Iain.Faulkner

Afternoon all, Got a problem with printers being deployed through group policy. We're running a windows server 2008 environment with most of our clients running Windows 7 (having upgraded from Vista in the summer). All our networked printers are deployed using group policy and under Vista this seemed to work fine. Since we upgraded to 7, we've been experiencing problems in that for some machines the group policy will run fine and allow people to use the printer and for others it won't. I've checked a few things on one client where the policy deploys fine and on one where it doesn't, and they both seem to have the same group policies applying to them (on the report I've produced for both machines, neither makes reference to the printer policy). My only guess is that the policy is not being called correctly, but I don't know how to resolve this. Has anyone come across this before? Does anyone have a solution? Many thanks in advance.

I've been hit by a car/been runover when I was a cyclist....it was my fault, the police and the insurance company said so as did the cycling profficiency officer who was driving behind the guy who ran me over (unbelievable I know!) and If I'm truly honest, they were all correct in what they said. It was my fault, there was nothing the driver could have done. I have to agree with Hightower on this, cyclists can cause accidents as well, it's not just bad drivers or drunk drivers which cause accidents. Is it also not illegal to be drunk in charge of a bike?

We're school of 1250 students and we have approximately 350 machines for curriculum usage, meaning a ratio of around 1:3.5

Shame i ordered our HP Procurve switches a few weeks ago!

My other half's son has just started high school at the school I used to go to...even better he's ended up with about half a dozen of my old teachers! I really hope I get to go to Parents evening :-)

I actually did celebrate christmas the other week :-) VW Action's theme for the weekend was Christmas comes but twice a year :-) quality weekend

Morning all, I've got a slightly weird issue with one of our PC's and a local printer. PC is running Windows 7 and the printer in question is a HP Laserjet 4000t. I've got two files, both of which are a series of pages of labels to be printed. One document I can print a single page of my choosing, the other I cannot and this is where the problem lies. The person who has raised the issue would like to be able to print a single page of the other document. The only difference between the two documents is that one was originally created from a mail merge. But surely this can't make a difference to this? Any suggestions gratefully received as always :-) Iain

I spent a good 2 hours on the phone last night to Adobe (having to ring 4 different numbers, speaking to 4 seperate call centre representatives who each kept fobbing me off onto someone else) support trying to get them to assist me with deploying CS5 across a network, not one of them could tell me about the tools which Adobe provide free of charge, and then they had the nerve to lock me out of the licensing centre and then tell me we were only licensed for 82 machines and that the license we'd bought over the summer only gave us licensing for an additional "1" machine!! Thankfully after speaking to Pugh, who we'd bought the software from, they gave us a link to the adobe tools and confirmed the licensing was correct!! Thank god for Pugh :-) Adobe Support = Waste of Space!

I'm spending today in our reception area, partly to be helpful as there are no admin staff in today (on results day!?! who's bright idea was that?) However, I'm finidng it quite a nice change, plus my office has flooded twice over the summer and stinks, so I'm much preferring being in a nice well lit office with natural light that doesn't smell, even if I have to answer phone calls and redirect students, plus it means I can get most of my desk based work done.

Due to the size of our rooms, a traditional "horseshoe" layout wouldn't work for us, so we've had to modify it slightly. We have however gone with fastening the trunking containing the power and data onto the back of the modesty panel so that kids can't access them. This has been a godsend, we haven't had one issue of kids unplugging the power or network cable in our IT suites in the year they've been in :-) *Edit: just thought I'd add some pics of how our rooms used to look...believe it or not our ICT Co-Ordinator actually prefers how they used to be.....madness! B6.pdf

Hi all, Thought I'd resurrect this thread rather than starting a new one. I'm looking for a few companies who will supply me with desking for our music department. Ideally I'd be looking at a multiple tiered approach. Has anyone done this recently? Cheers in advance Iain

We'd been told there was no money for anything major this year....then last friday we got an email saying we want one of the Tech rooms turning into an IT Suite and we want it doing over the summer, please can you cost up...gave them costs of £17k and they didn't bat an eyelid!! Where do they just find this money from!

We bought 360 PC's from Ergo last summer....only a handful have developed problems. Really impressed with them, especially as they gave us a buffer stock of spare parts so if one develops a fault then we can swap the part ourselves and just send the faulty part back. Saves so much effort and time!

That's awesome, now working perfectly :-) Thanks again Gatt

Hi Gatt, Solved the initial problem, it appears I had to allow the WDS Server to create the computer within the specified OU. Still struggling the the second bit, the Computer is clearly "Known" to WDS and as such won't treat it as "Unknown" (makes sense) where it would then prompt for the PC username to be entered and approved. Any idea how I make this computer "Unknown" to WDS. I've tried the command you sent through previously but that hasn't resolved it.

Hi Arthur, I've already tried this (having used that particular blog as part of my build process :-) ), and it doesn't pick it up. I wonder if it's actually ignoring my answer file completely.....

Hi Gatt, Just trying your approach to this, set it up to prompt for approval which it does successfully and assigns the PC a request ID. However, when I try to name and approve the PC in WDS I get an error (which I failed to write down infuriatingly! Now, when I try and reboot the PC back into WDS it fails :-( Is this something you've seen before?

Afternoon all, Just a quick one. Believe it or not I've got a fully prepped windows 7 image that I've managed to capture and I am able to roll out as I require. There's just one or two niceties that I'd like to add to the image to make our lives easier when it comes to actually doing the full rollout. Bascially, I'd like to get it so that WDS prompts me for a computer name prior to adding it to the network. Has anyone else managed to achieve this?

If you absolutely have to go down the Mac route, try "Admit Mac" for adding the Mac's to your Windows domain. Allows user authentication, and also allows mapping of home drives and isn't massively expensive. This is the route we've gone down, and we've managed to avoid having to buy a mac server. However, as has been said before, insist that the Music department (or the school) pay for you to be trained on them. We've got 6 in school for Media Studies, and we said we didn't want them in school, we said that we would need to be trained to support them effectively. We were ignored, and now they have a problem which we don't even know how to begin to fix.

Thanks Faza, Once the council unblock the website for me(!) I'll take a look and drop you a message :-) Thanks again.

Hi Faza, Have you got the URL to the sharepoint tips website you used? This is something I'm looking at doing over the summer and will need all the help I can get! :-)

Well she's home :-) thoroughly enjoyed my 40 mile drive home in her and can't wait to take her out again to Camperjam over the weekend :-)

Solved! Turns out there was a problem with the boot.wim file, replaced and all now working :-) Just a little tinkering with the answer file now to allow a full unattanded install to take place :-) Thanks for all the suggestions

Tahnks again for your advice guys, I've actually just made a significant forward step though, in that I've managed to get the PC (which has 4Gb Ram in it) to roll out a base Windows 7 image unattended....so at least it's going in the right direction. I will try uploading a new nic driver though :-) thaks again.

Still not resolved :-(