srochford

I can't believe I'm defending Virgin Media but it's hardly a hidden charge - Set Top Box | V HD & V+ HD Set Top Boxes - Virgin Media Shop has a big box saying "how much does V HD cost" which lists the £50 charge.

Has anything changed with your WINS setup? this will be used to resolve the short name and if it's not working then this is one thing that will fail (but almost everything else will work fine so WINS can fail without you realising)

I'd guess in the same way they do all the other updates and installs??? A quick google says that all you need is the command: netsh int ipv6 install which is pretty easy to stick in a machine startup script (How to install and uninstall IPv6 in Windows XP for info)

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/links/68991-check-your-ipv6-connectivity-readiness.html was posted earlier this year - it will tell you if you're ready (we are; it gives a 10/10 score for both IPv4 and IPv6)

http://www.edugeek.net/blogs/srochford/278-making-word-files-smaller.html is something I wrote quite a while ago that includes a script to scan a folder tree and convert any .doc files to .docx - these are effectively ZIP files so you get the compression without having to do the work :-) A problem I used to have with a shared drive was that a folder would be setup for a purpose (eg a 1 year course), used for that year but, of course, at the end of the year everything was just left. We had a web page that listed all the folders and once a year people would be asked to claim ownership of folders. Any that weren't claimed within (say) a month were archived and then deleted once a suitable time had gone past to allow people to realise that the folder had gone.

Playing devil's advocate a bit, but is it even worth it? You might do a very basic check (got an @, got a . somewhere after the @) but beyond that you just validate by sending an email which has a "click here to confirm" link in it. After all, I can tell you that my email is [email protected] and it will pass any validation you can do in code; it might even pass visual inspection but it's not my email :-)

What's wrong with @sukh's idea of RDP? It will warn you that another user is logged on but you can force a log on to the machine and just log off normally.

You're right that the government should never have owned many of the businesses it did own and it was sensible to sell them off. My problem with the sale was that most (all?) of them were sold at bargain basement prices. People complain because Gordon Brown lost a lot of money by selling gold at the wrong time and for too low a price but he only did it once. Thatcher sold lots of companies at far too low a price - making sure that big business benefited but the majority of tax payers lost out. I rather suspect that the current government will do the same when they sell the banks we currently own; it ought to be possible to sell them at a large profit (and hence clear a great chunk of debt)

As @synack has said, anything which is doing "number crunching" will run faster because the CPU works with 64 bits of data at a time instead of 32 bits. For most things, however, this may make no difference at all because most of what you do doesn't involve much CPU use (take a look in task manager at the amount of time used by "system idle process" - you need to "show processes from all users" to see this. It's probably > 95% meaning that you've used less than 5% of the available CPU time) I work with people who do try and wring every little bit of speed out of their machines (mainly mathematicians) - I can't find the numbers at the moment but the move from 32bit to 64bit code has had dramatic effects on the speed at which the code runs (and this costs nothing; since the later revisions of the P4 you've been able to install a 64 bit OS) Looking at the list of apps you quoted in the first post, I would expect compression to be faster with 64 bit code (but unless you compress huge files several times an hour it probably won't really make a difference to your life :-)) Decompression is always quicker than compression so I wouldn't expect to see much difference there (it might be possible to measure a difference but it's not going to be huge!) Media Player should be able to play HD video more smoothly (but given the clock speed of a modern CPU you probably won't see the difference) and Excel should be able to recalculate sheets more quickly (again, probably not too important for a spreadsheet with your home accounts but really important when you have huge spreadsheets with lots of complex calculations)

Almost nothing. Don't forget that National Insurance goes up - there's some info here:Budget 2011: using CPI to calculate tax explained - Telegraph (look at the section "how badly will people be hit") 1p off petrol is better than 1p on petrol but it's hardly making a change; on the AA figures for petrol prices, the government now get an extra 2p per litre in VAT since January (and that's ignoring the increase in VAT on 1 January) - the net effect of the change is that George Osborne is still sticking his hand deep into your pocket to take as much as he can (unless of course you're a big company in which case you're going to pay far less tax. Still, we have some advertising agency threatening to come back to the UK so I suppose it's not all bad :-))

I'm using it on Windows 7 and it works fine. As far as I know, it works on Vista but I've not tried it (the WMI Win32_UserProfile stuff was introduced with Vista)

You should have asked :-) I'm guessing you want something like the one below (and I'm sure I've already posted this but I can't find it now!) The first chunk of this deletes the profiles that Windows knows about (ie the ones that show when you go to computer properties) - it does the registry clean up but sometimes fails to delete the folders on disc. The second part cleans up folders on disc which don't have a matching registry entry. You need to run this at machine startup - that way there won't be any odd files held open (Windows 7 is much better at closing registry handles but just occasionally something gets left open) const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002 set oDic=createobject("scripting.dictionary") Set oReg=GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\default:StdRegProv") Set oWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2") set oFSO=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") set oShell=createobject("wscript.shell") on error resume next 'get a list of profiles; exclude "special" (stuff like localservice) profiles Set colItems = oWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_UserProfile where special=false and loaded=false",,48) For Each oItem in colItems sSid=oItem.SID Set oUserProfile = GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationlevel=impersonate}!\\.\root\cimv2:Win32_UserProfile.SID='" & sSID &"'") oUserProfile.Delete_ Next 'now clean up directories not attached to profiles 'and profiles not completely deleted by first step 'build a list of the directories used by profiles sPath = "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList" oReg.EnumKey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath, arrSubKeys For Each subkey In arrSubKeys lRc=oReg.GetStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath & "\" & subkey ,"ProfileImagePath",sDir) sDir=lcase(sDir) oDic.add sDir, subkey Next 'now add the "fixed" profiles (public etc) lRc=oReg.GetStringValue(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, sPath ,"ProfilesDirectory",sRoot) sRoot=lcase(oShell.expandenvironmentstrings(sRoot)) sRoot=sRoot & "\" oDic.add sRoot & "public","public" oDic.add sRoot & "all users", "all users" oDic.add sRoot & "default","default" oDic.add sRoot & "default user", "default user" 'look at each profile folder in turn set oFolder=ofso.getfolder(sRoot) for each oSubFolder in oFolder.subfolders sFolder=sRoot & lcase(oSubFolder.name) 'check - is it in the list of "do not delete" if not(oDic.exists(sFolder)) then 'orphaned folder so delete it ofso.deletefolder sFolder, true end if next

I think there are very few companies that offer "corporate" levels of support, particularly for laptops. We have very good experiences with HP and Dell but occasionally we have people who just buy $random machine and this almost always causes grief when something goes wrong. The one company that should really hang its head in shame (if that's not stretching metaphors too far!) is Apple - they just assume that every one of their machines is privately owned and you'll be happy to just wander into an Apple store to get it fixed. the alternative is to get it picked up by Amsys for fixing. that seems fine; the trouble is that you can be without the machine for 2 weeks (!!!!!!) while they fix it which generally doesn't go down well with users who paid a premium for a decent machine and naively assumed they'd get decent servce with it!

You do need some content filtering - I'd never seen duckduckgo before so I tried it. "sex" gave no results but "making babies" gave some decidely dodgy results (and, yes, I was being "naughty" but that doesn't seem like an unreasonable phrase for young children to use)

What version of Windows? We had problems with XP where all sorts of things would wake it up. Windows 7 is much, much better at staying asleep!

Probably a daft question but why don't you want a bank transfer? Much less work - money just goes straight into the bank, no faffing around with having to pay in a cheque!

Both :-) The ICT director will get involved in looking at high level strategy; the network manager (or other tech person) will look at how you actually configure firewall rules, set policies, enforce ACLs etc

Yes and if you only have a limited number of laptop models then this is probably the easiest way to go. If you have all sorts of different models then getting a WMI filter which identifies a generic "desktop" or "laptop" is near impossible (there are endless threads elsewhere saying "how can I use WMI to identify laptops/desktops")

First one's The Matrix Top right is a set of 4 sine curves which means nothing to me. Should it be "sin" (normal abbreviation for sine) but why 4? four sine wave? four sine curve? is Fe x Fe Iron Man 2 (not sure why it would be but it has got 2 Iron symbols!) Fourth down on the right is something to do with speed/acceleration?? a+bi - something to with imagination (the "i" is the imaginary number; square root of -1) The last one (bottom right) is Euler's identity (top row) and the number 666 is "the number of the beast" but googling that gets me nowhere :-( edit - just looked at the website; there are quite a few answers there!

Can I just check your setup? You have a server running x64 Server 2008 and on this you've got the drivers for this printer? If you connect from machine running 32 bit Windows 7 it works fine but from a machine running 64 bit Windows 7 you get the vanishing job you described? If this is the case, what happens if you take the server out of the picture (ie just create a TCP/IP port on the x64 Windows 7 machine so it treats it as a local printer) - do this with the Windows own driver (rather than downloading the Epson driver). If that doesn't work them I'm stuck but if it does work then maybe there's something wrong in the way the driver's configured on the server (but I must admit I'm not sure what to look at) I just find it weird that a driver which is supplied with Windows won't actually print anything!

MDOP is definitely not free (and it's not cheap; for a Campus agreement it adds something like 10% to the cost and I suspect for the school agreement it will be a similar percentage. You get quite a lot of stuff included in MDOP but, of course, if all you want is app-v then you're paying quite a lot of money for stuff you don't want. I've raised this with MS in the past (and been ignored ...) but perhaps if more people raise the issue it will make a difference.

So on that basis, would the invasion of Iraq been OK if we hadn't said anything about WMD but had simply said we're trying to stop a dictator from killing his own people? Why didn't the UN take more action against Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe?

I think jobs like that are more likely in bigger schools and colleges than small schools. It's often also an indication that ICT is seen as important to the school. I think @simplesi gets the description about right (although our IT Director did get involved in grovelling under the tables for one of our new ICT installs last summer!)

The drivers that @synack links to claim to be WHQL certified - I'd be a bit disturbed at them not working (or perhaps I'm just too optimistic about the driver cert process; is it one of these things which just checks the correctness of the code rather than checking that the code does what it's supposed to do??) Just checked in Windows itself - a driver is included for an Epson AL C4200 which I'd guess is the Aculaser C4200??? Do those drivers not work?? What problem are you having??

Out of interest, why are you having switches in classrooms? It will be slightly more expensive to cable back to a central switch cabinet but makes it much, much easier to manage and secure (switches in a classroom are likely to be fiddled with ...) You may also save money; instead of several small switches which might not have all their ports used, you just put in one stack of switches with about the right number of ports.