roland

Hi, I have been using FOG now for nearly 2 years, and I aggree it is a wonderful product. I had I shopped around for many other solutions and asked dumb questions on numerous websites and from supposedly very smart people who where using all sort of complicated methods to deploy. I read the manual thoroughly and took the plunge two years ago and have never looked back. Fog is just like Linux - "Elegant, Functional and Free". I have shown other school administrators FOG but they always seem to have some lame excuse why they cant use FOG, often they have invested too much in other solutions like Ghost which does not do half the things that FOG does. Its great to see so many happy users. Roland .

We are thinking of scanning students USB's when they insert them, this is because a number or parents are reporting that students are acquiring programs and games and bring them home. We know that the students are not getting the files from school and that strictly speaking the USB remain the students responsibility. - do you agree? If we can scan them regularly and generate a log , perhaps they will be more careful with USB contents! Am I being OTT or is this possible? if so, how could it be done? Thanks Roland.

Hi, I am keen to prevent Hibernation and Standby using GPO, can someone kindly advise me how we do this from inside Active Directory.

Hi, Has anyone got a "howto" or "best practices" for setting up Altiris Deployment Solution Server and Pxe Boot? I have found the vast info at Juice.Altiris.com OTT! Our install has gone well however we are just tripping over PXE working. I guess I am really looking for a step by step whitepaper or instruction guide. best wishes Roly

Hi, has anyone used ObjectPrint, or suggest alternatives fro managing print jobs in a school enviroment? according to Giveaway of the Day, - ObjectPrint allows you to audit, quota, and restrict printing and printer usage. This print management system gives you control over all of your printing resources, printers, paper, and toner. ObjectPrint is software for the management of printing in small and medium-sized companies, schools and organizations. ObjectPrint by Fitosoft - http://fitosoft.com/ Since it is free today at http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/objectprint/ I thought I would ask for comments or feedback. best wishes.

I wish someone would document how to do this.

Anyone deployed VLCPlayer or MPC player as an MSI and set up file correct associations? - Thanks Roly

Ha, that was fun to watch ... I like his work station (and atitude) the name of the product is about 3 minutes into the chat. Its called Power Bullet Presenter http://www.powerbullet.com/ tx. Roly

Craig, I want to thank you for telling me about SpecOps - I am rebooting 161 pc's with SpecOps GPUpdate right now, it is a wonderfully useful product. - Thanks Roland. ps. Does any one know how I can easily tell which users / computers are logged in to the Domain or are switched on?

Thanks Altecsole, I hope I understand this correctly, For each of Word, Excel, PP and Access I run msiexec /a "\\server\folder and create 4 mst files and then continue with normal AD deployment for each of the files.

I am attempting to deploy Volume Edition Office 2003 from AD and I have discovered the ORK (Office Resource Kit) but it is still somewhat unclear about how to embed the license key in to the MST file. Has anyone discoverd an easy to use guide to deploying office 2003 with AD? Do I need to have the key in each transform file, of PowerPoint and the each of the other office other apps? Do I need to have the entire install CD Rom mapped to a share?

How do I get the school PC's to "Wake on LAN" for interest I use the following cmd script to shutdown pc's each night for /f %%i in (list-laba.txt) do \\gc\netlogon\wait 1 && start shutdown -s -f -t 60 /m \\%%i However I feel there is probably a more elegant way to "Wake on Lan" perhaps even shutdown on Lan?

I have had some success with http://www.advancedinstaller.com/ Advanced Installer, comes as Freeware for the basic version or you can pay for the Extra Features, (Quite reasonably priced) but by all accounts it seems to work well. Best Roly

Hi, I am thinking of using OpenOffice at the school, OO seems to be very popular at Universities in Australia. I found this link which seems almost too easy http://user-faq.openoffice.org/new-faq/faqinstall/faqinstall/32.html The hardest part appears to be stopping the registration screen appearing, and it refers to the following two utils. Orca: extract --> allows you to open vviewer.msi and make changes to the tables in the msi. Msitran.exe: --> extract which allows you to generate a new transform (MST) file based on the changed tables in the msi. Other links of interest. http://www.appdeploy.com/packages/detail.asp?id=497 http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10925_11-6061085.html http://openofficetechnology.com/ If you have a simpler solution I would love to know. - Best Roly

Hi, I have been looking at ways to distribute prebuilt XP Pro SP2 (Volume Edition) , one of these ways using "nLite" require me to have all the Hotfixes downloaded ready to be slipstreamed into the build. How exactly do I download all hot fixes? I have had a look at http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/catalog Which seems like half of the answer I need, but I am not sure how to filter XP Pro hotfixes. Is there a list (somewhere) of what must be downloaded? How can I be sure I have everything? Best Regards. Roland

Thanks, I look forward to seeing how your rolled it out. I would probably like to associate VLCPlayer with DVD's / CD's etc .. so that it becomes the default player. (I think you can do this when you install it as an exe) that way it pops us as option whenever someone places media in the cd drive. - best Roly

Hello, I would like to suggest that you create an Open Source - Freeware Forum on EduGeek dedicated to the discussion of all things related to education and ICT and which use OS and Freeware. for instance Moodle Zimbra, Linux, OpenOffice etc .... just to name few. - Thanks Roly

Hi Guys Holidays start today (down here in OZ) so I guess now is my chance to get a few things done. I plan to deploy VLC Player and Media Classic onto our computers at school and I was hoping for some suggestions on how to do this easily. I hold the view that the computer equipment we use at school (software) should be readily accessible by students and parents at home. Also, I find playing Media particularly painful and frustrating on Windows which is why I am trying to find a unified reliable method. I still haven't found a satisfying way of deploying Codecs so hence again my reason for Media Player. Best regards Roly

Actually I heard, that this particular error is quite common amount emigrants who move to Australia, bringing with them their 110V electric devices. Bang! Flash! puff !!

Hi, Can someone please point me to a script / software which I can use to report Students who continue to store *.mp3 *.avi *.ogg in their home drives and My Documents? I have just done a search and there are GB's of *.mp3 *.avi *.oggs I am looking for a script that I can run / print and simply hand the output to management. (hopefully categorized by user/student) - best Roland

Hi, I would like to delete user profiles when they logoff XP Pro, I need to do this because the desktop are re-appearing after deletion. for instance I remove the student profile from the server, Student logins to a computer where which they have used before and surprise surprise everything comes back to the desktop. I'm sure (read guessing) this is a AD setting? best Roland

Neither although I do use Surf Control which simply blocks disallowed traffic but I don't do any caching with ISA or Squid. So I need way to globally configure IE settings through AD. (I think)

Hi, We use Moodle (and other applications) and I'm starting to get some caching errors in IE, across the school. How do I configure IE across the AD domain to always - "Check for the newest version every time I visit the page." for all computers on the domain? Thanks Roland

This sounds very exciting, I shall look into it, I have tried a number of Open Source solutions recently and I can help feeling that pretty soon something terrific will appear and perhaps Clonezilla is it? best regards Roly

Hi, Thanks of the heads up, I only have two VISTA laptops in the school and I would dearly like to get them working with Promethean Whiteboards. So if there is anything you can do to persuade promethean to let me have a BETA copy that would be good. I have just seen the active Driver V4 which you mentioned, just downloading it now, so hopefully that will work with vista. (oh I do hope so !!) Surely someone has got it working with VISTA, I once read in a grave year on a toombstone, somthing like " Where you now stand I once stood and where I now lie you too will oneday need to lie." :-) or something along those lines. Look forward to any feedback best regards Roly