Theldron

I dont know if anyone can help me, but over half-term I will be re-imaging 1 PC room with WDS and MDT. This afternoon I started with 1 machine just to try the image out and the PC kept restarting while it was loading the MDT imaging utility. I have had this happen before and I have had to format the hard drives before it will let me run the utility and image the machine. Rather than going to each machine and wiping them individually is there a way to bulk format 30 hard drives remotely? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for that FN-GM. I tried that but in the Recycle Bin it said "No Group Policy objects found".

Ok!! Confession time I am a muppet!! Right glad that's over with. I have accidently deleted a GPO, that creates a shortcut in the start menu, i didnt remove the settings before I deleted it and the shortcut is still being created. Is there anyway I can retrieve the GPO, so that I can remove the shortcut? Or can I stop the GPO taking effect? Thanks

Thanks unixman, I did look at that but majority of the teachers in my school are not very technical and they wouldn't know how to enter the text they want and then resize the browser to go to the top of the screen. The more teacher friendly this is the better.

I am looking for a piece of software that will enable us to display a scrolling banner on staff laptops. With students having to know the lesson aims, etc, during classes, I thought it would be useful if staff had a scrolling banner at the top of their desktop that would give the lesson course aims. This could be displayed to the class via the classroom projectors. Does anyone know of such a piece of software, free would be preferrable? Cheers

We have around 20 PCs around the school a mixture of MFDs, and normal printers. We have Papercut installed, but I know for a fact we are not using it to its full potential. At the moment we are only charging staff for what they print to there personal accounts, I have not setup departments as SLT were concerned staff would not be honest about it (as we all know teachers are not the most honest, when it comes to their budgets). I personally am in favor of setting up departments, but I also want to be able to charge departments for when they use a ICT room and students print. I wanted to setup print folders so students themselves wouldnt print. They would copy their work to that departments print folder and the teacher would print out the work. This would allow billing to the right departments, but also save on paper waste. Needless to say SLT were not in favor of this as they were worried about staff time. How do others handle charge back for paper and printing? How have others setup Papercut to do this? What I would love is a facility to put in the ICT bookings timetable in to Papercut and anyone who prints from those PCs for that period gets booked to that department. Thanks in advance.

My academy is looking to open up a small internet cafe in a seperate building on the schools premises. I have told them I want a seperate broadband link through BT, Virgin etc, for security purposes and I dont think SWGFL would be very happy if we allowed the public to access the internet. As anyone else done this? How did you go about it? Kind regards

At my school I create images using WDS and MDT and then transfer them to the PCs. Some of our software is only for 15/50 etc licenses so this means that I have to create several images because of the licensing, which is a right pain. I assume the licensing is for installs rather than users, is this right or does it vary occording to the license. If it is users is there a program, a license manager that can monitor the number of users using a program and when it reaches the license limit stops further users using it? Or am I hoping? Cheers

Does anyone know a good supplier for refurbished iMacs? I have found TheLaptopCenter.co.uk, whats this company like? Cheers

Right I set one of the PCs to reimage, but when it was loading into the MDT imaging software it kept restarting so I wiped the hard drive and tried again. It is now re-imaging fine. Could it be a hard drive issue? Once it has re-imaged i will try it and see.

Sods law. I should be able to do that via power management GPO shouldnt I?

They must be different BIOS's shame, thanks for you help though.

Hiya, thanks for the post at the moment I am willing to try anything. Can i ask how do you disable SpeedStep? Thanks

I gotta be honest I think they are unbranded. Ill have a play with some sticks in the dodgy machines and see if that helps. Thanks Michael.

Ummmm yeah it does seem to, these are very old machines.

Right have just ran 2 diagnostic test on the RAM using different software, but it cam up clean. Both sticks of RAM are new.

Hi Michael thanks for the reply, I have just had a restart in a room and checked the machine and i have had a dialogue box appear with this error message. Problem signature: Problem Event Name: BlueScreen OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.48 Locale ID: 2057 Additional information about the problem: BCCode: 50 BCP1: E7CC36E8 BCP2: 00000000 BCP3: 8200828A BCP4: 00000002 OS Version: 6_1_7601 Service Pack: 1_0 Product: 256_1 I have check this and it does seem to be caused by a RAM error, so I am currently running RAM diagnostics on the machine now.

Over the last couple of months I have been experiencing issues with our RM Ascend 1010CFWs. We have around 80 (180 PCs in total, made up of new....ish Stone and RM PCs - these are fine) of these within the school and after they have been on for a certain amount of time, they will restart. When we went over to Windows 7 I upped the RAM in these to 2GB. My first thought was that they were over heating so I took them apart cleaned them out and replaced the CPU themal paste with Arctic Silver. This has not helped, I have also tried turning off hardware aceleration in Flash Player, I have updated what drivers I can (finding Windows 7 drivers for these PCs is........impossible), all I am down to now is re-imaging the PCs. Does anyone have any other suggestions? I have check event viewer when a restart has taken place and it has proven as no help. We are only a small school and these PCs are around 7 years old, but due to budget cuts we cannot afford to replace them at this time, so I am currently looking for ICT grants that I could apply for. Does anyone know of any grants available? Cheers

Ok thanks Rob. The other option was to get a seperate broadband service setup just for the building. Either from Virgin, BT or Sky etc.

Hi Rob, Thanks for replying. We are currently using SWGFL for internet and filtering. With regards to internet to the community my plan was setup a WPA key that changes every day/week. Or the other plan was to only allow internet wi-fi to people who have booked the conference room and setup several PCs in the community building that people can use to access the internet.

Hi all, We are going to be useing a building on our site as a community area. This would be used as an internet cafe and a conference room with wi-fi access. How would I go about giving wi-fi access without allowing access to our network? Our WI-FI system is just seperate WAPs using the same SSID and WPA. I am going to be running cable down to the building and it will have a network cabinet with a 3com 4226T switch and patch panel. I have read about VLANs and this seems to be the way to go. Addtionally we run through a proxy, is there anyway to setup internet access for that area so that they dont need to enter proxy details? Sorry for the all the questions, hope somebody can point me in the right direction. Cheers

Hi Nick, thanks for the reply. I have HAP installed on a server and I can access it internally through https://servername/hap, when you say add a DNS entry how do you mean? Sorry if I am being dumb

I have just checked and offline files was switched on for some reason. I have switched it off now, so I will see if that makes a difference. Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the reply. I was wondering if it was a networking issue. No I have checked and they are using the files at different times.

Hi, We are having a really strange issue, where by on our admin network staff are saving work in a shared folder. But when another member of staff goes to open the file on a different login or PC it is either a previous version of the file or they can't open it at all. The files in the folder look like they are open, faded with the $ sign in front. Any help would be appreciated.