leonard.powers

Thanks for all the replies. Has anyone experienced issues with large attachements. If there isn't a set attachement limit as such, pulling down a 100mb zip file or emailing it to everyone in a class to download could cause problem for our internet link. From my point of view, if your going to have teachers and support staff on Exchange 2010 and students on Live@edu, surely it makes management more difficult. It certainly looks tempting to switch across but I feel schools that haven't given email to students before and are now giving out email are the ones that are benefitting the most. Schools like my one with exchange email for all students and staff might not benefit so much. As for the storage quota of 10gb, that's not realistic in todays businesses. I've got plenty of friends who work for the likes of Santander, Audi Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, Unisys etc who all have their UK head offices in Milton Keynes. Each staff member gets between 20mb-100mb storage capacity. So 10GB isn't what it's like out there in the real world. Just a headline grabbing figure I suspect. Has anyone encountered any hidden costs, maybe in terms of ICT support staff training or setting up mailboxes etc.

I've been asked to look at live@edu and just wanted to know if there are any benefits over Exchange 2010. We currently have an Exchange 2003 setup for all staff and students. This works well and all students have OWA as well. As a school we can purchase educational licenses very cheaply. An upgrade to Exchange 2010 will cost us £89.00 for standard or £464.00 for the enterprise version. I've also got to factor in a new server and an upgrade to older 2003 client licenses. All the papers I've read on the Microsoft site just mention Universities moving from their "old email system" and saving loads of money. No one ever says they dumped Exchange 2010 for live@edu or in fact any Exchange version. So just what are the benefits? I can already see issues with bandwidth. We have 1 support staff who sends out the cover list via email to every teacher each money (300 of them). That could potentially be 300 separate attachment downloads each day. And what about if I send an email to someone sitting next door. Email goes out into the cloud only to be downloaded again. Not very efficient. I've also been reading about live@edu moving across to Office365 so that Microsoft can offer more advanced features (chargeable of course). Any advice or thoughts would be helpful. Many thanks Leonard

Hi All, We're using Windows XP SP3 and are experiencing very long boot times. I've managed to narrow it down to our GPO for "Allways wait for the network at computer startup / logon". We currently enable this option. This has worked well since all our GPO's will be processed as we would expect before logon. However things have moved on since I implemented this over 4 years ago. We use Scriptlogic as our login script processor and this can do pretty much anything we want in terms of mapping drives, printers, running software etc. With the option enabled as I said above, our boot times from powering on to displaying the Ctrl Alt Del page was 4mins 10 secs on an Dell Latitude D530 laptop (2GB Ram). If I disable that option, the boot time decreases to an impressive 35 seconds. A significant difference. I understand that if I move to this setting certain GPO's might take 2 reboots before they become active. My question is; 1) What do you do? Do you wait for the network or let the GPO's process in the background? 2) Any gotcha's I need to watch out for if I move to this quicker boot. I know that if a students profile doesn't exist, their login will take longer first time around. Many thanks for any help you can give. Regards Leonard

I've done this for our Steinberg Cubase dongle key but haven't done it for keyboards and mice. I'm not sure if one make of keyboard will work for all makes, plugging them into different sockets. And what about different makes of memory sticks. Impossible to have something for all of them. We use Altiris/Symantec Rapideploy for our image format. So it's pretty much like ghost.

Hi All, Got a real annoying problem and I know what has caused the problem but no idea on how to fix it. Basically if a teacher/student unplugs a keyboard or mouse and plugs it into a different USB socket, the computer wants to reinstall the USB KB and mouse drivers again. The drivers are on the machine but you need to manually choose them rather then XP automatically doing it. Same thing happens with USB sticks. We're using Windows XP with SP3 and I've seen in other forums that it's SP3 that seems to have caused this problem. Has any got some idea on how to fix this. Proving to be quite annoying for us. Many thanks Leonard

Hi All, I've posted before about this problem but I've got some more info which I'm hoping someone might be able to help me with. I've discovered that if I run the SimsApplicationsSetup.exe update file manually and then close it down straight away (without installing it), it still stays running in memory (can see it in Task Manager, processes). This is causing us no end of problems with Sims.net updates as the first part of the install never finishes (althought it does copy the files across etc). Now here is the weird bit. Even in safe mode if I run this file, it still hangs in memory. Having the PC in safe mode pretty much rules out everything we might have running. We currently run Sophos & Altiris Client Management Suite which I thought could be the cuprits. Now with the same problem happening in Safe mode, it's rules that out as well. Has anyone seen this problem before. About the only common factor is that the sims.net updates use the wise installer. Other installs seem ok. But typically it's the sims.net updates that we need to get out. Any help greatly received. Thanks

It's happening to myself on my PC. Since I'm the domain admin, I've got the correct rights. I've tried changing the drive letters to UNC naming but it made no difference. Just to make the point clear, when I run the relevant updates manually, they install all ok. I click the finish button and it seems fine but when you check task manager, you can still see the update is running in memory. It's like its not being released.

I don't know how that space crept in. I've checked my sims.ini and there is no space in there. Might have hit the spacebar by mistake.

Here is a copy of my sims.ini file on my PC which has this problem [setup] SIMSSetupsDirectory=\\svr0001ictnp\Admindata\sims\setups SIMSDotNetDirectory=C:\Program Files\SIMS\SIMS .net SIMSDirectory=s:\SIMS FinanceDirectory=C:\Program Files\SIMS\Finance OfflineSQLAppsDirectory= SIMSSQLAppsDirectory= Folder=SIMS Applications WorkStation=5.28 NeedIcons=FALSE SIMSPif=s:\SIMS\SIMSXP.PIF [installationLogs] SIMSInfrastructureSetup.exe=C:\DOCUME~1\LEONAR~1.POW\LOCALS~1\Temp\SIMSInfrastructureSetup.log SIMSApplicationSetup.exe=C:\DOCUME~1\LEONAR~1.POW\LOCALS~1\Temp\SIMSApplicationSetup.log [Machine] Infrastructure=1.00 [bDE] BDEVersion=2.52 BDEPath=C:\IDAPI BDEConfigPath=C:\IDAPI\IDAPI.CFG [Fonts] SIMS Attendance Key 8pt (VGA res)=SIMSATT.FON SIMS Monospaced 6,8pt (VGA res)=SIMSMONO.FON SIMS Field Navigator 8pt (VGA res)=SIMSFNAV.FON SIMS Clear 'a' font 8,10,12,14,18,24pt (VGA res)=SIMSCLRA.FON [Alerts] AlertDirectory=s:\SIMS\ALERTS\ [KSMAN] SYSTEMDIR=s:\SIMS\SYSTEM\ [KSD] SIMSSYSTEM=s:\SIMS\SYSTEM\

Spoke with our sims support which is actually Capita at Chelmsford and they reckon it's the latest version. We're going to try removing my PC off the domain and installs sims.nets whilst it's off. We ran out of time today (caretakers shutting up). I don't know what it will prove but I hope a fix can be found that can be implemented via a login script. Don't fancy reinstalling on all our admin/teachers pc's.

Oops, it's 4.0.100.1190

The database schema is 3.61.568 / 3.99.502. What versions of .net should be installed on the workstation for it to work correctly. All our PC's are updated with all the Microsoft updates but I'm reinstall .net 3.5 and .net 2

Nothing in the event log. Oddly it's updated ok on my laptop. I recently rebuilt my laptop just before I went on vacation. It's pretty much got the same software as everyone else but hasn't been totally wrecked with my different admins tools etc. I'm about to try sims.net on our new image that I have just completed today. I suspect it will work which is great but I don't really want to roll out a new image for all our sims.net users. Not seen this problem before and I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to try next. I guess try uninstalling applications one at a time to see if one of them is interfering with it.

Already tried uninstalling it and it hasn't helped

Hi All, Installed the June update last week and been having problems updating client PC's. Basically the sims programs that run to update your PC (SimsApplicationSetup.exe, SIMSAMPARKSetup.exe, SIMSManualSetup.exe) won't terminate after they have run. If you check task manager you can still see SimsApplicationSetup.exe still hanging around in memory. If you kill it off, then SIMSManualSetup.exe will start. This happens with the silent install and when you try to manually install the program. Any ideas? It would appear something is stopping these programs from terminating correctly and it means the sims.update is hanging on people's PC's. I have tried it on one of our new Dell PC's which still had vista installed on it. It worked ok on this PC. I've also disabled antiviris (Sophos) on PC and server but this didn't help. Many thanks for any help you can give. Regards

I have installed the latest version on all the PC's. The fact that after we reimaged them the PC worked all ok lead me to believe that it's something that runs when the PC boots up.

We had a bit of a problem. I think it could be either Sophos causing the problem or NetSupport School that we use. We recently upgraded to v10.01 of NetSupport. Just before someone mentioned about Sophos, we decided to remove NetSupport school on 1 computer suite. Unfortuantly, the removal process totally destroyed our PC's. We had all the PC's booting up saying they were unable to start the server service, along with pretty much every other service. On the basis that trying to figure it out for 1 PC would have taken longer then 30 minutes, we quickly rebuilt the whole room. This of course fixed the hanging problem but I'd expect that. All I can say at the moment is that our newly rebuilt PC's with all the Windows updates installed (SP2 at the moment & IE7), Sophos install worked all ok. We've yet to install NetSupport to see if this causes a problem. Later on today I will remove Sophos from a smaller number of PC's and reinstall it. I'm hoping I will have some results by tomorrow.

Yes. we're using Sophos. I'll have a go at uninstalling Sophos and reinstalling it again.

Yes we are a Dell site. The main PC's are; Optiplex GX280 with 3rd party 17" TFT Optiplex GX620 with 3rd party 17" TFT Optiplex 745 with Dell 17" TFT Optiplex 755 with Dell 20" TFT (doesn't seem to happen as much with this model)

I forgot to mention that I have already tried this. This has sort of made the problem better. Before we were not getting the login prompt and it was just a blue screen. No with the screen saver disabled, it goes back to the Windows logon prompt (just before pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del) but the keyboard doesn't work. The monitor still goes into sleep mode and powers itself down. Not sure if that can be stopped or if that's built into the hardware. Could be a combination of the screensaver and something else. Thanks

Hi All, We have a problem on all our ICT Suite PC’s. Basically after the Windows logon screensaver appears (ie I haven’t logged in at all) and then the monitor goes into sleep mode, when you move the mouse to wake the computer up, the computer wakes up but the keyboard is not working. The mouse does work and I can ping the PC, so network connectivity seems to be there but I’m unable to remote control the PC or connect via any admin shares. The problem is noticeable first thing before period 1. We power on the PC automatically each morning at 7am. By the time period 1 starts, the PC’s have hung. Powering off the PC fixes the problem and because the PC’s are always in use during the day, you don’t really see it again. They don’t have time to fall into sleep mode. Since no one has logged into the computer, it makes me think it has to be something to do with a service that is loaded before the logon prompt. What I can say is that this doesn’t seem to happen to our Admin users PC’s. So it’s looking like something that has been installed onto the ICT suite PC’s. One program that springs to mind is NetSupport School. I might try removing it from a classroom to see if it fixes that room. Has anyone else seen this problem? Many thanks Leonard

Think we might have found the cause of the problem but don't really know how to fix it. It seems that the when you use Sims System Manager to create users or reset passwords etc that is when the reason 0 problem starts. We were told not to use system manager on a workstation as if there is a timeout, it leaves the SQL database in maintenance mode and you have to detach and re attach it. Capita suggestion was to do it on the server as this uses named pipes and not TCPIP for connection. We did this and initially we thought it seemed to fix the problem. However, it started going wrong again. We're about 95% sure that it's system manager that is causing problems with peoples accounts and not necesssary the account your editing. Can anyone confirm if they are having the same problem. You might find that when you have the problem, it's always after system manager has been used. I've told our person who uses it to do all the changes at the end of the day. Only people who use sims.net so infrequently are likely to forget their passwords. Why upset our power users because we have to reset someone's password during the day. They can wait until the end of the day and if it goes wrong, it doesn't upset too many people.

I figured that was going to be their standard answer. How easy is it to detached and reattach the database. Capita have remote controlled our server before and said they would prefer to do it. I've had a look at the DBAttach. Is there anything I should do before hand. I think Capita moved the database into another folder and allowed it to be copied back? Does that sound right. I would imagine that's why it took so long. Surely just detaching and re attaching would be ok? In terms of my server event log, I'm getting plenty of these Login failed for user 'SIMSRedirectService'. [CLIENT: 10.82.23.2] & Login failed for user 'sims_sheilab'. [CLIENT: 10.82.23.2]

No we haven't changed anything. We have a user who cannot log into sims on their PC but if they use someone elses sims.net login, it works ok. Leaves me to believe it's a database issue rather then a PC issue. The person who then tries another PC still cannot login. So people who cannot login, the problems followes them around the site.

We're running the SQL 2005 Full version