Paid_Peanuts

For that kind of stuff: PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory. Set and forget. Best $900 or so a year we spend

How did it go? We are potentially doing the same over summer to facilitate a new academy name etc.

"you get what you pay for in this game." - true That's why I'll be buying Dell ;-) But I guess they'll be someone whose had a similar bad experience with Dell, HP etc. I'm just not prepared to chance it again when I don't have to, not when I've had 10 years good experience with Dell.

Technicians not arriving next day, instead two or three days after the initial support call. Technicians arriving with the incorrect parts to resolve the issue. Hand fisted technicians breaking bezels on machines and denying or leaving us with plastic bezels not clipping in and securing properly. Power buttons being pushed in and disappearing inside the front plastic bezel. After experiencing Lenovo support for two years, I wouldn't go back! I've never, never had the types of experiences with Dell support. For the very small premium over Lenovo, Dell are worth every penny. I feel the pc's are built to a higher standard with Dell. I cannot talk about laptops as we don't have any.

I wouldn't buy anything Lenovo ever again! Their after support is horrendous!

Surely @Lonix you were doing more than just provide a BYOD wireless internet connection by the sounds of it. By utilising GAFE and/or O365 all they need is an internet connection - filtered appropriately? Using the services of a BYOD scheme from someone like BT Business or Stone Computers they do all the payment chasing and are the 1st line technical support to do with damage/warranty/insurance claims or assistance. Sounds like you were trying to do too much in house. We don't have a team of people to do all the various stake holder roles you laid out above but using Stone/BT we hope they will take care of most of it. Leaving our finance team to intervene when the default rate (quoted at less than 1%) doesn't pay after BT/Stone have chased up and leave us in the technical department to assist with any connection issues. Issues aside from connecting will be referred to any third party IT support company/individual outside of school. We are also looking at having a "Genius Style" IT counter inside school manned by the techie kids who want CV experience.

@roundit did you get anywhere with the keywords list in O365 and would you be willing to share the list so we could implement something similar?

50GB for all mailbox's Thanks Microsoft (O365) !

First of all let's understand your environment. Type of school, number of users, services hosted on-site etc. My personal opinion, if I were refreshing our kit starting again tomorrow: something like a Dell vrtx box with the blade chassis and utilise Windows storage spaces with hdd + ssd would be more than sufficient. Scalable also, know stone computers do their equivalents of the vrtx box which look good. If your hyper v - storage spaces Vmware - vsan and save your money on the San element. Get hosts like dell r730xd and populate with traditional spinning disks for capacity and then ssd for the hot tiering of data. I think the days of a San in a school environment are over.

Did the usual round of windows updates to our domain controllers this weekend - Server 2012 R2. Later we noticed Smoothwall was prompting users for credentials. Had a look in Smoothwall under: Services > Authentication > Directories to find our Active Directory wasn't happy - something to do with Machine Account - password validation. The result was Smoothwall couldn't query AD for any user or group details - hence everyone was getting NTLM authentication errors. Contacted Smoothwall support and as ever great service, after a couple of calls and an hour later we tracked it down to: HKEY Local Machine > System > Current Control Set > Services > SRV > Start (Reg_DWORD) If the DWORD says 3, the server only allows Windows Machines joined to the domain to look at AD, As the Smoothwall is not a Windows machine and we use a Samba connector, for the Smoothwall to be able to authenticate users, the option needs to be set to 2 and then the server rebooted. After the reboot we were back to normal.

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askds/2010/07/17/friday-mail-sack-saturday-edition/#dnsbest There is a bit of explanation as to why it is best practice to point preferred DNS to alternative DNS server first with itself as secondary.

How do you find it? I am considering this for our PE department. Do you know how it is licensed and the approx. cost?

I am currently investigating the use of online storage for students and staff. However, during my testing it would appear that the upload speeds to Google Drive are horrendously slow. It takes upto 5 times longer to upload the same amount of content to Google Drive then it does to Microsoft OneDrive. We are talking about exactly the same files, a combination of documents, photos, videos of varying sizes. The PC in question has a 1GB NIC and we have a 500MB sync. connection to the web. All connections go out through Smoothwall and all relevant Google URL's are in the do not inspect SSL category. At the moment it is making Google Drive almost unusable as it is painfully slow. Is anyone else able to do a comparison between the two? Upload the same content to both and time how long it takes for either service (Google Drive + OneDrive)?

How is this going? Do you have an update on how the sync went?

Just out of interest what was the cost of doing this?

PDQ Deploy + PDQ Inventory will do exactly what you need it to. Inventory checks to see which machines have what versions of software, then using Deploy you can schedule Java for example to update to the latest version once a week/day at 3:30pm or whatever on a schedule. Once the schedule is set, forget about it. Works a treat, we keep Flash + Java up-to-date among other software on a weekly basis.

Look at something called PDQ Deploy + PDQ Inventory. Will do exactly what you want. Deployment Software and System Administrator Tools

I believe if you use Promethean software on any hardware that isn't Promethean they want about £400 for the privilege of issuing a licence.

We have a couple of Promethean models for the same reason - don't want to contemplate moving away from the software and they have been great so far. We have 65" versions, for the money I don't know what else is out there - BETT would be a good place for you to see them all later this week.

sparkeh - are you suggesting then you will update your master image yearly and push out the new image to all your machines over the summer holidays and turn off periodic windows updates throughout the year? This is what we are currently doing. Due to the volatile nature of some of Microsoft's updates we don't push out updates throughout the year. Instead we update our build July time with the past years windows updates and patches then review and deploy over summer.

Was this a clean Windows 10 install or an update to an existing Windows 7/8? I am looking at potentially testing some older Dell Optiplex 755 (currently on Windows 7 with Vista drivers) with build 1511 (10586) by means of SCCM upgrade https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt426642(v=vs.85).aspx Core2Duo 4GB RAM SSD

Is anyone successfully running Windows 10 on older hardware i.e. Core2Duo's with no updated drivers since the Vista era?

I kind of wanted to keep this discussion away from what people have done at home on their own machines and look at it more from the perspective of: Have teachers/students seen any kind of tangible benefit for the upgrade? How has it affected the support you offer - do you deal with more/less/about the same queries that you did before the upgrade? Did Windows 10 kill any software you used to run? have you found any other quirks that you've had to resolve?

For those of you who have implemented Windows 10 in your environment - was it worth it? Has Windows 10 brought anything new to your environment which has made an impact over Windows 7? I'm considering the potential for upgrading Windows 7 this summer to 10. However, when I sit back and think about it, I am having a hard time justifying it. What would we gain? I know it would result in a lot of additional support calls from staff and students unfamiliar with the new Windows interface. If people had the choice again to move from a previous Windows version (especially the last known good version - 7) would you still move to 10 knowing what you know now?

Get started | IAM Cloud Education Don't worry - I found it. i am not used to companies being so open and honest about their pricing structure. it's normally smoke and mirrors then you find out a school down the road got it cheaper...