Callum

The way I've always seen it when it comes to installing Windows: Upgrade = Change the OS but keep your files/programs Wipe = Start from scratch with a default setup I'd imagine it's like any other Windows upgrade, which do indeed preserve your data.

I've found a simple trick to rejoining a domain is to add or remove the suffix. So if you're joined to "domain.tld", change it to "domain".

Thanks for the info. I'll have to try rebooting the laptop next time it doesn't have genuine windows. The first few times it happened I ran the batch script again which registers Windows with the KMS server, but then after logging off and in as a student user, it would still not be genuine.

Does anybody else experience either of the very common issues we have below, when using domain laptops (Windows 7)? 1. Laptops randomly decide to forget about the WiFi policy, resulting in a "There are no logon servers available ..." error when somebody tries to login. The solution is to connect Ethernet and run gpupdate, but it is an annoyingly common problem. 2. It seems to correlate to students forcing off the laptops at the power button, but randomly Windows will decide it is no longer genuine. Despite manually running the KMS activation again as an administrator, it still says Windows is not genuine. In this case we always have to spend an hour or two completely imaging the laptop.

We used to use proper Kenwood walkie talkies, but they were too expensive to keep buying and replacing, so now we use £10 Baofeng walkie talkies. They work fine for lunchtime duties and support staff communicating (e.g. reception asking for IT Support).

We have three server rooms. The primary is inside the IT building, and is just a room containing 4-5 cabinets. The secondary is next door to our IT Support office and is the home to two big racks, plus any misc. equipment such as keyboards and mice. We have a third server room for the Sixth Form which is on the top floor and doesn't really have much in it, just one big rack in the middle of the room. All server rooms have two air-con units. Altogether I think we have something like 50 servers, both physical and virtual.

Okay NB9457, thanks for the information. Will call Dell Support.

So a student thought it would be a great idea to setup a boot-up password on a Dell Latitude E5530 laptop. I know on a desktop you use the jumper to remove the password, but after taking apart the laptop I can't seem to find the equivalent. After some Googling I can't find any solid guides on how to remove the password either. Is anybody able to advise me on how to remove the password?

After the Windows Updates we're having similar issues. The computers in general have become really slow and take ages to login (in some cases over 30 minutes stuck on the black screen between the 'Preparing your desktop' screen and the 'Applying personal settings' box). Furthermore a few specific machines are so horrendously slow that they take an extra 10 minutes to load Internet Explorer. It literally takes a whole lesson to load something up, which is an absolute embarrassment to IT Support. If anybody has any suggestions of what we could try to fix it, we would very greatly appreciate it!

Lately a few specific workstations have suddenly decided that every time they login they will take (literally) 10 minutes longer than every other machine to get to the desktop. They seem to get stuck mainly on the black screen that appears before the "Applying personal settings" window (at the top-left) appears. Imaging the workstations using SCCM fixes the issue, but more and more workstations are coming up with the issue. Can anybody recommend any form of software we can use to see exactly what the machines are doing for 10 minutes?

Have you tried logging on the file server as the local administrator? In the past I've found that every once in a while a file would be completely undeletable by any form of administrator, however you could delete it as the local administrator on the server itself.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of this one before. Is it a discontinued product? I can only seem to find news articles about it going into beta, and there are no Microsoft pages for it. However I have managed to find an ISO download for it.

Is anybody able to recommend an operating system to use on really old computers to be nothing but a thin client? We have Remote Desktop Services in place and staff/students use it to work from home. Ideally just some minimal Linux distribution that is pre-programmed to launch an RDP session to the server. I've looked around on Google but there seems to be very few solutions, which all for one reason or another won't work.

I'm pretty sure we have 4 GB RAM across the board, even on the oldest machines. However we don't really have any money for upgrading HDDs.

Has anybody experimented with using Windows 10 on workstations yet? We're currently considering completely redoing the domain and upgrading to Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10. One of the issues we may face is that a fair portion of the workstations are over 5 years old, and run on Core 2 Duo (if I recall) processors. They currently run Windows 7...just about. Logging in takes a few minutes, and tasks such as opening SIMS/IE/Office takes half a minute or so. So I was wondering if anybody has any observations about the performance of Windows 10 on older hardware. Is the OS optimised in such cases, or will the workstations just run even slower? Is 'Tablet Mode' anything worth looking into? Also is logging in on a domain any faster than it is with Windows 7? Our users are constantly complaining that logging in takes forever; though we have found that replacing HDDs with SSDs massively improves the time it takes.

3 GB of RAM should be fairly decent, especially for school use. We found that replacing HDDs with SSDs massively improved performance.

Look into using mandatory profiles in order to provide the users with a 'templated' user, and just generally explore all of the group policy settings that are available, they're all very self-explanatory and very easy to manage.

We have created some in-house software to detect a variety of issues that may happen to any of the workstations. One of the most common issues we have is when a student unplugs the Ethernet cable that is connected to the processor, resulting in the workstation losing its connectivity. Our software does detect whether a machine is offline, but then the issue is how do you differentiate between an offline machine, and a machine that is physically disconnected from the network? We have Wake-on-LAN enabled on all of the machines across the network. My method of detecting physically disconnected machines is by waking up every machine in the ICT rooms (using WoL) and waiting 5-10 minutes, to see which machines still register as being offline. Though this wastes a lot of electricity and is not very ideal. Is there any way of sending a special packet to a workstation, similar to the 'magic packet', to detect whether or not it is physically connected to the network?

No, the staff are also very locked down, and cannot run programs as administrator.

Thanks for the response, JRowley. We initially thought this may be the issue and so removed the setting. However the problem still persists. We do apply "Disable changes to Taskbar and Start Menu Settings" to network users; could this be causing the issue? Though ideally we don't want to undo this setting as it would allow students to mess around with the visuals of the Start Menu and Taskbar.

We have a program written in C# which starts when a network user logs in, and among the many tasks it does, it has been programmed to set the Windows user tile to the photo we have, stored in Active Directory. It does this by calling the SetUserTile import, as shown here. When debugging the program as an administrator (with no group policy restrictions) it works fine. However, when actually running it as either a staff user or a student user, the program completely crashes and does not set the tile. After adding some debug outputs to the code it is definitely SetUserTile which is causing the crash. So why can't network users set their tile? I doubt it's the fact they're not administrators, as users in a default environment are free to change their own user tile. I think the most likely cause is some form of group policy setting that is applied to the users. We have an extremely locked down environment for staff and students; they login with a mandatory profile and group policy prevents them changing any form of visual setting. They cannot change the wallpaper, cannot change the start menu, etc. TLDR: If anybody is aware of any group policy settings which hinder the ability to change your user tile, I'd very much appreciate any information.

It didn't exist at the time of creating the domain, and still doesn't exist. Even so, what are the chances of needing to access that specific site from within the domain? We didn't use .local as it causes issues when used with Apple devices.

Happy birthday!

We don't. In the words of the Network Manager, "as if we don't have enough to do".

Have you tried manually mapping the network drives, after logging in?