srochford

The problem is that you're not alone - there are an awful lot of people who want to get into IT. Loads of them are really very good at it and you're going to be competing with them. You might also be very good but it's still a very competitive field (100+ applications for a post is not uncommon) You started by saying you wanted a job in networking but if you go into a school or small business then you're not going to do just networking - you're going to do everything. If your interest is in how routers and switches work (for example) then you'd probably want to look at working in a much bigger place where there is more specialisation. Do you have any experience of setting up networks (either just the network bit or the servers or desktop machines)? If you haven't, then you really need to get some experience either on a voluntary basis or as part of a course because once you start applying for jobs you really need to be able to show some experience - unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to get an IT job without some experience (and, of course, it's hard to get experience until you've got a job!) Don't give up, though; if IT is what you want to do then go for it - there are lots of people here who can give advice (and lots of other people who will benefit from eavesdropping :-))

How much is the lease charge? You need to get a feel for the total cost per page; obviously, that goes down fractionally as you do more pages. If it looks like being about the same price then it's worth doing - all the hassle of getting things fixed becomes "someone else's problem" (although you should try and get references from a comparable establishment so you can see how good they are at delivering consumables, dealing with repairs etc).

Too late now for the original request, but for anyone else wanting to travel in London English - Journey Planner - Transport for London is brilliant @dom_ - obviously far too much money if you think getting a London cab is a good idea :-) There is a direct bus from KX to Waterloo which would cost you £2 if you're paying cash (and should have accepted your tube ticket if the tube wasn't running)

are you sure??? As I understand it, this will stop anyone except admins logging on to the console of the machine (so no domain users can log on, for example) By default, "domain users" is added to "users" when a computer joins the domain and "users" is allowed log on locally. You could change it using GP so that you have a group called (say) local_users and this group is allowed local log on but "users" is not. You then add "domain users" to that local group and things should work.

Just a quick reminder - if you want to come and work in the IT department of a world class University then you need to get your application in today!

Too late now, but most manufacturers will deliver to desk, unbox at desk, plug in etc - there's typically a charge for this (some will say it's "free" but TANSTAAFL applies ...) Dell (and other large suppliers) will preimage - again, they may charge and there may be paperwork involved (typically they want proof that you have licenses for everything they're putting on the machines). We buy from HP and we no longer have an image put on the machine (too many different images would be needed so it's not worthwhile) but they do asset tag the machines and provide us with an XML feed of data about the machines that we import (so we get asset tag, serial number, mac address, model etc in our host database before delivery)

You do like conspiracy theories too much :-) (and, apparently, the police do know where he is)

Given that it's called the "world" cup, doesn't it make sense that it moves around the world? If Wikipedia is correct, half of them so far have been in Europe so isn't it about time we moved it somewhere else? Africa got a look in this year but there's quite a lot of people in Africa so perhaps they should get a look in before it comes back to Europe. I wonder if our response to winning the Olympics influenced the decision? At a high level there's been lots said about how wonderful it is to have the Olympics in 2012 but if you read the press or listen to the radio in London, all you get are people whinging about the chaos it will cause to traffic, the high price of the tickets, the fact that the tubes will be over crowded and so on. If that's how much people want the Olympics, perhaps FIFA didn't believe David Cameron when he tried to sell the idea of England hosting the world cup!

Given that the average poll gets about 0.5% of the membership, I'm not sure that it would be a statistically useful exercise :-)

Could be something to do with your (loud!) signature ??? :-)

I'm guessing the OP wanted to use Excel because they know how to query it - for a single user, storing data in a spreadsheet is better than in a CSV or text file because you can store your filters, queries, charts etc The problem is that it doesn't scale (nor does CSV or Access) and you really need a proper database to make it easy. Given that SQL Express (or MySQL) is free it makes sense to go straight to a proper database.

Setting the spreadsheet to not visible will speed things up a bit but that's not going to the problem if you use this for real - it's currently writing data to cell A1 which is fine for testing but no good if you use this for real because you'll only ever get one record. If you actually want to know more than the details of the last student to logon then you've got to find the next empty row and put stuff in there. This web page Monitoring Computer Usage is something I wrote ages ago. It's a login and logoff script which records the username, computername, on time and off time for each logon. You need to have a SQL database (SQL Express is fine) and the line: sConn="provider=sqloledb;data source=SQLServerName;initial catalog=logoninfo;uid=username;pwd=password" needs changing so that SQLServerName is the name of the SQL server (eg mysqlserver\sqlexpress), logoninfo is the name of the database and uid and pwd contain the username and password. The logoninfo database needs a table called logonoff with the fields: username - varchar[50] compname - varchar[50] ontime - datetime offtime - datetime and also an id field (just an integer set to be an identity) You also want to set non-unique indices for the other fields - this will make it easier to find when details of a computer or user.

You can use OLEDB to write the data to Excel but what you're doing really needs a database.@synack has just recommended SQL Express for just this purpose and I'd agree with that.

When I was in Kent this morning it was snowing quite a bit :-)

Looks like a cut-down version of Orca (How to use the Orca database editor to edit Windows Installer files) - eg I can't see how to create a transform file in this program. The KB article suggests Orca is "retired" and no longer supported but it does still work.

We're advertising for an IT Support Engineer. Details here IT Support Engineer - Imperial College London - jobs.ac.uk and the JD and form are here https://www4.ad.ic.ac.uk/OA_HTML/OA.jsp?akRegionCode=IRC_VIS_VAC_DISPLAY_PAGE&akRegionApplicationId=800&transactionid=23427238&retainAM=Y&addBreadCrumb=S&p_svid=22257&p_spid=1123022&oapc=7&oas=OBMWI5lmE_iNVi63fzTTag Salary in the range £26,860 - £30,680. In the first instance, this job is likely to be split between the South Kensington and Silwood Park campuses.

On the server copy of the profile, delete everything under Local Settings - there's nothing there that needs to be in the local copy of the profile, it will delay the logon even if it works and I'm guessing you're just hitting something like "path too long errors"

Used to use it in my previous job (an FE College) and it is provided by RM. Essentially it provides a proxy server so you point your own proxy server at the Janet filter. It's fairly basic - you can't do things like saying "this group has access to these sites but this group does not" - it's an all or nothing system. We used it because it was free and there was no money for anything better. Details are at JANET Web Filtering Service

This is what we say to visitors using our wireless network Roaming Section 2 on this page Policy 2 might be easy to adapt for any visitors.

If you make a user admin on their local machine they won't be able to browse other user home folders unless the permissions are wrong on server where the folders are. If you make a user a member of domain admins then by default this will give them the local rights but will give them far too many rights - they will be able to browse home directories (and absolutely everything else) If you use Active Directory Users and Computers then this won't directly let you set someone as a local admin - if you put someone into an admins group there, it's the domain admins group. If you want to make this happen for quite a few users then one way to do it is to create a group called (say) workstation_admin and add your users to that in ADU&C - that gives you a group you can manage centrally. Now you need to add that group to local admins on the workstations. The easiest way to do this is to use a group policy. You need to have all your computers in an OU (they can't be in the default computers container) and then you create a GPO which is attached to this OU. Edit the GPO and go to Computer Configuration/Windows Settings/Security Settings/Restricted Groups and choose the group administrators. Add to this administrator, domain admins and workstation_admin When the group policy next applies to the workstations in this OU, the membership of the administrators group will be reset to just the 3 you've added above (you can obviously add whatever you need). Note that this will get reset by group policy so if you change the settings on a workstation they'll just get reset.

@burgemaster - I assume you're running that as part of machine startup (or your build process)? A normal user wouldn't be able to delete those values. For most apps, that's not going to cause a problem but I know we deploy some apps (VMWare player comes to mind) where we've put in an active setup that we really do need to run for a user (it's trivial, doesn't display anything on screen and takes a fraction of a second but it was the easiest way to make sure the VM settings are configured properly for the user)

One major change from Server 2003/XP to 2008/Windows 7 is the introduction of client side rendering - basically, this is designed to take the load off the (perhaps busy) server and move it to the (perhaps not busy) clients but it can cause problems. You can turn it off on the server and see if that helps. CSR adds some info to HKLM for each user who uses a machine; I think that this may cause the driver to be downloaded if a particular user hasn't used the machine before (even if the printer has been used on that machine) There was a problem with one of the versions of the HP UPD Ant's Blog » Uncategorized has some info about it and a fix. This caused us big problems (although the symptoms aren't the same as yours) What is there in the event log? Check out the Applications and Services logs | Microsoft | Print Service | Admin - there is probably lots of irrelevant info there but there might be something helpful. All this just makes me hate HP even more - I know they make pretty good hardware but their software (and their sad excuse for a web site) is just rubbish!

Apart from giving people a reason to make fools of themselves, why do mains plugs now come with those plastic covers? It's not as if the pins need protection against scratching - they're pretty solid chunks of metal. American and European plugs don't seem to be fitted with them.

Definitely "lol" but not totally true - IR are probably very good at collecting the small amounts of money from mere mortals but let the likes of Vodafone get away with not paying billions in tax!!

Active Setup is a system used by a number of installers which need "something" to happen when each user uses the package that has been installed by an admin. If you look in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components you'll see a set of GUIDs which identify various packages. As a user logs on, Windows checks this list and compares it with HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Active Setup\Installed Components. If you look at the list under HKLM you'll see that there's a version value for each one. If the version value is different (or missing) under HKCU then Windows runs the stubpath program from the HKLM bit. So, if you want to stop the active setup stuff running, one way is to try and capture what happens after a user logs on but sometimes this doesn't work (it writes stuff into HKCU which points to a user profile path that won't exist for other users or it writes the UNC of a home directory etc). The alternative is to either delete the Active Setup values from HKLM or just add the matching stuff to HKCU