srochford

The Register article says "Apple has little regard for 'the customer is always right'" and also "The low-price, good-enough laptop boat has sailed, and Apple's not on it." I think the first point isn't right. The right kind of customer is always right when they talk to Apple but Apple is not interested in big chunks of the market for whom "good-enough" is OK. Apple products are not just "good enough" - engineered down to a low price point. They're engineered up to make sure that they're "as good as they can be" If you're buying a school full of computers then the extra cost for a Mac is an obstacle and "good enough" probably has to do the job. If you're buying a single computer to do your job and it's important that the computer does the job properly then a few extra hundred pounds probably doesn't matter.

I'd guess this is just one of those things where Wikipedia is wrong (shock, horror!!) type: robocopy /? and it says: Usage :: ROBOCOPY source destination [file [file]...] [options]

delete the file desktop.ini in each folder - Explorer shows the folder name from there. If you really want to make it "nice", you could put the user's name in to the file.

if you've got a question which says "how do I move/copy" on a network then the answer's probably robocopy :-) robocopy \\server1\oldshare \\server2\newshare /move *.mp3 *.wma *.jpg

If you just want a raw count then countif is good; if you want a bit more structure (how many of each grade in each subject then dcounta is the function to use. I've attached a sample. Key thing is that you have headings for each of your subjects and then this section becomes a table you're going to analyse. The analysis section has a set of criteria (name above grade) and then you use the dcounta function to say look at table XXX (make sure you use absolute referencing - highlight the data and press F4) the column number doesn't matter for what we're doing here (can't remember what it does!) the final bit says "count when English=A" (or Maths=B etc) It looks hard but you actually only type in the first formula; you then just drag right to do all the English and then copy/paste for the other subjects. Excel is fab :-) grades.xls

In what way? You can do some pretty major databases with SQL Express. There are limitations but I'm intrigued as to what you're particularly thinking would cause a problem.

Bet you've got a Dell at home :-) I personally have a Lenovo; I love it (screen res of 1680 x 1050 and just a really good machine) but at work we mostly have HP (my work laptop is a 2530p which is also excellent although I wish it had a higher screen res) for any company you'll always find someone who's had a bad experience; the bigger the company, the more people you're likely to have with bad experiences (even if it's 0.001% of the customers who have a bad time, that's still a lot of people when you have 1,000,000 customers etc) I now find HP pretty good but I've had bad experiences. In my last job, we invited them to tender one year (we'd been test buying odd batches of about 50 and the HP machines seemed good) but their presentation was useless; they just couldn't offer any of what we wanted (really difficult things like shipping with USB mice and keyboards!!) so they didn't get the business.

Microsoft have always said that you should never image a domain controller as a backup means. In the past, I'd guess it wasn't easy to do this (would have had to boot into WinPE or whatever to run Ghost etc) but snapshotting makes it much easier so this is a timely reminder that you mustn't ever try and use a snapshot/image type backup. I'd guess the only exception might be if you've had a total disaster and lost everything - bringing back one image could work. (It's also OK if you've only got one DC but no-one runs a real network like that :-))

Not the permissions but the names - I've always found that Macs won't properly mount a home directory that is "server share folder" - they seem to want "server share"

Rants are good - hopefully gets other people thinking about "why don't I do that?" Your method is fine if you're starting from scratch (although the permissions it sets up won't be right for some people; I think MS defaults to giving full control on the home folder and I would never want this) If you've got an existing network and you want to clean up the permissions then you've got to be able to script it (and it's a pretty trivial script) there's also the scale of the thing - I always smile when I see things like "select all users and right click" - it ain't going to work on anything other than the smallest of Active Directory setups :-) Finally, the method you describe gives users a home directory of \\server\share\username - works fine for Windows, completely useless for Linux or Mac. Obviously not a problem for many places (I've used it and like it for all sorts of reasons) but doesn't work for everyone!

Oops! Forgot to mention one other thing that's just designed to make life more fun :-) At a command prompt you can use "%i" as a variable. To do the same thing in a batch file you need to use %%i (double up the percent signs) There is a reason for this - it's not really done to make your life a misery!

Go into device manager, find the driverless card, right click and then properties. go to the details tab and choose "hardware IDs" - you'll get a list of stuff looking like: PCI\VEN_1234&DEV_5678 The 1234 bit is the vendor code; the 5678 is the specific device. Now go to PCI Vendor and Device Lists and enter the vendor code and look it up; separately, enter the device code and look it up. There might be more than one 5678 (example!!) but knowing the vendor from the first bit you've now got "who made it" and "what it is" If it's something like Intel the drivers will be easy. If it's something like "Joe Bloggs manufacturing, China" then it may be harder but at least you know what it is :-)

Not sure exactly what you're trying to achieve so let's start with the basics - apologies if it's too basic :-) The permissions that a user sees are made up from 2 parts - the permissions set on the share (you've said it's full control on all of them) and the NTFS permissions on the actual folder/files. The result is the most restrictive of the two - eg if either of them is "read/only" then that's all you can do. Given this, I like to make the shares full permission and focus on getting the folder permissions right. The cacls command is part of Windows and you can use it like this: cacls E:\Users\Students\Work\Intake07\07smitha /e /t /g 07smitha:c This says, take the folder e:\users etc and edit the existing perms (/e) Do this to the whole tree (/t - ie everything under this folder) and grant (/g) change permission to user 07smitha (change permission means read, write, delete - basically, everything but change permissions - in general you don't want your users changing the permissions) If the permissions on e:\users\students\work are set right (I would normally have administrators - full; system - full) then this is good. so, how do you do all the folders in intake07 in 1 go? this is where simple batch commands come in. If you type: E: cd \Users\Students\Work\Intake07\ for /d %i in (*) do echo %i then you'll see a list of folders flash by - the for command is saying do "something" multiple times. The /d says "only match directories". The %i is a variable - basically, you're going to look at every folder (* means match every folder; try using s* and see what happens) and put it's name in %i and then the "do" bit says what you want it to do - in this case echo (show on screen) its value Well, that's pretty but no use. To make it do something "real" you change that echo to something meaningful: E: cd \Users\Students\Work\Intake07\ for /d %i in (*) do cacls %i /e /t /g %i:c this will give you a series of commands and because your username matches the folder name it will work - eg you'll get cacls aardvark /e /t /g aardvark:c cacls buffalo /e /t /g buffalo:c cacls cheetah /e /t /g cheetah:c and so on. I hope that get's you started - shout if it doesn't help or is going completely the wrong way!

I'm sure you're right. The scary thing is that I remember the early days of IT in schools and you're describing the kind of thing that was going on back then. Does anyone else remember ILECC (London), AUCBE (Hertfordshire) or any of the other LEA based groups that encouraged schools to work together to develop systems and resources? They were all scrapped back in the 1980s when central government decided it was better to let schools directly manage their own money. That meant there was no money available to fund LEA organisations and they all folded. I doubt we'll ever see this sort of working again; George Osborne was talking last week about how a Conservative government would save money in schools by paying private companies to provide even more services at a lower cost than employing people directly. This doesn't suggest that we'll see anything better in educational IT whoever's in power after the next election.

It's worth taking a quick look at the spec for this qual (http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/pdf/AQA-4900-W-SP-09.PDF) which says in the introduction "The Entry Level Certificates are designed for use by students who are unlikely to reach Grade G at GCSE" That includes many kids with special needs but also an awful lot of kids whose parents are simply not having any input into their education (either because they can't or won't - doesn't really matter) Given that, some organisations try to do something with these kids and they end up with what look like pretty Mickey Mouse qualifications. I'd guess that the boy who made the news is either not "entry level" ability and shouldn't have been entered for this or is measured as entry level because he chooses not to do any work and also probably shouldn't have been entered for this because it then devalues it for the people who would benefit from having their minimal levels of achievement recognised.

I reckon you do - everyone knows Sony is a complete nightmare when it comes to drivers :-)

A big problem is that although you're well qualified, you've got no experience and (rightly or wrongly) employers will pick people with experience first. You can try getting by experience by doing voluntary IT support - you need to try and get this in a reasonably large place so that when you apply for a job you can include this as an example of the experience that you've got (it also looks good that you've not just sat on your bum :-)) You could also look at getting temp IT work through an agency; again that will give you experience. Unfortunately, it may not be good experience because some agencies are rubbish - try a few if you can till you find one who knows what they're doing. Good luck!

I'm not remotely suggesting that there's any "benefit to society as a whole" for qualifications/certificates like this and I have no problem with people laughing at mis-use of quals (if that's what actually happened) but for a small number of people this would be a valid qualification, recognising that they have achieved something pretty special. I think all arguments like this are supposed to descend to calling the other person a Nazi; so I'd guess I should do that now :-) In your Nazi world, we'd have no need of low level qualifications because we'd just get rid of anyone with any kind of disability and life would be lovely :-)

Do you really not understand that "most young people" does not mean "all young people"?? There are plenty of people for whom getting a bus on their own is a real achievement and it should be acknowledged. If you've never done it, talk to someone who deals with pupils having a variety of special needs and ask them what the phrase "independent traveller" means - it's nothing to do with students on a gap year!

The kids who've just got this qualification may think it's a bit of a joke but for quite a lot of people it's a real achievement to be able to travel independently; getting a certificate for doing something which might seem trivial to you or me will be a real achievement for them.

You've probably got a drive mapped to the domain controller - check in Explorer or just do "net use * /d" at the command prompt. If it's not a drive then it's a mapping of some sort - connection with computer management console, for example??

HP don't help themselves - SFF and USFF are pretty similar abbreviations for very different machines (whereas the CMT and SFF are essentially the same in a different box!) Another quick rant - with so many numbers, letters etc to choose from, why do HP have to re-use product names and numbers???

Do you have a machine startup script? If so, why not just add delprof to that? You would have something like: set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") intDays=1 strPath = "\\server\tools$\delprof.exe" sCmd=strPath & " /q /i /d:" & CStr(intDays) oShell.run sCmd,,true This leaves out the possibility that it's not connecting to the remote computer and because you're running it at startup there's no risk of files being open etc. The "true" at the end of the run line will make the script wait for this to complete. You could leave it off but you run the risk of a user trying to log on while delprof is deleting their profile which is not good :-)

My work laptop is an HP Elitebook 2530p; it has a 12" screen but I don't know if that's too big for you. The battery life is amazing - it'll run pretty much all day if you're not doing too heavy stuff with it. There are a variety of specs available depending on what you want (eg if you can lose the optical drive to get a big hard disc) Windows finds all the drivers for Windows 7 with one exception - it has something called Driveguard which shuts down the hard disc if the machine is jogged. The Vista driver doesn't work (installs OK but tends to shut down the disc and won't come back on - makes it a bit difficult!)

It will have written log files (I think in the temp directory) and they should tell you something about what's going on. You could also change the "displaylevel" from none while you're debugging - can't remember the different options but use the one which is most verbose; that way you'll see if there are errors displayed.