Sheridan

We've used milestone for cctv for a few years now, but now need to upgrade and extend our cameras, which pushes us over the 48 camera limit of Express Milestone are taking the mickey with their pricing for Professional to allow 50+ cameras, so they're not an option anymore. Has anyone else moved away from Milestone like this? Unfortunately our SLT like the software and playback facilities but they will change their mind when they see the pricing!

We don’t have actually this blocked, users have always been able to search the start menu, and it also happens on a test pc logged in as an admin, will minimal policies applied!

Has anyone found a workaround for this issue, its well known that the Search box in 1909 file explorer doesn't work - you can't even type into it FFS! The usual 'restart explorer' solutions don't work for me, so I'm wondering if there's a registry fix I haven't found yet?

That's the opposite for me, dozens of broken micro usb and quite a few snapped surface connectors and the only lightning cable failures are usually down to the cable being so tangled in knots something gives eventually. I also feel the lightning connector has a more satisfying 'connection feel' than usb c, but that may be a sign that I need to get out more.

I prefer lightning myself! If you had a race to plug 30 devices in a trolley, and ones USB C and ones Lightning, I bet the lightning connector wins!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51137069 I'm no apple or samsung or whatever fanboy but this seems utterly pointless to me, its not like there's dozens of cables types out there anyway (its either USB or Apple!) and wireless is becoming more popular In fact over the years I've found lightning connectors to be the most robust by a mile, especially in education where the motto 'if it doesn't fit you need to push harder' seems to apply, although USB C has addressed that more recently.

Why did I read that as 'Four standard deer...' I was thinking, is there an upgraded deer or deer Plus I'm unware of. Or maybe I need some new specs.

We've had fixed desktops for many years, with occasional staff having a laptop (SLT etc) and I wouldn't want to reverse this unless we did an full site wide replacement. That would mean ripping out PCs in over 100 classrooms and giving everyone a laptop/surface or similar with the appropriate dock/connectivity, and I just can't see that being popular In contrast last year we helped upgrade a primary, which had the laptops option. What a nightmare that was, as the laptops had been bought piecemeal over the years so had W7,8 and 10 and never updated - everyone seemed to have local administrator rights. In many of the classrooms blutac etc was used to keep the vga/hdmi connections in place due to years of disconnection/reconnections. We put refurb desktops in each classroom, and the response has been positive across the board. Once staff get out of the routine of storing things on the desktop of their laptop and use their cloud (One drive) things improved even more.

I've had this issues with from 1607 right up to 1809. I've tried everything over the last couple of years and there's plenty of threads on here about printers not appearing. I gave up in the end and just tell people to logoff and back on again, and welcome to the world of Windows 10!

.url and .lnk files seem to work as long as they are copied locally, I've managed to get that working. The issue that screwed mine up was because one of the .url files had an ampersand in it - something like 'Estates & Buildings.url' which works fine on the desktop and start menu but completely knackered the tiles when added! Removed the ampersand and it worked OK - which is odd as the path name for these files is all in quotes anyway.

Sounds like it might be worth building a brand new applocker policy, and setting it up with the defaults, and then whitelist what you want to allow.

I'm not sure if this is even possible, as I've had such poor experience with deploying start menu tiles in windows 10, but I'd like to deploy a tile that is a shortcut located on a server share. I've added the tile like this: Needless to say it doesn't appear, but has anyone managed to do something like this? Ideally I want to add a selection of website shortcuts to their Start tiles, but it seems like the .lnk file has to be in their or the All Users profile on the local machine for it to work?

Have you got a Deny for all executables in the Windows folder for students? I would have thought that would cause problems. We whitelist that folder and block specific executables within it. Same goes for Program Files folder as well.

Yeah - these aren't the normal way we'd set PCs up to be honest , but the school doesn't have an EES agreement so the PCs were simply booted with their OEM Pro image on. The administrator account was then used to join to the domain and a few standard applications installed and that was basically it, and they worked fine for a couple of years like this (albeit with classic start menu installed) This problem only occurred since we did an in place upgrade to 1903 - no profiles were copied or anything like that, just a simple upgrade really.

I know of a school in our region that was Outstanding and wasn't inspected for a long time, at which point it was classed as Requires Improvement - probably a 10 year gap between the two. Quite why it was inspected I'm not sure, maybe a whistleblower as apparently the leadership had really gone downhill.

It must be the GPO setting 'Remove pinned items from taskbar' - I had that enabled, and soon as I disabled it the taskbar items appeared! I always thought there were 3 different categories of pinned items, system, user pinned and deployed pinned items. But with that policy enabled it seems to disable all pinned items.

We've got a Start menu tile layout xml file which works (as well it it ever does) and wanted to add some pinned items to the taskbar, so we added the following xml to the end of layout file to test: These are just office applications that are on every PC so we can test this, however nothing appears in the taskbar. I've checked the event viewer and no errors appear in the Microsoft-Windows-ShellCommon-StartLayoutPopulation/Operational log, only messages saying that the Tiles have been written (they were in the xml already) I'm just wondering, if you lock down the taskbar with Group Policy, does that disable the taskbar completely? I thought it just stopped users pinning their own apps to it?

These are local profiles, no roaming or mandatory profiles. These particular PCs came with W10 pro on, and were simply in place ugraded due to OEM licensing. The local admin account was probably only used for the initial setup and domain join and that was about 2 years ago!

Odd, when I delete the web cache folder in the above administrators profile path it all seems to work. To me that’s a pretty dodgy bit of coding as I fail to understand why the local admins profile is being access when another user logs in!

Well it looks like a rebuild, the Application event is chock full of events like this: StartMenuExperienceHost (1992,R,98) TILEREPOSITORYS-1-5-21-1649468332-2773550204-2569608857-1406: An attempt to open the file "C:\Users\\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer\Database\EDB.chk" for read / write access failed with system error 5 (0x00000005): "Access is denied. ". The open file operation will fail with error -1032 (0xfffffbf8). and lots of these: taskhostw (9064,U,98) WebCacheLocal: Database recovery/restore failed with unexpected error -1907. and thse: taskhostw (9064,R,98) WebCacheLocal: An attempt to open the file "C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WebCache\WebCacheV01.dat" for read / write access failed with system error 5 (0x00000005): "Access is denied. ". The open file operation will fail with error -1032 (0xfffffbf8). The above error is odd, as its referring to the local administrator account, even though its a non admin account logging in. I used to hate windows 10, now I simply expect rubbish like this.

Got a really odd problem developing at a primary, all running windows 10 1903 that was upgraded in place from 1607 due to licensing being oem keys only on the PCs. This update was done some months ago. Basically we did the in place upgrade, installed office 2016 and all seemed good. However we are now seeing major problems as anyone who is NOT an admin can’t actually use Word, excel etc as when they start it, it goes into ‘not responding’ pretty soon. Sometimes you can type a word or two but it always freezes. When you login as an admin all works as expected, office apps open fine and show as activated, log back in as a teacher account and word etc will hang. I’ve also noticed the login times for these accounts seems a lot longer, even though they don’t have a lot of group policies applied and nothing has been changed. Another oddity is that some of the desktop icons take a long time to change from a white square shortcut to what they actually are, internet explorer link for example. I’ve checked all the usual, making sure dns is all good and nothing is being mapped or directed to a dead path. What I don’t understand is why it’s happening to non admins only, suggesting it’s a policy problem but nothing has been changed in months. Assuming a policy problem I moved a test non admin user to an OU with no policies and it was exactly the same! So now I’m baffled as the only other difference now between an admin and a non admin is their rights on the local PC and the smooth wall filtering they receive! Anyone got any inspiration as I’m heading toward a full reimage of a lot of pcs, a pain as we have to use oem keys!

I've had to take over a wireless network in a primary running a Xirrus network, its working fine and people are using it all the time. Problem is, we need to make some changes and no one seems to have the Xirrus cloud login for the network, and I'm assuming the APs are probably EOL anyway as they are 4-5 years old so the support will have stopped. The thing I don't understand is that we can't connect direct to each AP to make any changes as an alternative (theres only 10 anyway) as you can't connect direct using their IP address. They are all online and can be pinged, but you can't connect via a browser like normal (we have xirrus here so I know its possible) and its a flat network so no routing issues. Is is possible the original installers of the APs have disabled the web access? I wasn't aware you could do that. Without local access and no XMS console their alternative is a whole new wireless network, which is not practical for them right now.

Maybe its just the places I visit, but I aim to spend as little time as possible in a public bog as it is. I don't need an incentive to 'drop and run' any faster

I had a Greggs seasonal slice the other day... rather nice. Still burnt the roof of my mouth off though.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/12/18/nerds_hate_speech/ Interesting article, but I think its out of date now. Personally speaking I was called nerd/geek etc at school as I had a VIC20 (and then a C64!) Back then it was meant as an insult and was intended as derogatory. But now? Seems like its got no sting anymore and people actively like to call themselves geeks. Comparing it to genuine hate speech just seems a bit silly to me.