gshaw

I'd always recommend sticking with quality kit for your network backbone, with education special bid pricing and a raft of suppliers fighting for business the HP ProCurve switches are hard to beat imo. Stick with the 2xxx series and you'll be sorted for years

Regarding screen, physically larger, 11" at high resolution isn't comfortable for long term Win8 desktop mode imo Regarding weight, too heavy to use comfortably as a tablet holding it up etc. The RT is no lightweight but is usable, the added bulk of the Pro makes it laptop esque so you may as well have... a laptop? As for power are you quoting Surface2 as reviews never got those stats out the original Pro? I know MS were betting on Pro as a one device to replace tablet, notebook and tablet but seems people aren't buying it (literally). Wouldn't fancy taking a nearly £1000 device around the way you do with a tablet and by the time you add the power cover and eveything else the weight and cost go right up, most of the time wasted on web browsing with the odd burst of desktop mode. The funny thing is on one hand I'm not a typical user as I run more specialised techie apps than say the average iPad buyer but yet as a "Pro" user find it unsuitable. When I want to do VM work, lots of typing or a spot of Photoshop I use a ThinkPad with a proper keyboard and screen, HDD + SSD and so on, not a tablet. Yet at the same time I want a thin / light Windows tablet that can do 80% of the work with Win8 desktop apps (hence no RT) but without the crazy Pro price tag, is that so crazy? Shame MS can't offer a full range as that's where their strength should lie in theory, the ability to offer a device spec and price point that suits every need but with a unified OS across them all.

@Arthur multi quote on phone is a pain so used the mention instead Pro work on an 11" tablet or a convoluted mess of docking cables, nahhh I'll pass thanks. At that point a laptop with a decent screen makes more sense and then back to the question of why you want a tablet in the first place... portability. So what about those who want Win8 Pro for their existing apps but don't want to carry around a brick with poor battery life? MS have no offering and Lenovo aside the other manufacturers don't have a quality offering, RT far too limited but lovely form factor, shame.

Yup fair observation and the pricing on the Surface line was (and still is by the looks of it) well off the mark. At £130 we can make use of the two we ordered to try with Office 365 but anyone with a large fleet of them might regret it later on. Still say the idea of an i5 tablet is the wrong answer to the wrong question, people will pay 400-500 for a full featured tablet, 200 for a 7" tablet or 300-500 for a laptop but not 800+ for a combination of the two. Seeing as Windows 8 is lighter on resources I just don't get the need for an expensive CPU in the Pro device, MS should either go for the hardware market properly and put an affordable mid range device out there or pull out completely as they keep falling into no man's land with the RT / i5 Pro models imo

Maybe but driving around it yesterday gave me deja vu of San Andreas

Got it at the weekend and although good I haven't been blown away by it somehow, I guess mainly because it's a mix of San Andreas map with GTA IV graphics and I knew a couple of years ago this is how the next game would look. Still be a good play though.

Makes me glad to have done exams in ye olde style, OK for English \ History typing the long essay questions rather than writing may have been less painful on the hands but for anything else screen based is nasty. Trying to imaging doing A-Level Chemistry, Physics or Electronics on screen only would be a nightmare!

We've just bought eStream, very impressed by it and solves streaming, digital signage and off air recording in the one package

Still find it a bit amusing that a device that's meant to be lean and light on system resources due to the cloud focus still needs cutting edge CPU power and ends up not much cheaper than a standard laptop

The good news, with your new £709 iPhone you won't need to remember any of those pesky passwords anymore thanks to the new fingerprint reader The bad news, when you get mugged for said phone you'll also get your finger cut off at the same time If going by past technology trends Apple must be on the way out by now, it's time for something newer and shinier to take its place (see Nokia 1990-2000 lol)

There's a Microsoft Fixit tool available for that, iirc MS broke their own files for the update mechanism Try MS update first and if you get an error code Google that and it should lead you to the fix.

• Did anyone install a full NAP solution including having the client devices check for up to date AV / updates etc We did but it's a menace and causes more problems than it solves, especially on iOS and Android devices (doesn't seem to have a clue what to do with them) Being replaced by a simpler LDAP authentication \ guest isolation model on a separate VLAN and Internet connection • Do you have a transparent proxy in your solution? Effectively yes (goes through our Palo Alto where all traffic is inspected seamlessly on its way through for URLs, application signatures and so on) • Do you allow your guests / to print Will do via Papercut once we get that configured • Do you allow your guests / students to plug their laptops into the school power to charge their laptops up? Not sure on this one, good point and worth further investigation • Do you track what the students are browsing? Yes via the filtering etc • How have you authenticated them onto the wireless? LDAP lookup for valid staff \ student account • How have you protected your wired network? Policies on switches • Do you have an AUP that all your users have to accept before they come on line. Yes, the usual "by connecting to the network you accept the terms of the AUP" kind of line, along with a link to it on the Aruba portal

Considering FIFA14 is available on PS3 all my mates are avoiding the PS4 / Xbone for now to avoid the mandatory PS+ subscription for a year at least. GTA5 is on PS3 and I play Battlefield on a proper device (PC) so have to admit I don't really care for these new gen consoles as it stands.

Still falls between two bases for me, not a big enough screen for a power user device and not enough features in the thin and light RT version. That said there's not another Windows tablet on the market under £1000 (Lenovo Helix I mean you!) that comes close in the design and build quality stakes. i3 mid range Win8 Pro Surface... if only eh

There's a neat little script I used to use that will check any Task Sequence to make sure all content is available on the Distribution Points. If I find it I'll post back with the link Edit: here it is Using PowerShell to Check Task Sequence Package References for a DP

Received ours OK after about 2 weeks, upgraded both to 8.1 Beta and going out to staff soon. My thoughts on the RT - love the form factor but find that outside of MS Office and OneNote I need Win8 Pro, if only MS could make a mid range i3 Surface in the RT form factor I'd be sold for sure

VDI up until now has really been hamstrung by the storage back-ends not being up to the job - hard disk based is horribly inefficient if you want to match the performance of any half-decent desktop. Seems like there's some new ways of doing things coming through using flash \ RAM now and if those work as well as suggested it might finally be possible to give a user experience that's more positive than the equivalent desktop

Have to say going from 8.1 on a Surface RT back to 8.0 makes you realise how much better the OS feels with the update installed (or conversely how bad 8.0 is \ was). With a few more fixes and tweaks it's a much more viable prospect.

Yup we edit ours in audit mode when creating the image (to remove the Public locations), works a treat

Sadly seems like the offer is USA only Great deal for anyone over there though!

Sophos and I hate it - slow, clunky and brainless updater module that always needs to run msiexec, borking any managed software deployments that happen to be occurring at the same time. Can't wait to get rid although not sure how long that will be. I like ESET, going from Kaspersky or Sophos it will be like having a free PC upgrade such is the difference in resource usage

That's just like the Pixar story where someone nuked half a movie then they found out the backups didn't work either

On desktops at the moment probably not - just in the process of shifting 2500 PCs to Win7 this year but for tablets (and maybe laptops) I'm starting to give it more serious consideration. Just updated our trial Surface RT to 8.1 and using the same wallpaper in both interfaces definitely helps reduce the jarring feeling when moving between UI modes. Still find it amusing how MS have now implemented most of the features many of us complained about initially that were just dumb design decisions (desktop wallpaper, unified search, boot to desktop etc) but MS were adamant were the right thing to do

Just remember with the proprietary cloud managed solutions to ensure your budget will always be able to cover the renewal costs otherwise you could end up with very expensive plastic bricks mounted to the ceiling in the future Used Ruckus at my last place, very nice and got Aruba at the college I work at now

Or not as the case might have it