srochford

I would definitely get every driver installed (with the exception of devices such as those mentioned by @TheLibrarian) - it's too easy to have device X missing which actually stops something else working properly. As an example, before XP SP3 you had to install the UAA stuff before high def audio would work (think that's right - it's a while ago!) - the missing device looked unimportant but without it you get no sound. Now that's pretty obvious but there are others which are less obvious but could cause problems. if it's a new machine, don't buy it if the vendor doesn't provide the drivers on their web site. If it's an old machine then surely the drivers are all on your install server :-)

I think you may have picked out some bits that were in the original document - Virgin do try to make their stuff lighter than normal - but I'm sure the bold bits were not approved by a lawyer :-) The stuff about nuclear use is interesting - it is quite common in software EULAs and I've been told that we have negotiated special agreements with some companies to leave out that bit because we do have a nuclear reactor to play with!

I'm probably being really stupid, but what are you getting it from it being a mirror compared to just a large touch screen?? There doesn't seem to be any use made of the fact that you can see yourself in it (eg you're not trying out clothes, hair, make up etc)

Not loading at all for me in either Chrome or IE8 - just a blank page. Intrigued at @flake's block report "policy: PontelandHigh" - that's the name of a school in Northumberland. Is the filtering company blocking your site because Ponteland requested it or is their school site and others like it blocked??

I like the idea of using the triangle like a sort of canary! I'd guess the only possible danger with something like this is not superman opening the door but something giving way under 50 tons of force and bits of vacuum chamber flying around. I suspect it's not a big risk - from what little I know of this kind of thing it's always massively over engineered just to make sure it is safe (unlike any mass produced item where you try to under engineer in order to keep the price down)

"It depends" but probably not - the key thing is what sort of license was on the machine when you bought it and does that allow transfer to someone else. Do you have "work at home" rights for staff? If so, then the answer might be yes.

The problem is that Margaret Thatcher changed the way unemployment was counted a huge number of times (I think it was 23) to massage down the figures so it's hard to be exact - there were certainly more people not working who wanted to work than were counted in her figures. It's pretty much down to her that we have the huge number of people on incapacity benefit - they were given that rather than unemployment because they didn't mess up the stats. Now we're stuck with people who seem to believe that they really can't work and have pretty much lost the desire to do it.

This isn't quite true - National Statistics Online Through the late 90s and into the early part of the 2000s Labour paid back debt - it fell from about 42% of GDP to just less than 30% In part, that's because GDP went up but it's also because Gordon Brown as chancellor did pay back money which had been borrowed earlier. Over the past few years, borrowing has gone up (and dramatically recently) but it doesn't mean we can't afford it. If our economy doesn't recover then perhaps we can't but I'd like to think that it will recover and start growing again (the phrase "green shoots" isn't popular but we did see a tiny amount of growth at the start of this year and many of the other indicators are pointing the right way) A government can increase income from tax either by putting up the rate or by having more people working and paying tax - sharing out the load nicely. If GDP goes up (and it almost certainly will) then the debt problem is reduced. To me, it's a bit like taking out a mortgage. When you first take it out, it eats up a huge chunk of your income but then time goes by, your income goes up and after 5-10 years the mortgage payments don't seem so bad at all.

That's only because you drink in the posh places :-) You need to find Sam Smith's pubs (eg The Crown, 51 New Oxford St, Bloomsbury) where the beer is very cheap I'd much prefer to see the prices quoted as a percentage of median income - that feels like it would be a better indicator of what most people could afford. It's also very difficult to compare prices over time because the things you buy change so much. Just as an example, the price of jeans at £54 is more than 10 times the price of jeans in somewhere like Primark. Even if you don't shop at Primark, clothing is one of many things where prices have generally dropped over the past decades - it's only the designer labels where the prices have soared.

Does this help - To add a bunch of IP addresses to a network connection without having to type each one in individually

That's certainly the way it was being discussed in the commons last night. I've forgotten the name of the MP but he was pointing out that it was madness that his entire household could be blocked because one of his teenage children did something wrong. He may also have misunderstood what was going on; he was talking about changing "ISP" and "email address" as if they were the same thing (and I know that for many people they are - they have email addresses from their ISP and can never change!) He also raised the issue of what happens if a "banned person" goes to Starbucks etc and uses their internet - how can that be managed/monitored? Do you have to show proof of ID before you buy your morning latte??

This is a real problem which no-one seems able to address. Cameron can trot out all the big business people who support his stance on NI and says how wonderful they are at creating jobs and yet all of them are actually trying to get fewer people doing more work (eg every supermarket near me now has rows of self service checkouts so you get 1 member of staff supervising 12 checkouts instead of 12 checkout staff) It's easy to talk about people doing "non-jobs" but sometimes that's because there aren't any "real" jobs to do - we seem to have closed down all the manufacturing industry that used to employ people (and does anyone remember coal mines - they used to employ tens of thousands of people)

Is it a fact? it's not one I've ever seen proved - there are plenty of stats which show that for decades the average tax level has been about the same - it's just moved around (so the last Conservative government dropped income tax and put up VAT; this government dropped income tax and put up NI) and the net effect is very little change (except for the richest who get good accountants to avoid the taxes that everyone else has to pay!)

Remember that they are also the party that cut the rate to 10% (from 23% when they came into office) - it's not as if tax was always 10% and Gordon Brown decided to put it up! Also remember that Gordon Brown cut the VAT on domestic fuel (ie gas and electricity) from 8% (as introduced by the last Conservative government) to 5%. It's not a huge cut (probably not worth more then £20-£30 a year for many people) but if you're on a low income then "every little helps" It's also misleading to talk about doubling the rate of tax from 10% to 20% - the 10% was only ever paid on a very small fraction of income. Yes, it made a difference and, yes, the whole process was badly handled but it didn't "double the rate of income tax."

I don't really know what to think about it except that not having a single currency means that a lot of people sit in the the City of London making shed loads of money buying and selling currencies at no real benefit to the majority of people. I also know that some of those most vehemently opposed (Nigel Farage, for example) are barking mad so if they think the Euro is a bad idea then I reckon there must be something good about it for normal people!

Have you gone all the way through that article? The arpwrapper bit is just the start - it seems to go into a mass of detail about finding GUIDs and removing stuff with MSICUU etc and looked pretty thorough!

I open Chrome and type "E" in the address bar which takes me to "new posts" (because it's remembered edugeek.net/forums/search.php?do=getnew) and glance through the new posts. I believe there is other stuff there but I'm afraid I don't notice most of it :-) (although I have noticed that the new layout seems to have far more white space than previously - all the stuff on the left just seems far more space out so a 2-3 line post takes up a good chunk of the screen. For example, in this thread powdarrmonkey and localzuk have posts with 2 and 1 lines of actual message but between them they take up my entire screen height!)

I don't think Brown is the best prime minister ever (not sure who was!) but there are many things which have happened while he was chancellor and prime minister that were better than when Thatcher and Major were in charge (and I'm sure some will find many which were worse). I intensely dislike the attitude which says "Brown rubbish" or "Cameron rubbish" partly because I don't want to reduce politics to the level of name calling (which sadly is what most of the tabloids and some of the party leaders are doing) and partly because I'd much rather find out what are the good things which party X claims they will do rather than the bad things party X says party Y will do. If you're at a football match I'd guess it's acceptable (required?) to support your team and slag off the opponents even if they are doing well. In politics I want rather more - the way my country is run is much more important than that.

This kind of thing should work if you have kids who are not very clued up. The problem with anything that relies on open shares and text files is that if you have tech savvy kids then they can read the files and change or delete them (and of necessity, they can read the script to work out what's going on) I can also just copy "stuff" into the folder so that it fills up and brings everything grinding to a halt. Ideally, you want something which is talking to a remote service that can control the workstation. This means that if I carry out the "logoff" action from my workstation so that I can go to a second machine then I actually get logged off and can't just carry on using it (as I could with your script). Sorry if that sounds very negative but this really is one of those areas where you either have to accept that it's a people problem, not a technology one, or you have to have technology which is much cleverer than your kids :-)

Have you tried this - How to uninstall an instance of SQL Server 2005 manually It gives details of how to manually remove the instance of SQL 2005

Typically, you copy it into c:\windows\system32 with a machine startup script and then (if necessary) do a regsvr32 /s xxxx.dll (/s makes it register silently) If this is something needed by Internet Explorer, though, it may be different and may need installing as an ActiveX which you can do with group policies but I've forgotten how and I need to be out of here in 2 minutes :-)

@triggmeister, the reason your script won't work is this line: Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _ & "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") What it's trying to do is to connect to the remote computer using the credentials of the user running the web page - this will vary depending on the version of IIS but it's almost certainly not going to be a user with admin rights! What you can do if you want to go down this route is to specify credentials for a user who is able to connect: <% sComputer = "ma613-03" Set objSWbemLocator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator") Set objSWbemServices = objSWbemLocator.ConnectServer _ (sComputer, "root\cimv2", "domain\username", "ReallySecretPassword") objSWbemServices.Security_.ImpersonationLevel = 3 Set colComputer = objSWbemServices.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem") sUser="Free" For Each objComputer in colComputer if objComputer.UserName<>"" then sUser=objComputer.UserName next response.write sUser %> This connects to the machine with credentials and then does your query. I've added a bit to it to cope with no user logged on - that may not be important! The benefit of a method like this is that it's "live" - you're not relying on a database which could be out of date but the downside is that it takes a little while for the web page to query each computer, particularly if any machines are switched off or restarting etc.

Can't find anything :-( There's a property - Document.HasPassword - which will tell you if the document has a password set but it only works on a document which is already open. I know it's kludgy to just try and open the file and see if it fails but I can't see why this shouldn't be fairly robust - Skipping Password-Protected Documents in a Batch Process is an example of the kind of thing you can do.

The job I got 12 years ago involved soldering a connector as part of the practical test. The thinking behind this wasn't because soldering was a vital part of the job but to see if you had common sense and could use tools sensibly (eg there was a small vice provided which you could use to hold the connector while you held the solder in one hand and the iron in the other. Not every candidate did this ...)

If you save it in .ppt format, you'll make sure others can read it (same goes for installing the compatibility pack) but it doesn't mean to say that they'll see what you see. This MS web page (also in the help file) shows you how you can check to see if you've done anything that's not going to work and also gives a list of the features that won't be supported in earlier versions.