gshaw

This is who I did mine with... FGI Training & Consultancy - ITIL Foundation Very good trainer and course content

Went 32-bit this summer to make sure everything ran OK, x64 next summer now the Windows 7 setup is running nicely

It's also a bit of a risky one for motherboard manufacturers as they'll have to get their stocks of CPUs exactly right or face being stuck with a bunch of boards no-one wants when new CPUs come out. Might also suggest a slower rate of change in terms of new tech as the CPU now becomes an integral part of the overall product rather than just another piece of the jigsaw. It's another part of the move to throwaway computing, something I don't like from a tech geek perspective but seems to be the way consumers go now (no doubt the only people to really benefit will be the large companies selling this locked down kit as usual).

I've used the GPP method as well, best way to remove the Public locations. With the Documents Library is it intelligent enough to know to redirect to any user's redirected folder if you customise it or does it try to redirect to the folder of the user you were editing the library file with?

Never mind Steam sale, got Battlefield 3 Premium half price from Origin on Friday... the Armored Kill maps are immense

I did mine via a training course, when it comes to this kind of topic it's better to have it put in context by an experienced trainer imo.

Depending on what OS is installed on the old physical servers the virtualization could be a good time to start with a clean slate and new OS. We did P2V on some of the more awkward servers but migrated the rest to 2008 R2 with clean VMs

The current Office 365 interface is awful for personal document storage imo, the new version that's in preview at the moment is 10x better. Personal Sharepoint = SkyDrive Pro in the new release and that syncs to your PC as you want. It's all bundled around Office 2013 and should work really well, check out my blog as I've got a post about the Preview release that might help

Fair do's, interesting to hear from someone who has the VMware \ DPM combo in practice as at the time I found people tended to go either Hyper-V \ DPM or VMware \ Veeam. You can exclude disks from Veeam, I do it with my WSUS server store as there's no point backing that up (it's in the advanced options for each VM in the selection list iirc). Exchange restores are better now provided you have 2010 as they've brought out an Exchange Explorer tool but take your point on SQL backups, was one thing I wasn't so keen on compared to other products. Btw does ofc mean what I think it does, hope it's not #3 lol? Urban Dictionary: ofc

Out of interest how do you back up the virtual machines themselves? Last time I looked I thought DPM couldn't do VMWare virtual machines and you had to back up the data via a client installed inside the VM, whereas with Hyper-V (as you'd expect) you could back up the entire VM via the host. What made me go for Veeam was the fact if we lost the machines entirely (e.g. storage failure) you could drop the lot straight back in from a Veeam backup and carry on, whereas if you've only got the data inside the machine it'll be a lot more work to get back to a working state.

Why not run Veeam daily? As it uses VM snapshots the daily backups are very quick then you can archive as often as you need. For paranoia I backup our SQL database via Management Studio before any major upgrades but would avoid running Backup Exec and Veeam together on the same job

That's the way I've always understood it, we say to staff they can either a) bring the machine in and we'll install Office for them b) order the CD and install themselves at their own cost

Are the SQL and File Servers virtual as well? If so just let Veeam do the lot then make a copy of the backup files either to the cloud (a bit pricey), tape (some say unreliable) or another disk (preferably removable so you can keep the copy offline)

What hardware are you trying to image? Could be that WinPE doesn't have the correct Mass Storage driver for the SATA \ AHCI controller on the motherboard.

Been using it for a week and a bit now and I really like it, some of the little touches like the alignment boxes that come up in PowerPoint, Word etc are very useful. Almost getting to the point where the shouty menus don't bother me as much, think I'm beginning to filter them out of my line of vision like adverts in webpages

It's just like Windows Driver signing all over again Am I reading this right, MS are saying that the following scenario isn't actually possible right now? > I want to buy an app for everyone on my network > I want to deploy that app to all my machines > I want that app ready and waiting on the Start Screen for any user that logs on If so that's absolutely crazy...

Another VMware shop here, 3 hosts running the Essentials Plus bundle (make sure you get the academic pricing). Currently on 4.1 but will move to 5.1 once all the early bugs are out the way. Backed up with Veeam (they do matching Essentials Plus bundle for 3 hosts) on a physical HP DL180 server. Currently on Veeam v5 but once the vSphere 5.1 upgrade gets done it'll be moved to the new v6.5 release. I prefer VMware to Hyper-V as there's no underlying OS or drivers to worry about and the whole thing fits on an SD card so no need for HDDs in the hosts either. Set it and forget it then enjoy the flexibility of spinning up VMs as and when you want

Agree with the poor quality of kit from OEMs thus far, there's nothing out there apart from the Surface that looks anywhere near up to the quality of the competition. Lenovo maybe at a push but haven't really seen nor heard much of it. Can understand MS being frustrated there tbh. Pricing is also really bad as it stands, £700-800 for a decent spec tablet running full Win8 is too much and smacks of profiteering imo. As noted in that article the delay in launching the Surface Pro is crazy, as is the two different product lines with different feature sets. - you can have thin & light, good battery life and OK pricing but no good for businesses or - you can have more power and desktop mode, but as a result heavier and a lot more expensive but you can manage it with standard enterprise tools The word or is what's wrong, said it before and I'll say it again, the RT should be as manageable as the Pro just with the caveat of Metro-only apps. Ask business users if they'd take that compromise to replace iPads (bearing in mind Office works on there) and I bet they'd snap MS' hand off. As it stands it's RT seems a bit pointless I wonder if consumers will "get" it and not be frustrated why their existing apps won't work; business won't want it as you can't manage the thing on a domain. Result is everyone sits on the fence and waits 3 months for the Pro and will no doubt be disappointed by the price. I still can't see it only being slightly more expensive than the RT as if price isn't an issue there's no need to release a lower spec device to confuse the product range? If what's said in the article is true about Cloverleaf and Intel are having problems with it MS could be waiting a while longer for affordable Win8 Pro devices to appear on the market (ouch) Very strange product launch and decisions from MS at a time when they really needed to get it right first time and hit the ground running.

Good to see the 7363 at the top of the ratings seeing as I bought 12 of them this summer

How is your 802.1x configured? Do you connect to the wi-fi network based on user or machine?

- It's a lot faster - Drag and drop works in Moodle - It's got the Metro colour scheme and flattened web controls - I kinda like it That's my observations so far, impressed with it tbh and hoping the full release isn't too far away

Cloud backup could be useful but again costs are prohibitive when I say I want to store all my Veeam backups there (what's the point otherwise???)

Core2Duo \ 2GB RAM runs spot on here, slowest is E6600 and fastest E8400. SSDs will make a big difference but I wouldn't worry about a 3yr old CPU provided it's not an old Pentium \ Celeron \ AMD chip. If your machines are pretty standard, either Dell \ HP \ Lenovo or Intel OEM desktop boards drivers won't be an issue either. Intel sometimes make you hunt for them (their support site reckons the DG965MS Stone board has no Windows 7 drivers yet if I download the chipset, VGA and sound drivers manually elsewhere on the site the whole thing runs perfectly!) Try a few out first and see how they perform then make a decision based on if they're still under warranty and cost of upgrade vs replacement

Downloading now and hoping that it finally supports the drag and drop file API that Moodle 2.3 uses, if so it'll be going on our machines when it hits RTM

I guess it's more flexible in the same way that deploying Office 2007 onwards through an EXE and clunky XML file is more efficient than using MSIs