DaveyPitch

I hate UAC, I turn it off instantly when setting up a new machine.

Don't you have a seperate GPO for your students? You could just disable it for them and leave the search bad working for staff.

It might not be how you want to do it, but we have the search bar disabled so it doesn't show any results at all when they try to search. They can still use the search bar in Explorer if they want to search for files, so we find it works well for us.

No help in converting them I'm afraid, when we switched to Win 7 last summer I simply re-created the mandatory profiles we use (which is only for students here, the staff get roaming profiles). It only took a couple of hours (if that) and I had the safety of knowing everything was fine with Win 7, so perhaps it's worth considering that rather than converting them?

We have 1 image, set up using WDS and it's own driver store, that we can deploy to all hardware types in the school (currently 5 different types of desktop, plus 3 different kind of laptops). I tend to update the image myself once every few months, ironing out any glitches/problems that were on the old image, updating it fully, then saving it for deployment. It only takes about 30 minutes to completely re-image a machine, from the first button press, to the login screen being available for people to use it. Works great for us

Yup, that's the exact same script I use, and import it the same way

Top stuff, very useful

Anything in Event Viewer that shows up as errors of warnings? Might be a clue in there.

Excellent, glad it worked for you

Right, just tested it on my machine, and not only do you have to take ownership of the file, you still have to grant yourself permissions as well. This is the script I used.... takeown /f "c:\windows\resources\ease of access themes" /a /r icacls "c:\windows\resources\ease of access themes\*" /grant Everyone:(F) del "c:\windows\resources\ease of access themes\*.*" /q Hope that helps a bit

Just checked, it's because the file is owned by TrustedInstaller, and I couldn't even manually delete it. Looks like you'd need to run a script using takeown.exe to give ownership of the file to the Administrators group, then to delete the file. If you write it as a batch file you could probably make it part of your logon script.

Yeah, it should do it fine. I've not deployed a shared printer to more than 10 machines in this way (only networked ones), but I can't see why it wouldn't work. As you say, worth a shot.

Are the PC's in the same OU in Active Directory? If so, you can share it really easily by deploying it through Group Policy, by creating a policy for that OU alone and then using Print Management to add the Teacher PC as a print server, and then deploying the printer to the policy for that room. I've done it here in a few rooms and it works a treat.

Yup - c:\windows\resources\ease of access themes

Here's a thought - do you actually need the High Contrast themes at all? If not, couldn't you just delete them from each computer? You could set up a GPO to do that for you.

Ah yes, I see what you mean, just tested it myself and it didn't revert back to my standard theme, I had to change it manually back. That's rather annoying :/

If the pupils have turned on High Contrast mode via the shortcut keys then they should be able to disable it the same way. I don't think you can strictly disable it, but you can disable the shortcut keys which should do the job for you. Go to Control Panel -> Ease of Access Centre -> Make the computer easier to see, then untick the box at the top.

Heh, I've seen it do similar things here, though thankfully our machines all have internal speakers, so when we finally got them working properly, Windows stopped messing about. Glad you got it sorted anyway

Does it work as anyone else on the machines in question? Does it work fine when you log in? Can students use the website fine on other machines in the school?

I think BartPE will do it for you, though it's been a while since I used it and I can't quite remember if it lets you get to Msconfig. You'll need to burn it to a CD though I think, I don't think it runs from USB.

I never used the unattend script to join the domain, as it caused problems here (I used a command line util as part of sysprep instead), but yeah, I would always use the FQDN whenever I had to enter it in the unattend file.

The way I did it here (before we got our KMS server set up) was to set up the unattend file to do an automatic first login as a local admin, then run a command line utility to enter the product key and activate windows. If you want to use it, the command line bits are... c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ipk XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX c:\windows\system32\slmgr.vbs -ato The first line enters whatever product key you enter, while the second line attempts to activate windows with your new key. Hope that helps.

I looked into this exact thing as I wanted our staff to have a default desktop (which they couldn't remove icons from), but have the ability to add and delete their own shortcuts. I couldn't find any reasonable way around it in the end so I just went with a shared desktop that they can't edit. It's not ideal but it works for now.

Have you used the fully qualified name of your domain in the answer file? I think it has to be domain.com, not just domain for the answer file to work properly. That's how I did it anyway.

I thought about that, but I believe you can only use GP Preferences to delete specific files. With a batch script designed to delete anything on the public desktop, you don't have to worry about adding new GP Preferences every time some new installation adds another shortcut to the desktop.