srochford

I used to work in FE and this is a complete nightmare - probably half the intake had no idea of their qualifications (they ranged in age from 16 to 86 and came from all over the world!) In a 6th form college with such a tiny intake (:-) - we used to process about 15,000 enrolments per year) I'm guessing you're pulling from no more than a dozen or so schools - can you not liaise with them to get the electronic results that they will get? Assuming you can get the unique candidate number and the results from the schools then it should be easy to tie that in with the new students (who ought to be able to give you their number!)

Also very glad he's OK (and it's a real tribute to his driving and the quality of the car that he is!) Playing devil's advocate, but what exactly could the police have done had they come out? Offered tea and sympathy? We'd have more accusations of wet liberalism if they did that! I'm guessing there are no other witnesses so what info could they collect? If there are CCTV cameras on the road then the info they hold will still be there tomorrow but if there are no cameras then this is just one of those complete nightmares where the guilty party will get away.

Bitter past experience shows that you may need to get a new KVM - some machines just won't play with the USB to PS/2 adapters. One thing to try (which you may have done already!) is to make sure that the KVM is set to the right channel when you switch on the computer (if if you're plugging into socket 1, make sure that the KVM is set for socket 1 although sometimes you can't select a channel when there's nothing plugged in ...)

There was a comment the other day about a test set for a technician which needed them to use Excel - this is a classic example of where you can use a spreadsheet to do much of the donkey work. Assuming you've got column A with username, column B with password and the data starts at row 2 then you can put this in C2 ="CREATE DATABASE "& A2 &";" and this in D2 ="GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON "&A2&".* to "&A2 &"@localhost identified by '"&B2&"';" Fill down columns C and D, paste the results into notepad and save each column separately and then just redirect like @kmount suggests.

2 near me are "spread the love" and "keep the f... out"

Income tax is reasonably progressive but it's not the only tax and most other taxes are not progressive (because they're not related to ability to pay) - someone on minimum wage pays exactly the same rate of VAT, insurance tax, excise duty etc etc meaning that the total percentage of income paid out as tax can be higher for someone on lower income. People earning more money may be able to employ accountants to "hide" income so they don't pay as much income tax.

Are you sure it was the post that blinded you - maybe that old wives tale is really true :-)

How much does it cost to keep the army in Afghanistan compared to (say) keeping it on Salisbury Plain? If we bring the army home, do we just sack all those soldiers? If not, do we really save money? There may well be good reasons for bringing the army out (but not many military people seem to think that there are) but I don't think it should be about the money. The Conservatives have said that they will "slash" the cost of running the MoD; that might be possible but what that actually means is that they will just dump another load of people (probably mostly quite low paid) on the dole. It's the way they generally try and fix problems and it was a stunning success for Margaret Thatcher back in the early 80s!!!

The Sun front page claims that the PBR increases tax for 10 million people ("Darling screws more people than Tiger Woods") I don't know if that's true but, if it is, that means tax is the same or less for nearly 20 million people (28.93 million people in employment in September 2009; National Statistics Online) If he'd move the threshold to (say) £25,000 it would affect fewer people which means there's less tax income so instead of a 0.5% rise perhaps you need a 1% rise and so on.

Seems reasonable to me. Get the technology staff involved and I'm sure you could generate power from the trampoline. You could then have a wireless data connection and a wireless power source. Green IT - coming to a sports hall near you soon :-)

You can get USB extenders for up to 45m - Videk Online

If your problem with Ghost is that the DOS boot disc doesn't work then you could make a BartPE boot disc and put the ghost32.exe file on that - you can then multicast to it (I've done this with Ghost 8 quite happily) Also, to get your count up to 25, you could use some VMs. Finally, don't panic about getting them licensed by Thursday; you've got time after deployment before they'll finally give up on getting a license key!

He's probably right. If you think of the outrage that's been expressed elsewhere that someone might phone and try to sell you stuff, you can see how hard it can be to start selling :-) I'm sure I'm not alone in barely noticing advertising (I see the irritating message which tells me I'm playing into the hands of BSF by blocking adverts even though I do no such thing; I'm afraid I couldn't tell you anything about adverts which are on pretty much every page!) Who *does* click on the adverts on Edugeek? That might be a useful bit of info you can give to companies (ie we get x thousand visitors per day and y% of them click on 1 or more adverts) I think how you describe Edugeek depends on who's asking. If it's a technical person in a school etc then you can explain that it's a place you can ask (mainly) technical questions and generally get good answers. If you're trying to explain it to someone in marketing then I think it's way more difficult to explain what we do and why.

I think the "administrator" account is disabled by default in Windows 7 so anything just trying to change a password for this could have problems. The NT password reset disc that richard_s mentions does work for Windows 7 - it will give you a list of accounts. It's more reliable to blank the password rather than try and set it to something new.

the OWA logs are also good - they will show you the subject of every email read/sent and can help to prove that someone has read the email and the time at which they did it. Not sure how accurate the info in the Exchange server console is - it could just be saying "user X made a connection at hh:mm" but if the browser just hangs at that point then the user won't have read their email even though they did make a connection.

Internet routing is fascinating: C:\>tracert www.edugeek.net Tracing route to www.edugeek.net [78.46.90.194] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms hux-192-hsrp-master.net.ic.ac.uk [155.198.192.254] 2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms hh-core-ns5400-2-trust.net.ic.ac.uk [155.198.1.6] 3 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms ic-ns5400-2-trust.net.ic.ac.uk [155.198.1.5] 4 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms hh-core-ns5400-2-untrust.net.ic.ac.uk [194.82.153.33] 5 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms ac-core-hh.net.ic.ac.uk [194.82.153.22] 6 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms me-core-ac-core.net.ic.ac.uk [194.82.153.6] 7 1 ms 1 ms <1 ms ic-gsr.lmn.net.uk [194.83.102.125] 8 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms po0-0.ulcc-gsr.lmn.net.uk [194.83.100.5] 9 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms so-1-0-0.lond-sbr1.ja.net [146.97.42.61] 10 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms so-6-0-0.lond-sbr4.ja.net [146.97.33.154] 11 2 ms 3 ms 2 ms ldn-b4-link.telia.net [213.248.100.237] 12 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms ldn-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.254.21] 13 9 ms 50 ms 10 ms prs-bb1-link.telia.net [80.91.254.209] 14 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms ffm-bb2-link.telia.net [80.91.249.46] 15 19 ms 20 ms 19 ms ffm-b2-link.telia.net [80.91.252.254] 16 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms hetzner-ic-134650-ffm-b2.c.telia.net [213.248.92.82] 17 42 ms 23 ms 23 ms hos-bb1.juniper3.rz4.hetzner.de [213.239.240.234] 18 23 ms 23 ms 23 ms hos-tr4.ex3k16.rz9.hetzner.de [213.239.244.253] 19 23 ms 23 ms 24 ms eg4.edugeek.net [78.46.90.194]

We have this problem; I know our switches are configured to not age out the MAC addresses for the printers.

They can get it pretty easily on any of the manufacturer web sites - it's only a security risk if they know the existing BIOS password (and if they know that then your security's gone!) The Dell OMCI stuff has to be installed on the machines first (it's part of Dell's standard build) and only works for people with admin access; again, if users have those rights then all bets are off in security terms :-)

Cron for Windows - CRONw - CRON for Windows if you're used to cron on Linux then this should be easy to master (but it's not too scary even if you've never touched cron before!)

I *think* you want to add this to your startup script: cacls c:\ /e /g users:r administrators:f system:f but check it on one machine before you to do it to all of them! This will change the existing permissions on this folder only (you need /t if you want to change the tree) but if there are folders lower down which are inheriting from this folder then you could break them.

oops! That line should be: oShell.run sCmd,,True Moral: always, always, try out the whole code, even the bits which you know are right because you use them all the time ... This Technet page Customize Outlook profiles by using an Outlook Profile (PRF) file has some details of how to import the settings; the most transparent one for the user looks like you check to see if the "first-run" value is set; if not then you set a registry value. I can't really check out the whole of the code below but it does set the right registry value so I think it's OK. I'm using the WMI registry provider to read the registry - that second line looks scary but you just have to copy it but shout if you get stuck. Probably no help, but life gets much easier when you go to Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 - you pretty much just add "autodiscover" to your DNS and Outlook just works, no more profile settings etc. Const HKEY_CURRENT_USER = &H80000001 Set oRegistry=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\default:StdRegProv") set oShell = createobject("wscript.shell") 'start Excel and get its version; should be same as Outlook Set oExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application") iVer= oExcel.Version oExcel.Quit 'import settings as appropriate for Outlook version sCmd="regedit /s \\mydomainname\netlogon\outlook\" & iVer & ".reg" oShell.run,,true 'need to check to see if Outlook setup already run sPath="Software\Microsoft\Office\" & iVer & "\Outlook\Setup" 'get a list of values for correct version of Outlook lRC = oRegistry.EnumValues(HKEY_CURRENT_USER, sPath, sKeys) bFirstRun=false 'assume we've not run Outlook yet if lRC=0 then 'return value of zero means we didn't have an error reading reg for i=lbound(sKeys) to ubound(skeys) 'step through each value in turn - convert to lower case (makes check easier) sKey=lcase(skeys(i)) 'technet article says look for either text if sKey="firstrun" or sKey="first-run" then 'we've already configured Outlook, don't do it again bFirstRun=true exit for end if next end if if bFirstRun=false then 'we've not run Outlook before so force profile settings import lRC=oRegistry.SetStringValue(HKEY_CURRENT_USER,sPath,"ImportPrf","\\domain\netlogon\outlook\outlook.prf") end if

It's good but it's not all true :-) No 1, for example - if you look at almost any of the longer threads here, you'll find plenty of examples of things where people really ought to say "I don't know" but they are just arguing for the sake of it (and that definitely includes me...) Nos 2 and 3 just contradict each other; 3 says "be honest if you've made a mistake" but 2 says "don't start off by telling me you've made a mistake" No 5, however, is absolutely spot on. I treat people who send me email with "important" flags attached as queue jumpers and quietly ignore them!

It is .vbs (sorry; should have said that :-)) and no, it won't work for OWA but will work if Outlook is installed and there's a profile there (or would be auto-generated) Out of interest, why not use Outlook? If this is just a user preference (they get used to being able to use OWA everywhere and "fat" Outlook doesn't add that much) but Outlook is there if they want it then the script will still work. The other alternative is to use webdav to query the server - this would work even if Outlook isn't installed. I googled and found quite a few example bits of code but I can't get any of them to work :-( I'm not in work today and the sun has just come out so I'm going to get some fresh air; if I get time tomorrow, I'll try again to get this to work because it ought to be easy :-)

All HP "business" desktops support remote BIOS password changing as do Dell - I'd guess you probably can use SCCM but Dell and HP provide a (very simple!) command line utility to do it so it can just be part of the machine startup script (and you don't need to have set anything previously in the BIOS - that would kind of defeat the purpose!) A quick check shows that the Tecra A10 has an SMBIOS and this is the first thing you need to allow remote management so you might be in luck but I can't find any more info about this.

Not at all. It's when there are three cars moving in all 4 directions that it becomes a bit more complicated :-)