srochford

Does it have to be a batch file? It's an awful lot easier to do this in a language like vbscript. I haven't used batch files like this for ages, but I thought the syntax was: if errorlevel 1 goto end rem reinstall SAV :end echo SAV installed The other thing I've done in the past is just write a flag file to some location - you can then use something like this: if exist c:\windows\sav.flag goto end rem need to install rem run install process rem now write flag file echo dummy text > c:\windows\sav.flag :end echo SAV installed

I generally do this by tracking the name I last displayed. if the name I'm going to display next is the same then i don't print it, else I do print. Something like this: sOldName="" Do While Not RSlist.EOF %> <% sName=RSlist("Forename") & RSlist("Surname") if sOldName<>sName then response.write sName & " " & rslist("form") sOldName=sName else response.write " " end if %> <% ' Needed is some code to iterate and display each subject without showing the name again response.write(RSlist("subjectname") & " ") %> <% ' write the attitudinal and a line break response.Write(RSlist("attitud") & " ") %> <%=RSlist("attcomment")%> <% RSlist.Movenext Loop This isn't quite going to do what you want because you'll end up with blank cells for each student where the name was. It looks less cluttered but it might not be what you want. I'm guessing that each pupil won't have the same number of subjects. You can find out how many they have with a SQL query: Query="SELECT pupils.PupilID, count(subjects.subjectName) as numsubjects" Query=Query & " FROM (subjects RIGHT JOIN sets ON subjects.subjectID = sets.setsubject) RIGHT JOIN (pupils LEFT JOIN reports ON pupils.PupilID = reports.pupilID) ON sets.setid = reports.setID" Query=Query & " WHERE form like '%" & request("form") &"%'" Query=Query & " group by pupils.pupilid ORDER by surname" and you could put the result of that into a temp table which would then be linked to your original query to give the number of subjects as a field in the list of data you already had.

Assuming the command line ftp client stays then you could use that to get whatever you need :-)

What's wrong with the power settings in XP or Vista (configure to allow hibernation or sleep if not used for an amount of time)? What sort of things would need to change in the browser to make it more accessible? Isn't the biggest problem not the browser itself but the content it presents (can't really see that Microsoft or any other browser maker can change the way people provide content)

Janet Server Certificate Service

Task manager? Performance monitor? The first is very quick - just press Shift Ctrl ESC to bring it up and then click networking. Start copying a big file (something like an ISO image) and just watch. Perfmon will give more info - click on the + to add a counter, find network interface and then add (eg) bytes received per second and bytes sent per second. Make sure you choose the correct network card if more than one is available. You can also write a trivial batch file to give you some useful info: set file=\\server\share\bigfile.iso dir %file% > %temp%\speed.log echo | time >> %temp%\speed.log copy %file% %temp% /y echo | time >> %temp%\speed.log You'll end up with a file called speed.log in your temp folder; it will contain the name and size of the file and the start and end times (the echo | time is just a crude way of getting the time logged to the file; you can use time /t but it only gives whole minutes) - a quick bit of maths on the 3 numbers will give you the speed in Megabytes per second (or whatever other unit you want)

Always more than one way to do a job :-) Earler versions of Windows didn't come with shutdown (I think it was first in 2000 but it might not have been there until XP) so other techniques were needed. Using scripts and WMI lets you do things like checking if the machine is switched on and needs switching off; checking the OS so you don't shut down servers and so on. If you want a shutdown at a relatively fixed time each day then you can just schedule a task to run on the local machine at the appropriate time - perhaps changing the time by using a machine startup script.

and people wonder why IT staff are looked down on ... There's no point in you providing a service which is the wrong kind of service or at the wrong time - you (or your manager or someone senior) has got to find out what's needed and then make sure that's provided.

It will be particularly bad if the link points to a now-dead server but even for live servers this can really slow things down. If you've never done it, put sysinternals filemon on the machine and run it and then click start - watch the amount of work done by explorer as it builds the menu. if you can change the start menu links for anything which does need to be launched from a server so that the icon is picked up from a folder on the C: drive and the shortcut actually points to wscript launching a network based script then you remove a huge amount of network traffic and should see a big increase in speed of start menu appearing.

Don't give up - talk to individuals and find out why they didn't come along. I suspect part of the reason will be the timing. Lunchtime is either a time when teachers (and most sane people!) want to try and get a break but it's often also frantically busy (all sorts of things go on in schools at lunchtime!) Start with the people you think are reasonable (there will always be those that no-one gets through to!) It might be that they'd tried the software, found it easy and didn't want to spend time at lunchtime. It could be that they were busy that week but could have come before school/after school/at some other time. It might be that they would prefer to just read some instructions (I much prefer to be given a set of instructions I can read in my own time for anything new; I can then try things out and, only if I get stuck, ask for help) I know it can be very disheartening when you think you've made a lot of effort to get things across and it's not taken up but as a couple of people have said in this thread it does benefit in the long run - people don't feel left out and can see you've put in the effort to make things work and explain what's going on.

Not quite sure what you're using, but is this a universal network driver? If so, I'd guess it's slightly less tolerant of network problems - if you have the "genuine" NIC driver on the floppy, it perhaps retries for longer than the universal driver. Sometimes the NDIS2 drivers have configurable options - there might be something to change how long it will wait before timing out?? If you can use the client as imiddleton25 suggests then I really would do that - it makes life much easier!

I think it's more general than that - people don't read most of the stuff that's available in the way of notices, newsletters etc. Often, that's because they just get too much stuff and much of it's not relevant. I suspect that if you talk to anyone who's trying to get out information about events or changes you'll get the same sort of message - no matter what they do, some people just don't take it in. I don't think that means we should stop trying - there will be some people who will read notices etc and act on them and we should make sure we put out info when we can for the benefit of those who can be helped :-)

What can you do when Vista decides it's not genuine even though it is? Nearly 2 years ago, I took part in the beta, submitted a couple of bug reports and got sent a Vista Ultimate key to say "thanks". I finally got round to installing it a couple of days ago. All seemed to go well (I did it as an XP upgrade which might not be the best idea but I just wanted to see how well it would work - MS claimed that the XP to Vista upgrade would work much better than things like 2000-XP) I activated it online and then started installing updates. After a reboot, I got a message saying "something's changed" and asking me to go online. That then told me that my copy of Vista was not genuine. Given that I'd downloaded the ISO from the MS web site and used my own genuine key I'm pretty sure that they're wrong. Unfortunately, MS at that point are judge, jury and executioner and you've got no way of questioning the decision and no way of contacting anyone to get it reconsidered! Is there anything you can do when the "is it genuine" test gets the result wrong??

Another useful ID tool is PCI32 - also free. It can give you just a basic listing of devices with the ID numbers or a verbose listing of everything it knows about the devices.

You would be better not turning off UAC - it is there for a reason. Essentially, anything which a "normal" user should not be able to do you will be prompted about. Deleting shortcuts from an ordinary user's desktop/start menu will go without prompting; deleting from the "all users" (public in Vista terms) desktop will prompt because you are making what could be a significant change which will affect all users of the machine. The wording of the UAC prompt is poor but basically, if a UAC prompt pops up and you don't think you're doing anything that would need admin rights then you probably want to say no. Once you've got all your software, drivers etc installed then you should get very few UAC prompts.

Best tool I've seen for collecting info about all the PCs on a network is Lansweeper. There's a free version which does pretty much everything you could want. It comes with a wide range of reports and it's easy to produce others.

Group policies and now preferences are pretty much designed to make profile changes - I'm not really sure that there's anything sensible which could do what you want. there's no easy way of knowing who might log on to the machine and will need their profile changing so I can't see any real way of doing this. What sort of thing are you thinking of? Only an administrator can move icons from all users to anywhere else unless you've changed the permissions; by default "all users" is read-only for normal users. I think this might be quite hard to handle - basically, the default action for dragging any file when it's on the same disc is to do a move, not a copy so what you're asking for is something which does a different default for different folders. I'm sure that's possible but I'm not sure I'd want it (and yes, I have managed to lose icons like this in the past :-))

Doubt that you can "not install" IE for the reasons you gave but what's wrong with the options in "set program access and defaults" where you can (eg) set firefox as default and untick "enable access to Internet explorer"?

shadow copies do quite a lot of what time machine does - problem is, they're not easy to set up, it's not obvious what they do and I'd lay money on it that most of "joe public" doesn't use them :-) Not really bothered about standards compliant browsers - until we get everyone writing standards compliant HTML and CSS there's little point (the big problem now is that there are too many standards to choose from; if my browser rejects everything but the current standards then it's pretty much useless) Would like it to run on low spec machines but I'd guess that's less relevant - by the time it's out, the sort of machine that would only run XP will be pretty ancient and most machines should have reasonable CPU, RAM and GPU. Would like much simpler file dialogs. For example, with XP I do File | Open and the cursor is in the file name box. I typically want to go to a folder so I hit back tab and I'm in the folder list and can just arrow up/down to where I want. With Vista's file dialogues I end up in some random bit of the furniture and end up having to pick up the mouse - this alone drives me mad :-) Not really bothered so much about UAC - it's an annoyance but having spent more time recently with Linux and Apple OS X they're almost as bad in terms of prompting every time you want to do something! I know why Vista has every language included and I know it has value in organisations which need multiple languages but I'd still like an option to just install the language(s) I need - a bit like WSUS can choose languages for updates. Discs may now be absolutely massive compared to when XP came out but I still don't see why I have to dedicate quite so much of it to the OS instead of *my* stuff! I'd like Microsoft to just crow less about how good the flipping OS is, particularly when it's really not that much different. For example, power saving. When you put XP into standby mode it uses pretty much exactly the same power as Vista in standby mode so all they've done is change one default at shutdown so it goes into standby - not really that much different from XP. I know Vista is supposed to resume more quickly from standby but it's not really a big deal! Search - just make it work, and recognise that many people don't store stuff on the local hard drive so a search system which doesn't index network documents is also pretty much useless (and I know you're supposed to have a central search server but it's all a lot of work and means that Vista's search is just not relevant) Make sure that when it's released, it's actually going to be usable by people who administer networks etc - when Vista came out the fact that you couldn't manage AD, couldn't manage Exchange, couldn't manage ISA server etc from a Vista workstation made it a non-starter.

Most of the SQL queries will work - you just have to change your connection string - but watch out for the "like" wildcard - it's "*" in Access but "%" in T-SQL Instead of replacing the databases each time you could just have a year/term/whatever field which you select on - that might just make it easier if ever you want to go back to a previous year etc data. With SQL you don't really have to worry about the size of the file (whereas Access just gets horrible with use)

Well, yes, but the "latest" service pack is not very recent - I think it was released about a year ago and there have been quite a number of fixes released since then. I'd guess there's a balance between having a reliable install process (which replaces "big" files and should work) and some kind of patching process (which would just change the necessary bits of files but could fail if the files get mixed up in some way). Given that the updates do get installed automatically, does it really matter if there are lots of them? I think I'd prefer to have regular updates to fix problems rather than MS (and others) just hiding things and hoping no-one notices :-)

We had endless problems with the SIS900 cards but I haven't used them for some years. Is there any possibility of fitting some other NIC (even to just a couple) to see if that helps? If it does, could you put new NICs in every machine? It will cost but it may make them work better.

Don't know what you used for packaging in the first place but with the WininstallLE program you get an "NAI" file which is plain text which shows you what's going to be packaged. I always check through that to see if there's anything which shouldn't be there - changes like windowsupdate.log, virus updates etc don't want to be there so you edit them out of the NAI file and rebuild the MSI. I'd guess you can do similar things with any of the packaging programs. The other thing to do is to turn off pretty much every service which is not essential - windows updates, virus scanner etc - so that you don't get any crud in the package.

If the two machines are next to each other then a USB switch box should do the job - quick google finds this If you have networked photocopiers then they can often be used as scanners as well - typically emailing the scanned image back to the user. The default is often to email as PDF but you can pick TIFF on the ones I've seen. another alternative would be to dedicate one computer as the scanner computer - you're obviously going to have to physically take your image to the scanner so it's not a big deal to just sit at that machine to do the scan. Issues arise with where do you save the image. could be to a USB stick (lend it out and make sure you get it back at the end of the lesson; insist all users have them??) or a shared folder which anyone can write to and then just get back their file when they return to their own PC. Alternatively, some kind of upload system where they put int their username etc and it puts the file in their own user area.

What on earth do you get to talk about? I think the only reason conversation hasn't died out in the UK is because we can discuss what the weather was like yesterday, what it's going to be like today and for the rest of the weekend :-)