Darylrese

I can confirm the issue is with SOPHOS. After removing it from machines, boot times went from 10 - 15mins to 20 seconds (with SSD). Thank god we are ditching it.

Have you installed the middle man certificate? I too have issues with the 'google app' that most people want to use on BYOD.

Many thanks. Kaspersky already has all of those exceptions added in by default.

Hello, I have been having the exact same issues. All of a sudden a few weeks ago our PCs started taking 15 - 20 mins to boot. I enabled Verbose mode and the PC's affected are getting stuck on 'Applying Computer Settings'. I have been playing around with all my policies, DNS and domain controllers slowly going grey in the process then someone pointed me to this thread. We too have SOPHOS, however we are in the process of moving away from it. If i reformat a machine (new image doesn't have SOPHOS on it) the PC is much faster booting and has no issues. On effected machines during startup i also see a group policy called 'Wireless Group Policy Policy' which doesnt exist anywhere on my network! It only happens on effected machines and not ones working as expected. I'm going to remove SOPHOS from all machines ASAP, however it seems to be a right pain to remove as often it wont uninstall saying Almon failed to respond or some such nonsense. I cant wait to see the back of SOPHOS. I have reformatted about 20 machines today until i found this thread so thank-you for saving me a lot of time!

Ah yep exactly same issues we are having. Funny thing is i have just scrapped SOPHOS so that explains why a reimage works as it removed SOPHOS all together. Thanks for your help. Cant wait to get rid of it.

Hi all, A strange one, quite a few machines have started hanging on 'Applying Computer Settings' for around 5 - 10 minutes. Everything looks fine in DNS, no mismatches or old records. A reformat seems to fix it but i'd rather not go around and reformat everything! Any ideas? They were fine and i cant think of anything that's changed except for having a good clean out of DNS a few weeks back. Verbose mode is already enabled and the only other point it gets stuck on is 'Applying Wireless Group Policy Policy' but this policy doesn't exist! After a format, the machine doesn't even process such a policy and startup is pretty quick. Both laptops and desktops are affected so i have ruled out the wireless. Many thanks

Hi all, For the last 5 years or so i have been using SOPHOS Endpoint Protection on my network. I find the enterprise console to be problematic and protection is sub par for modern day threats. I trialed CYLANCE which was fantastic but was priced way out of my reach. I am now trialing Kaspersky Endpoint Security Select Edition. So far i am impressed with its features and ease of management. Does anyone have experience with Kaspersky good or bad before i pull the trigger? It doesn't seem too intrusive on workstations and the security center software has just 'worked'. I was thinking of trying ESET, however i have good pricing on Kaspersky and already have the server setup and working. Your thoughts / comments are welcomed

Yes indeed, however in my experience no matter how much advice you give users there will always be a handful who will still open unknown emails and download junk from the internet. The best we can do is take good offsite backups, get permissions sorted and invest in a good AV.

That was with a different provider, with educational pricing. I also went direct to Cylance for help on the pricing, I managed to get it down but was still out of my reach.

OMG! 34K...I do think its a fantastic product but that is crazy money. No school can afford that surely? I have already had this conversation with Cylance and I did get a discounted price eventually but it was still out of my reach. The thing with education is you cant really put a price on your data because if the network goes down for a few days whilst you get things restored, it doesn't really have a cost implication. Therefore spending £34,000PA on AV isn't viable. I can totally understand it in a bank or business that makes large sums of money. Kaspersky seems very good. Easy to deploy, good price and easy to use. SOPHOS has been useless for us. Deployment is very hit and miss. Requires loads of machine settings to work correctly and never reports correctly to the enterprise console. Also experienced everything you have mentioned. Had enough of it and moving away. I haven't tried ESET yet but I doubt it is much different to Kaspersky. Anything has to be better than SOPHOS.

My network got hit a few weeks ago by this. I had to restore the entire SIMs directory from backup as everything was renamed to .mp3 and encrypted. User who got it was member of staff. Somehow it didn't infect other network drives she had access to. I have SOPHOS endpoint protection and it's useless so looking for alternatives. I have completed a trial of Cylance PROTECT which is excellent but costs a bomb. £34 per endpoint per year to be exact. £12,000PA for my network!! Looking at Kaspersky at the moment and that comes in at just under £2900PA. Would love Cylance but it's just crazy money when we all have to save money in our budgets.

Yes certainly is a clean reboot. I tried it for myself. Logged on and off no problems very fast (under 30 seconds) then reboot and sometimes still quick, other times very slow (15 mins +) I haven't enabled verbose mode yet will do some testing on that when I get in today

Hi all, When i started at my school, all staff had roaming profiles and the more they put on their desktop, the longer it took to logon. Some users couldn't logon at all in a location other than their own room as it took too long to login. Now i have used redirection policies for My Documents / Desktop / Favorites to a network location and changed their accounts to local profiles. On desktops it's really quick to login after making these changes and takes less than 30 seconds to logon even in a different room. However, am experiencing very intermittent logon times when it comes to staff laptops. Sometimes it takes a matter of a few seconds to logon, other times it can take up to 25 mins! It seems much slower to logon after a reboot than if you logon / off without shutting down. I cant see anything obvious in group policy but its faster when a user logs on off the network. Unfortunately we use Offline Files and i have read some settings for this can cause issues? Many thanks

Good Morning, I have Office 365 synced up to AD via Microsoft Azure and can see AD groups in Office 365. When a teacher shares a file or folder with a group, the users do not get a notification and cannot see the files / folders in 'Shared With Me' They do if shared individually. They can use the 'search' in OneDrive and find the folder that has been shared but have no way of automatically finding a link to it. Any ideas on the best way of making this work?

Turns out it WAS something in the code. The flash object had tags which caused the content to not load. Thanks for your help

I know I have told them to stop using it but they continue to do so! Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit, but have tried it on Windows 8.1 64bit too. Back to square 1 with this as I just tried to load it on my laptop (not joined to the domain) and it didn't work on that either

Hi all, Some of our Year 10's and 11's have been making websites in Dreamweaver and embedding flash content to some of their pages. When previewing them in IE11, a message appears saying ActiveX has been blocked and the flash element disappears. For administrators, this runs fine, however no standard user can run it. I have compared browser security and advanced settings between admin and standard users and they match, so the only thing I can think of is that I need to create some kind of GPO to allow these to run? I have seen guides on the internet to enable ActiveX services on a local machine using gpedit.msc, however the same options are not available when creating a GPO on Server 2012. Any ideas how I can get embedded flash files working? The .swf files are in the root of the website folder. Chrome and Firefox are the same.

I wouldn't really lock core features down anyway, its highly likely it will cause you issues down the line when you want to open things up. You download the app on the MAC through the iTunes store (selecting ipad version) and then import the app into Apple Configurator. If you browse to the iTunes folder on the MAC, they are buried in there somewhere. For paid apps, you purchase them through the VPP and import the excel spreadsheet of codes into Apple Configurator. Once you get the hang of it, its quite simple If you only have a small amount to manage, you can do one by one no problem. We do for our class set of 10 because theres apps already on there paid for that we don't want to lose / pay for again.

You can 'Supervise' them using Apple Configurator but it won't stop them changing the wallpaper etc. You can disable the camera all together though if that's what you want to do. For Apple Configurator, you need a MAC and a volume license from Apple (free of charge)

EDIT: Just found another answer file under SERVER > PROPERTIES > CLIENT, unticked and now working. Now to look into new answer files!

Hi Guys, When we image PC's, 90% of them are fine but the other 10% come up with this error: I have removed all unattend answer files from the image, but it still comes up with the same error. The machines are identical in terms of hardware and software. Any ideas as it means I have a stack of PC's that refuse to build. I have tried swapping HDD's which used to fix some of them but not anymore. Many thanks

Yep new year 7's getting the same error and of course they have never logged in before. Cant see anything on a GPO relating to logon's / profiles either and the fact it works if you reformat makes me think its 100% workstation related. Didn't do anything to those machines over the summer either...odd!

Also removing a local profile from computer properties > advanced > advanced system settings > user profiles results in this error coming up for that user on that machine there after even if they were OK before

We don't use roaming profiles for students. Just a local profile with redirection policies. I reformatted around 60 PC's yesterday which fixed those workstations but still have a large amount refusing random logons. There are errors in event viewer relating to the windows profile service and copying A to B - neither of which path exists! Then it says access denied. So strange, was fine before the summer!

Hi Guys, Hope everyone had a productive summer holiday! I am riddled with this error in ICT Suites at the moment...even for our new Year 7's who have never logged in before. 'The User Profile Service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded' Their profile doesn't exist in the registry or in the local profile lists....any ideas?