gshaw

It's really sad Google are so inflexible with this for edu. I've got a pile of Geobooks that would make great Flex devices but between the short support shelf life (2028), the flakiness of the hardware and the cost per device it's not worth re-using them

Just a quick bump \ resurrection to say thanks to @mrstrong for documenting this, glad to get rid of all the extra nag screens and make the login process much slicker for students. Have also configured Privacy Sandbox and Memory Saver to stop those pop-ups too

Had a report yesterday of PowerPoint doing random annotations on slides and a menu sometimes appearing when the user tries to move between slides. Sounded odd but after testing it out in the room I've never seen this before; it appears to be an extra pop-out navigation that only appears when a) in Extend mode b) with a touchscreen display connected Problem is the panel is really inconsistent when it appears and also conflicts with the board's built-in navigation (SMART GX 065). Even worse, on the SMART panels dragging in from the edge seems to automatically cause annotation to turn on and you end up with unwanted inking all over the slides. I can't find much reference to what this "feature" is even called, Copilot doesn't seem to know outside of "it may be a new feature" and trying the usual suggestions like "turn off pop-up menu" don't help, as the bottom navigation menu is also there but seems indepedent of this one. Anyone seen the same or am I going crazy and this has actually been there all along?

That's interesting, I have a couple of Dell 5040 SFF machines that were freezing 5 mins after boot as mentioned further back in this thread. They didn't have anywhere further to go on BIOS version when I was troubleshooting the other week but maybe they will now! Edit: or maybe not then Microsoft 2011 Secure Boot Certificates Expiration for Out of Scope Platforms for BIOS Updates | Dell US

I tried the Classroom embed this morning as the ads on a laptop repair video were driving me insane, it seems to work!

Is this still working consistently for you @paulkerton

We use OSDCloud to build our InTune machines, very quick and slick for branded machines. Not quite as clean with drivers for Stone and similar OEMs as you get the Windows Update drivers rather than the manufacturer curated driver packs. Was playing with adding a custom driver injection script for these though not used it in anger yet.

Nice words for Intelligent Servers from me too, their quick response and shipping of some urgently required RAID cards saved us a lot of headaches last summer

These were the ones I saw at BETT https://www.acer.com/gb-en/chromebooks/acer-chromebook-311-c725-c725t Though if those daughter boards are still available @ICTDirect_Dave that's a tempting price point! I've got piles of 30+ dead Chromebooks at two schools, all soldered USB port failures, it's painful so want to avoid that issue going forward.

Hi all, following on from BETT I've been looking at some potential Chromebook options for our schools, particularly the new generation ones with easily replaceable USB-C ports What I'm noticing in the quotes now is options of 4GB vs 8GB RAM, which route are you all going down for new devices in the current climate of AI-induced expensive memory? Generally I've thought of Chromebooks as lightweight devices but trying to predict the future of whether these might end up running Aluminium OS at some point in their lifecycle is 8GB a safer bet? The 8GB devices seem to double the SSD size too. Interested in your thoughts!

The best tip I can give you especially if using Autopilot... don't log into the device! Wait for it to hit the login screen after deployment then push the Kiosk profile and wait for it to apply. Will save you a world of pain!

Been setting the 64GB machines in InTune Kiosk mode for Primary School use, they'd be better off running Chrome OS Flex but the £30 management charge isn't worth it when support ends in 2 years. Similar story with a stack of Geobooks

The first device that I checked was set as Shared (Primary User removed) so it seems to rule out that theory Ironically the InTune portal that would've allowed me to push the Remediation straight away remotely was also down due to the Azure Front Door service outage, so the onsite tech had to run the remediation sneakernet style

I was wondering the same thing, we use Company Portal and have machines with drives filling up so... maybe? Reddit also has the same question...

It's gonna be a long day if all the SAML SSO linked apps are struggling too

Yup having issues with Entra, InTune, SSO on Entra-joined devices and Senso V2 SSO login (don't think it's their fault tbf as it relies on Entra)

Public service announcement, we had reports of machines filling their drives yesterday and this morning. Upon investigation it's a winget log, now acknowledged as an issue in M365 Admin portal. In the meantime there's a Remediation script on the Reddit thread here:

Yup having multiple issues this morning. Started with an InTune bug that's filling SSDs, followed by SSO issues for students on Entra Joined devices, then the Entra portal was struggling to load with connection issues, then the InTune portal down and now Senso Microsoft SSO is also down. Fun times...

All ours are on V2 and haven't noticed this, though will keep it near the top of things to test if I get any slowdowns reported

Yup also thought the same when my phone went off with the American EBS sound, last time I heard that it was announcing a "state of emergency due to a disaster of unknown type at the Black Mesa Research Facility" so the flashback made me do a double-take 😂

No it was just the Agent: - from the Updates library find the Agent in the list - Download button - Extract button - install onto a test machine using the freshly extracted files What was really odd in my case was that a domained fresh machine was working on the older agent (think it was .72) but the new InTune builds only worked with the newer agent .86

Fairly standard steps but it did work in the end for me, with an added step of also Download / Extract SOLUS for a clean install (mine were freshly built machines) Please attempt the following fixes Restart the SOLUS3 deployment service from the SOLUS 3 Server. On the affected workstation restart the SOLUS 3 Agent Service. Re-download the Update in question. On the affected workstation delete the package from C:\ProgramData\Capita\Deployments\Package Deploy the update in question to the affected workstation to resolve the issue. If this does not resolve the issue the SOLUS 3 agent on the workstation will have to be removed and reinstalled.

It's basically following this well-written guide How to deploy SIMS.net to Entra Joined Devices - Tech Blog, News, How To's and More. though with the issues I had this week make sure you get the freshest MSI files by running a re-Download & Extract of the SOLUS Agent from the server console

Good news for my issue, all working now downloaded the SIMS Summer update and SOLUS Agent update again in SOLUS manager cleared C:\ProgramData\Capita\Deployments\Package on the affected client reinstalled the latest version of SOLUS Agent 3.12.86.1 (instead of previous 3.12.72.1) deployment now working on the InTune devices Very strange one, especially as the older client was working on the domained devices but not arguing with a fix that works (!)

Just built a domained machine from our previous image (moving these devices to Entra Joined \ InTune this summer) and SOLUS deployed the Summer 2025 update fine from there. Appears to be either firewall or AV then hmmm