srochford

Yes, but if you read Edugeek you'll see any number of people on here have carried out just such upgrades this Easter without apparently having tried it first on a test network, without apparently having a fall back plan and have ended up with bits not working! It's not just bsf contractors who seem to lack common sense!

Sorry, but that's utter b*ll*cks!!! There is *always* risk - I'm about to go outside; I could trip on the step, get knocked down by the bus, get stuck in the lift (it won't let me out on level 6 any longer!!) and so on. I'm afraid people saying "if there is any risk at all" either don't speak English (and apologies if English isn't your first language!) or simply have no clue about what "risk" means!!!

Oops - giving "Service Unavailable HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable." Not sure if that's from their old kit of the new MSP! No reason why thin clients shouldn't be able to work but it does need well provided central servers. One of the intriguing things with Sharepoint 2010 is that you can do video and photo editing on line in the web apps. I know that's not really thin client but it shows the sort of thing you can do with the processing handled on a central server rather than on the client. Get it all working well and there are potentially huge savings - just look at how many threads here concern imaging desktop machines. Thin clients mean you never have to do that which will save money (but saving money is pointless if the kit doesn't work ...) PS just done a bit more googling - looks like the school only started using the new systems this month. google's cached version of the web site says "The Project Board has decided that due to pressures of time and issues experienced during the migration of the school to the new systems we will be rolling back to the school systems as they were prior to the Easter Break." so it doesn't look like it's been installed and failed after significant use but rather that they've tried to move to a new system, the move has failed and (perfectly reasonably) they've moved back to the system they had a couple of weeks ago. I could be mis-understanding that; it would certainly be good to get more detail but I'm not sure that this is a complete disaster but rather a fairly standard "we think we can change but we have fallback position if it goes wrong"

Weirdly, I've paid marginally less every year for the past few years. Admittedly, I spend ages trying every web site I can find to get quotes and I drive an old and cheap car (51 reg Daewoo Matiz). I'd guess I get my cheap insurance because everyone else is paying more so I suppose I should just say "Thank you Edugeekers for making my insurance so cheap :-)"

Not a tax, but you've not included the actual cost of the car! I appreciate that you probably didn't buy a car just to make this occasional journey but you still had to buy the car. No idea what your car cost, how long it's going to last etc but is it reasonable to allocate £500 per year for the capital cost? If so, your 75 mile journey as fraction of your 6000 miles per year means that you should probably allocate (75/6000)*500 or £6.25 to the journey cost so your total cost is now about £22 and more expensive than public transport. Of course, it's still not as convenient and if 2 or more of you were travelling then the costs are probably way more expensive by public transport (unless you can buy in advance; eg Southern Railways regularly do £3 singles to anywhere on their network but this is no use if they're not at the time or place you want!)

What I suspect you'll see happening is that the "building" bit of BSF will go on hold but the outsourcing bit will be speeded up - that's what can save money ("remove inefficiency" as we keep being told!)

Worth pointing out that pressing Shift Enter will give weird effects if you're doing justified text - it forces a new line, not a new paragraph, so the previous line will be justified - typically adding far too much space. I don't think there's an easy way of changing the styles in existing documents but if you don't like using a properly configured style sheet (yes, I agree with Angrytechnician) then I'd guess you can push out an updated template which would make the change for new documents.

I'm guessing the drive was NTFS then I'd expect chkdsk c: /f /r (from BartPE or whatever) to get back a good deal of the data (unless there's more than just the master file table gone - if the drive is failing physically then that's possible) Have you read the SMART data - does that tell you anything useful (I like Speedfan for giving Smart info)

And you can still buy it Podd - Educational Software Evaluation - TEEM

Fantastic game - you could have endless fun by doing "Pod can " followed by inappropriate words :-) (and if you watch outnumbered, the discussion in yesterday's programme about what does "inappropriate" mean was very funny!)

In a machine startup script: if exist %windir%\ff_allow.cmd goto got_allow echo cacls "c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe" /e /g users:r > %windir%\ff_allow.cmd at 15:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f %windir%\ff_allow.cmd :got_allow if exist %windir%\ff_deny.cmd goto end echo cacls "c:\program files\mozilla firefox\firefox.exe" /e /r users: > %windir%\ff_deny.cmd at 09:00 /every:m,t,w,th,f %windir%\ff_deny.cmd :end first chunk checks to see if the "allow" script exists; if not, it creates the script and schedules it at 15:00 second chunk checks for the "deny" script; if not, it creates it and schedules it for 09:00 It's not perfect - if the machine is switched off at 09:00 or 15:00 then it won't run. You could have a more complex script to run every time the machine starts up and checks the time and sets permission appropriately or you could just have a script which runs every 5 minutes and checks the time and sets perms.

I think this is technology which not a lot of people can use yet but I wouldn't be surprised to see it change. Some of you will have done chemistry and used either ball and stick models or framework molecular models to try and represent molecules. These sort of work but it's not easy to make the models or to store them. Henry S. Rzepa has an example of JMol and Prof Rzepa uses a 3D projector for showing this kind of thing - it really is impressive and is a real use for 3D projectors. What about using it for teaching biology? 3D film (or model?) of living organs? Engineering? I'm sure there are uses beyond showing 3D DVDs :-)

The fact that there are lots of versions of this story on the web just shows you how the web works - one person publishes the story, others pick it up and repeat it and within hours there are hundreds or thousands of versions - just looking quickly at the first dozen or so doesn't suggest that there are a dozen different reports, just a dozen versions of the same story. This doesn't make it untrue - sadly, I suspect it is true. We live in a world where we want everything to be cheap and we don't often ask "how can XXX be so cheap?" (Look at the number of threads here which are asking/talking about low prices for products and compare that with the number talking about products sold at higher prices but produced in fair trade environments) The current election typifies some of this - we have many politicians talking about cutting out waste and increasing "efficiency" - what that means is we're going to have people doing the same job for less money or doing more work for the same money neither of which is particularly good for the people concerned.

Might be a daft question, but why do you have it installed if you don't want it to be used? If it's there because some groups need it but most don't then change the permissions on the .exe so that instead of allowing "users" read/execute you only allow "firefox_users" permissions on the file If it needs to be there for everyone but only at certain times of the day then set scheduled tasks to remove the users read permission at (say) 09:00 and restore it at (say) 15:00

http://edugeek.net/forums/search.php?do=getdaily will get you today's posts.

for /f %%i in (c:\temp\comps.txt) do copy /y c:\file_ini "\\%%i\c$\Program Files\usbdlm\usbdlm.ini" Assuming you have comp1 comp2 etc in c:\temp\comps.txt I've put copy instead of robocopy because I don't think you need robocopy to do what you're trying to do but I hope this points the right way!

Might be worth looking at Sharepoint 2010 and hosting the web apps in house. The Microsoft demo yesterday was very impressive in terms of what you can can do. Of course, demos are supposed to be impressive and I've no idea how good it will be for real or what you have to buy to get it to work but at least that way you have it hosted in house and don't have to worry about external problems (someone will dig up the fibre outside at a critical time!) and privacy problems.

Actually, this fits with the other thread about break ins where the OP wants to fit "grills" on the windows. I thought this was just a typo for "grilles" but I reckon he is actually going to turn them to toast if they try and break in again :-)

I think you can do this with group policy preferences but I can't find the details :-( I would script it by recording somewhere who "owns" each machine and then use a machine startup script to add that user to local admins just on that machine. This won't work with the restricted groups policy - the policy will reverse your script.

is the batch file just launching an exe file? If so, I'd guess the batch file is terminating pretty much immediately but the exe is left running. If this is the case then even setting the "stop task if it runs for more than 15 minutes" won't help - I'm pretty sure that task scheduler will look to kill the batch file, not the process it spawned. If you just run the exe file, does it quit cleanly once it's done its work? If not, then that's the problem and that needs to be fixed (eg If the exe file does its stuff but then just sits there waiting for someone to click "exit") You could probably use pskill at the start of the batch file - eg if the process is called mytask.exe then you would have something like: pskill mytask.exe rem do more stuff rem now launch app mytask.exe

Watch out for the fact that CACLS without the /e switch will prompt for every change (because it's making possibly disastrous changes - eg remove system permissions from the Windows directory and Windows might not work as well as it should ...) You might want to look at xcacls (How to use Xcacls.exe to modify NTFS permissions) which has a /y switch

According to the UK Techday on Office 2010, it RTMs in the next couple of days. One of the most impressive things is the way the web apps are supposed to work on (more or less) any browser. They didn't demo much of it but what they did show looked the same on IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari (all on Windows)

Looks like some people read the rubbish I post :-) as @angrytechnician says, I work at Imperial although I don't actually get to play with nuclear stuff (it's out at Silwood Park)

I bank with Smile - what transactions are you finding are not up to date? I can't say I've ever noticed and they were also one of the first banks to move to fast transfers which is a big plus. I also like the fact that if you do have to call them you speak to someone who knows what they're doing and can actually help!

It just goes to show that you should never try and expand abbreviations - leave them vague and then no-one knows you don't know what it means. To be fair, I've had people who really should know the difference between bits and bytes get them confused so there's little chance for non-techy people.