srochford

I don't think you are at risk. AD is pretty good at not replicating "bad" data - @gibbo's comments about changes made on this DC not replicating to other DCs tends to confirm this. Having said that, you might as well leave the machine disconnected. You can use dcpromo /forceremoval so that it will stop being a DC; you then just run ntdsutil - this is a good description of what to do.

Pretty sure you won't get anything for that - you're going to be asked for symptoms etc and they will then fix the problem for you. What you need is an expert of some sort to have a look at things; the trouble with this is that there are a lot of cowboys out there who will come and charge you £1,000+ per day to look at it and will end up telling you what you already know! Microsoft do consultancy and I understand that their guys are generally good but I don't think they're cheap. I'd start on the MS web site, looking at white papers (search for things using the term "best practice") and also download all the best practice analysers - there are various for AD, Group Policies, Exchange and possibly others. If you run these, they'll analyse a lot of stuff about your network and tell you what's good/bad and link you to docs which can help fix (if necessary!)

Is the disc booting DOS or Windows? If the former then there are some instructions here as to how to make bootable USB stick with DOS. What you probably want to do is boot a machine using your CD so you have the right DOS version, then put in your USB stick and FDISK and format it as in the instructions. If it's Windows then you're probably got something like Ulimate Boot CD for Windows and these instructions should help you get it on a USB stick Once you've got it working, take a Ghost image of it - that way it's easy to just put the image on other sticks in the future (you can even make any stick you have bootable and then put all your other stuff on it)

You can also use group policy to change permissions on a registry key - given that you want to delete the key, I'd just set the permissions to "everyone - full control" subinacl and setacl can also do reg permission but the syntax is hard :-)

Not really true - RM is very much a "local" company; it is and always has been based in the UK. HP, on the other hand, is not a local company (although it does have offices in the UK) but generally gives better support. The big thing is money (and the credit crunch won't help). If you pay £200 for a mini-book then you get £200 worth of product, including support. The equivalent HP is about £300-£400. That gives HP rather more money to build a higher quality machine and to offer better support. The other difficulty with something like the mouse buttons is that I suspect a manufacturer could easily argue that this is expected wear and tear. If that's the case then the warranty is irrelevant (the "classic" legal case is with shoes - if you pay £20 for a pair of fashion shoes then you shouldn't expect them to last anywhere near a year. Pay £200 for a pair of walking boots and you'd expect them to outlive you and the manufacturer probably will replace/repair if necessary)

Bring back RISC OS - you know it makes sense :-) I wonder if some of the people who used to be on that newsgroup are now just quietly emailing each other, bemoaning the terrible state of the world??

That error means "the network path was not found" - don't know if that points you in the right direction. When you get an error 0x8007xxxx then take the last 4 digits, convert to decimal (calc is your friend if you can't do Hex maths!) and then do a "net helpmsg at a command prompt

"local settings" will be a hidden folder - make sure you've turned on show hidden folders in explorer. Also, if you're looking at a server copy of the profile then it won't be there - by default the "local settings" folder isn't copied back to the server.

I always worry about replacing drives in a mirror - I'm sure it's possible to end up mirroring the blank drive onto the good drive (although I never have got it wrong :-)) The backup/restore route is good although slow; at least if it goes wrong you can just put back the old discs and nothing at all will have changed so it will "just work" If you can plug in a new, big, external SCSI drive then you could also Ghost the drive onto this, choosing to expand to the new drive. If money allows then it would be good to get another server in; that way you could have a second DC which gives you some resilience if the main DC fails so you don't have to restore everything to get working again (or even lose all your accounts). If most of the data is accessed with a drive mapping to \\server\share then it's pretty easy to change that so it maps to \\server2\share. You can use robocopy to copy all the files across (keeping the permissions).

exmerge works both ways - you can bulk export to PST and bulk import to the Exchange store. I wouldn't use this as a sole backup mechanism (it's horribly slow and you can get huge backups because you lose single instance storage) but it is good for "belt and braces" backups - makes it very easy to retrieve stuff when a mailbox gets accidentally deleted, for example. It may not be that useful if you make sure that deleted item retention is set in the Exchange server to (say) 30 days and you configure "dumpsteralwayson" on the clients. If that's done then it's trivial for a user to recover anything that they (or someone else!) has deleted for up to 30 days after the event. In the event of disaster which destroys the exchange server, the full store backup is generally quicker to restore than the individual PST files but having these files does mean that users can get to critical emails very quickly if the Exchange server does die.

This can be a complete nightmare to get working properly and the config process in Outlook is not friendly. You can ignore that first error about not finding the name - just go through to the bit where you set up the RPC over HTTP and it should be OK. The instructions we give users are here for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003 (think those are public URLs; let me know if not and I'll send you the contents!) One other possibility is the SSL certificate - the name on it must match the server (eg if the certificate is for mail.domain.com then the cert name must also be mail.domain.com) and it must not be self-signed; it's got to be a fully trusted cert.

Or virtual box (VMWare works but seems to eat CPU and RAM; everytime I start up a VM my host machine just hangs for about 10 minutes!) It's really annoying that the virtual machine provided by Virtual Server is so limited - on the whole, I like the way MS VS works and would like to use it for all my trial VMs.

2 separate issues - @chrbb wants to rename some PCs (so the names match physical locations) and wants to make sure there's no problem in WSUS if you just rename them in AD then WSUS will still work but I seem to remember that you'll get two machines appearing. You can either just delete the old name from the console or you can use the reset method you've documented.

Just picking up on the packaging bit; if anyone wants PCs supplying without loads of packaging then talk to Viglen - they will ship PCs on palettes with minimal packaging. Saves forests worth of cardboard and all the polystyrene etc that most PC makers use. I think Dell will also do the same but last time I checked they charged extra for the privilege!

We remove all of it (just got a new 7900 yesterday and did the same thing)

Enterprise 11 does exist - you can find info about it here. I can't see anything on the site to say it's free for education - only details of how to contact a sales rep. I have done that in the past and was quoted a silly price. It is possible that Real have changed their policy - do you have any links to something on their site which says that it's free for schools?

I don't know about the legality of capturing the You Tube videos but it's easy to do with Google Chrome (and probably other browsers but I only know for Chrome!) Real Alternative is almost certainly not legal - if you do install it and look at the DLLs you'll see that the ones for the Real codec are copyright Real Networks. The only proper way to install Real Player in a school is to buy (at big cost!) the Enterprise Version.

It depends on the particular package. If you do this with Office 2007 then it will work fine - the first part of a 2007 install is building the local installation source (basically, it caches the entire CD on the C: drive and then installs from there). Earlier versions of Office don't work so well; they need access to the server. I think that MSI installs generally run in the context of the machine account, not the user, so even when you do add components you should be OK if you only give computers access (but I'm not absolutely sure; I've just installed a package and watched the processes - there seem to be 2 msiexec processes working, 1 running as me, 1 as local system; both "do stuff") I do know that in the past I've had the network set up so that users didn't have read access to the MSI share and it did all work.

I suspect you're being told that your settings are wrong because people assume that you are running AD; in that case, you absolutely mustn't use external DNS for your clients. It's easy to install the DNS role on your 2003 server; you then configure that with the county DNS as its forwarder (or you can configure root hints or even both). You should get faster resolution if you bring the DNS in house but it's not going to be massively faster. You can also set up a Linux box (or Windows anything box) running BIND or similar DNS (BIND is easy, free and very well supported) If you want to find out how name resolution is happening on your network then install Wireshark on a machine and then try and ping a local machine and (eg) EduGeek.net - you'll see the name resolution taking place and then the ICMP traffic.

Agreed; it is slow, but look at the data you get from it - there's is now so much more stuff available from that central console. Not really had to use it in anger yet so I've now idea if it would actually help but it does look as if it should!

I want an Archos 5 with mini-dock and I want some kind of netbook (but I can't decide which!) @little-miss - do you think you could sneak my items into your list as you're so spoiled :-)

Surely, the point is that the *school* has a CPD budget and the school expects to use it to develop staff at the school so that the school can benefit from the skills acquired. I've been out of schools for too long to say what happens there for teachers but in FE it's normally the case that anyone (lecturer or support staff) receiving more than a few pounds for training would be expected to pay it back if they left within a short space of time. Every decent employer knows that they need to train their staff and also knows that as an employer they will get some benefit from this and the employee will get some benefit. What they need to do is try and balance the cost of the training against its benefits to all involved.

The latest PC Pro has an article about sales of netbooks and how they've transformed market shares - Dell and HP were relatively late to market so Acer and Asus have now got a quite substantial share of the whole PC market just because of the netbooks they've sold. What the article doesn't say is what percentage of these have Linux on them but it's not going to be zero. That means Linux is being used by quite a few people (although as your article points out, some will find it confusing) The same confusion, of course, happened when MS released Vista - people didn't like it because it was different. I suspect this has helped Linux a bit - if you don't like Vista, why not try something else to see if it's any better. All the student PCs in my area dual boot Linux and Windows but I hardly ever see users in Linux unless there's a specific class going on which uses it. I wouldn't bet on Windows being around for ever but Microsoft have huge marketing clout which simply isn't there for Linux.

SQL server is designed to use as much RAM as available; I think the "Windows internal database" installed by WSUS probably limits at a max of 1Gb. It shouldn't be a problem - Windows processes in general are designed to share memory and use it all if possible. It's almost more worrying to find a busy machine with 4Gb of RAM showing that most of it is unused; it ought to be used for things like caching!

There is a driver option for "face up" delivery which I think would do what you're describing (you can have the paper go in from the drop down tray at the front and come out at the back so you get an almost completely flat paper path). I don't have one here so I can't check the options but it definitely is configurable