have 96 staff and had a quote for just Win 7 upgrade and Office 2010 which seemed very reasonable. Also, (i'm told) staff can use the products you buy on their home computers at no cost and students can but a boxed copy of the product at the individual coat, i.e (for us) Win 7 = £12.93 and Office 2010 £17.58 Hope this helps.

Hi all, We're testing Win 7 and have an issue where students can see all the hidden files on a drive we use for running apps. I have logged on the machine as local admin and set it correctly but when they log on, still shows the hidden files. Thought it may be written in their mandatory profile, edited the profile making the change, wrote it back, same problem. Tried applying the following reg setting through GPO but still they can see these damn hidden files! Am I missing something obvious here? User Key: [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced] Value Name: ShowSuperHidden Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value) Value Data: (0 = Hide Files, 1 = Show Files) Thanks very much in advance. Gary

Fixed!....my fault, after trying every possible way of creating a profile and logging on as multiple users, the issue was simply I had forgot to give 'Domain Users' the relevant permission to C:\Windows\Application Data. All seems to be working fine now.

Microsoft UK Education - Types of Educational Licence - EES

You can choose what software to license. I received a price for Windows 7 and Office 2010 based on 92 members of staff (anyone who does over 200 hours a year who could have a access to a computer) Here are the per year prices : - 92 x WinPro ALNG UpgrdSAPk OLV E 1Y Ent £12.93 £1,189.56 92 x OfficeProPlusEdu ALNG LicSAPk OLV E 1Y Ent £17.51 £1,610.92 Teachers and students can also purchase boxed products at the indivudual price listed above. We got our quote through our software reseller which in our case is Phoenix Software. Hope this helps! Gary

Hi all, I have recently started testing Windows 7. Created new GPO's which seem to work ok. I created a new mandatory profile which I intend to use for students and teaching staff. I did this the MS way. The situation is, if I log on to the Win 7 machine as Domain Admin or Local Admin, everything works fine. These are both using the local profile (with a size of 218MB of mainly temp files) If I log on as a student, teacher or even myself (full Domain Admin rights) every time I load Office and quite a few Adobe CS5 titles, it fails. Office just shows a load of Chinese symbols. I've tried removing the profile so it creates a new one and have given all users Admin Rights all round to see if its permissions related. Tried putting them in an OU where no GPO's are applied. Still doesn't work. Basically, it will only seem to work if a user is using that local profile. I've even tried copying the Application data folder (212MB) to the mandatory profile we want to use. Surprisingly it logged on at the same speed but still didn't fix the problem? Has anyone get any thoughts, suggestions or advice? Thanks very much in advance. Gary

Sophos sent me a document containing a list of steps that needed to be carried out before you deployed Sophos to a Win 7. Certain things to turn on/off, adjust, etc. I can't actually find the document anymore but it may be it should be easy enough to find from their knowledge base or give them a call. Personally, I've never done anything other than run the installer but like I said, we did have some huge problems last year which started after we upgraded EC to version 4.00. Since using web to do the updating, don't recall having a it fail on a single machine. Maybe you should give it a go? I thin the 2 can run side by side. Ask them to set it up for you. If you're not getting far with tech support, contact your Account Manager. That's what I did and the next day I had a specialist call me back who stuck with me on a daily basis until we got the problem resolved.

Hi, We had MAJOR problems with Sophos last year, it just went on for months, not specifically Windows 7 but something that has fixed all the issues we had was installing Sophos as a web service through IIS. The machines get their updates via this website. Sophos themselves remoted in and did everything configuration wise and it has been working perfectly on all machines including Win 7 since then. Once thing I will say is I tend to install from the machine as I’ve never really trusted doing it from EC, I just prefer to install, reboot and confirm it's on and working correctly. Hope this helps. Gary

'Sunderwood' We don't have the option to right click in the nav pane...not sure if locking this down will help (although can't remember what setting I used....sorry!

Hi, Cheers, done that now, network icon gone. Is it possible to use the libraries and redirect them to the user area?

We're looking into how to hide the navigation pane right now....keep you posted.

Thanks for this great info for preventing libraries. I am using the way of 'Enable Disable Known Folders and adding the values but the only one I can't seem to get rid of is the Music Library? {2112AB0A-C86A-4ffe-A368-0DE96E47012E} - Music Library I've tried putting it at the top and bottom of the list to new avail. Anyone got any ideas why this one is still being displayed? Thanks very much. Gary