Roberto

I've got a crucial MX100 in my PC and I'm very happy with it. I picked up a 512Gb one during an Amazon sale. I had a hybrid drive in my system before but since replacing it with the SSD it is much improved; booting in a fraction of the time it did with a hybrid disk and it is very fast and responsive in day to day use. I would say that the Samsung 840 series are even better, having worked with those before, so those would be my two picks.

And even if I'm happy with someone, a new regulation may be introduced that requires me to start 'advertising' contracts via a purchase framework that your average local "two people in a shed" type of business can't afford to join - often due to admin burden if not cost.

Know your market: I get lots of people offering me consultancy. Why would I choose you and your mate over literally dozens of others? Or is there less competition where you are? In either case, is there a demand?

... Because while everyone likes to moan about poor delivery companies, very few of those complainers are prepared to pay the extra that a good delivery service will cost. We, that is everyone who shops online as a whole, are not only getting the service we deserve from Yodel, we're also getting all the service we're prepared to pay for. Indeed. And IIRC City Link were sold for £1 by their previous owners, which is rarely a sign of a profitable company with a good future ahead of them. It's horrible to see and obviously terrible news for employees but this has been a long time coming.

Yes, because real-time surveillance and intelligence analysis of the entire surface of the globe is a trivial exercise.

Actually I was going to reply and point out that this might not align well with "runs at logon" if that's really what the OP needs, but then thinking about it, my first suggestion isn't the greatest solution either depending on what the goal is here... So, if you need this image to be a per machine thing @featured_spectre then go with the suggestion from @sted - it's trivial to make this a task that runs at system start up via GPO or even with a scheduled task ("when the system starts" or suchlike is an option here). I'd still suggest writing to somewhere outside the root, maybe create a folder in programdata to host the images? If you need to to be a per user thing then instead have it run as a user login script and have it write to %temp%, which will write to the designated temporary folder for each individual user (users\%username%\appdata\local\temp IIRC).

^ this Try writing the file to an area that all users have read/write access to. Creating files and folders in the root is unlikely to end well. I might suggest ‪C:\Users\Public\Downloads for a save location.

Any web-facing system, whether a CMS or not, whether a website of any type, or an email server, etc. should be firewalled, audited and kept up-to-date.

All I'd say to these is: It might take twice as long for them to install HyperV because they don't know it very well. That's a reason to go elsewhere for consultancy, not to turn away from using HyperV. As for cost, I can tell you that in the year we decided to switch, we paid less to licence and install all the costs we would need to install HyperV and all the stuff you could possibly want to manage it with from scratch than it would have cost us to simply go ahead and renew the vcenter licence we already had. I personally prefer VMWare's approach to a complex cluster - vcenter and ESXi both come as a couple of complete packages that you can add plugins to, whereas a full hyperv cluster really has you leveraging a number of different and separate microsoft technologies in order to reach the same level of functionality, so it is a bit more "backwards and forwards" configuring things between different subsystems (even if its not that much more time-consuming)... but it's very difficult to ignore the huge cost saving.

Not Netgear. Never Netgear. Not unless the problem you're trying to solve is "my network is working too well, how can I 'fix' that?". We tend to use the larger chassis-based HP procurve switches but I would agree with the suggestions from dhicks for smaller models. HP aren't perfect but are pretty damn good. Certainly a good balance between cost, reliability, etc.

I've used Kroll Ontrack. Expensive but worth it.

Thanks Colin.

We've been consistently delighted with Stone equipment and they have constantly supplied winning bids via our CPC invitations. @VeryPC_Colin_M you mention people getting quotes from resellers via CPC. Are they actually going out attempting to win bids with your products, because I cannot recall having a bid proposal that offered your equipment? As happy as we are with what we have, it would still make a nice change the next time we go out to tender to see something other than Stone, Viglen and 100 anonymous box-shifters offering various HP systems that appear to have only a passing resemblance to our spec.

Good point. I work for a college with a primary JANET link so don't tend to worry too much about this, but you're absolutely right, this does need to be thought about on slower links. While I still think its the way to go, maybe its not an automatic panacea either.

Depending on the exact layout of the network, I would be very careful about this - I would certainly expect any well behaved router to be able to conform to your internal network structure, not force you to configure your internal network to its needs. And please don't take this the wrong way but I can't think of a 'gentler' way of saying this: if you have to ask how to change a server's IP address then you probably shouldn't do it at all. This has the potential to cause more problems than its likely to solve without an experienced hand at the tiller.

I think this has to be the answer. It's certainly something we're looking at as a big advantage. Not only will it help with safeguarding by ensuring that users are connecting to the Internet via your organisation's filtered feed, it also means that resources on your LAN that would otherwise only be available internally are usable everywhere, which should be a big win in its own right too.

Papercut supports the kind of feature you're talking about in your other post in general, but without knowing why its not working right now its impossible to say if papercut, or any other solution, will fix it in your particular case.

For those that are wondering, this is what happened the last time I put on my sunglasses and then asked @Norphy about putting SCCM on one of our virtual farms...

No....

We've had the odd request in the past. We say no and explain why. It's not generally been a problem after that.

Yup, that and the network settings on the working vs. faulty ipads themselves. Even if the issue _is_ DHCP, it might not be an issue with the size of the range (... said the guy with 3 /20s configured for wireless clients) but instead could be something as simple as a long lease time being applied to the wireless range where a shorter lease time might be more appropriate. This is typical where someone's just tagged an entry for wireless DHCP on to a server that's been carefully set up to serve DHCP for wired clients, and not considered the implications.

Before you go too far down a potential rabbit hole, what do you mean exactly by "failing to connect" in this case? Are the ipads failing to connect to the wireless network at all? Connecting but getting an APIPA address, connecting to the network but failing to connect to the internet/other resources? You seem to be sure its a lack of IP addresses because someone suggested that, with nothing to back that theory up, and it should be easy to troubleshoot this issue to fix it as effectively as possible with just a bit of digging first.

Even if its "kinda known about", I think some parts of western society still prefers its gays the way they used to prefer women and ethnic minorities: Unseen, unheard and preferably at the back of the bus without a voice. One day the media and some of its readers will mature enough to consider the 'news' that x's CEO is gay or y's CEO is a woman to be about as newsworthy as whether they're left or right handed. It is about as significant to their ability to do the job, after all.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo Trolling level 11 out of 10.

Not sure what you mean here - do you mean mapping drives to their home shares on different sites? Use DFS to replicate traffic between sites for staff home shares (maybe only the ones that need to travel) and have one mapping to one share that's the same on all sites (or fast enough WAN links to do the similar). Or did you mean mapping to other people's shares? Give them shortcuts that point to share UNC paths rather than drive letters that are themselves pointers to share UNC paths.