srochford

Not sure if you'd call it full sized but the HP Elitebook 2530 has a 1280x800 screen and a battery life approaching 8 hours (depends what you do but I've had it running fairly heavily for >5 hours). Bad news is, it's not cheap and, no, you can't have mine :-)

Why does it matter? Typically, it's because you want to stop people messing up the laptop and then you have to waste time fixing it. It may be better to take another approach but you will need management agreement. You then basically let staff do what they want but with the proviso that if the machine stops working (for any reason - misuse, misfortune etc) then you will wipe and reinstall. If you've got an image for the machine it's pretty quick to do that. If you go down this route then you need to make sure you've got an easy way for users to backup their data. For example, you might give them an icon which they click when plugged into the network that uses something like robocopy to sync with a network share If you try and lock down the machine you will get some people asking "why?" If the answer is "so you can't break it" then you're opening yourself up to nightmares when the machine breaks (and it's not the user's fault) - they'll then say "you must fix it" because you told them it was unbreakable. There's a whole mass of software which is legal and justifiable even if you're taking the view that the computer can only be used for work; if you don't let staff install it themselves then you're going to have to do it for them which just makes more unnecessary work for you - something that you really want to avoid :-)

As you say, with a read-only, mandatory profile it's fine to put it in netlogon (and if you have more than 1 server then you get automatic replication and DFS for free :-)) If you want a default profile for all users on your network, netlogon is the only place to put it because that's where an account with no profile specified will look for the default

Not quite. XT was very early but it wasn't the first model - check IBM's own web site for some more history IBM Archives: The first 10 years I love the "Portable Personal Computer that can travel where the work is" but at 30lb weight I'd guess it helps to have a trolley to shift it! Could you imagine offering a 30lb computer to someone today and telling them that it's portable :-)

Is 10% over 18 months unreasonable? I've no idea what the turnover is in the civil service but it could be that high (actually, after a bit of googling, 10% in 18 months seems very low - PART 3: Labour Turnover gives some stats from the CIPD and the CBI which give figures ranging from 15% - 25% per year) There are further savings if people leave and you don't replace them - it costs money to recruit and you don't spend that if you don't replace leavers. A saving of £20,000 salary could be more than £30,000 if you add in the other costs of employment that you save. Of course, part of the problem, is that the "wrong" people might leave - once politicians start saying "we need to lose 10% of staff through natural wastage" the brightest and best are going to start looking for new jobs before that natural wastage becomes compulsory redundancy.

I'm well aware that there's not an awful lot of difference. Even the Lib Dems are calling for a freeze on public sector salaries so there's not much difference there, either. I know that the UK is hugely in debt but I'm not sure I understand why everyone is so keen to fix this so quickly. I could have misunderstood this but isn't a big part of the debt because we've bought shares in the various banks that were in trouble? RBS seeks to loosen grip of toxic asset scheme - Times Online says "RBS shares, which hit a low of 10p each in January, have rallied as investors have grown more confident about the economic climate and their loan portfolios have begun to appear less fragile. RBS shares closed at 56.3p last week, giving the Government a paper profit of £1.9 billion on its stake, which was taken last October." Less than 2 years ago, RBS shares were worth 10 times that; if they return to that value within the next few years then doesn't the government (ie us) get back not just what they spent on the shares but an absolutely massive profit? Doesn't that help to pay off the debt? If so, why can't we just wait a few years? I appreciate we have to fund the borrowing in the short term but is that really not possible?

Don't assume that they're real at all! It's far too easy to basically make up figures to prove what you want. I'm sure that throughout all of the public services there are managers and support staff doing jobs which aren't needed but it's simply not true to say that every increase in support staff is a waste of money. In hospitals, for example, nurses/matrons used to do a whole pile of admin work which is now done by "managers" - this frees up the time for medical staff to use their medical skills. In schools, it used to be the case that teachers managed all of the computers and ran the networks (a job I did as well as teaching just over 10 years ago). Now we employ IT support staff and network managers to do this - the taxpayers alliance will tell you that they're a waste of money; I suspect some here would disagree with them :-)

I suspect the Conservatives will throw away the bit of BSF that could be good (spending money on new buildings) and keep the bit that is bad (out-sourcing everything to private companies). I heard an interview with George Osborne a couple of weeks ago in which he was talking about the way money could be saved by outsourcing more things in schools (I think he was particularly talking about teachers but I'm not sure how that would work; outsourcing pretty much all support is easy to do but doesn't necessarily give good results)

Yes, but you can simplify it and speed it up: for /d %i in (*) do cacls %i /e /t /g %i:c administrator:c "domain admins":f not too relevant on a server which will probably always stay in the domain, but it can be better to set the permissions to the local group rather than domain (assuming that you add domain admins to local administrators group)

@mattx - how big is your cupboard that you can go to the back of it and find lost things? Are you sure this isn't a "The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe" type cupboard??

I don't think you need to worry about not having exposure to the latest technologies on a daily basis. A key thing that any good employer would be looking for is the ability to learn new stuff. They might employ you today because they need (say) VMWare skills but this time next year there'll be a whole raft of new stuff to deal with and if you're sitting there saying "but I know all this good stuff about VMWare" but you're not able to learn the new stuff quickly then you're no use! If you can go to an interview and say "I was presented with technology X which was new to me and I was able to learn it and make it work for my work place" then that looks good - doesn't really matter if the technology is actually common place; what you're showing is that you're flexible and can move forward. I don't always think it's true to say education is disconnected from the real world and can't keep pace with the private sector. There are plenty of private companies (particularly smaller ones) who have no kind of replacement cycle, use shared desktops instead of servers and are running a weird old mix of software (some of which might be licensed!)

7dayshop.com - Online Store are £4.59 inc VAT and delivery for quantities of 4+; they might do more discount for a bigger quantity. I can recommend 7dayshop - their prices are generally good

Not sure if this is what you're trying to do but one of our students has a blog entry on pretty much this topic - Anas’ blog Blog Archive HOWTO: Connect Nokia Devices to Imperial Wireless Network!

There are technical ways you can deal with this, but really it's another "people" issue. You need to get management on side; if they're not and you do something to stop staff using the laptop at home then you'll end up with management telling you to reverse the changes and then everyone gets upset. If management agree that the laptop should be brought in regularly then it's a simple disciplinary issue if they don't do as requested.

Looks good. Just a quick point - if you have nested groups then this won't work (eg if you want to map a printer for everyone in year7 but the group year7 is actually made up from groups year7a, year7b, year7c etc) If this is unimportant to you then ignore me completely (most people do :-)) but for anyone else, you could either do things like: If IsMember("year7a") or ismember("year7b") or ismember("year7c") then or you can get into nasty recursive stuff where you take the top level group, enumerate its members and for any groups you find, enumerate them as well. You then have a list of every user in your group and you see if your user is there.

Minimum wage? Better pay for nurses? Better pay for teachers? New hospital buildings? New school buildings? More police on the streets? Just a few of the big things that this government did - not sure if they're all a good idea. David Cameron obviously thinks most of them are a waste of money and will reverse them and I'm sure that there are plenty who agree with him.

Sadly, I'm not sure that that's quite true - one of the things that doesn't seem to be sorted by sysprep is the WSUS ID - hence all the suggestions in this thread for deleting the WSUS info. What I do is make the image, run sysprep and shutdown. I then boot the machine using Windows PE and delete the registry keys mentioned (you need to load the hive c:\windows\system32\config\software to get at them - there's no point deleting stuff from the WinPE registry!) I also delete the contents of c:\windows\softwaredistribution - this cleans out all the software used by Windows update but when the service starts in the newly deployed image it will find this is missing and fetch a new copy from the server. This time in WinPE is also good just to clean up - remove any temp files which don't need to be there, any log files in C:\windows (windowsupdate.log is a good one; you then know that anything in it is actually relevant to your newly booted image but I think every log file in c:\windows can go) You can also delete pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys (if it's there). On a machine with 4Gb of RAM these 2 files can add 8Gb to your image size (although you don't need to worry if you're using ImageX - it doesn't include those files)

I think this is genuinely difficult. Whether there's any point in an apology for what happened to Turing is debatable but certainly the government of the day behaved badly in the way homosexuals were treated so something was definitely wrong. Should a government apologise for the fact that soldiers die during a war? Not really sure. I think most people would agree that there is risk from the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan (and Pakistan). If that's the case then it's probably right for an army to be there and, sadly, soldiers get killed when you're fighting a war. Iraq's a bit different; many people think that we should never have sent armies there but our government disagrees (and it's worth remembering that the Conservatives basically also supported this). If it was right for our army to be there then I think it's actually wrong to apologise for the fact that soldiers get killed - that's just what happens in war time. Of course, you can argue that the soldiers need better defensive equipment and that's probably true but in reality even if they had vehicles with better armour it would just meant that the bad guys use bigger roadside bombs and people would still die.

Answer to the first question is "almost none, and most of the abusers will be relatives" - so called "stranger danger" is incredibly rare. Answer to the second is a bit more difficult; this is has all happened because of the Soham murders about 7 years ago when "people" said "something must be done". If the government did nothing then they'd be criticised for failing to act. If they do something then they get criticised for over-reacting. Life's tough when you're a politician :-)

Are you sure??? I seem to remember that we had to buy Expression when Front Page was dropped. Is this perhaps tied in to the fact that Sharepoint Designer is now free; if you had bought that, then you get a free license for Expression - details on the MS web site http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA103607611033.aspx

Do you want to use the E71 with Exchange? If so, be aware that Nokia's mail for Exchange doesn't support folders in your inbox (which is a real show stopper for me; there are a load of emails which I have in folders because of rules which I'd like to read on the bus - can't do it with the Nokia product!)

Sadly, that's probably just the inaccuracy of Sky News showing through - it's not intended to cover situations like that (but the whole idea seems over the top) I'm not sure if @lazerblazer was being sarcastic with the initial comment but if not, then that's why we end up with systems like this - people think that "we must do EVERYTHING to protect one kid". That's never going to be possible and it's almost certainly not sensible to even try!

It's over 20 years (wow!!) since I had anything to do with Green School but it was a pretty decent school then and I think it still is. it's not a bad bit of London (but no tube nearby - nearest would be Hounslow East). Syon Park is just across the road so there is open space nearby and you're not a huge distance from the river.

Are you saying that if you type "delprofile.vbs" on a "faulty" machine that the script runs? If you type "cscript delprofile.vbs" does it run? What about "wscript delprofile.vbs" As Matt says, it's Windows scripting host which runs a .vbs file and there are two versions (I think of them as the console version and the Windows version) - I'm wondering if one is Ok but the other is faulty. You could try following this MS KB article - When I run a script in Windows Script, I receive an error message: "Library not registered" to see if that helps. If typing "delprofile.vbs" doesn't work but "cscript delprofile.vbs" does work then you could always change the batch file on the server so that it calls your script like that - it's actually not a bad idea anyway because you avoid problems where some machine might be using wscript as default and others using cscript

You could use MS Virtual Server if you've got a physical server with enough RAM (if you're allocating 512Mb RAM to each machine and you want 20 of them, you've got to have 10Gb of RAM on the server - say 16Gb to be safe) - in this way, the VHD stays on the server running it and effectively you remote desktop into it. You certainly can run Virtual PC with the VHD on a network drive. The VMC file should specify the location of the VHD and you just point virtual PC to it (you can just make a shortcut to the VMC and clicking it will load VPC and the machine)