srochford

You have to have the profile on the machine while the user's logged on. @Bio has pointed to a GPO setting (it's for Windows 2000 but I don't think it's changed since) that will delete these profiles when the user logs off. UPHClean makes sure that profiles are closed cleanly at logoff (which is needed so that the group policy stuff can actually make them be deleted) but you can also use delprof (resource kit tool) as part of your machine startup script to clean up profiles which are left over following machine crashes etc.

What @burgemaster is suggesting is not a roaming profile - the profile won't get copied back to the server when they log off because there's no profile path specified. Given that, he would be better with a mandatory profile but it won't speed up the login process (you need to remove some of the active setup items if you want to get rid of things like IE setup) The mandatory profile will stop profiles being left on machines as users log off (unless the machine crashes or is hard powered off)

@jamesreedersmith's delete statement should do it (but del not delete) but you might also want to set the folder to read-only so they can't put more stuff there. You could do this with a group policy to change the permissions.

I think it's fascinating that a government that's talked about transferring power out of Whitehall to local people now seems set on removing control from locally elected councils and taking it back to the centre! I don't know that we want a "more equal distribution of money to schools" - we want a distribution that reflects the needs etc of schools (if one school has buildings which are falling down and another has good buildings then it doesn't make sense to give them equal money. Similarly, if one school has a population that joins at age 11 and leaves at age 18, they may need less money than one where there's a 50% turnover of pupils per year). These are the kinds of things that local councils ought to be able to deal with and central government can't do so well.

Many people now use Facebook instead of email - it's the way they keep in touch with each other so for them the idea of Facebook running their email is just an obvious extension of what now happens. I'd guess the trite phrase "we need to educate users" is probably needed here but I've no idea how you actually do that :-(

I've worked with people who are dyslexic and it doesn't affect their ability to do IT. You will find people who think you're stupid or lazy because they just don't understand - that's their problem! By all means use a spell checker but be aware of the pitfalls of the spell checker giving you the "wrong" word - for me, a good sign of someone who's dyslexic is the document that passes a spelling check but has some "uh; what does that mean" bits in it. If you have to present documents to other people then can you get a colleague to check them for you after you've done the spell check etc - that way they'll pick up on the odd things that you might not notice. Good luck!

Fantastic machine - spent several years working with them (and then the 480z which was the successor). Scary thing is that I think they were about £2000 each in 1980 - you get rather a lot more machine for that money today :-)

We use SafeCom - Home Don't really know what it costs but it's not ridiculous - "full cost recovery" comes in at about 2-3p per mono page (ie that covers the cost of leasing the equipment, toner and paper). We use HP multifunction devices and it's all supplied by Welcome to DTP Group - Managed Print & Copy Services - Enterprise Solutions - HP Gold Preferred Partner who are generally pretty good (but we're a big organisation with 2 full time DTP staff on site)

Still some modems here - NASA JPL uses one to connect with some hardware we have (they have a proper internet connection but the modem is there as backup!)

I wonder if this is true any longer? Have you used Google Picasa? The face recognition is pretty amazing. If you can do that with free software running on a desktop PC I wonder what you'd be able to do with more computer power? Tie that into stuff like collecting pictures at tube gates and on buses and linking them to Oyster data (you won't have a registered Oyster card but that means you stand out from all those who do) and I think it might be quite difficult to vanish in a crowd!

Don't think you can see if a new message has gone into a folder without opening the folder. Unfortunately, Nokia's Exchange client is still poor - it's better than it used to be (when it didn't even handle folders) but it still has a really clunky feel to it.

The big problem with getting people to Google for what they want to do (or come up with a descriptive sentence) etc is that this only works if you even realise that you might be able to do this. For example, styles were mentioned earlier. I think they're one of the most powerful features of a word processor (or DTP package or web design) and yet they're rarely used - people don't ask "how can I apply formatting and then easily make sure it's consistent across documents and can be updated at will without having to change every file". They ask "how can I make the heading bold and centred" I think it's useful to learn about all the things you can do with the package - hopefully, you'll then know "I've seen something like that before; I'll Google how to do it" but I'm well aware that even to briefly look at every facility in even the major Office packages could take rather a lot of time!

You have to specify which folders you want to synch. When you have the folder list visible, scroll down to a folder you want to keep synchronised and press the left button ("options") - you'll see "subscribe to this folder" - select that and it will synch the folder contents. Once you've done that you should get access to the messages you want (but if it's like mine it will just randomly synchronise; it's currently telling me I have 7 unread messages even though Outlook tells me I've only got 1 (and Outlook is right ...) Has anyone used an N8 yet? Does that actually have an email client that works???

The letter really needs to be written so that it matches the school's actual situation - copying and pasting someone else's letter would not go down well (even if it is a good letter by Ray!) It does no harm to remind a head why you're there and if you can say "look, we can do x, y, z which will cost £xx but could save £yy per year" then it has to be a good thing. IT is almost always seen as something which costs a school money - this isn't going to go away but if a small investment (buying print management software) can save a large amount then it has to be a good thing to look at.

It's tempting! Good thing is that if you work on the Docklands campus you can watch the planes as they taxi into City Airport.

I think that could be a real problem - that's part of the reason we have so little technical content in school IT at the moment! Of course, it may not matter. We're trying to do this for one school, not 6,000 so we only need a small number of teachers. More critically, will you find parents who want their children to go to a school like this? Most of the schools that I've heard talked about are not really doing anything that different from the best existing state schools so is there any demand for this? As a techy I can say "well, of course pupils should learn programming" but as a parent I might see it as a waste of time.

Loads of suggestions already but why not add a couple more :-) sc query spooler | find /i "running" if errorlevel 1 ( echo not running echo starting spooler net start spooler ) The sc command allows you to do "stuff" with services - in this case we query the status of the spooler service - try sc query spooler at a prompt to see what it does. The results are piped (the | symbol) through the find command to see if the text running is there (the /i says "ignore case" so it finds it if it actually says RUNNING or whatever) If the find command works (ie the service is running) then the errorlevel is zero (no error; find found what you told it to find) but if "running" was not found then errorlevel is set and the stuff inside the brackets happens. The other alternative is to just use services.msc to set the spooler service to restart if it stops. If you look at the properties of any service you'll see there's a "recovery" tab - here you can tell the system what to do if a service stops. The simplest is to just restart the service and this is good for services which are normally fine but occasionally fall over. You can also do things like restarting the machine (drastic but might be the best solution for some things) or you can run a program. If that program was something like blat then it can send an email to you. A reasonable set of options would be to make it just restart the service on the first and second failure but send an email on the third (because by then you probably need to do something!)

But which is better? A 10Mbit broadband which gets throttled to 2Mbit if you download loads of stuff or an "up to 8Mbit" which only ever delivers 2Mbit (or maybe 3 or 4 but you can never be sure??) Virgin has always been rock solid for me and I know what I can and can't do and when I can/can't do it.

I'm sure something could be stolen from the "Don't be a spanner, check your nuts" campaign :-)

So redirect the desktop (we use a folder in their home directory) and set a quota on the home directory. Those who are sensible have files on the desktop, no slowdown at logon/off and everything is lovely. Those who are stupid and try and put huge files on the desktop hit the quota while they're trying to do it - no errors at log off which they don't read, don't understand etc and no stupidly huge profiles.

That would be good. Can I also sneak in a mention for Keep Your Eye On The Ball - Home Page and Everyman - The Home of Prostate Cancer and Testicular Cancer- Home

I'd say it's a sign that standards aren't slipping - someone realises that they're not sure how to spell a word and asks for help - that's surely a good thing!

Not sure I've ever seen such a thing! Easy to get the standard IEC C14 splitter but not the C5. What about using 2 of these C14 to C5 Adaptor : Mains Power Leads : Maplin on a C14??? Messy (and expensive) but would work.

Another thing which you don't mention but might be relevant - there are several sets of firewall rules (I think they're called public, private and domain) and if (say) you're making changes to the domain settings but your machine thinks it's on a public network then you're not going to get anywhere. One of the things which can cause confusion is installing VMWare or other virtualisation software - it installs dummy network adapters which confuse the Windows network stack.

You don't work at Imperial do you? I know someone who does just that (and got very upset when something emptied his recycle bin!)