srochford

I've found that that won't always work - Windows will scan the contents of %windir%\inf to see if there's an INF file that matches the card. If it finds one but it's for the wrong driver then it's likely to install it. I always remove the card like you suggest but before that I go through the inf folder and check out any oem*.inf files - delete anything which refers to the graphics card (or other hardware - this is a good trick for cleaning up any drivers). If you find (say) oem25.inf is the one then also delete oem25.pnf (it's a "compiled" version of the inf file). Now delete the file infcache.1 - this forces a rescan of all the inf files and finally delete the card from device manager.

I'd guess the only thing you've overlooked is that it's a Vaio and they are, quite simply, the spawn of the devil :-) The only thing I can think of is the Intel SATA drivers - I wouldn't expect you to need them but bitter experience of Sony suggests that anything is possible!

Easier to put users in security groups than OUs - you can only be in 1 OU but multiple groups. Code below looks for users in group called "ma users" and copies the file listed at the start (c:\temp\special.doc) into their homedir. Not sure if that's the sort of thing you're trying to do. sGroup="ma users" sFile="c:\temp\special.doc" set ofso=createobject("scripting.filesystemobject") Set oRootDSE=GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE") sRoot=oRootDSE.Get("DefaultNamingContext") Set oConn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") oConn.Provider = "ADsDSOObject" oConn.Open Set oCommand = CreateObject("ADODB.Command") oCommand.ActiveConnection = oConn oCommand.properties("Page Size")=100 oCommand.CommandText = ";(sAMAccountName=" & sGroup & ");sAMAccountName,distinguishedname;subTree" on error resume next Set oRS = oCommand.Execute if not ors.eof then wscript.echo ors("distinguishedname") set oGroup=getobject("LDAP://" & ors("distinguishedname")) for each oMember in ogroup.members set oUser=getobject("LDAP://" & oMember.distinguishedname) sHomeDir=oUser.homedirectory ofso.copyfile sFile, sHomeDir, true next end if

marking might not do much to stop component theft (unless you mark every component but that really is a lot of work)

I'm guessing the missing CDs are not drivers but the software that needs putting on the machines and this is often not replaceable (although some companies will ship you a replacement CD if you can prove you bought the package; they may charge a nominal £10-£20 fee) It won't help now, but for the future, make sure that when any new software is bought a copy of the CD is put on a server and install it from there. You can then lock the CDs away knowing that you will probably never need to touch them again! It's certainly worth just taking your existing machine, sysprepping it and then putting an image on the laptop; it might just work. One thing to watch for is SATA drivers - check in the BIOS to see that the settings are the same (ie if your desktops are set for IDE emulation then change the laptop to match; if the desktop is AHCI then do the same on the laptop)

Remember BSE when we just piled up all cows that might be hazardous and burned them? I reckon we should do that with any person who might possibly have flue, any person dressed as a Mexican, any person that comes up with daft responses to flu, basically, any person that irritates me :-) Is that OK ?? :-)

A crude approach would just be to have a read only copy of the VM file elsewhere on the disc and an icon to copy it into place. If a student accidentally messes up then they can quickly get back to the original settings; if someone deliberately messes up it's also easy to fix and you could even automate an overnight/early morning/whatever replace of the image file.

One "cheat" way to do it which is good if you just want to find the files owned by one or two users is to use the quota management stuff. If you don't have quotas, turn it but set it so it won't deny space to users going over quota. When you go into the quota list you'll see each username and the total amount of space they're taking. find the user you're interested in and go to delete the entry. You'll be asked if you're sure and it will then show you a list of files that the user currently owns.

thanks for that; I'm downloading it now. One of the speed improvements is supposed to be in Outlook - various bits will get quicker (moving between folders, closing down etc) so I'm looking forward to that :-) The downloaded EXE should expand to give you an MSP; if you put this in the updates folder on your admin install then it will update new installs from that location.

I've done jury service twice; I wouldn't describe it as exciting but it is important. British justice is based on the idea that you get tried by a jury (the judge and barristers don't make the decision about guilt!) so I'd say it's important that as many ordinary people as possible take part in jury service. Dealing with your fellow jurors is probably the most fascinating bit - you're almost certain to get some who are absolutely determined that the accused will be hung for parking on a double yellow line and must be guilty because the police say so but you'll also get those who don't believe a word said by either barrister or any police. Add to that those who feel sorry for the poor person in the dock and you can get a weird old brew :-)

There are 2 kinds of DFS replication - the original Windows 2000 kind and DFSR which came in with Server 2003 R2. The first can be flaky; I've seen it take days to replicate a few hundred Gb of data. The second is far better and replication is pretty much instant on the same AD site. If you have multiple sites then replication doesn't start instantly (I think the default is every 15 minutes) but once it starts it's quick. As Dean says, you can hide the server name - the really, really good reason for doing this is to let you do MSI based installs which don't fall over when you replace a server. If you start off with \\server1\install and then put in \\server2\install you have to update all your group policies. If you use \\domain\install then you just update DFS to say server2 now hosts that share, not server1 (and you can use replication to move to the new server so there's not even any down time) You can also do things like having home directories at \\domain\home\username - again, this lets you move stuff around without having to make changes to users. I think there is a limit on the maximum size of share but it's massive (assuming the 7Gb wasn't a typo then you're nowhere near the limit; in my last job one of our DFS shares held ISO images so some of the files were nearly 7Gb!)

You've redirected "my documents" to a network share. By default, anything deleted from "my docs" goes in the recycle bin and that's still true even if it's now on a network share. I don't think this is well documented (and I may not have it completely right; I'm just writing from my experience) There's an equally poorly documented registry value which stops this behaviour; create a DWORD value called NukeOnDelete at the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\BitBucket and set its value to 1 (0 or absent means files go in the bin) having the recycle bin is not necessarily a bad thing as long as your users know about it and you give them a way to get at the bin and empty it or get files back from it. If you want to script emptying it then something like this would work (put it in a batch file) d: cd \home for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\recycler" /s /q This assumes that your user home folders are something like d:\home\user1; d:\home\user2 etc. If you have them a level further down then you could do: d: cd \home\year9 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\recycler" /s /q cd \home\year10 for /d %%i in (*) do rd "%%i\recycler" /s /q

With or without aircon, you need some kind of environmental monitor so that if the room gets too hot then systems get shut down cleanly. You can also get the electricians to install the aircon supply in such a way that if it fails, the power for the servers gets cut off. UPS will then take over but they will then shut down the servers before everything melts. There's a whole raft of monitoring stuff which you can get that just rack mounts and gives SNMP info but I found this at Dartmount college which gives a rather simple DIY system. the web site refers to US suppliers but I think homechip sell all the bits you need

I don't think you can. If you're worried about cost then it's not an issue - WSS will use SQL Express (and I think it actually installs the "Windows Internal Database" which is basically a cut-down version of SQL for single purpose)

there was a man from (I think) Hyundai interviewed about this point. The deal is not about encouraging manufacturing in the UK but the retail sales (and everything that goes with that). Not sure how many people are employed directly and indirectly but apparently it's seen as worth saving.

Waves hand - I own a Matiz (but, sadly, it's only 8 years old so I'm not getting a new one just yet :-)

Thanks all - lots of new toys for me to play with :-)

I have seen something similar happen in the past - it looks like the name change hasn't really worked (which shouldn't happen but this is a computer!) Try removing from the domain, renaming to a dummy name and then back to the name you want and rejoin the domain. Note that leaving the domain could well delete the "good" account in AD as well as or instead of the broken one so it's worth doing all 3 removes first.

Do you have quotas on the server where the roaming profiles are stored? if so, are you exceeding the quota when users try to log off - Windows handles this very badly and will mess up. Does it fail mostly for people with large profiles - if so, you definitely want to look at ways of reducing the size. Are you redirecting my documents and desktop? If not, it's worth doing this - it keeps down the size of the roaming profile (ie the stuff which actually has to be moved at logon/off)

For Publisher, you can't - see this MS article. If it's not too late to use Word then it's easy - just make sure that your headings are done using styles Heading1, Heading2 etc and then you just insert table of contents and it all works.

Does what it says on the tin :-) To throw in yet another option, if you have Vista or Windows 7 then "Snipping Tool" does much the same

Can't remember what we paid and I don't have access to that info any longer but it wasn't cheap. Suspect the pricing is done with an Excel formula a bit like this: =RAND()*1000+10000

It's just possible that the "/" is somehow being lost - try doing it with regedit -s The other thing you can try to see what's going on is to run sysinternals procexp when the regedit pop up is on screen - this will tell you the exact command that has been used and you can see if it's regedit that is somehow misbehaving or if it's being called in the wrong way.

I'm afraid you're shooting yourself in the foot if you don't log all calls - management will be disconnected because you're not telling them what's going on! Your management could be the best in the world but if they can't see what you're doing then they'll never know that your'e snowed under. If your logging system is taking more than 30 seconds to record what you've done (changed a password, added printer credits - quick things) then you need a new logging system (although I accept that changing just now is probably too much pain) If you possibly can let staff log jobs themselves then do it and definitely let them see the queue. People who don't work in IT generally don't understand that you can fix things without being seen do to anything. Some IT fixes need you to actually visit a machine and get a screwdriver out but most don't so people think you're "doing nothing" when you're actually working like mad to try and keep things going. Job logging systems are not there to make your life hard - they're there for all sorts of reasons and one of them is so that people can see that you really are busy and you really are getting lots of things done!

Err? Why? If the person is working in your school and disruption is being caused in your school then surely it's right that you do what you can to help. It's not like it's a big job - as others have said, you can just click on it to flag it and the video goes pretty quickly (I've had to do this in the past for bullying; it worked very well)