enjay

Our heating has has been on for a few days. The living room was 15C when I got up on Tuesday.

I often need to refer to old emails, in fact literally earlier today I wanted an email from April 2021. Yes, you can flag emails so they don't get purged, but I wouldn't have known at the time I would need that email again later so wouldn't have flagged it. Also, I suspect many people (me included?!) would just flag every email for longer retention! If you do implement a purge, what measures would you put in place to ensure people weren't just exporting emails, saving them as PDF, or even printing them? A 3 month purge is pretty brutal. I wonder if this is organisations post-GDPR protecting themselves from SARs - if you don't have it, you can't disclose it.

No, I think I maintained them manually, computers were typically named after the room they were in so names didn't change very often.

That would be cleaner than how I had to do it - there were often evening functions when PCs needed to stay on longer than normal, so the shutdown was called from the server which meant I could stop it running on those days. From some dark recess of my brain, I think I had a batch file per department, then another batch file which called each of those; that way, each script was only waiting for a handful of computers.

I've done this from command line in a previous school. I can't remember the syntax of the command, but I can remember you want to write your command carefully, so it doesn't have to wait for the command to fail on the first PC before issuing the command to the second PC, otherwise your shutdown script will take several hours to execute.

Is there a difference between halogen ovens and air fryers? I thought they were different things, but looking at them just now, many of them call themselves "halogen air fryers". Do they roast things okay? My wife is a big fan of roast parsnips but we can rarely be bothered with the wait involved in cooking them!

Which one have you got? I'm looking at getting one too. I had one before, but it was really noisy and often dried the food out so I binned it.

Did they understand what the time-out was? I've had teachers object to a time-out because they thought it was like the password lock, and didn't realise the time-out would only kick in if there was no input from the computer (either laptop disconnected, or PC with activated screen-saver). Once they understood that, they had no objections to the time-out.

We have that too, and teachers all have laptops so the "no input blue screen" kicks in pretty quickly and the projector turns off. That doesn't help during the day though, when it seems many teachers turn their projectors at 8:30 then they stay on until 10 minutes after the teacher leaves that evening.

We use PowerMAN on all the desktop PCs to hibernate them at night (quicker boot up and logon, compared to fully off and they wake from key/mouse with no need to scrabble under desks) but also during periods of inactivity during the day. Have a look at your empty room timetable in SIMS, then add on break and lunch every day, plus the time from 3:15-7pm or whenever you are running your scheduled shutdowns, and there's still a significant power saving to be had. The reporting on PowerMAN has also proven useful when we tried to remove some computers and were told they were used "nearly every lesson". The power reports from PowerMAN said otherwise! Next task, getting teachers to turn off their projectors when not in use....

It's more than just a reg key. You need to create the local user too, and then add a startup shortcut to launch Chrome in incognito. I'm not familiar with InTune either, although we are licensed for it - I don't know if it is quicker/easier to do this manually or to learn how to do it in InTune, probably the latter given the numbers.

@dhicks you're an absolute legend, that works a treat. Coupled with a startup app which opens Chrome in Incognito Mode to our SharePoint site, it works really nicely. Can I do all this with InTune, or should I set the laptops up manually?

That sounds like what I want. How do I do that?!

I get this - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/239709/windows-10-kiosk-mode-edge-not-working.html How are you adding that as command line? Is that via InTune? I was using Family and Other Users in Settings. Possibly that no-first-run thing is my problem...

That would save passwords/logins from one user to the next, though. I'm thinking I should have gone with actual Chromebooks! I'd decided against that initially as we use SSO through AzureAD and the ChromeOS login screen can't handle that, but it is starting to look like changing that for Google Password Sync might have been easier than getting Windows laptops to run in a guest mode.

I'm assuming we're not talking about licence plates and registration for, say, 5 year olds, so when would this start and how you would determine whether a cyclist was of that age or not? It certainly sounds like a way to discourage cycling, especially casual cycling, and the health and environmental benefits of cycling are clear. Slightly mixed language in Grant Shapp's comments too. He switches between talking about cyclists speeding and acknowledging there is no speed limit for pedal cycles. You can't speed if there isn't a limit! I wonder if these changes will also include taking action against e-scooters, which are illegal on roads or pavements.

Kiosk mode doesn't seem to work with new Edge, only the old one. Any other ideas? Basically, I want some laptops which can be loaned out of the library, used for a bit then returned. Access to domain resources isn't important, as these are loan devices for students who've forgotten their BYOD that day.

With temps reaching the mid/high 30s being the norm now and more people working from home at least some days every week, I think this will get increasingly common.

I use a tiered steamer which is a large pan at the bottom then shallowed layers above, so potatoes in the bottom then veg in the ones above. Doesn't work as well with rice though as the starch gets onto the veg. I did have a bamboo one which sat on top of a normal pan until I set fire to it over a small pan and a gas ring which was turned too high!

"Because of the 3 year lock-in" isn't an option in the survey...

4 digit PINs give 10,000 combinations, so a roughly 1/10 chance of guessing someone else's number.

Also, go to the "World foods" aisle and buy ingredients like tinned tomatoes, coconut milk, rice, oil, etc. for less than the supermarket own-brands which are in the regular aisles. Ethnic superstores are good for that too, but the labels are often Farsi, Mandarin or whatever the relevant language is - Google Translate app on your phone is a win in those situations!

We bought Parago for 3 years, this was our first renewal and it was with Civica because they bought Parago during those 3 years.

Agreed, they're not totally comparable. It was just interesting to note their default agreement was 4 years, and it was only when questioned they offered something shorter. Even then, the 1 year was "we don't normally do this" and "I'd have to check with my manager". We renewed for 3 in the end!

6 digit, randomly generated. We are phasing in cards as we replace the copiers. At my previous school, it was ID and PIN, which I much prefer. Students use AD login details, although some struggle as the copier times out before they finish logging in. They would forget a random PIN, and based on experiences in initial IT lessons, using their DOB wouldn't be much better (plus would be easy to guess someone else's, plus there would be duplicates).