srochford

Not sure that the Academies will be anywhere near £200,000 better off as suggested - sure, they may get this extra money but they will have to start buying things in which they previously got from the LA (payroll is one small thing I can think of; I'm sure there are others) The writer seems to think that schools will slash the salary bill because they're no longer tied to the LA but that they won't use any outsourcing. The two don't really go together - I suspect we'll see much more outsourcing because it's a quick way to cut salary bills (initially, things like facilities management but why not IT - get the right company and you can get superb outsourced IT support) Faster internet connections might be nice but they cost huge amounts of money - has anyone recently looked at commercial prices for a 100Mbit link (and it needs to be symmetrical if you're going to be using it so that the pupils and staff can access resources from outside school). Links like this are not cheap; you're going to need to put a big chunk of money in to make it work and I can see that any school which does become an academy will have every department making a case for increased money.

His theory was that as you increase the velocity of an object, its mass increases. As the mass increases, the amount of energy you need to put in to make the object go faster increases. As I understand it, that means you need infinite energy to make something move at the speed of light and you can't make anything go faster than the speed of light - some more info here NASA's Cosmicopia -- Ask Us - General Physics - Speed of Light

It's not recommended (eg if you dcpromo the DC so it's no longer a DC then all sorts of things will stop working) but it's perfectly possible to do it and it's even support by MS under some circumstances - they will happily sell you Small Business Server (or whatever the new name is for it) which puts everything including the kitchen sink on the same box!

Definitely want a pivot table (also known as a cross tab in other packages) Put a column heading at the top of the subject and mark column, highlight your data and do insert pivot table Put the subject as row headings and then add mark - Excel will guess you want to sum the mark (but there are options to average it or count it, for example) If you've never used pivot tables before then to take a bit of time to get to grips with them - they are brilliant for doing all sorts of analysis and just totally sexy :-)

Likewise Open Source Software that Authenticates Linux, Unix, and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory Not quite sure what you're looking to do - this won't look like Windows, you'll still get the Ubuntu login screen but you will log in with your normal Windows credentials.

No help now, but this is one reason to make sure you buy "business" class laptops - they're so much easier to disassemble than the "home" use (Dell Latitudes are trivial to take apart; Dell Inspirons a complete nightmare and so on!)

Does sound a bit high :-) We have a threshold temp of 35C; above that alarms go off and people fix things ASAP (I know that there was a problem last night, for example) You need to get some of this: TROX | Data Centres The liquid CO2 cooling basically puts an extra "door" behind your server racks. This contains the liquid CO2 coolant and so air drawn through it is cooled. It's much more efficient than blowing air randomly into a server room and hoping some of it gets to the servers!

There's no problem with adding custom fields but it's very hard to change your mind later and take them out. A really important thing is to not use a field name that someone else might use (so add a prefix which would be unique to your school, for example) As @fawkers says, there are 15 (I think!) extension attributes available and these are available to you with no problem

Scrapping the "building" part of BSF will save vast amounts of money and is likely to happen. Scrapping the outsourcing of IT is much less likely to happen - pretty much every company that wants to save money outsources everything it possibly can. I'd be very surprised if we don't see an even bigger push to outsourcing in the near future in the name of "efficiency" It's easy to say that it's "wasteful" or "inefficient" to employ people to do all sorts of jobs but we then have the statements that we need to get people off benefits and in to jobs. What jobs exactly are they going to do? Where is the money coming to pay for them? Cameron has made it very clear that he thinks the public sector is too big and perhaps he's right but I don't see any private companies standing up and saying "we could employ so many more people if only they weren't employed in the public sector"

You probably don't want to let your management know that - it suggests you're overstaffed and staff are far, far more expensive than PCs!

Not just "supposed" to be internationally recognised, it is recognised :-) They're only used normally in schools outside the UK and there's a feeling that they're "better" than the UK based exams so it's not just about the fact that other countries will recognise them it's more that students from other countries can come here and show that they've done exams that we recognise. I should declare an interest - I am slightly involved in the setting process for the International A Levels set by Cambridge.

@vikpaw's suggestion of using the Scripting Guys code is good - just replace the whole of your "'Remove registry key to keep startmenu alphabetised" section with their code to delete a tree and change the key path to this: strKeyPath = "Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder" Another alternative would be to replace the block with: sCmd="reg delete ""HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder"" /f" Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") WshShell.run sCmd (and I'd guess the OP has done what we all do - found 2 bits of code which almost do what's needed and mix them together but not got it quite right - you can use the shell object to do a "regdelete" but the syntax is slightly different or you can just shell out and run the "reg" command which is what this does)

What's the DNS setting on a client machine? (ipconfig /all at a prompt will tell you) The answer should only show internal DNS servers. If it doesn't then change the DHCP server to give out the IP of your internal DNS. If it does give out the correct internal address then check the DNS server and see if it's using forwarders or root hints. If forwarders, are they correct? (I'm guessing they should be the same as your other schools - they need to point to an external DNS server). If root hints, are they correct?

I've not used powershell like this but I used to create accounts using vbscript and didn't have this sort of problem - I wouldn't have thought that powershell was doing anything that different under the hood but not really sure. It does sound like it's a problem where (say) the account is being created on the PDC emulator but but the rest of the script is working against another DC (possibly all working against another DC but "create user" requests are automatically forwarded to the PDCE) Can you set up a test domain (eg with VMs) and run your script against it with only 1 domain controller? If everything works then I would think it's definitely a timing issue. One other thing - are all your DCs global catalogs? If not, make them GCs (you need a DC to be a GC if it's going to process logons so it's a good idea unless you have a multi-domain forest)

I think if you do a proper cost comparison you might well find that he pre-built work out cheaper. Your time costs a lot of money and unless you only have a small number of computers then the money spent on building and repairing can easily be more than the cost of buying standard PCs. It's not easy to be accurate with the cost comparison. For example, you need to include something to act as a warranty cost and it's hard to estimate in advance how many of your machines will fail inside the 3 years where HP, Dell etc will replace the components but outside the 1 year which your components probably have as a warranty.

OK; thanks again to @twozeroalpha. I've used Gimp and it works well and cellwriter also works. My handwriting is rubbish so I think it'll need a lot more training and, in the end, I'm not sure it will do what I wanted :-( (Really wanted something like OneNote rather than a line by line entry system) The other problem is that the machine is just very slow (and slower in Linux than Windows which doesn't help - I think there are AMD optimised drivers for Windows which aren't there for Linux) Still, it's been fun playing and learning more new stuff :-)

"brainy" is a difficult word - it doesn't really mean anything. If what he's comparing is IQ then there are endless arguments about the value of doing that because many people don't think it measures anything of value (it's a bit like SATS - people get to be good at doing SATS but it doesn't mean they're intelligent. Similarly, people can get to be good at doing IQ tests without being intelligent) Later on, the article goes into a bit more detail and suggests that he's really saying men are better at maths and science than women - that's a bit different from saying "men are more brainy"!

Not sure at all. "Fewer CO2 emissions" suggests that there's a puff of gas, then another puff of gas and so on and the new process means that there are fewer puffs of gas emitted. In reality, this isn't the way it works - there's some kind of industrial process which emits CO2 continuously and this process reduces the amount emitted per time unit. I think "less CO2 emission" would be better (or perhaps even "less CO2 is emitted") As a complete aside, the term "CO2 emissions" conjures up visions of horses wandering along the road producing emissions as they go - in this case, I think we would want fewer emissions!

It made me laugh as well but I'm not telling anyone - I don't have a sense of humour :-)

Probably just talking to myself now but that's OK. Just thought I'd say it's all working OK. Not quite sure how I did it because I didn't expect it to work! I booted into single user mode, copied the failsafe xorg.conf to xorg.conf and restarted. Magically, it came up in full colour and seems to be working fine. Now, the reason I was trying Ubuntu out on this was to see what the tablet support is like. The answer seems to be that it's not there at all which is weird because I'm sure I had read that it did do tablet stuff. Does anyone know if you can turn on tablet features or am I wasting my time? (The touch screen is working as a mouse but I'd like to be able to draw, write etc like on a Windows tablet)

Boris Johnson's not called the "Idiot Mayor" for nothing. I do quite like the idea of sticking David Cameron on a barbecue to see what happens :-)

Can you tell it not to backup permissions? This is the key thing you would lose with a non-NTFS volume and maybe it would work if you turn that off. Alternatively, as @j17sparky says, use robocopy - nice and easy to understand and it works :-)

Well, thanks to @twozeroalpha I've got it installed and can work in text mode. X still doesn't work but having done some googling I found out some changes that needed making to xorg.conf and X then started. It gave an error message about a problem with the .conf file and offered to fix it - now it doesn't work again :-( I kept a copy of the nearly working file so I'll have another look later but given @simplesi's comments about the size of dialog boxes I may be wasting my time. Looks like I'll have to stick with Windows :-(

I think this is approaching it from the wrong end; you would be better to delete them from the server copy overnight. When a user logs on the next day they will copy down a clean profile. On the server I'm guessing you've got profiles in (say) d:\profiles with each user under that: d:\profiles\david d:\profiles\gordon d:\profiles\nick etc If this is the case then you want to create a batch file like this: d: cd \profiles for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q What this does is change to the correct drive and folder. The for statement then looks for each directory (/d switch) and executes the stuff after "do" for each one, substituting its name for the %%i bit Schedule this to run overnight (or do it manually when you know most people are logged off) If you want to check what it's doing then add a pause command: for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q & pause This will do the first rd command and then wait for you to press a key - you can then see if it did the right thing! (Make a dummy profile called 11111 or something which comes at the top of the alphabetical list for safety) If your folder structure is different from this (eg split by year) then you should be able to do something like this: d: cd \profiles\year7 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q cd \profiles\year8 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q cd \profiles\year9 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q - just adding extra pairs of lines for each year group. You can then schedule this to run every night. I'm sort of surprised that this is causing a problem - cookies are supposed to be very small files (typically well under 1kb) My own cookie folder is only 15kb in size so unless something is storing stuff in cookies which shouldn't be there then I don't know if this is the problem. I would look at the profiles for a couple of users with problems using (eg) Treesize - JAM Software - Windows Freeware This will show you which folders in the user's profile are taking up the space and slowing things down. Finally (!) you might want to look at redirecting cookies to the user's home drive - that way they don't get copied at logon/off so you don't have to worry about how long they take. Redirect Favorites and Cookies folder using a Group Policy has a good article on how to do this.

I think this is approaching it from the wrong end; you would be better to delete them from the server copy overnight. When a user logs on the next day they will copy down a clean profile. On the server I'm guessing you've got profiles in (say) d:\profiles with each user under that: d:\profiles\david d:\profiles\gordon d:\profiles\nick etc If this is the case then you want to create a batch file like this: d: cd \profiles for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q What this does is change to the correct drive and folder. The for statement then looks for each directory (/d switch) and executes the stuff after "do" for each one, substituting its name for the %%i bit Schedule this to run overnight (or do it manually when you know most people are logged off) If you want to check what it's doing then add a pause command: for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q & pause This will do the first rd command and then wait for you to press a key - you can then see if it did the right thing! (Make a dummy profile called 11111 or something which comes at the top of the alphabetical list for safety) If your folder structure is different from this (eg split by year) then you should be able to do something like this: d: cd \profiles\year7 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q cd \profiles\year8 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q cd \profiles\year9 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\cookies" /s /q - just adding extra pairs of lines for each year group. You can then schedule this to run every night. I'm sort of surprised that this is causing a problem - cookies are supposed to be very small files (typically well under 1kb) My own cookie folder is only 15kb in size so unless something is storing stuff in cookies which shouldn't be there then I don't know if this is the problem. I would look at the profiles for a couple of users with problems using (eg) Treesize - JAM Software - Windows Freeware This will show you which folders in the user's profile are taking up the space and slowing things down. Finally (!) you might want to look at redirecting cookies to the user's home drive - that way they don't get copied at logon/off so you don't have to worry about how long they take. Redirect Favorites and Cookies folder using a Group Policy has a good article on how to do this.