gshaw

That just proves what I'd always suspected, I don't use Windows like the rest of the world My Start Menu has 7-8 pinned items at the top and I use the jump lists to access recent documents. The amount of time to get there compared to the bottom of the list is negligible compared to the time saved opening Word then loading from the Recent list \ Open box. Personally I hate taskbar pinning as it makes it look cluttered and makes it harder to see what's running and what isn't at a quick glance. Probably part of the reason I find the new Start Screen feels less productive for doing any real work (as opposed to one click app launches)

I've got some pics of the Office 365 UI on my blog, it's a cross between the Outlook.com style and OWA. Personally I think the Windows 8 Mail app should've used the Outlook.com style as it's much easier on the eye

HP for me, Dell's business and support processes lose them more custom than any other major manufacturer I reckon. Procurve network kit is solid and servers also been good for me with the exception of our DL180. That thing has shocking firmware that runs fans at full pelt (10000rpm!) as soon as you install an expansion card, despite having temperature sensors all round the motherboard. Only got it as I needed a server with plenty of drive bays but it's clear the quality of management features drops very sharply on the lower end servers i.e. anything below the 380 series. Dell desktops made me laugh a few years back, sent the same spec to 3 or 4 suppliers (Stone, HP etc) and whereas most came out around the £400 mark for a base unit Dell were giving £750 as their base price, regardless of what channel you get the kit from it the price shouldn't vary by £300!

This ^^^ Ours aren't routed at the moment so the BYOD VLAN is isolated but as soon as routing is on without ACLs everything might as well be on the same network

Inkjet ouch, do you need colour in the classrooms? Agree with the above and get some cheapy \ refurb LaserJets and compatible toners from somewhere like Laserlife - More than, printer repairs Cheap to run and will do the trick. MFPs are the way to go for ultimate efficiency but depends if you can have students leaving the room to collect print-outs

Very good point, my Win8 laptop is exactly the same, the Metro (TIFKAM ) apps are still really poor imo. Slightly bemused that MS didn't build Office 2013 to be more Start Screen friendly considering the Windows 8 \ tiles look has been in their mindset for quite a while now. It's not as if Office 2013 is a radical departure from 2010 either, which seems to suggest development silos within the company not all pulling in the same direction... not good... I think the sensible route seems to be a Win 7 \ Win 8 mix at the moment... 7 for the desktops where we all know where the little niggles are and how to sort them then 8 for tablets where the use of touch can be harnessed. By the time users are asking for 8 on the desktops it should have a Service Pack \ update bundle behind it and hopefully MS will sort out some of the glaring errors they've made around Enterprise management and deployment (yes Metro apps I mean you!)

Stone or Lenovo here. Haven't had any major problems with either, just the odd HDD here and there. Lenovo is more of an enterprise product than Stone but you have to work harder to get good pricing on them (I find Lenovo are hopeless if left to their own devices but if you have an account manager from a big reseller like Misco on their case you're sorted). Also goes without saying to avoid the Edge series desktops as they're inferior quality to the M series machines (crap Realtek NIC etc) Also another +1 for ICT Direct, got some M58p machines in over summer and they're fine Personally wouldn't go near Dell, awful service and pricing. Hated their kit for years since the first machines I encountered with all the proprietary parts.

Mentioned in this thread http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/97506-analysis-logon-times-how-speed-up.html and confirmed via this link https://wss.psu.edu/CLM/Lists/Windows%207%20Issues/DispForm.aspx?ID=121 I wouldn't mess with anything related to Libraries, the WinMail key is the one that causes the slowdown so killing that should speed things up at logon That registry key stops it re-generating on each logon, to shrink the profile you'll need to remove the matching files from the profile, will be around 14MB on a freshly captured profile

Run Windirstat on a copy of the profile folder and you'll soon see where the fat can be trimmed from. Kill the WinMail folder and set the reg key mentioned on here to stop it regenerating at each login. Office templates and similar files are usually common culprits, they rebuild when the apps launch so no need to download it in the profile.

One thing with the Metro tiles is that they're incredibly irritating to line up and re-arrange. MS seem to have a set layout where tiles want to go and they often take a life of their own when moving around. The fact pinning is still reliant on community-space script bodges rather than being a standard GPO option on the (supposedly) Enterprise versions is poor form imo. The excuse of "yeah but the user can customise it themselves" is rather lame, I'd imagine many businesses don't want 500+ different combinations on their managed desktops and would prefer to have some degree of control over it (otherwise you might as well use Macs ) Whether the UI is bad or not isn't the only issue with Windows 8, it's the lack of care and attention to detail around management and deployment where a lot of the criticism seems to be coming from. MS make a lot of money from this market and it's not going to disappear overnight so neglecting it seems somewhat silly?

Thought with 7 the GPOs have no effect on the Offline Files service? It seems to be more of a hindrance than a help from the amount of threads I see caused by Offline Files, does anyone have a setup they're actually happy with that has it enabled?

Love the design of that, none of this minimalist stuff give me buttons, sliders and squared off corners any day

Assuming all the machines are on (WoL only helps if the plugs don't get turned off as well lol) Just seems like a realy kludge to something that should be a simple process

@techie08 Do you provide a full Windows Desktop as part of the apps that appear in the RD Web Access list? That refused to SSO and MS were saying a hotfix was required to enable it (whether that's since been included in Windows Updates I'm not sure?) Apps I got working with no problems once you sort the certificates (set in about 3-4 different places in the GUI) This guide is useful http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2011/03/08/easy-guide-for-using-certificates-with-websso.aspx Also is there any way around the stupid security warnings that pop up all the time (not certificate ones). Again the MS reply was "manage the clients via GPO and add the thumbprint of the certificate"... ummm they're home users on their own machines not domain clients Microsoft

This is the biggest weakness of SCCM and I'm amazed MS didn't sort it in the 2012 release. If old-school GPO deployment can install applications at boot why can't their flagship management product?! Had some problems with doing an Office 2007 > 2010 upgrade because of this... disabled every user control and left the status bar showing but people still shut down their machines while the installation was in progress! Would be easy to blame the users for this but (imo) an enterprise-level software deployment tool should at the very least lock the workstation or deploy at boot time before the user sees the logon screen.

Palo = awesome App-level firewall that will stop P2P and multimedia hogging your network. Filtering has been OK for us so far but we're quite light users on that front. Spam filtering doesn't bother me, use a cloud service and save your bandwidth (note Microsoft give Forefront Online free with EES) Smoothwall as far as I understand is a very good content filter but can't do the application level stuff. In an ideal world you have both but I'd say get a Palo in on demo to analyse your network traffic then depending on what you find you'll know if you need the app-level control.

Funny enough I was just re-looking at this while documenting our Exchange server where I force Outlook to be set to online mode (cached disabled). Saw some documents saying Cached is recommended so was beginning to wonder if I made the right choice... seen a few posts like this since and remembered why I was so adamant in turning it off in the first place!

Clever site but can't tell for me as my numbers change depending on what date / time it is when doing the ticket

I use 2010 on our Veeam server, have you got access to previous versions?

That's all it comes down to at the end of the day sadly. If MS wanted to take the market they'd make a mid range tablet, size and battery life of the RT and pitch it as a device to edit \ create your Office docs on and price it about £50-100 under the iPad... market won As it stands it's the IT equivalent of the trophy wife... you get it because you can not because it's the best overall package

Call me cynical but the first thought I had when reading this was that it's a clever way to charge for service packs...

Very very clever design, nice work

I use bginfo to paint the user login details on the desktop but the other info is useful as an extra layer of protection against the dreaded local user folder (great piece of design for business users there MS!)

I know the one you mean, hide it in two places: - remove user folder link from Start Menu GPO (takes the name out the Start Menu) - hide user folder on desktop GPO via GPP registry keys e.g. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-7/60579-user-folder-icon-desktop.html That way your Start Menu only shows the Documents, Pictures etc links and never takes you to the local profile folder

Ours generally work OK on Windows 7 x86 running the latest v11 drivers and software although one board does do the disconnect thing you mention above (think it's the board rather than the drivers though as it did it on XP as well)