sahmeepee

grrr. I checked and you're right of course! Something more devious is clearly in order! Perhaps pointing the machines to a broken/non-existant proxy would do it?

I'm pretty sure you can stop them from typing locations into the address bar in explorer.exe or even remove the address bar completely via GPO.

NetOp and similar suffer from the same problem - I remember a thread in the u.e.schools-it newsgroup about it. NetOp runs (at least partly) as a service but still manages to cop it when they do this.

The user property that lets you restrict the max. number of recipients is a bit buried (User properties>exchange general>delivery options), so it's not one of the ones you can apply when you select a big clump of users and bring up their Properties. Possibly it's scriptable with ADSI or something - I'm not too hot in that area. Of course troublemakers can have their limit manually set to 1 permanently without too much hassle. There is an organisation-wide setting, inside "global settings>message delivery>defaults" in System Manager, but you'll it'll apply to all users that you don't opt-out with the above setting as you've found already

I managed to get this working as instructed in your message edit and it looks nice. Unfortunately Windows doesn't seem to let .hta files "run as..", so I have to be logged on under an admin account to do the good stuff (shutdown PCs etc). Anyone got any ideas? Feature request: It would be hella cool if you could put a "prune" button down near "Select all" and "Select all" to ping (or similar) each of the listed PCs in turn and work out if they're turned on. Otherwise trying to shut down a whole room of PCs will almost certainly end in a VBScript error when it hits one that's already off. Definitely keep at it! PS: Wake-on-LAN would be nice too!

There's also a java one mentioned in the Essential Software Wiki page (JDiskView IIRC) UPDATE: JDiskReport

Similar to WMI Scriptomatic and released in May2005: WMI Code Creator v1.0 The most useful online KiXtart reference for me: KiXtart Online Reference The KiXtart HTML Help file is also very useful.

Our LEA (and quite a few others out there, Bradford I think) use microwave dishes (not the pyrex type) to provide broadband. They do 64MBit over a few miles line-of-sight IIRC. Not cheap, however. I reckon microwave sounds almost as cool as laser, but certainly miles cooler than crumby ol' wifi

You might have more luck changing the default background for Windows so that they see something other than a blue background before they log in. Not sure how, but it is possible.

If it works OK during quiet spells it sounds that way.. maybe try telling Active Desktop to grab the image from a URL on a web server rather than a UNC path to a share. Not sure it'll help, but it could be worth a go. As a side effect it'll also give you nice web logs telling you what time a machine was logged on to.

Dance eJay is more software produced by Satan. Dreadful install, crappy licensing structure. Yuck. This software is mentioned in the essential software Wiki: http://www.entechtaiwan.net/util/multires.shtm (Entech MultiRes), but I can't vouch for it myself. If QRes is better, you might want to put an entry for it on the wiki page?

Part of the reason I hate it is that it's made from the black bits in the middle of frogspawn, marinaded in bitumen and seived through a pair of soiled pants.

Wholeheartedly agree! Is there some sort of vetting going on to decide which software gets curriculumonline/eLC status or is it a questionnaire with "Is it a microsoft product?" as the only question.

(Assuming you don't have cameras in classrooms)

I think we need to resort to mind control to get rid of the inane print-everything mentality. Does anyone have some software that can flash up a large message for 1/25th of a second?

I second that! It's nice having a few different LiveCDs instead of having tons of software on one OS install.

Every site on there is like that. The kids love it (especially the girls). It looks much nicer when you have http://pic.piczo.com/* blocked imho.

Yep, but I think it's in Security rather than System. Even if you enable the auditing option you need to enable auditing on the folder/file as well. Pretty unlikely to do that by accident.

It did try to download 1.5Gb of updates for some reason. I'd advise you to approve it on its own, then go to WSUS's main summary page and check how much data it's trying to download. I had all foreign languages and wacky installers turned off in WSUS settings, so I've no idea why it was so big, but someone else had had the same thing on a newsgroup. If you have difficulty you can always download the full package from the MS site and do it Ric_'s way.

We run it on a virtual machine (virtual PC). WS2003 hosted on WS2003. It works fine and looks after about 500 clients although the interface to WSUS is a fair bit slower than SUS was.

We always use that one. Free, fairly effective, but does crash occasionally. Generally it doesn't matter to us much if it doesn't work because we're recovering stuff as a favour.

Fair point Russ - it definitely sounds like a good idea to me.

That is fair point, but the target market (school techs) is very small compared to the total number of people that go through (say) MCP courses each year. With eLCs, the software manufacturers that complained may well have got all their income from schools. I know of at least one LEA that has got some of its staff trained up as Microsoft Certified Trainers and is trying to sell MCP courses for school techs within the LEA and if possible further afield.

The 2 posts with that error on google groups both mention large files and suggest some sort of network timeout. Possible ideas: Are you running it at the same PC? Is there anything else affecting the speed of your network? Are there any multi-gigabyte files knocking about in there?

A simple summary of the info in this thread might be nice in the wiki if anyone has the time, knowledge and inclination.