OutLawTorn

This did the trick, thanks all

At one of the schools i work at, Year 7 students and some teachers have their own laptops. They have a domain account that has user rights (gets their printers/etc installed via group policy) then a local account with full access. Generally we haven't had too many problems with their domain accounts, since its the "home" accounts that get full of junk. We then have an image of the laptops (since the hardware is the same on all of them) that includes windows, office, virus scanner and other school related software using altiris/ghost and if they have a problem with any aspect of the software it just gets reimaged. They have been told to keep backups of any work and files elsewhere, so if they lose anything its on them.

http://eventid.net <-- Great source of information on Event log errors, and how to fix them. You might be able to find some more solutions there.

Yes, but as i said in the earlier post, Perth is where a lot of ISPs are based, because thats where a lot of the Internet lines into Australia come into... And as it only has a population of its 1.5mill (curious where u got the stats from), means more options in terms of employment compared to sydney with its considerably higher population... not to mention the severe shortage and high expense of properties to rent/buy in Sydney at the moment... Why go where more people are trying to find fewer available positions, when you can go to somewhere that has more jobs available and less people trying to get them?

Thanks for your help. The command works to change the path, however could not get it to script. Using a batch file, it ignores the %1 at the end, and adding it as itself in a GPO as a startup script and it doesn't seem to be applied (yet an existing logon script in the same GPO still runs).

VMWare Converter can create virtual PC images of windows while its running. I'm not sure if there is any ways of then deploying that image back to the PC tho?

Its always amusing seeing how the rest of the world looks at us... have to say tho, what does Fosters Beer, Home & Away and Neighbours have in common? they're all exports since no-one here actually likes them In terms of IT Jobs, its pretty much the same as everywhere: experience speaks for more than qualifications... although that being said and done, most places seem to like you to have a uni degree in something, even if its not necessarily in an IT area. I'd look at Perth would probably be my first suggestion of where to start off, as its a state capital that is growing fairly well and there are quite a few ISPs based there. Sydney and Melbourne are fairly saturated in terms of population, not sure about Brisbane... Darwin and Tasmania are holes... Adelaide is growing too, just not quite in the same way as Perth... Hope this helps

Hi ladies and gents, just having a recurring problem with pdf files. We are using Windows XP machines on a Windows 2003 server domain, and use Altiris to deploy software. Whenever staff members try to open PDF files, it defaults to opening them in Photoshop. If they right-click on the files and go through the choose program steps, even if they click the "always use this program as default" option it still eventually goes back to photoshop, even if no new software has been deployed to the workstations. Does anyone have a script or registry key we could setup to run on startup, to re-associate the files with acrobat? Thanks, Olt

http://www.prime-expert.com/flashboot/ Found this one quite useful, can create a bootable USB drive from a bootable cd, floppy or image.

I work in different schools over different days, and a recurring problem i've found is in Group Policy Management. When trying to view the settings for an existing group policy object, instead of displaying the settings it just displays "An error occured while generating report: An unknown error occurred while the HTML report was being created." This makes it a long, time consuming task to go through every setting to figure out what the policy does. When trying to copy the object, the copy has the same issue.

There is a little application we use at one of the schools i work at, called "EZ GPO Tool". It allows you to set the idle time for workstations to turn off monitors or suspend via group policy. Alternatively, the program can be run by local registrry settings.

We have used old PCs as TS clients in a couple of different ways, with varying success. The first method we used was Windows 98 running a pre-configured mstsc.exe instead of explorer.exe. This method was reliable, and easy to set up as the ghost image was only ~150mb. Downsides included bad USB drive support (as windows 98 driver support is, well, old) and its a bit of a pain to change the mstsc settings (gotta boot in cmd prompt, change the system.ini, then reboot, make changes, change system.ini back then reboot again). The second option we tried was 2x Thinclient Server which has a freely downloadable version. It involves running their server application. Their application ties in with AD and runs a sql database that keeps track of the users, clients and settings, with apache/tftp for the interface and PXE booting. The clients can then boot off PXE, CD, USB drive or the hard drive. For local installs, the client can be updated remotely. The clients are linux based, and has better driver support. It takes up approx ~35mb on the workstations if a local install is done. The main downsides we have found with the system is that it uses a fair amout of resources on the PC hosting the software, and if the database dies, the clients can get a bit twitchy.

Windows 2003 Server R2 has printer installation via group policy. It doesn't handle setting default printers very well (no way of setting it within group policy, so it just picks the last printer on the PC (alphabetically)). It can also have some problems for users in mutiple groups. More information can be found here.

We have an asp based application on our intranet that ties in with AD and lets you reset student passwords. As it also connects to the print charging software, it automatically deducts 'x' amount from the student's print balance each time their password is reset (they get the first 'y' number of resets free, then it charges them after that).