srochford

You'll be impressed when you do go - it's not silent any longer - there are people talking now :-)

You also don't have to do "big bang" approach. You can have both servers running at the same time and pointing to the same printers; you then just gradually move all your users across.

When you say "all users" profile do you mean a default profile on each machine? If so, it's not impossible to push out new profiles to the machine - depends on how many different printers you need to set up. If you've got (say) 100 different printers then it's hard work. If it's 5 then it's just a case of editing the profile on each of 5 machines and copying to the other machines that need to be the same. If you've got space on the D: drive then changing the spooler to use D: instead of C: is very, very easy. It's non disruptive/destructive and often gets back a load of space (and more importantly means you won't run out of disc space during the day because a printer is out of paper and jobs are being queued!)

It's easy to setup another machine as print server; it may be much harder to point all your existing clients to use it! If you currently have a system where login script, group policy or similar assigns printers then it's easy to change the printserver, change the login script and at next login everything "just works" If you've manually added printers over the years then changing printers is hard work - it needs that step repeating. It's possible to automate it - you can have a script which says "if printer \\server1\printer2 is configured then delete it and install \\server2\printer2"

Not a buyable product yet but this BBC News - India unveils prototype for $35 touch-screen computer might help in the future. Hundreds of years ago, when I was at school, calculators were an unaffordable luxury (I think my first one cost over £30 which was a shed load of money). Now, calculators are essentially free and everyone has one. I can see that eventually (and quite possibly quite quickly) we'll get to the point where a machine with enough functionality is affordable and everyone can have one.

Not sure if it is traffic management - details of the policy are here - Virgin Media Broadband:Traffic management - & Traffic management on XL, you'll only get rate limited after you've uploaded 1.4Gb of stuff between 3pm and 8pm It also ought to reset once you go outside the management period (or perhaps the next day at the latest) When you say "no upload speed" do you really mean "no" or is it just much slower than it used to be? Much slower could be rate limited (you get 25% of your normal speed). Unable to upload at all suggests something has gone wrong and you need to get Virgin to fix it.

have you also changed the quotes - it won't work as you have it because what you're doing is testing if T is equal to "T" which it isn't! Just make a really simple test file: @echo off set letter3=%computername:~2,1% if "%letter3%" == "T" echo "going to install" - on a machine where you want it to work it should say "going to install"; other machines should do nothing.

the "if" statement defaults to being case sensitive and you either don't need the quotes around the "T" or you need them around the variable as well and not sure about using "equ" - I use == if /i "%letter3%" == "T" goto loadsoft (the "" bit is essential if the variable might not be set; it can actually be anything, it's just to make sure that you don't end up with a blank on the left hand side of the test)

So, put the reg value there in your app and have a task scheduled to run "at startup" which just deletes that reg value. Seems pretty simple??

If you manually save to that area, close the program and go back in, does it remember where you last saved stuff? If so, then there's got to be a registry/config setting you can push out to users. If it doesn't remember and always goes back to my docs then you're stuck.

The other thing to consider is a virtual machine - depends on what you want XP for, but the XP mode VM that's built into some versions of Windows 7 is pretty good (eg at home I have an old USB scanner which doesn't have win 7 64 bit drivers but works fine with the 32 bit XP VM) If you don't have the appropriate version of Windows 7 then VMWare and Virtual Box are good for setting up a VM.

I'd really want to look at what it is about your GPOs which is taking so long - you really want them to complete quickly rather than letting them carry on in the background.

Just kind of thinking aloud, but one trivial thing that might help is to set a cron job that runs daily and checks against a server to see what needs to be done. If you schedule wget -qO- http://myserver.domain.name/thingstodo.sh | bash to run on each machine at a particular time then you can put whatever's needed in that script on the central server. You could have the script running regularly and it could include logic that decides what/if it needs to do based on time, machine name, whatever. (basically, what you're doing is fetching the text of the shell file from the server and piping it through bash - whatever it contains will be executed as if you'd type the commands locally)

Not sure I understand what you're trying to do, but a machine startup script will run before a user logs on. It will run at every startup but you could include logic to say "do I need to do " Similarly, you can schedule a task to run at system startup and include logic which checks to see if it needs to do something.

Can't help with the libraries stuff but for the other things you just need to get used to the Windows 7 way of working - press the Windows key and type what you want to do! eg: rename - first option it finds is "rename this computer IP - first option is view network connections; open that and look at the properties of the connection you want. It is different but it's consistent - most things you're going to want to do are now searchable and that just wasn't there in XP. I now really, really miss that if I use an XP machine!

Press Windows and type "Wireless" or type "Hidden" - not exactly difficult (and I know it's different but the point if you want to do anything with Windows 7 you "press Windows and type a key word") No idea what you mean about hidden files. In XP I would press Windows E to open Explorer and then do ALT T O to get to Tools | Options and then just click view. In Windows 7 I do exactly the same thing - I'm guessing you knew some secret way to do it in XP which no longer works :-)

If you've done a full install of Visual Studio 2008 (or 2010) then you will have SQL installed. I'd definitely recommend putting it on a server for the students to use. You need to find out exactly what they're wanting to do. If they need to be able to create databases (which is quite reasonable) then you may be better having multiple instances (name them with the student usernames??) because you can then make the student the owner of the databases and they can't accidentally or deliberately mess up other people's work. If they're just going to create/modify/delete tables then giving them each a database on the same SQL server should be fine.

Do you mean how can you press F12 to PXE boot but do it remotely? If so, one way to do it would be to change the BIOS settings so that network boot is the first option. If you have Dell or HP computers then you can change the BIOS settings remotely so you would just run the program (remote desktop, psexec, whatever) so that it will boot from the network.

Make the link point to http://somename.someaddress.tld/webpage.asp In that page you then add some logic which checks the IP address of the requester. If it's a local address then you redirect to the 172 address else you redirect to the extrenal address. this should then cope no matter what browser etc is used.

Logon script runs as the user logging on - it has exactly the same privileges. Machine startup script runs as the local system account - it has high privileges on the local machine (effectively local administrator) but doesn't have any network access (so can't connect to a network share unless you give "domain computers" access to the resource)

I don't think runas will help - it's going to prompt for a username and password. You need to get the student to sit with you. You log on as admin and create the task. They then enter their username and password in the credentials section. I think you'll get a popup saying "user xxx has been assigned the logon as a batch job right" but it should then work.

We've used these - Ethernet to DVI Video Adapter over IP - StarTech.com Not sure if you can have multiple devices (but I think you can - when you run the software it asks you to select the screen to connect to which suggests you could have more than one)

You can also turn off all the administrative shares (C$ etc)? Are you finding that C$ works but admin$ doesn't or are neither working? If you setup a share (eg do net share win=c:\windows) can you access that share? If you can access a non-admin share then I don't think it's a firewall issue. I thought there was a standard GP setting to disable admin shares but I can't find it! What it will do is set a value at HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanManServer\Parameters\AutoShareWks to 1 or 0 - take a look at that to see what's there.

This looks like one of those open source projects that's just died - the most recent ISO seems to be based on an 18 month old version of Ubuntu. Nothing wrong with that necessarily but it does mean that if you have problems, they might not get fixed. I've been using Mythbuntu OK; a few niggles but they're not really to do with the "myth" bit (my wireless card doesn't work unless you compile your own driver; the USB TV card I have needs firmware but that won't download until you get the wireless working ...)

Microsoft seem to be moving away from using MSIs deployed through group policy - Office can be deployed like this but it's really hard work compared to using a script. Tools like MDT seem to assume that you will have a script which silently installs the software - it might run msiexec, might run setup /silent, might be a batch file or vbscript. I'd guess this has the benefit that you're not tied to one way of working; lots of manufacturers do now release software which can be silently installed, it's just not an MSI.