srochford

@danlewis3 - there's nothing wrong with your script but this kind of thing has a tendency to grow (new rooms are added with printers etc) so my (personal!) preference is to do this kind of thing with a select statement: select case room case "room7" PrinterPath1 = printserver & "\suite7biz190f" PrinterPath2 = printserver & "\KONICA COLOUR PULL" case "Design04" PrinterPath1 = printserver & "\mfdkmc253design" case else printerpath1 = printserver & "\mainprinter" end select if printerpath1<>"" then Wshnetwork.addwindowsprinterconnection Printerpath1 end if if printerpath2<>"" then Wshnetwork.addwindowsprinterconnection Printerpath1 end if I just find it easier to read multiple case statements than lots of if/elseif. The other thing I've done is move the actual addprinter bit to the end - it saves typing (making errors less likely) but also means that you can see more of the script on screen which just makes it easier to see what's going on. I've also put in a "case else" - this deals with any room that doesn't have a specific printer. You might want this to print to some central printer (library??) or you could even have a dummy printer set up (some software won't do print preview without a print driver; like this you can have a printer driver everywhere even if there's no physical printer available) I've left out the printer driver bit - I can't remember ever using it and looking at this MSDN page suggests that it's only needed for Windows 9x clients. Finally (and I think this has been mentioned before) if you name your machines based on the room they're in then you can just use that instead of having to set a registry key. This is easy if your room names are all the same format (H215, B319 etc) but less easy when the rooms are all different lengths! What you could do is have names like room7_01, room7_02, design04_01 etc. This code will then get the room: set oNet=wscript.network sComputer=oNet.Computername iUnderscorePos=instr(sComputer,"_") if iUnderscorePos<>0 then sRoom=left(sComputer,iUnderscorePos-1) end if If the computer name doesn't have an underscore then the script won't get a room name and the printer will be set using the "case else" bit above. Hope this of use to someone - when you're writing scripts there are always different ways to do things; none is necessarily right or wrong but they might be better or worse for your particular setup!

Not sure if it's a typo or just rubbish reporting! Should it be "64MB of memory" or "64GB" of disc space or none of the above?? I'm also not convinced that parents won't need to pack DVDs to take on holiday to entertain the kids. Pretty sure most people won't want the kids sitting in the back of a car trying to stream movies over a 3G connection!!

Oops! Thought you were talking about me then but it can't be, because I'm 51 :-)

As a wild generalisation, 100% of all active directory problems are down to DNS problems :-) Your netdiag shows: Host Name. . . . . . . . . : zion IP Address . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1 Subnet Mask. . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway. . . . . . : Dns Servers. . . . . . . . : so it looks as if your DC does not have DNS configured?? Assuming DNS is running on the same machine then you need to configure it to point to itself for DNS resoution - you can either enter 192.168.0.1 or 127.0.0.1 (localhost - ie "me") Once you've done that, I'd shut down and restart the server (you can just restart services but this is probably simpler given that things are broken now) and I think it may all come back.

My previous job was as IT Manager in an FE College; we took on several people more or less as soon as they finished their studies (vacancies rarely appear at exactly the right time) and it worked well (less than 10 years on one of them is now IT Support Manager) I think it's hard to answer the question "what's it like working in high schools" because they can be very different. That will depend on lots of things. If the head and senior managers see IT as important then it will be very different from a school where IT is just something that has to be done; if you read some of the "behind the red door" stuff here you'll see the kind of nightmares that sometimes happen ... If you can't immediately get a job, see if you can volunteer to help out in a local school - this gives you a chance to find out what it's like and also gives experience (which always looks good on a CV). Not all schools will take volunteers (there are problems both with child protection and also with people doing a job which ought to be paid) but some will so persevere. Good luck!

OK; sounds reasonable. I don't think you can reply with an alias - only with an alternative mailbox and people will get it wrong. What about having a web form - you pick "Mr Bloggs" from the list, fill in the box and hit send. The webserver then sends the email. If it doesn't work out then you just shut down the web site. If you want to avoid spam, you can easily add a simple captcha system.

We used to give all visually impaired students a roaming profile - they could then get the system set up the way they wanted it. Occasionally, the profile will get messed up and a new one has to be created but it's not a huge deal. If most of your students have a mandatory profile you just copy that and convert to a roaming profile.

I can't really see the point in setting up aliases like this except when you want them for roles (so you could have head_year7, head_year8 etc) Why don't you want parents to know the "real" email? Is this a worry that some bozo will start spamming them and you'd just remove the alias? That would work but you'd then have to let all the other parents know the new alias and the problem would just start again!

I'd guess many people have volume licensing deals so they can just download the proper ISO from the MS web site. While this probably does break the MS licensing conditions I would hope that if it ever went to court it would be thrown out as unreasonable but I'm not a lawyer ... Why MS can't just let the installer run, ask for the product key and then say "that's a home premium key" or "that's a starter key" and continue. It has to be easier than faffing about like this!

Could you not just shred the tape? I know this isn't going to totally destroy it but you'd have to be pretty determined to get data back from shredded tape!

This needs to be shouted from the rooftops! Whenever people start talking about "efficiency savings" what they mean is "sacking people" Sometimes there are people that need to be sacked but I would much prefer it if politicians (and consultants) just said "What we will do is sack a very large number of people and this will save money" and stop pretending that what they are doing is making the world a better place!

spoilsport :-)

If you just want to see if it powers up, stick a paper clip in the plug to link the green and black wires (several black - they're all the same)

Start procmon running on the machine and then click start - watch as it tries to find icons etc for each program. At some point you should see "file not found" errors; that program on the start menu doesn't exist (or is in an inaccessible network location etc)

Should be able to do it with a combination of prnport.vbs and prnmgr.vbs (both in the standard windows build). First will add the port and the second can connect a printer to it. I really, really, wouldn't do this - it's a nightmare to maintain if ever the printer changes and it would be much better to find out what's wrong on the server! Can you (even temporarily) put this particular printer on a different server?? that might help you to isolate the fault.

the controls between the seats no longer do anything - sorry :-) When Virgin first started planning the Pendolinos (>10 years ago???) no-one had an iPod so the idea of building a music player into the train like they did on planes kind of made sense. Now everyone has iPods etc, so no-one was using the entertainment systems and they're all disconnected

I think you need to look at the software that's creating the virtual CD drives - that's probably got an option to say "use drive Q:" rather than "use first available drive"

You can encode the script so that it's not (easily) readable - Using Script Encoder

From Kings Cross take the Piccadilly or Hammersmith and City line to Hammersmith. You can walk from Hammersmith to Olympia - it's about 3/4 mile - or you can get a bus (9, 10, 27) Alternatively, get the 10 bus from outside Kings Cross station - it takes about 50 minutes. You need to buy a ticket from the machine at the bus stop; it costs £2 (can't get one day bus passes any longer; Boris "Idiot Mayor" Johnson has scrapped them in a bid to make buses better ...) That National Rail Enquiries route sounds like someone's having a laugh!!

From a quick google, I think the GUID {3E2E4965-2518-40A4-A72B-95FCE2809D03} is something to do with Sophos Enterprise Library - are you running Sophos? If so, is it configured to run as administrator and have you recently changed the admin password? If this is the case then you can either change the password used in the Sophos app to match the new password or (much better!) set the service to run with a completely separate account.

The trouble is that the 2-3 options you want are absolutely not the 2-3 options that I want so you get (2-3)^number of users in the world options on any piece of software :-)

eventvwr on the server should give you the MAC address of the machine causing the problem. Do you have a database of MAC addresses? If so, you can then find the machine from that. If not, do you have managed switches which can give you their arp tables - that will let you find the switch port?

There's nothing wrong with the basic idea but the VM files can be huge (my "standard" Linux VM is 7.5Gb and doesn't really have very much in it; a Windows VM with a batch of apps could be 3-4 times the size). If your problem at the moment is that it takes too long to renew an image using FOG then it might also take too long using the VM method to repair problems. Not sure if you can do what you want with Virtual PC but you can certainly do it with VMWare Player and Virtual Box (both free products). How would you stop users from just ALT Tabbing to the host OS? I'd guess you could reasonably easily configure the start menu etc to give no access to any applications but it won't stop people fiddling ... I'm guessing you're probably doing this with a budget close to zero; that always makes things harder but you might want to have a look at the various VDI solutions which are designed to do what you want but without having quite so much on the client.

Early days yet, but given that Cameron is saying we must cut public spending by a massive amount, I can see the BSF project carrying on but without the buildings - everything which can be outsourced will be and that includes pretty much all support staff in education.

This can also happen if the user's profile has got slightly mangled. Try getting them to log on as a different user - if that user can access https sites then I'd definitely look at clearing out and giving them a new profile.