gshaw

The ActiveSetup key is pretty safe as long as you do it right, as mentioned above the Windows Mail database is the key culprit, adding ~25MB of junk into the profile and slowing down the logon process. Also check out your antivirus as well, that can slow things right down if you're using a product with a slow scanning engine (Sophos and Kaspersky fall into this category)

When I say Pro I mean x86 aka full fat Windows. I know MS always use Photoshop as a reference but I'm not saying editing huge files, just day to day productivity applications that would run fine on Bay Trail / i3 and keep the cost down; Surface Pro is just too expensive for an 11" screen device

Twice the purchase cost, or are you buying them for me ; Fair point, copy and paste can be a pain Performance-wise the Bay Trail looks good enough for tablet use from what I've read in the reviews Build-quality wise the T100 is cheap and nasty looking, back to netbook quality and weight - that said the price point is at a realistic level for a tablet Need 8.1 Pro to use the one thing Windows has as an advantage i.e. being to run the full breadth of applications available within the Microsoft ecosystem; whether that's a weird and wonderful educational program or something more techie. RT is too limited and the app store too basic - if you just want those simplistic apps you might as well get an iPad and have more choice. If Microsoft made a Bay Trail Surface I'd be very interested, sadly they're still clinging onto RT (although hopefully not for much longer if the rumours are to be believed)

Given the choice I'd rather have an Android tablet with a keyboard than a Chromebook, Android is arguably more flexible with a wider range of apps and has the benefit of touchscreen for less money. Will the two ever converge or is there some sort of phone = Android, laptop = ChromeOS strategy going on for the long-term? Agree Microsoft are in trouble if they can't hit back with a similarly priced quality Windows 8 Pro tablet \ laptop hybrid. They haven't managed since Win8's release and they're running out of time at this rate now Google are getting more aggressive with the Chromebook marketing \ sales drive.

Just noticed the same thing on my work laptop today, couldn't access the Store without a Microsoft account Also get the same with the OneNote app, won't let you login with a 365 account until you create a consumer-grade account to go with it... bizarre logic really

Yup I get there's some things that are better discussed via other means, maybe if you're at BETT? Interesting, all ours will be eligible under student advantage, so once they activate the benefit against their college account they're licensed as a 365 ProPlus subscription as an add-on to their Plan A2 sub? If so that makes it a bit less painful as at least students will be able to access the service on their BYOD kit, staff are more likely to be on a larger device at present so there's a bit more flexibility using the web apps at least.

This one might be best answered by @jamesbmarshall - we're evaluating Office 365 on a range of mobile devices including Android and iOS but finding it hard to understand why the native mobile apps aren't included on the A2 plan? Lots of our students have iPhones and Android devices yet they can't use the apps unless we upgrade to a higher plan? I was able to use them when on the Office 365 for Education demo (which is plan A3 iirc) but once on our real one I can't sign in anymore, which makes sense based on this link Seems really odd to tie the mobile apps into the 365 ProPlus licenses when we already pay for that (effectively) via our FTEs on the EES agreement and can give the full version of Office for desktops for free under Student Advantage? Reading the link above basically says you get Office ProPlus now so is there a way to add that as an Office 365 license option? Have I missed something or is this Microsoft trying to force people onto Windows Phone \ Surface?

Same for me plus local crashes as well "Battlefield 4 has stopped working"

Sounds like something out of a TV comedy rather than a "professional" company. Keep evidence and threaten to name and shame if they don't get their act together as some of those anecdotes are hilariously bad

Be careful of these lease schemes, some of them make the school ultimately liable for the lease if the parent \ student doesn't pay. Check the small print with a fine toothcomb!

Ohh yes, quite a few areas were so close to being set up with this - some pretty good lobbying and protests managed to prevent it in some cases. It was also looking like Greater London \ Essex were going to get the Congestion Charge if Livingstone had got re-elected instead of Boris, fortunately enough people saw the light and killed that off too

Whatever it is the simple fact is Microsoft tablets are too expensive to justify over their rivals. A decent Win8 Pro device is £700+ and RT was still around £400 when quality Android ones can be had at nearly half that price. Still not buying (literally) the idea of tablet being a laptop replacement as they're too clunky and heavy but the smaller and lighter ones hit £1000 which is just silly. MS might have to go down the Google route and give the OS for free if they want to build market share, either that our the hardware to run Win8 is just to expensive in comparison to iOS / Android which I find hard to believe.

HDGuard also used to trash HDDs on a regular basis when I had it at my last place, must've been the increased amount of disk writes as the drive failures basically stopped after we removed it and went to mandatory profiles instead. HDGuard used to slow the boot down by an extra minute or two due to the AV issue and profile re-creation - again once on mandatory profiles it was down to 30 seconds or so after login (cold boot to desktop with HDDs was under 2 minutes) We managed to set up all our software with the profile and tweaked it over time for anything new, maybe another alternative would be to set a pre-configured default profile, let users change things but then reset on logoff?

There's another article that debunks it and shows up some of their graphs as being a bit ropey, ultimately it's a fear-driven sales tool for the magazine but at the same time the only people raking it in are the banks and those who run them.

Hi all, just wondering if anyone has a stash of DDR2 memory modules going spare that aren't being used? Trying to recycle a couple of our older machines to use for digital signage and need to beef them up a bit. Hoping for DDR2 800 but 667 would also do the trick.

Dell Precision T5400, getting on a bit now but would be quick enough to not skip a beat apart from the dire RAID controller that seems to not like disk writes very much, even slows down the Crucial M4 SSD I've got in it for VM use

It's so buggy, played a few games at the weekend and only managed one map where me and my mate got to the end of the match without it bombing out. Most common one seems to be the audio starts repeating then the game freezes, also had random disconnects mid-game, causing you to lose all points from that round The one game we did complete was quality, pushed towards a lost Conquest point with tickets at about 70-120 then turned it round and won at the last

Edugeek pizza, worth its weight in gold at the show after a morning of walking around I do need a new mug though (the sillier it looks the better!) as my one met an unfortunate end the other week Aside from that Intel gave out some good stuff on the Stone stand a few years back - the USB desktop charger \ USB hub \ memory card reader was very handy and a clutch of USB sticks always prove useful. Novelty wise funny shaped stress balls make nice desktop ornaments, imaging having a squidgy grumpy cat on your desktop... http://cdn.dashburst.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Grumpy-Cat.jpg

That's pretty cool, I like it

If you're on EES licensing you should be able to get the cloud based Forefront product (FOPE) free from Microsoft. Save yourself server resources, bandwidth and money all at the same time

Ah yes Orange, was with them for 12 years until the merger when the service quality went rapidly downhill, calls kept dropping out, often had no 3G despite being in a busy urban area etc. Eventually found out from one of their more knowledgeable techs that a local transmitter was down plus works for the Olympics had knocked out 3G in a lot of places. Their customer service rep tried to tell me that 2G was acceptable Internet speed to which I sarcastically replied "yes sure, if we're still in 1999" and got the same 20% off the bill. Soon as my contract was up I was off to Vodafone which is miles better plus they did the handset I wanted when Orange didn't.

On a related note the Windows Store seems to be causing headaches for lots of users, I posted a fix I found on the 8.1 Beta on my blog ad had comments from quite a few people since all having connection issues. The dangers of relying on the Cloud eh...

Ruckus at my last job, Aruba here (very powerful but the management console makes me want to weep compared to the simplicity of Ruckus!)

I think you have to be a bit sceptical with a lot of the offerings out there in the IT world, so much is sold as the solution to everything but rarely lives up to the hype once you really dig into the detail. The cloud does have its uses, spam filtering is a good one that saves your time, energy and bandwidth for less cost than running internally. Student email works well as a commodity service where internal IT can't realistically give 25GB+ per user but with the caveat of limited backup \ archiving. Was also impressed with Lync Online and the time \ effort it saves having a hosted version for quick and easy web conferencing. We're looking at shifting staff email onto 365 but with our own archiving product as £40k+ per year for full compliance is just silly. Likewise anyone who puts their entire infrastructure cloud based with no failback option is putting themselves in a risky position (imo) As usual a sensible blend of services works the best, it's the thin vs thick client debate all over again

This is exactly why you have to approach cloud with both eyes open and not get taken in by the marketing hype. Only put up there what you can bring back in-house should the need arise as one day the price can shoot up or the company can drop you like a sack of spuds as this story shows.