srochford

Of course they're probably going to work while travelling but there's a good few people manage to do work travelling in steerage on the Virgin trains that Winterton uses. Maybe he does need to travel in first class in order to do his work; it's more the tone of his comments that are offensive!

Or maybe not - FT.com / UK / Economy & Trade - Economists reject calls for budget cuts Cash crisis hits town halls from Truro to Aberdeen - Home News, UK - The Independent - cutting spending means putting people out of jobs which means that they don't pay tax, they don't spend money and they probably claim benefits which costs more money! There's no easy solution (which is what the FT article is saying but with numbers etc to back it up!) and I wish all the politicians would recognise that and be honest about it. Maybe we do need to cut public spending but we need to recognise that that will put many people out of jobs. Of course, MPs like Nicholas Winterton (Tory MP Sir Nicholas Winterton blasts new economy travel rule | Mail Online) won't really care - the people who are put out of jobs will be hoi polloi and not like him!

Never worked in a small school so can't comment on that but it's very common for finance people to not want IT (or anyone else!) involved in price negotiations. I've had meetings before now where I've been told in no uncertain terms by a purchasing manager how to talk to suppliers - basically, you can say "OK" and "err" and make other non-committal noises but what you don't ever do is say "that's just what I'm looking for!" Once the supplier knows that they've got what you want then it's much harder to negotiate a price. If the finance people can go in and say "well, the IT department quite like it but it's not exactly what they want and it's a bit expensive" then they can negotiate better prices. This then brings you back to the earlier thread about "why can't they just give me a price" - it's because the price you're going to pay is determined by all sorts of things including how much the supplier thinks they can charge and how much the buyer is prepared to pay.

assuming you're sysprepping your images then as part of the sysprep.inf file you can specify processes you want to run as the machine runs its mini-setup. The MSDN website has a script Searching, Downloading, and Installing Updates (Windows) which will query either the MS updates site or your WSUS site if you have one (it just uses the default location for updates) and installs all critical updates. If you run this then your machine is automagically up to date - you don't have to do anything and that always seems like a winning strategy :-)

If you want to do home brew then there is a raft of tools concerned with working with digital TV here: DigitalTV/DVB/HDTV - Video software and downloads - VideoHelp.com DVScheduler looks promising for this kind of app and it will happily process all channels in a multiplex. If you had 2 cards you can get: BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three, CBBC and BBC News on Mux 1 and ITV1, Channel 4, Five, ITV2, Channel 4+1, More 4, E4 and ITV2 + 1 on Mux 2 The one programme which doesn't seem to handle multiple channels on the same multiplex used to be Windows Media Centre; not sure if that's still the case in Windows 7???

There are always going to be people who misuse terminology but the I think the idea that there is a group of people who have grown up completely surrounded by IT is important and may change things we do. Just because they're familiar with mobile phones, Facebook, search engines and so on doesn't make them experts in IT but it does mean they expect to find an IT based solution to pretty much any problem (look at the thread about whether we need libraries any more for examples of this)

They're lazy questions in that the interviewer has to do no work to prepare them but they can be really useful in working out what sort of person you're dealing with. Communication is really important if you work in ICT and lots of people who are good at the technical stuff are not very good at the human bit of the job (and frequently take pride in that!) There are no "right" answers to questions like "what are your greatest achievements" - there's just a way to answer it which shows that you can communicate and do understand what your job is about (it's not just about making a set of boxes work properly)

Completely different approach, but I read about FontJazz - Embed fonts on web pages this morning - it will work even with mobile browsers when you want to get different fonts on screen.

I don't understand why people print 1 page emails etc but I can see why they print longer documents - it's much easier to read a long document on paper than on a screen. Often, people want to make notes on the document; it's not easy to do that on screen (although if you've got One Note and a tablet then it's kind of possible - is there something similar for the iPad??)

Vacancy for a Windows Systems Administrator University of London Computer Centre Hosting Services Team £30,973 to £37,603 pa inc LW University of London: 003/10 Windows Systems Administrator

I've seen this kind of problem before. It's almost always due to something "wrong" in the user registry if it only happens for certain people. A quick fix is to delete their profile (assuming they're using roaming profiles) and let a new one get created. If this isn't acceptable or doesn't work then you can try and fix it (but it may not be easy!) A quick google for "troubleshooting right click context menu explorer" gives this Right-click is slow or weird behavior caused by context menu handlers which deals with a number of similar problems, all caused by the things which happen when you right click (Essentially, Windows has to build a list of what to show you; this can go wrong - watch it with process monitor from sysinternals to see who complex it is!). The second method there might help you to find the culprit - you can hopefully then remove it from the affected users.

that's me, that is :-) Not sure if I'd brand this building "inoperable" but it's certainly grey, 60s concrete (unlike the building next door with its parquet floors and marble walls!). We do, however, have nice toilets so it's not all bad :-) On a serious note, I don't know how current the information is and how much account it takes of planned works. We had a massive programme of electrical testing over the summer to make sure that the fixed wiring, fuseboards etc were safe. All of this is necessary in order to get insurance for the buildings but I know that some of the wiring failed inspection so I'd guess that makes part of the building "inoperable". We have, however, got planned works coming up to replace the mains circuits which will fix this problem and funding is in place to do it. The other thing is that if we were to replace buildings which were in good condition just so that they don't deteriorate then we'd get accused of wasting money ("that building's perfectly good, why have you knocked it down?") but if you wait too long then you're accused of having buildings which are not good enough. Finally (he does go on, doesn't he!), we have a real problem with space. In order to replace this building you'd need to rehouse every one in it while it's demolished and replaced. There are about 87 rooms on my floor; I'd guess each holds an average of 4 people. The building has 9 floors - they don't all have so many people (there are lecture theatres and labs) but there's still a lot of people and "stuff" that would have to be moved (optical benches polished so smooth that apparently water would spread out to a single molecule layer!) so it's not just a case of finding a few spare rooms or sticking a portacabin in the (very small) car park.

I think this is a good approach. You could spend forever searching for inappropriate images (what a fantastic job description!) It's much better to take a people centred approach to dealing with it. I think whatever you do ought to fit with the school's general policy. Does someone go round on a regular basis and search bags, lockers, mobile phones etc to see if there are dodgy images? If not, then I don't think it's sensible to take the same approach with the computers.

If the barcodes aren't yet printed then you can add whatever lead and terminator characters etc you want to them (so I think you should be be able to have a barcode with something like ID Number) but it's probably easier to have a system which either allows you to type on the keyboard or scan and the result ends up the same. That's good for when the scanner won't work :-)

Ghost works fine with Windows 7. You don't have to worry about the complexities of unattend.xml until you're ready - just run sysprep (and it's on the machine - c:\windows\system32\sysprep) and choose OOBE, generalise and shutdown. Once it's shutdown you make your ghost image and life is good :-)

The range of skills that you need in a person depends massively on the kind of organisation. If you have a small place with 1 or 2 IT staff then they pretty much need to be able to do everything. Understanding AD schema, OSI models and so on will take up some part of their time. If you have a large organisation then you are going to have specialists and you don't need that full range of skills in everyone - you need some people who will be doing little more than setting up desktop PCs and fixing printer jams and you need a different batch of people who completely understand DNS, DHCP etc. From what I've read and seen, most schools seem to have no more than 2-3 people. I imagine that one of those people will be reasonably skilled and probably have a title like "network manager". The others will perhaps have lower skill levels but will (I hope) get the opportunity to learn more on the job. In this case, if you're interviewing for the "low skill" person then you're not trying to find out if they can configure a core switch but you're trying to find out if they have basic common sense, good customer service skills and a willingness and ability to learn. If schools move to an out-sourced model then this changes again. You can probably make do with 1 or 2 highly skilled people somewhere outside the school with the people in school being lower skilled but dealing with the crucial day-to-day stuff.

Quick fix might be to check in the BIOS to see if AHCI is enabled; if so, turn it off (may not be labelled that but you're looking for something that changes the SATA settings to IDE emulation or similar)

Just been reading some of our stats. Last month, 75.2 million email messages were sent to our domain. Of those, just 3.2 million were allowed through spam filtering (Mail Marshal) which is just over 4% The spam filtering is good but the infrastructure which is being wasted so that just 4% of email can be delivered is frightening! How long before we're throwing away 99% of all email?? (The figures are actually far worse for the sub-domains that we no longer use but still accept email for "just in case" -for example, 99.9% of email sent to the maths sub-domain was removed as spam!)

You need to remember that there are 2 things which can be "128 bit" (or any other number of bits) on a CPU - the data bus and the address bus. There's almost certainly no need for an address bus to be bigger than 64 bit at the moment (not going to say "never" - at one time we were "never" going to need more than 640k of memory!) because that's what controls how much RAM you can use - as has been pointed out above, 2^64 is lots and lots of memory. The data bus is a different matter - that's about the calculations that you can do and the bigger the data words you can handle, the faster and more precisely you can do maths which is what you want the CPU to do. 64 bit OS have been slow in getting under way because of the classic "no-one uses it so no-one develops for it". That at last is changing - almost all major manufacturers are shipping 64 bit drivers for new kit. We are planning to go to 64 bit Windows 7 on all our teaching machines this year. We've not had any problems with drivers for this and all the packages we use will work fine on 64 bit OS (some will be much better - eg some of the big maths and engineering applications have 64 bit versions which are really beneficial). We've come across a few 16 bit apps which won't be supported - so far, none looks like a show stopper. Finally, it may not be as easy to use but you can do things like plugging a USB scanner into a 64 bit Windows 7 machine and connecting it to a virtual 32 bit Windows XP machine. This works for me at home but I'm not sure I'd want it running in a room full of kids :-) (although this is where the idea of having a dedicated machine attached to the scanner comes in)

OK; I've now actually read your whole script and can see what's going on :-) You're trying to create the same file twice; the first one is the "Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("computers.txt", True)" line near the end, the second is the one I "fixed" You only need one such line - the createline is good (the "true" at the end will delete the existing file which keeps things tidy if you run this regularly to get a list) the code below does now work (I've actually run it this time ...) Sub ListConnectedComputers( strDomain ) Dim objPDC Set objPDC = getobject("WinNT://" & strDomain ) objPDC.filter = Array("Computer") For Each objComputer In objPDC 'WScript.Echo "Name: " & objComputer.Name objTextFile.WriteLine(objComputer.Name) Next objTextFile.Close End Sub Dim strDomain Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set objTextFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("computers.txt", True) Do strDomain = inputbox( "Please enter a domainname", "Input" ) Loop until strDomain <> "" ListConnectedComputers( strDomain )

There are some contact numbers on the Leeds council website -http://www.leeds.gov.uk/Advice_and_benefits/Community_advice/Anti_social_behaviour_and_nuisance/What_can_I_do_about_domestic_noise_nuisance.aspx - not sure if these are the people you've already spoken to? Dealing with any kind of domestic problem is always difficult - go in too early and you get accusations of nanny state, interfering in people's lives etc. The council also has to try and decide who (if anyone) is actually in the wrong - what if you have 2 sets of neighbours, each equally bad and they just want the council to join in the fight.

You need to specify that you're going to write to the text file in the open statement: Set objTextFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile("computers.txt",2) details here: OpenTextFile Method

If the permissions are going to be set on keys under HKCU then you can do this with a login script but f it's HKLM then the user won't have permissions to set the permissions on the keys (and I'm guessing this is the case - you almost never need to change permissions on HKCU because users are supposed to be able to write to it!) What I think would work best is to use a machine startup script to create the registry key(s) and then set the permissions in the same script. Create a .reg file by exporting from your reg file - let's say that it's going to make changes to HKLM\Software\MySoftwareCompany and it's saved as myswsettings.reg Your batch file will look something like this: regedit -s \\server\share\myswsettings.reg \\server\share\SetACL.exe -ot reg -on "hklm\software\MySoftwareCompany" -actn ace -ace "n:users;p:full" The regedit bit will silently load the settings you need and then setacl will make the permissions changes. setacl is available on sourceforge. It's an amazingly useful piece of software and there are some pretty good examples on the web site (which really helps because it's pretty complicated!) The actual code there says that you are working on an Object Type registry with Object name HKLM etc. The action you are going to make is a change to an Access Control Entry (ACE) and the ACE that you want gives full Permission to a group Named users I'm not quite sure how you're deploying the apps to each machine but the ideal way of getting these registry keys and permissions in the right place would be to add this at install time - they're then set properly before machines get deep frozen!

it only sets the permissions; it won't create the key if it's not already there - browsing on your own machine just seems to be a way of making sure you don't mistype the (often long!) registry key You can use Group Policy Preferences to set registry values - there's an overview of this here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=42e30e3f-6f01-4610-9d6e-f6e0fb7a0790&DisplayLang=en Note that it although it refers to 2008 server you don't actually need that; the client side stuff runs on anything from XP and you can manage it from Windows Vista, 7 or Server 2008

NTFS Recovery, Recover deleted file, undelete files with DiskInternals has some software which might recover it. Even though the MFT has gone, I seem to remember that you can recover directories and their contents - you just lose the name of the top level directory (but it's fairly easy to recognise the contents of \windows, \program files and \documents and settings) Got to be worth a try :-)