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To sound a note of dissent, I've used DPM to back Hyper-V up for about six years now and it's been flawless. Backs up to local hard drives 4 days of the week and tapes for off-siting one day of the week. Restoration is a matter of clicks, just restore to original location and it will boot it up and have it running like magic (or to a network folder for off-site disaster recovery). I looked at Veeam when I last did the servers but it was an order of magnitude more expensive to licence, in the thousands each year rather than the hundred or so for the System Centre licence on our EES, and I've never felt limited by DPM in the slightest.

Everywhere else in school is on Win10 but we ran out of time to audit all the weird software and config changes on our own machines, so we're still on Win7 in IT Support. And tbh not too motivated to change that for a while!

On the bright side, without Edge maybe Windows will finally accept that you want Adobe Reader as the default application for PDFs!

Ah, marvellous--that'll be the one I'll look at then. The last LTSC was a bit too old to consider, and I had the niggling feeling I'd be missing out on too much stuff on the long term channel, but now I'm running a current branch version I'm looking at the LTSC with doe eyes and wistful thoughts. A job for once I've updated my virtual servers to 2019!

This is the problem wieh Win10 though--where before Service Packs use to be about stability and refinement, Windows 10's major updates are about adding yet another pile of half-baked nonsense on top of the foundations of sand. 1809 won't be any more stable and sensible than 1803, which wasn't necessarily any better than 1709, which wasn't any better than... etc. etc. Some problems seem to get fixed, but new ones get introduced (documents deletion in 1809, wth! 1803's improved AV interferes with stuff, too, and needs more exceptions setting), and it doesn't feel like there'll ever be a solid version of the OS. 1903 is meant to be the next LTSB, isn't it? Very, very tempted to reimage entirely again next year to that, then at least we can build towards some stability internally and not have to worry about basic functionality breaking again with the next feature update. We'd need to reimage every year anyway to stay within the 2-years-of-security-updates window that each release gets, so may as well do it right and treat this first deployment as the trial run where we've learnt everything we need to be worried about so we can get it right next time.

I can forgive the slightly anemic It's Predator, Innit plot, given that the job the episode had to do was introduce four new characters--the plot always takes a bit of a backseat in any new Doctor's first outing. I'm with @witch though--there was enough death in the episode to set the tone (they layed it on a bit thick with Grandad at the construction site, didn't they?) and they didn't need to kill Grace off. I'd hoped (fool that I am) that she'd be an anchor at home, like Rose's mum was, but it depends on how they handle the grief going forward--if, in two episodes time, Graham & Ryan have forgotten all about her and are just having lots of fun with the Doctor, I'll be really annoyed, but if they're still processing their grief and working out the shape of their relationship without Grace to tie them together, it could give a lot of depth to the TARDIS family. My favourite series so far has been with Amy & Rory handling how their relationship fit around being in the TARDIS, so it could be good to see something similarly human with those two. I thought Whittaker was halfway between Tennant and Eccleston (gods I love having a Northern doctor again ), and it doesn't feel like she's settled in yet, but it always feels that way with a new Doctor, so I know to give it time yet more excited and curious about what the new writer will bring, though: Capaldi was completely wasted until the final series, when they finally let him act his age. I know Whittaker will be good, it's Chibnall who I'm crossing fingers for! She looked better in Capaldi's old get up than her charity shop ensemble, though. Missed opportunity that.

That setting got disabled on my very first pass through the GPO settings in the earliest days of configuring this bl%dy thing we've turned it off and disabled it in every way we can possibly find, and yet still, if you watch a UE-V folder the first time a user logs on, the very first settings that get synchronised are for flipping Cortana! I've turned off User / ADM / Start Menu and Taskbar / Do not use the search-based method when resolving shell shortcuts (and tracking-based method) too, but if you type in exact command (e.g. mstsc) it doesn't need to search, technically speaking, and so shows the program even though no shortcut to the program exists on the redirected Start Menu. I've disabled access to all MMC snap ins apart from ADUC (which would require us to provide the MMC file anyway, and has security set on the tree) and Event Viewer, which may well be useful to us at times without presenting much of a risk. Cheers for the heads up on that one.

The settings page visibility thing is already available under Computer Config (on 1803, at least)--bit of a PITA when it locks it all out for an admin, too, and you end up having to apply a temporary GPO to undo it if you need to change something, but it's better than nothing if you need to lock down users now, anyway showonly:about;appsfeatures;bluetooth;colors;dateandtime;defaultapps;display;emailandaccounts;network-ethernet;network-wifi;powersleep;printers;privacy;personalization;troubleshoot;typing;windowsdefender;windowsupdate;easeofaccess-display;easeofaccess-magnifier;easeofaccess-highcontrast;easeofaccess-narrator;easeofaccess-audio;easeofaccess-closedcaptioning;easeofaccess-speechrecognition;easeofaccess-keyboard;easeofaccess-mouse;easeofaccess-eyegaze;easeofaccess-otheroptions

That looks to be mostly true (although is an improvement on my initial fear!)--strangely I can start certain services (e.g. Data Sharing Service, Office Source Engine, quite a few others but not all) and then can't do anything else to them. Which is probably not a problem? But is still something I shouldn't have to worry about! "The Start Menu should only show things actually in the Start Menu" doesn't seem like an unreasonable request, but oh no, got to make sure that Mixed Reality Viewer is available to everyone on our 7 year old i3 desktops... Some of our staff use an MMC to enable Controlled Assessment accounts, with appropriate limited permissions granted on the relevant portion of the AD tree. That's the only thing that's come to mind for me so far, and so I can probably block for students and be comfortable with that compromise.

Looks so good. The first Creed was surprisingly compelling so I'll definitely be watching this

I hadn't found that hole yet. I knew you could get mstsc from the Start Menu thanks to its stupid searching, even though I've turned off all the tracking based and shell based searching and what have you, but I hadn't realised it let you go through the UNC paths. Staff folders are protected by NTFS permissions, thankfully, but the student folders are bloody open thanks to the permissions inheritances set up. Guess that's my job for this morning, then... :mad: ETA: it lets you open services! Just type services and there it is! Auhfughuhgugh Any ideas on how to block that? I'm wondering if there's ever any reason a user would need mmc.exe and if I can just block that outright, tbh...

I've never much been in the market for network management, more for classroom management, but we've used LanSchool for about 5 years for that latter purpose now and always found the product reliable, light on resources and the least interfering when it comes to other software (e.g. Impero was breaking Edge for us, Securus broke IE for us once...). Easy to install via MSI and easy to configure via GPO. It's also the cheapest option per year from what I've seen; we actually ran for a few years without support because it was working, and just picked it up again (at only a few hundred quid) to get an updated version that'd work on Win10. Support have always been fast, helpful and knowledgeable, and sales don't pester me which is always bonus points as far as I'm concerned With the new stuff being added in as well (e.g. safeguarding keywords with screenshots), I'm getting tempted to let a couple of other contracts run out and consolidate onto LanSchool alone soon.

Gods, I feel your pain @ICT_GUY. Well, some of it: at least I have techs to help me. I don't know how you're managing it all as a one-man band. I've had Win10 at home for a couple of years and liked it, and I thought I'd waited out the early teething problems everyone here had been posting about, so I didn't think the upgrade would be too difficult. I'd done the job once before in moving from XP to 7, after all, and that went really well, and cut down on our day-to-day issues massively. I knew there'd be work involved--better just to filter out all the old GPOs and work from scratch, albeit leaning on old configs to make sure you didn't miss anything--but I didn't think it'd be too hard. Bloody hell. I didn't half meet reality with that one. This entire OS is built for two markets: (a) consumers (b) people who live in Microsoft Surface adverts. The ability to administer it centrally has gone backwards by a decade. There are things we can no longer control by GPO but have to do by tweaking the image, which--ha ha--isn't exactly easy to update if you change your mind later. There are settings that have lost their GPOs and now require obscure reg keys. There are settings that change every six months with a new update and when you try and Google an answer you get something that applies for 1709 but it won't work on 1803, don't be silly! Old stuff gets deprecated before the new stuff is ready. IE being dropped in favour of half-baked Edge is the obvious example, but afharfkaytkaytwjywegge:mad:sgesgaetg UE-V! Granted, Roaming Profiles were not perfect, but they did what I wanted in letting people move between computers. UE-V, the supposed replacement, works some of the time for some of the things and doesn't work quickly enough for some other things (Start Menu, Sticky Notes) and is incapable of doing other things altogether (email signatures! Because who needs them in a corporate environment, ffs). It's like the developers get excited about a new idea and develop the first version in a rush of inspiration and get it working 85% of the time, then realise the remaining 15% of edge cases & documentation & helpful error logging will take just as long with far less dopamine reward and just... move on to the next thing. (Currently extra-annoyed at UE-V as it somehow, mystifingly, seems to break Word & PowerPoint 2016's Share > Email. HOW. HOW IS IT INVOLVED AT ALL. WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE.) They seem to think, as others have said, that we all live in an age of 1:1 devices, or worse, 1 user:4 devices and we all move between a desktop and a Surface and a laptop and a flippin' HoloLens and need a different experience on each. But we don't! We all move between functionally identical desktops where the only difference is the IP of the printer I want connected! I want the Start Menu customisations to roam and the default apps to be the same and everything to be easily configurable from a domain controller! But no. Because they're not developing Windows for the bread-and-butter corporate customer anymore; they're chasing shiny consumer features, and never mind those of us who get the blame when it's their stupid mess. Never mind if you don't want Cortana, or the Solitaire Collection, or things to actually work on the first login. Never mind. Right, enough ranting. I've got to try and fix the default app for PDFs for the fourth time...

I spent weeks fighting with GPP printers when we went to 2008R2/Win7, but I could never get it working with 100% reliability. It was fine 99% of the time, but 500 computer x 5 periods a day means that 1% comes up a lot. We use a VBScript now, not as a logon script but through User\Admin Templates\System\Logon\Run these programs at logon (linked to the computer OU and applied to the user via loopback processing). That stops it slowing the login down, and although the printers take around a minute to install after the desktop appears (depending on the driver etc.) Office is clever enough to pick them up as soon as they're added without needing to close & reopen the program. The only problem is that this policy doesn't stack like logon scripts do, so you can only ever run one thing through this setting; that's fine for us, but if you already use it you may need to set it as a login script instead. Dim server Dim printer ' replace "printserver" with the name of your server; no particular need for the DNS suffix server = "\\printserver\" 'List printers, separated by a comma, with the default printer first e.g. 'printers = Array("IT Lobby - HP M880z (U)", "Te2 - HP X451dw") printers = Array("N2 - HP X585z", "N2 - Epson XP-860", "Ar3 - HP M651") Set wshNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network") on Error Resume Next 'Deletes all existing network printers, to make sure only the correct printers for this location are available Set clPrinters = wshNetwork.EnumPrinterConnections On Error Resume Next For i = 0 to clPrinters.Count - 1 Step 2 wshNetwork.RemovePrinterConnection clPrinters.Item(i+1), true Next 'Add Network printers for each printer in printers wshNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection server & printer next 'Set Default Printer (takes the first printer from the list above) wshNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter ps0 & printers(0) That has worked far more reliably for me than GPP ever did. Does mean you have to start from scratch, though, so @skell's linked solution may be less work for you at this stage if you have the GPP infrastructure set up.

Oh mate, I'm so sorry. I know how much she meant to you. Go easy on yourself, and give yourself permission to grieve. It is difficult, and there's no shame in it being difficult; it means she was loved.

Just realised my second post isn't related to my first post but is the other issue I'm having with MS and discissing on TechNet. I'm having so much fun with Windows 10! Anyway, if you're having the same problem @jmak this is the TechNet thread for that problem, not the stupid Share\Email problem https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/Office2016ITPro/thread/a4f4c9e3-4c73-42b7-95f9-a737253f22e9/

Still working through this in a TechNet forum, but I am slightly staggered and irritated by the discovery thus far that disabling either Microsoft Windows Defender or Microsoft UE-V allows Microsoft Word to talk to Microsoft Outlook on Microsoft Windows. Is it so much to ask that the different parts of Microsoft just talk to each other?

Now that Windows 10 is deployed and mostly-working (does the treadmill of stupid loopholes ever end?), I'm looking at updates, and wondering what the best strategy for them is. Under Windows 7, I filtered out the cumulative updates and only installed each month's update. By the end, though it took about two days for SCCM to get a PC fully up to date as there were so many, so I was considering switching to cumulative. But then I just checked the file sizes, and the 2018-09 Update for Win10 v1803 for x64 is 13.34Mb, and the 2018-09 Cumulative Update for Win10 1803 x64 is 755Mb, which is... quite the difference. I'm not sure how they manage that given that this is only the 6th patch for 1803, but hey, Microsoft gonna Microsoft. I gather there's this fancy new Express mechanic where your SCCM server downloads the cumulative patch and also a load of delta files so that clients can grab just the subset of files they need, but the recommendation is you plan for 5Gb per update when using this. 5Gb! I know the quantity of Windows updates had gotten a little unwieldy in the past, but it's hard not to feel like this is some rather stupid overengineering to solve a problem they created themselves. They've reinvented individual updates except you need to have every possible combination of updates packaged up because, I dunno, reasons. Progress! Anyway. There doesn't seem to be one obviously superior method, so I'm wondering what others have chosen and why: do you push each month's update, the cumulative update or use Express?

Under GPO, User Config > Admin Templates > System > Prevent access to the command prompt. You'll also want to set Prevent access to registry editing tools while you're there. I can still get cmd up on the Start Menu, despite the shortcut being in no redirected menus and various other GPOs set to stop such nonsense, but all it does is open a CMD window that says The command prompt has been disabled by your administrator, so whatever. Too many other problems getting this OS into shape to worry about that right now!

Oh no! They were always friendly and easy to deal with, as well as mighty good value for money. CPC have the range but ye gods, that website. FWIW, the last headphones we got were from CPC (as Hills have been out of stock of their robust headphones for ages; maybe that's why their turnover dropped! D: ) for £3.95 each at quantity. Decent enough.

Caveat: measure your comms cabinets first. If it's a smaller wall mounted one (rather than a floorstanding full rack) then a PoE+ may not fit in; they're a lot deeper than non-PoE switches. I have learned this lesson the hard way. A general recommendation for the HP Comware switches; better value than the other HP stuff and have been rock solid for us. Specific models depends on whether you need 10GbE, Layer 3 etc. Talk to SwitchShop, best networking company I've known by far (and if you get on their mailing list you get chocolate at Christmas and Easter!)

Installing a PHP/MySQL server on Windows 2012 R2 took me about an afternoon at most, and is conveniently written up on my blog here Part One covers the web server, PHP and mapping the drives for students, Part Two covers the MySQL side of things (so you can ignore it if you don't need web applications) I'm guessing the instructions will be pretty much the same for Win 2016 tbh

This is a frustratingly specific error that somehow end users are managing to find repeatedly, and is a right PITA when they do find it. Just upgraded to Win 10 (1803) and Office 2016. If I open a Word document from a user's mapped drive (connected via the user object in AD), make a change, go to Save As then go to the UNC path (e.g. a redirected "Documents" under Quick Access), Word complains that If I select the first option, it looks like it's saved--it doesn't offer any further complaint--but it hasn't saved. If you go to close Word straight away, it will prompt you with the usual unsaved changes, do you want to save warning; clicking Save gives you the whirling blue circle for a few moments then doesn't close Word. Clicking No closes Word, but the changes are lost. In summary: it's not saving. If I select the second option above, different name, it just takes me back to the dialog so I can use a different filename. That does allow me to save, so it's not a permissiongs thing (it's the same folder via two different routes, it couldn't be!). If I select the third option, it complains that it couldn't merge. If I choose either 1 or 3 now, then go to Save As again, it then starts prompting in the usual Save As fashion (i.e. You already have a file named $file. Do you want to replace it with this one?) which is what I'd expect all along. But it still doesn't save! It does this both ways: I can open from Documents and fail to save to the mapped drive, I can open from the mapped drive and fail to save to Documents. It does this even if I Run as Administrator. If I open from the UNC then go to save to a subfolder on the mapped drive where there's no existing copy, it saves fine. PowerPoint behaves similarly, albeit with different dialog boxes. Excel, strangely, is fine. Still amazes me how fragmented Office is as a suite after all these decades. Basically it seems like it's seeing the UNC path and the mapped path as two completely different paths, and acting as if two people have the file open, even though it's one file and one user. It's leading people to think their work is saved, but it's not, and thanks to Win10 deprecating roaming profiles we can't even go back and rescue from tmp files now we're on mandatory (AutoRecover files don't get kept as it's not crashing, it's being closed by the user). It's proving a right swine to Google, so I'm hoping someone here has hit something similar--nearly every Google search ends up back on EG anyway, after all

First Man! Ryan Gosling starring as Neil Armstrong, and covering the Space Race from Gemini up to the Eagle landing. The reviews from Cannes were really good too. I get goosebumps just from the trailer.

It, er, it wasn't an ActivPanel pen I first thought of when I saw it. Tell me I'm not the only one! What a design to give the first female Doctor