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Don't know if anyone can shed any light on this? We have a 2008 machine that acts as a print server - HP Officejet Pro 8000 inkjets deployed to the workstations via GPO. During everyday use, we seem to have way more errors that I would expect - particularly from our staffroom printer. I have to unblock the queue numerous times during the day. It also refuses to print larger jobs - if I send a single page of photos, it prints ok. Anything over that just sits in the queue and never goes any further. Just wondered if anyone could recommend something?

Having a strange problem here, wondered if anyone had any wonderful ideas? We have a number of XP workstations that have network printers deployed to them via GPO. If I try to print a document in word, it works perfectly. However, when I come to print a document from Acrobat Reader, nothing prints. There's nothing in the print queue either - it's as if the job is never being sent. Has anyone else encountered this?

Just been looking into Shutdownertron to shut down our network machines each day. I set up a GPO to install the MSI but the package fails. I went to a machine and tried to install the MSI manually and it appears that I don't have priviledges to start a system service even though i'm logged in as domain admin. Can anyone tell me what i'm doing wrong or how I can get around this?

Thought i'd ask another question to do with the seemingly never ending profile debate. I'd just like to get people's thoughts on what they think would be best for me to do? We are a small primary school with a small network (fewer than 50 individual users). We have a Server 2008 domain controller and XP Pro clients but after buying a few more machines, we are about to have Windows 7 Pro too. We have been running our vanilla network with no major troubles, the kids have mandatory profiles and the staff have roaming ones. Both use folder redirection for things like documents and start menus etc. With Windows 7 about to happen though, we're not quite sure which route to take with profiles? Should we keep a mixture of roaming and mandatory profiles (one for XP, one for 7 etc)? Should we scrap roaming profiles and just use the locally generated ones being as we are already using folder redirection? Is there any major downside to giving the staff mandatory profiles? (it's only ever the roaming ones we have trouble with). Is there anyone out there with a similar sized network and if so, how do you do it? Cheers everyone A few people on here have been really helpful already but I just thought i'd ask about.

Experiencing a strange one at school - Over the summer, we moved onto a new server running Server 2008. In our computer room we have 2 HP Businessjet 1100n printers that we decided to deploy via GPO. We used pushprinterconnection and the clients involved (XP) picked up the two printers. From using them however, we have found that when a client prints something, in certain instances parts of the page are not printed. For example, if you type a sentence in Word then it prints out fine. However, if you draw a shape (eg speech bubble) and type a sentence inside, only the sentence is printed. The speech bubble just disappears. Our school uses a lot of the 2Simple software packages and the same seems to happen in them. Certain graphics are printed, others are missed. To test what was going on, I set up another client and instead of deploying a printer to it via GPO, I manually installed it, setting the port to the printer's IP address. This worked perfectly - everything prints fine. Am I right though in thinking that doing things this way would mean that I can't manage the print queue centrally? Anyone got any ideas?

Ok, i've just checked the event viewer and I can't find anything about 'the server shutdown unexpectedly'. Sorry to ask this but which section of event viewer would that be stored in? Also, I've just tried running cmd using an explicit path and it has rebooted in the same way.

Thanks Jinnan - i'll have another look and try the explicit path when it reboots.

James, Excuse my totally none technical explanation but it seems to reboot correctly, certainly not a power issue. The only thing is that it seems to do it very very quickly. Where a standard server reboot would take a while as processes are stopped etc, this takes literally 3 seconds (it flies through the screens stopping processes screens etc)

Hi james, Thanks for the reply. I've been into the event log and checked to see if there was anything major but there doesn't seem to be. As for tracing my steps, we've done very little on the server recently other than creating a couple of shared folders. Sam

Just had a strange one and would really be grateful of any help. The primary school that I work at has a single server which carries out all the roles on our network and runs Server 2008 R2. This afternoon, while using the Print Management tool, the server very suddenly closed everything on the screen and rebooted itself. Once it had finished rebooting, I tried logging back on as administrator - it went through the standard 'applying settings' and 'preparing desktop' but I was then given a blue screen with the mouse cursor. When I do a Ctrl+Alt+Del, I get the task manager and from there I am able to run explorer and my desktop is shown. However, I then tried to open a command prompt and the server rebooted itself again. I've just tried doing the same thing and again, it doesn't show an explorer and once I have explorer open, the moment I try to open a command prompt, the server reboots itself. Has anyone got any ideas? I'm slightly concerned as this is our only server.

Thanks for that Ric - the sparklines look great but it would involve us buying third party software to achieve that in Office 2007. Looks interesting though Any other ideas?

Quick question for any Excel geniuses out there. I have a sheet in Excel which contains pupils' names and their spelling ages throughout their school career. At the moment, i've got all the information feeding into a bar chart but it displays every child's data on one big chart. Is there a way of adding something like a dropdown list to the chart so that a user can pick which child's data they want to chart? Thanks for any help

I have a user on a Windows Server 2008 domain using Windows XP Pro clients. The user logs in fine, the profile is roaming and is loaded fine. However, as the user works on a machine, it sometimes randomly restarts. Also, when the user clicks Log Off in the start menu, the machine sometimes logs off and other times, reboots the machine. I was just wondering if anyone had seen this before. I'm assuming it's a profile issue as it's following the user around the school.

Thanks for the posts everyone. Everything that everyone's said makes sense but I'm sure this is a profile problem because it is following the user around the school. If they log onto a machine and have the problem, I can go onto the machine straight afterwards and it will behave perfectly. I have a feeling it's something in the user's home folder but I've scanned it all multiple times for nasty bits and pieces and nothing is turning up. The machines are XP by the way.

Ok..the plot thickens. I removed the relevant user profiles and recreated the user on the server. All well and good. The user has just come to login this morning and the same thing has happened. It's also thrown up a new error. When the user logs in, the full explorer is not shown, just a My Documents window as before. This time however, a Data Execution Prevention error message is shown and after a few seconds, closes the My Documents window leaving the desktop wallpaper with no icons or toolbars etc. Has anyone got any brilliant ideas because i'm stumped?

I have a domain user who logs onto the domain but no explorer is shown. All that is displayed is a My Documents window. If she closes this window then explorer kicks in and the desktop is shown. I was just wondering if anyone else had seen this problem before?

Sorry if this is a real newbie question..setup my first FOG server this afternoon at work and didn't get a proper chance to play with it and i've still got a few niggling questions. When I created an image from my test workstation, FOG resized the partition down to just over 6Gb to make the image. Once the imaging process was done, the machine rebooted and I was left with a C: drive of 6Gb. When I deploy that image onto another workstation, will it partition the drive in the same way or will it use up the whole drive as I have experienced before when using Ghost? Cheers for any advice.

Hi..just thought i'd reply and agree with everything you just said. It's nice to know there's a place on here where we can talk to other primary schools. It can get a little intimidating when you're asking advice from a techie at a 1000+ pupil academy Will be good to see what kind of technology other schools are using.

Over the summer we're moving from Ranger to a vanilla network and i've already found a number of tools which give us a lot of the same functionality. I was just wondering if there is anything out there which would allow our teachers to start an application on all the computers in our ict suite. At the moment in Ranger, all they have to do is browse for the .exe on their computer, choose which computers they want the app to start on and click OK. Thanks

This might sound like a dumb question but i'm just trying to get my head round things. Is there anything wrong with using one username and password to login an entire suite of machines? I'm just playing around with iTALC and have been looking at the login function. It would be ideal to use in our primary school with the really little ones. Any advice welcome

A primary school which I look after is looking for a new server to replace its current (and fairly ancient) one. I've been sorting out specs but I thought I'd quickly ask what people on here would recommend? I've got a budget between 1000 - 1500. It's a small primary school with around 75 workstations in total. Storage isn't an issue at the moment but they would like to future proof themselves. The new server will be acting as DC > DNS > DHCP etc. I've been advised to move storage over to a seperate file server aswell. What do you think? Thanks for your advice.

Apologies if this is in the wrong forum, wasn't sure where to post. I've just moved to a tiny little primary school and I've been confronted with a complete mess. I was wondering if you guys would please give me your opinions and ideas. At present the network consists of a Windows 2000 server, an IT suite of 25 machines (fairly old XP), digital whiteboard machines in each of the classrooms and the odd staff laptop (various). The school has been using Ranger for the last few years but it seems to be setup quite badly. Software seems to be all over the place and staff laptops aren't connected to the domain, they just use the internet connection. Certain classes use a single login (eg, Year 4 will all login with the username Y4) and the so called "Head" of ICT doesn't seem to have a clue. Could anyone give me some pointers on where to start? Do we really need Ranger or would a vanilla network do the job? Is the group login thing ok and if so, how should it be setup? (never properly experienced it before). I know there seem to be a million and one questions here but any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

This is probably an extremely simple one so I apologise if it is. Is there a way that I can open a website on all the computers in our IT Suite from the teacher's machine? Thanks for your help

Tell me about it GShaw. It's what you get for working in a small independent primary school. No money whatsoever! I've told them again and again we need to update stuff but will they listen? lol

Thanks Clywedog for the info. I'm gonna give up now. I had an hour spare so I thought I'd give WDS a go and I've only just learnt that the client's need 512Mb RAM. The room I want to image only have 256 Really fed up about that...the whole setup of WDS on the server worked like a dream. Knew it was too good to be true.