Willith

Hiya I will take your advice and downgrade (or upgrade should i say) her laptop from 10.9 to 10.8, as long as i dont forsee any major compatibility issues! Thanks

Hiya My mum is a primary school teacher. She uses Smart Notebook 11.4 at home on her MacBook Pro. Im not 100% sure what version they use at her school but i assume it is also 11.4 for PC. I have asked her to ask the IT guy at work (she is not very good with computers) but he is often at other schools and often she is so busy she forgets to ask or doesnt get the chance. Anyway, quite often she complains about Smart Notebook or Microsoft Word 2011 (i know, seperate software) crashing. When i go and investigate, the beachball is just spinning and the whole program unresponsive. I have to remind her to save often. For the Word 2011 problem, i have found some .docx documents open under Word 2016 but not Word 2011. I could simply solve this by updating her laptop to 2016. Except i cant do this because Office 2016 will not run on OS 10.9. And i cannot update her to 10.10 or whatever the latest is because Smart Notebook 11.4 will not run on anything later than OS 10.9!! From what i have read on the Smart website, Newer versions of Notebook are subscription based. There is no longer a one-off payment model. I will be stressing to her how important it is to find out what version they have at her school. From what i remember working as the IT guy in a few primary schools, i didn't get many people complaining about Notebook 11.4 but this was on Windows. Not being a teacher, i dont know what the necessities are for the software, and i have suggested to her to use Powerpoint but she says it isnt as suitable (or maybe she just doesnt know??) I havent been able to connect anything to the random crashes she experiences. I know some documents go on for 12 or more slides and do sometimes have at least one picture per slide. Is Notebook 11.4 notoriously bad for Mac??

Hi I think i may have cured the problem. It appears that within the groups which i have set up to syncronise with AD, i left "Legacy Updating" checked in group details (Right click on group). Since unchecking that option, the machines appear to stick with 9.5 Thanks

Hi Im late to the sophos upgrade party. Im trying to update a 2003 vanilla network to the latest version of sophos. I have updated (with much grief) to the latest version of End point control. I am trying to deploy the new client to all the workstations but this appears to be a bit hit and miss. I think on some machines the new client is working successfully, however others i have tried updating have reverted back to the older version. I cant tell if its a server problem or a client problem. Would be grateful for any help on this issue. Thanks

Hi One primary school i work in has two problematic network switches that will randomly drop the connection and require unplugging and plugging back in to get them working again. They are very old D-Link 10/100 ethernet switches. So i am about to purchase some new switches and am looking at netgear specifically on amazon. However, i dont quite understand all the variations they make. They have Prosafe, managed, unmanaged, platinum... Ranging from £16 to £40. The switches will simply be plugged into three computers, a wifi access point and an uplink. Due to the schools budget, i am opting for the cheapest one which appears to be the "Platinum" version. Is there any reason to go for a more expensive one? Thanks

I had to perform something similar where i ripped a DVD and used Handbrake to convert the VOB files into m4v. It's a lot easier for teachers to start a video by simply double-clicking on the video file. From what i understand, Windows 7 already has the codecs. Windows XP users have Quicktime installed.

Some of our Windows 7 machines have Smartboard 9.7 loaded on them. I remember orientating a board and having to set the resolution to 1024x768 because the orientate application was only showing up in a corner of the screen. I dont think 10 has this problem.

Quicktime 7.1.5 vendor MSI wont deploy via GPO? Did your MSI deploy in XP ok?

Not 100% sure as i am not at work at the moment but i know i had problems installing it on XP without editing it in orca. You need to remove all language mst's and only include 1033 (whatever mst file is in english) Since getting it to work on XP, ive deployed the same edited msi on Windows 7 and havent heard any problems from staff.

Check that you've applied the relevant language MST file with ORCA Also apple application support needs to be installed too

Hi Im guessing you mean group policy preferences? Im afraid what im dealing with is a rather old Windows 2k3 setup with XP clients. Im more interested as a curiosity as to why this happens. The only major differences i know between deploying an MSI and executing it locally is one is automatic installation whilst the other is manual. Thanks

Hi I have some software deployed via group policy (in this case Rigolo 2 with the provided MSI). We are using a redirected desktop for the student logon where i have a few shortcuts placed including rigolo. This isnt really a major issue however it has bothered me as to why this happens; On some machines, Rigolo was installed manually (ie running the MSI off the cd using a local admin account) and the icon appears fine. On other machines where Rigolo was deployed from group policy, i get the "broken shortcut" icon, giving the illusion that the program is not installed (however it does work). What is causing this to happen and is there a way to fix it? Thanks

I too thought of a similar solution. Only problem is, they only have one retail license of Windows Server 2003

Is your ram upgrade suggestion aimed at the pentium 4 or the celeron D? I think regardless of which machine either could do with more ram, and with ram not being very expensive i could recommend it to the school. However you've guessed it right, they dont have a lot of money and i think other component upgrades are out of the question. (Hence the current hardware). I will give performance monitoring a go for a better insight Thanks

Yea i was quite surprised to find some computers doing a scan disk on boot up. I remember taking them out of their boxes and setting them up in 2007 so it beats me as to why the manufacturer did this (other than your suggestion that they use older tools for distribution). Im all for NTFS as far as windows goes.

Thats good info. Just needed some reassurance before i switch to a processor named after celery =]

Thanks for your quick response. Good to know it'll be worth my time whilst i figure out the next step of transferring all the data and domain settings over. Cheers.

Ok, i'd rather keep it NTFS so i'll try changing the permissions when im there next week. Do you know why FAT32 allows this by default whilst NTFS doesnt? improved security?

Hi The school i am working in at the moment has an old desktop computer running as server with an old Pentium 4 1.6ghz chip inside. A year or so ago i upgraded the ram from 256mb to 1.25gb and added a secondary IDE hard disk for more storage (160gb on top of original 20gb). When accessing this server for administrative work it is rather slow and from examining the task manager, the processor often maxes out every few seconds. The server is host to 20 XP machines and it runs WSUS and Sophos enterprise along with roaming profiles, Group policy and shared folders with software placed as shortcuts on student desktops. I have just obtained a newer machine which comes with 1GB of ram, 2x 160GB hd's (SATA) and a 3.0 ghz processor. Unfortunately this processor is a Celeron D and i dont have a lot of time to be able to do benchmarks, which is why i ask; Will this 3ghz Celeron D straight up beat the crap out of this older 1.6ghz Pentium 4? Or is there more to this than i have made out? Thanks Will

Hi Yesterday i was investigating a problem with one computer which would refuse to run certain programs. The school runs a network of 20 or so classroom computers all running XP. They are tied down with the use of group policy so the student profile cant access the C:\ drives. The software in this case is Izzys Island and Starspell 2001. On this problematic computer, they will run fine under admin but not under student. The software throws up various error messages which i gather is a result of not getting 'proper' read access. The only difference between this machine and the others is that it was rebuilt by me not so long ago and has an NTFS formatted drive. The rest use FAT32 as provided by the OEM and they work fine. I have tried reinstalling the software in the exact same way i have done with the other computers but no luck. I will be working in this school again next week to try and remedy the problem. I hope anyone could give any advice to someone who may otherwise sit there for hours scratching his head. Thanks Will