gshaw

Pay to use a web browser, Skype and view Netflix content? That's a joke tbh - those are standard software features! On top of that you can pay for the privilege of having your YouTube etc vids tracked so they can "recommend" you videos (no doubt slanted towards whoever pays the most to MS in ad revenue) FIFA14 will be out on PS3 so that'll be enough to keep me happy for another year, anything else will be played on PC as these next gen consoles are taking rip off to a whole new level. Dread to wonder what they'll do once a large enough user base has been established and people are locked into the platform. Won't be going near the Xbone with a large bargepole, PS4 will wait and reserve judgement after it's been out for a while but not convinced by either tbh. The sad thing is kids growing up with this will accept this kind of behaviour as the norm, makes the cult of Apple look like hippies in comparison

Would be interested to hear about anyone using their Palo with Bloxx or Smoothwall hanging off it for web filtering, particularly if the filtering runs in transparent proxy mode...

Just out of interest what features have you found people prefer over Moodle?

The 8.1 update will let you set a layout via GPO so should do the trick

Interesting with nComputing as either their demo suites at BETT were pure lies or you've inherited a config issue somewhere as they used to show 20-odd machines running HD YouTube videos with no loss of quality. If money is tight you probably won't be able to replace them with PCs anyway so maybe see if you can get any joy at improving the graphics performance (do the "hosts" have graphics cards or are they using onboard VGA etc) What setup have you got, is it the one with a PCI card and loads of cables coming out of the central PC (X-Series) or networked one (L-Series iirc), if it's the latter the 100Mb backbone might be what's killing it. Student accounts and AD sound like a big win to get started with, along with the client performance if you can get anywhere with that.

Windows 8.1 should make life much easier in terms of network deployment so I'd definitely hold out until then at the very least; at present I'd be sticking with 7 on desktops but looking to run 8 on tablets with a view to testing 8.1 on some trial desktops and see how it goes in terms of user acceptance and compatibility. IE10 causes problems for some of our web apps so make sure you've factored that into your testing as well.

Hi all, I attended a CentOS event on Friday and got talking to one of the project leaders regarding the use of CentOS in education. They seemed surprised when I mentioned how many of us use it as the base OS for Moodle and as a result we discussed the possibility of setting up a dedicated education group. The group could help with technical questions regarding OS tuning, showcases for your organisations and so on. There's also a possibility of getting Moodle added to the list of products that CentOS does QA testing against for distribution updates so this seems useful on quite a few fronts. If you're using CentOS and would be interested in joining the group please let me know by replying to this thread with the name of your organisation (any further details such as number of servers \ students would be great)

You might need to watch out on your KMS server as sysprep resets the client machine ID (CMID) that it uses to check how many unique machines have checked in against the server. If they're all the same they'll never activate. Would always sysprep an image before deploying it, standard MS practice really.

Downside being it uses Windows InTune to set it up, bizarre that you can do it through the cut-down cloud solution but not the hulking on-premise flagship SCCM product (unless I'm missing something?)

Apparently a new RT with better spec is coming out in the not-too-distant future so this is how MS are trying to shift the old stock. The price point on the offer is pretty much where the RT needs to be anyway for the experience it offers imo.

EES with Datacenter for your VM hosts is the way to go, cost is a couple hundred £££ at most per license (it's done per physical CPU per host iirc) which will save you a lot in the long run if you're going down the separate VM route. I'd also build some System Centre licensing into the project, again it's relatively peanuts for what you get and SCCM \ SCVMM (if you're using Hyper-V) will be well worth the investment. Maybe try and build a 3yr license into the project costings if you can't be sure of budgets year on year. For web servers and the like CentOS Linux is awesome

I'd recommend learning Linux and running it on Apache instead, PHP seems to perform much better there than on IIS

Go virtual and split the print servers between office staff and classrooms, gives you a bit more leeway should something go wonky on one of them as only 50% of the servce will lose printing. Once you're on VM there's no need to shoehorn services onto one machine so keep them as split apart as you want to, makes life easier in the long run provided you're on EES licensing (use Windows Datacenter licensing for your VM host then you get unlimited guest licenses )

If you're virtualised Veeam is awesome

I really liked it as well, some nice back story early on then Transformers style mayhem at the end... I'm easy to please

I've got a mix, Win7 on my work desktop and home gaming PC but Win8 on both my ThinkPads (T430s and x100e). Win8 suits the mobile devices well and I don't mind Metro for casual \ light work, however for heavier daily work with multiple (I mean 20+) windows I'm more productive on Win7 as too many of the power user UI elements are either missing or take an extra keystroke or two to access which I find slows me down when multiplied together. All comes down to the appropriate use argument that comes up time and again with technology, trying to force one size fits all inevitably ends up fitting none of them (imo)

Never used Build and Capture on my SCCM server as I like to do additional customisations on the base image before capturing it - Task Sequences as mentioned do all the layering you need for adding applications afterwards so you can have the best of both worlds.

Yes when the service is poor and falls over every time a new game / download comes out, when your details get leaked after hacks and so on. Then on top the publishers add their own servers (yes EA I mean you) that are even worse. As someone said above it's not like you even get dedicated servers or anything worthwhile, only the cost.

Think this might be the end for me and consoles now The suits have really taken over this time - MS with mandatory spycam, phone home and 2nd hand restrictions then Sony nearly had it sorted but announce they're going to start charging for the online component... thanks but no thanks. My 360 went back in the box at the start of this year as I'd had enough of paying £35 every couple of months for the "privilege" of Xbox Live, not doing that again. The worrying thing is the next generation of kids growing up with these consoles will see this level of monitoring and control by large companies as perfectly normal

Yup, makes it a lot more enterprise-friendly. Only the Metro app deployment to go on that front now...

Good to see these much needed features finally making it into Windows 8 but also really funny to watch MS furiously backtracking over all the controversial decisions they made that nobbled Win8 in the first place Not sure how much use boot to desktop is on RT, if anything desktop would be better off being invisible on that device. One down in getting Outlook, one to go (domain join)

The next release of Win8 should sort a lot of the issues that tbh should have been ironed out well before it was released. What with the delays on the release of the Surface Pro a few extra months development time may have been better rather than rushing out the OS to try and compete with the forbidden fruit but then making a right mess of it and all the negative feedback that's come as a result. The sad thing is that the OS itself does perform well and it's poorly though through \ stubborn design in some places where they've come unstuck. For example the search, MS were defending splitting it up in the initial release now have backtracked and putting it as a unified search, much easier to just do it first time as everyone wanted If enterprise app distribution isn't sorted on 8.1 MS really do deserve a kicking, not being able to centrally deploy Metro apps to the Start screen (even with MS flagship management tool) is really, really poor at the moment imo.

Looks like the new slide out search panel might solve my app launching woes, maybe the Photoshop was closer to reality than I first thought

Yup, looks like this will do the trick, similar method to installing the XP black third party theme Windows 8 default theme - Fix for dark title bars. by ~maddada1 on deviantART Nope, just something I knocked up in Photoshop a few weeks back to see how it would look, I'm honoured that it looks realistic enough to resemble a real screenshot, MS please feel free to copy and make me a happy user

Glad to see olde custom toolbar trick still lives on Didn't really need Quick Launch in its original incarnation once Vista / 7 did the pinned apps, used the same idea but just had them a bit larger, same as MS had in mind when they pre-pin IE, Explorer and WMP on all Win7 installs by default. Can't imagine 30+ pins on the taskbar the whole time, nurse my eyes they're burning... so many colours, so little space! Btw have you got a quick hack to change the Window title bar text, I like my ones dark grey but MS hard coded the text colour to black which kinda makes it invisible. Seen a few people with some workarounds but they all looked a bit clunky... shame the custom UI colour settings window got killed as that goes back to about Win 3.1 in places, retro ftw I was thinking more like this, make use of the Metro UI... http://gshaw0.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/run-for-windows-8.png