ToyHeartsFan

- Unfortunately iffy drivers can cause all sorts of problems I would sort out the 3 infected machines before doing anything else then rescan and if the network is clear pick a PC thats playing up and reinstall the drivers on it. I’ve had strange problems with drivers in the past; sound stopped working on a newly imaged PC, I had to revert to an older driver rather than the new one I had put on the image. Upgrading the nic driver on a server caused network problems to appear on all of the workstations and I had to upgrade the driver on every workstation in school to fix that problem. I would check that the latest drivers are installed if they already are you should consider installing the previous version and see if that makes any difference. Also if you have gig network cards connected to gig switches remember that XP has a problem with them (although they shouldn’t stop working) and you need to disable media sense via a reg entry or group policy doesn’t always get applied.

I don’t use McAfee but as they have a free conficker detection tool (McAfee Conficker Detection Tool | McAfee Labs) then your AV software should detect it if its there. If your computers are kept up to date then conficker shouldn’t be able to infect them as Microsoft released a patch for it. Were all your workstations reimaged when you upgraded the servers? I had problems with a new image when I used the latest sound drivers and had to use an earlier driver or the sound would stop working. If you want to try another tool give sophos a go but it sounds like something else could be causing your problem (Conficker Removal Tool | Conficker Virus Removal | Sophos Free Tools).

Years ago I set up a modified user account on a CC3 network that had highly contrasting colours, large fonts etc and changed the monitor on the class PC from a 15” crt to a 19” crt for a child that had problems with their vision. Something similar might help but your situation is different due to the problems he has focusing. You need to sit down with him and find out if he can focus better on things that are closer to him or if having bigger fonts etc would help or not. If it does help then it might be worth running a video splitter from the IWB feed to a large LCD monitor (or even a large screen plasma / LCD TV on the wall) mounted closer to his desk as the image quality would be a lot better than anything you will get from a projector. I’m assuming primary age here so they spend most of their time in one room if its secondary age and every lesson is in a different room then I’m not sure what you could do! If focusing is still a problem with objects that are closer then you need to consider some sort of text to speech software as any visual solution i.e. larger screens, tablet PC, laptop etc won’t really help. Obviously text to speech will only help with pre prepared work and he would need 1 to 1 help when the Teacher is working at the board otherwise he won’t have a clue what’s going on and will really struggle to participate in lessons. The child I created the modified account for had someone come in to help him that knew about his disability and they provided a laptop for him with specialist software. If he already has some one working with him then its worth talking to them as they will know what’s likely to help the most, if he isn’t already receiving support then I would have a chat with your SEN coordinator as 1 to 1 support might be more appropriate than a technical solution.

If you look on the direct support tab at the top of the page you will see a promethean page and they will be able to confirm the current situation for you. I think you will need to buy the licences so it depends how much your school want access to the software, it is a very powerful tool if used fully.

We have a lot of Promethean boards with Activinspire and I could be wrong but this is what I thought the current situation was (they do change the licensing every now and again though): Anyone can use the free personal edition for lesson planning etc on home PCs / Teacher laptops. But you are NOT allowed to use the personal edition on a computer that is connected to an interactive board or projector. I thought the Teacher consent licence was free but was only for using resources directly obtained from Promethean world i.e. if you purchase a resource from their website you can then use it on a smartboard etc if your teachers have the consent licence. If however you want to use the full features of the software i.e. create your own flipcharts etc… then you need the full pro version which will be expensive. Why would Promethean or SMART etc… give their software away for free for other board manufactures to use?

Sorry but I don't think you are allowed to do that: "Non-Promethean Products Users are permitted to use ActivInspire Personal Edition with non-Promethean products, subject to them having applied for a Teacher Consent Licence. The Teacher Consent Licence is provided solely for the purpose of operating Resources available from Promethean Planet on non-Promethean hardware Use of the software outside these conditions with non-Promethean products is a breach of the ActivInspire Personal Edition Licence and requires users to purchase an ActivInspire Professional Edition Licence"

"adjust group policies" - This but we dont block USB! I have added a software restriction policy that will stop users running exe files etc... from USB drives so they cant run them then sophos will delete any infected files it finds. "third-party software" - Never tried any! "partial or complete bans on their use" - Would need to be enforced, possibly with Group Policy or they will just ignore it, may impact on devices such as dig cams that are seen as removable media? But on the plus side if you are a secondary less worry about kids bringing in files they shouldnt have in school...

Not much help but: I found the file in a small number of users home directories around the same time I introduced a software restriction policy to stop prog’s being executed that I hadn’t installed. (2003 Servers XP clients) Logged with link2ict (June) as I was concerned my software restriction policy might stop policy central working correctly, told it’s been passed on to forensic – they didn’t contact me! The answer you got from forensic is nonsense, we are a primary and the kids are not investigating the file – lol, we use Sophos but why would that cause the file to popup in users home directories? They are just grasping at straws… As far as I can tell policy central is still working but it’s hosted by link2ict so the only check I can do is that the process is running in task manager. Side note: Sophos has just started deleting the policy central file SSSTool.exe from c:\windows\system32\ (and the system restore points) it looks like the path has changed as we were originally told to add c:\windows\system32\PCENT\SSSTool.exe to the exclusion list… I don’t know what SSSTool.exe does so will log it with link2ict and ask them if I need to redeploy policy central or anything.

Thanks for the info but I couldn't get the mst to work, but your method (changing the "InstallLevel" Value from 100 to 200 in the Property table) did work if I editted the msi directly. I also found an Entry in the ControlEvents table for "Addlocal" which is the option required if you wanted to install the msi with serial support from the commandline. I tried changing that entry instead and found that if you change the condition value for that row to 1 in the msi it works ok, but again only if you edit the msi not if I used an mst. In both cases either using the mst from the command line or allocating via group policy the driver appeared to install ok but if you open the promethean control panel, then open the connections tab and click find nothing happens. Using either method directly in the msi seemed to work ok i.e. when you click find it starts searching for a board on a com port. - I'm not sure why this happened it may have been a problem with the MST files I created with orca or it could just be the way the driver has been packaged. One thing I did find when using an edited msi was that the new driver didnt automatically detect a serial connection unless you either reboot the PC or used the find button on the connections tab. The last driver I'm aware of that had serial support (V5.1.2.7) didn't appear to require a restart or for you to click find, it just found it as soon as the driver finished installing - this is minor but could be a pain the first day you deploy the new version if you have a lot of serial connections as you can expect lots of Teachers saying their board has stopped working. I used orca to create the mst files / edit the msi's, the driver was obtained using the network install option from the full activinspire download (installationActivInspire_v1.4.23015_ENU_Setup.exe) and the promethean board I used for testing is the oldest board in school. Any of these could be factors in why I couldn't get an MST to work, you may have better luck! Other than ActivEngage and additional languages I'm not sure if much has been changed in the driver since 5.1.2.7 so I may stick with that one for now. It would be good if Promethean could develop a working MST or even split the drivers so we had one msi for serial and another for usb (or go back to the old method and just install both by default) - you really shouldn't have to edit an msi before you can deploy it using group policy and not being able to deploy it via group policy kind of defeats the purpose of having a network install option in the installer... I hope this saves someone some time as its been quite a frustrating process... Stephen