sonofsanta

Have been running Chrome alongside IE on Win7 for years now, and with the shift to Win10 I'm making Chrome the default (because lol @ Edge). The GPOs are detailed and thorough, you can force-deploy extensions and blacklist everything else, block sign in if you want, roam settings via a small profile.pb file... it's more secure than IE, more configurable than the new Firefox Enterprise and better supported than Edge. It's the obvious choice now, IMHO.

Sorry, @MYK-IT, missed the notification as I wasn't much about EG at the time! SCCM is as big and complicated as you need it to be, I find. The Windows-Noob guides are great, I followed them last time with SCCM2012 and I followed them for the install this time (they provide scripts now, which make it much easier; just a few variables to change). I've only ever run everything SCCM on one server, because that's sufficient for ~550 PCs on a single site to be honest. The VM is a bit of a beast, relatively speaking, and you need to chuck lots of RAM at it (I use 4-cores/16GB, and should probably give it more), but it keeps the set up and architecture simpler. As ever, my personal motto remains Keep It Simple, Stupid We also only use it for updates, AV and app deployment--we have a FOG server for imaging already, so I've never dug into that side of things. If you wanted to get into OSD it might need more.

You can recreate the Undo Send functionality (i.e. delayed send) in Outlook through this guide: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/delay-or-schedule-sending-email-messages-026af69f-c287-490a-a72f-6c65793744ba#__toc294769135

I'm hiding the Group2 and Group 3 folders, but now wondering why Shut down or sign out has disappeared from my Win+X menu too, seeing as that's in Group1. Logged on as admin, with the full Win+X menu, the option is there but there's no shortcut for it in the Group1 folder, so I don't know how it gets there to work out how it disappears for users

Just made use of all this--thank you muchly, @jacobjb, you're a star

What the flipping crikey? That's ridiculous. Signed & shared!

We went through this a few years back with 140 or so HDDs, mostly 250GB. Looked at the motherboards that can support 12 drives or whatever, but you ended up spending more money on them than you would on a single 3TB drive anyway. In the end, this was the best use I found for old hard drives: * Dismantle outer casing * Remove one of the magnetic platters * Get a 10p coin and place it in the hole in the middle. Should fit almost perfectly. * Tape it in place with insulation tape (gaffa tape would probably also work) * You now have a very reflective lid that balances perfectly on top of your mug and keeps your hot drink warm when the phone inevitably rings just as you finish making a brew

Bit of a necro, as Google has just dug this thread up for me... but it seems that even though the Group Policy is deprecated (WHYYYYY, MICROSOFT, WHY SO MANY STUPID ENTERPRISE DECISIONS IN WIN10, WHY DO YOU HATE SYSADMINS SO MUCH), the underlying reg key still works. I've added this registry key as a GPP item in my user policy: The full path is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer That blocks Win+R and takes it off the Start Menu, as it should, as it used to. Of course, this just makes it all the more mystifying--if the underlying mechanism is still present and working, why deprecate the GPO? It's because you hate sysadmins, isn't it. Argh. (This is on 1803, btw.)

Annihilation on Netflix. Very strange, hypnotic, unsettling, creepy, beautiful, dreamlike... and also largely nonsensical. I enjoyed it, and reckon it's worth a watch, but where Arrival was genuinely intelligent, this is a load of first-year-at-Uni metaphysical mumbling. Also not particularly related to the book beyond the idea of Area X and a couple of character details, tbh. Plot is almost entirely different.

I'd been figuring on switching to Chrome when we go Win10 (because as if I'm having Edge as the default...) but this might be an interesting alternative. I much prefer Firefox myself

Oddly compelling, this: a New Yorker article on the engineers who design paper paths and solve paper jams. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/why-paper-jams-persist

Two minute video of the whole thing, as produced by Jonathan Nolan i.e. creator of Westworld, brother of Christopher. Well worth two minutes of your lunchtime; gave me goosebumps

Vettel did more for his carbon footprint before the first corner than Hamilton will manage in a year of being vegan, I reckon

Yeah, hell of a race. Hadn't planned on catching it. Glad I did; would never have guessed the podium after lap 7, with Bottas two laps down and Ricciardo in 17th! (Vettel should have been black flagged, for my money. Terrible for the image of the sport. And then acting all innocent, "what was that for?" come oooooon)

@ICTDirect_Dave is like a child in this place

Excellent! I'm bringing my dancing bikini for the table, and I wouldn't want screencap footage floating around afterwards. Looking forward to it are there going to be tasty snacks on arrival as well? Planning whether I need to stop for a Sausage + Egg McMuffin en route or not... (don't mock me, I'm from Lincolnshire, McDonalds is still a novelty to me)

As will Dave, all night, all day, and all night again

No @VeryPC? it'll not be the same!

This, from rather marvellous SF author Charles Stross, may amuse some of you: Rejection Letter - Charlie's Diary

Managed to paste in one of the filters as the URL by mistake >_< corrected now. Thanks!

Further to this weekend's fun round the globe, here's a post on WannaCry including the extensions it uses. Not gonna lie, was a little nervous coming in this morning just in case--it's still unconfirmed how it initially breaches a network, whether it is via the usual means of a macro Word document and then spreading via the SMB vulnerability from there, or whether it's just scanning the internet for vulnerable SMB ports and injecting itself. I've long lived in fear of ransomware learning how to be as virulent as other families of malware, and, well, dark days are here :/ EDIT: for reference, things I'm adding to my file server filters this morning:

Probably late to this particular party, but watched Hidden Figures at the weekend and it is the best thing I've seen in years. So superbly, wonderfully done, and thoroughly emotionally satisfying. Y'all should be on it, pronto.

Fun fact: we sometimes get this when we install a wireless card in a PC. If it's a card we've used in the past, FOG recognises the MAC address and forcibly renames the PC to match whatever the last machine was. Caught us out a couple of times, because we're idiots (Probably not what's happening here, but might give you a nudge in the right direction)

Just my name. Because that's what people will be searching for on my writing, and I love me some of that sweet SEO magic. And it's worked! I'm number 1 (unless Google is being kind and bumping me on my own results because I'm logged in...)

Engine penalties already for McLaren McLaren suffer first grid penalties at Russian GP amid Honda woe | F1 News