gshaw

@OhDear if I didn't know better I'd suggest there's a healthy dose of sarcasm there having read the VM forums regarding the Superhub The wireless issue is all down to location, hence the thought if the modem can't be moved the antenna can be and to do that I split the AP from the router. The reason I thought of Unifi is partly because of the design, the little white disc won't look too intrusive in the hallway. The Unifi / Ruckus idea is partly because I don't trust the quality of a lot of consumer kit these days but willing to be proved wrong! I can get a cable from the router to where I want the AP pretty easily so no worries there.

I'm having to go the other way, no-one on Xbox so will need to buy a PS3 to actually play anyone I know

Needs to be a good £100 cheaper than the iPad to make the headlines, would love something like £299 to really get people onboard but would expect about £349 once UK rip-off charges get added as is usual with tech over here

Something along the lines of - no technical support given - no warranty - no software supplied apart from the OEM Windows license attached to the unit - new school is responsible for PAT testing them before use From your side... - have they been removed from your inventory list and does anyone from your finance team need to approve this? - have the drives been wiped with a disk erase tool? All there to make sure you're covered and the old machines don't come back to bite you

What we really need is a new developer for the shutdownertron project, that was an awesome bit of software for XP but seems like development for W7 has died

Installed this on my Windows 8 laptop the other day to get Office 2013, looks more like the Outlook.com redesign which is cool, although not sure if it's just my demo account but I don't have any services apart from email on there at the moment. Edit: makes sense now, 365 ProPlus is just the local office and you need to be in the 365 Enterprise demo to get everything... For anyone who doesn't fancy setting up a demo account just done a quick blog post on the 365 Preview, I'm impressed http://gshaw0.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/office-365-enterprise-preview-hands-on/

All this need for Start Menu shells could be avoided if Microsoft would give us a sliding search panel when on in Desktop mode. Something like Winkey+S (aka search \ start) and you get the same kind of panel you do with Winkey+I Would mean they could keep the Metro look but not force users away from their work to use the Start screen, which I still find distracting when in the middle of something in desktop mode. Another alternative would be to enhance the run box with predictive search so Winkey+R becomes the quick way to launch apps in desktop mode.

Aren't the HP Enterprise drives apparently really slow for the price as well, sure I heard that somewhere recently DFS is one of those technologies that sounds wonderful but when I read threads where it's clogged up with a 20GB backlog it doesn't inspire confidence, maybe that's just the unlucky ones?

Would much prefer that although running cables from upstairs to downstairs is something I have no idea how to do from a DIY perspective

I'm still a bit confused about the Sharepoint My Site for students (effectively replacing SkyDrive Office Web Apps, which were really easy to use) as every time I've trialled 365 I can never find an easy way to get there from the welcome screen. It seems to be obsessed with Team Sites (which I'm not bothered by right now) but doesn't focus on the user's personal space (which they definitely need!) Have I missed something really obvious? Edit: OK I've found the link https://yourdomain-my.sharepoint.com/ but why isn't this on the front page when you login and can I add the link?

Does the user have a roaming profile? If so might be worth resetting it...

Personally I'd only use enterprise grade kit for enterprise applications but maybe I'm just cautious. I remember seeing an EMC presentation where they compared standard SSDs to storage-grade ones and they were showing how consumer drives wear out much quicker in high read\write environments (although you'd expect them to say that!). Think it was to do with consumer drives writing in two directions and enterprise only uses one to save wear on the flash (although memory is very hazy on this) No RAID on a file server seems very risky, although you can restore from backup would your users tolerate the downtime of losing a 600GB file server VM because one of the drives failed and then takes however long to bring it back up? Seems like you're sacrificing one of your layers of data protection for speed, is it worth the gamble? Saying that if this is a physical machine it'll take even longer to restore so it's an even bigger gamble.

Need some ideas to sort out my pitiful home wireless Back when I first had cable installed I was the only person using Internet so had the coax installed into the top front room where I use my PC. Internet is via a bog standard Netgear router, thinking about it the box is getting on a bit now as it's not 802.11n compatible. Trouble is we now need iPad, digital box and a couple of laptops connecting to streaming media and it's tragic tbh; wireless on 1-2 bars and cutting out constantly. Moving the Virgin cable isn't really an option so need to box clever with what I have already. First thoughts... - find a router that allows me to plug in an external aerial and mount that in the middle of the hall so signal starts from the middle of the house rather than in one corner - replace the wireless functions of the router with a separate AP using PoE... maybe a Unifi would do the trick perfectly for this? - move the router (although this is messy with all the cabling extensions) Hadn't thought about a Unifi AP until now, was actually wondering if Ruckus do home kit but either way that should do the trick?

Interesting, not seen anyone going for SSDs in a file server before. How much are the SSDs, I take it they're the server grade ones not desktop drives?

You think that's OCD... when you have a list of 20 or so products you have to apply to the car for it to have a "proper" clean you know you've got the bug! Polishing takes me about 3 hours as I have to go over the car 3 times to apply polish, sealant and wax and that's just the paintwork Then you can get one of these... http://i1124.photobucket.com/albums/l574/D4NNYT/My%20Cars/IMG_0145.jpg

If only this were as simple as classroom machines Basically what I want to have is a generic Start Menu that we issue to all admin staff users but that can also be added to as some teams need to install additional software etc. Thought about a couple of scenarios... folder redirection to central Start Menu personal redirected Start Menu (same as Documents etc) no redirection at all? Option 1 means I'll have to update the central one each time someone needs a new piece of software, not fun Option 2 is what I'm trying now but thinking about it most software installs shortcuts into C:\ProgramData so what value does the redirection actually have? Option 3 I'm not sure what it will actually do with a new user account, blank Start Menu but just in the local profile folder rather than the network? I think all I want is the Start Menu to show ProgramData shortcuts plus any personal ones. That should be Option 1 but at the moment I'm getting a blank Start Menu even if I disable the "hide common program groups" option, which I'm finding a bit odd?

Couldn't you write a logoff script that copies the bookmarks from the local user profile to a location on the network then copies them back at next logon? OK it's not an ideal solution but it would work and allows you to get rid of IE as the default browser

This is where I'm getting confused with the branding of 365... the beta I'm trying out suggests it includes... - Office 2013 for desktop (I guess that's the ProPlus bit) - 365 in the cloud (email and I guess SkyDrive pro?) Then there's the current Office 365 for Education I've tried a demo of but not had much joy getting an environment that gives me the personal file storage element, which is the part I'm most interested in from a student perspective.

Has anyone tried this? I was looking for Office 2013 on TechNet the other day but the link goes to Office 365 ProPlus. I assume that means Office 2013 and 365 are being branded under the same umbrella? Got signed up and have an Office 365 login page and local software downloaded but it doesn't seem to have any Sharepoint \ SkyDrive Pro functionality or basically anything more than email. This version of 365 looks newer than the others I've seen (has the same interface as the new Hotmail with the blue bar across the top etc) so must be a beta of the next generation 365?

I need to remove the public locations from Libraries for our staff accounts, done this easily on our classroom machines as the Documents folder points to the same location for everyone but does anyone know how it behaves for users with their own folders? E.g. does the library for Documents actually know to change the location for each user name or is it hard coded? If it's hard coded is there any way to get %username% in there so I can have a generic library file that gets injected into our users' roaming profiles that only has the network location listed (no C: drive locations at all)

I think BYOD depends on which "flavour" of it you go for, I see two main camps... 1) provide a standard desktop on someone else's device, pretty much a VDI project 2) turn everything web-based e.g. VLE, Google Apps \ Office 365 etc I'm more in the 2nd one than the first at present as VDI is so pricey to implement, as it stands I've got the usual guest Wi-Fi VLAN and Palo Alto to keep P2P etc in check. Ruckus does client isolation so one BYOD laptop cna't talk to another within the same network.

No trouble with CS4 and 2GB RAM here on Core2Duo E8400s. CPU and RAM are fine for pretty much any Core2Duo system, it's the HDDs that bog things down...

I'm having one of those paranoid moments so just want to double-check this I'm making new GPOs for our Windows 7 office machines, want to start afresh with clean folders for all users. I've got new folder redirection paths and set the old home area as an archive drive letter so users can access their old files. Under Settings of the GPO the Move the contents of *folder* to the new location is usually ticked but I've been disabling it as there's nothing local I want copied to the new network folders. Didn't really think much of it when creating the policy but for some reason I'm doing a double-take on it now...

Did you make your mandatory profile via the supported sysprep method? It's not as painful as it first sounds when you read it and does work at the end. And yes definitely kill WinMail, made a big difference for us as well.

I've set up dynamically created redirected folders with the usual permissions from How to dynamically create security-enhanced redirected folders by using folder redirection in Windows 2000 and in Windows Server 2003 to use with our staff desktops with the permissions below... CREATOR OWNER - Full Control (Apply onto: Subfolders and Files Only) System - Full Control (Apply onto: This Folder, Subfolders and Files) Domain Admins - Full Control (Apply onto: This Folder, Subfolders and Files) Everyone - Create Folder/Append Data (Apply onto: This Folder Only) Everyone - List Folder/Read Data (Apply onto: This Folder Only) Everyone - Read Attributes (Apply onto: This Folder Only) Everyone - Traverse Folder/Execute File (Apply onto: This Folder Only) Redirection is set to create new folders under the root e.g. \\server\user$\username\Documents (and so on for Pictures, Movies etc). I prefer this way as it's neater and avoids the whole desktop.ini issue. The redirection and roaming profiles are working fine so I should be happy, right? As usual I had a further check to make sure all the permissions were correct but found something a bit odd that seems to appear on Folder Redirection and Rights Bug Server 2008 R2 as well... If I look at a folder within Documents and check the permissions I see the user's name with a Full Control permission but Apply To "This folder only" then CREATOR OWNER underneath with Full Control to Subfolders and Files only. Not sure where it's getting the "this folder only" Full Control from? Would think it should be the user's name with Full Control to subfolders and files? If I look at a file within any of the folders there's no CREATOR OWNER permission mentioned at all, just the user with Full Control (what I would've expected). The permissions are being inherited from the Root folder and the other ones set there look normal (SYSTEM, Administrators, Domain Admins) As per the Technet thread if I look in my Roaming Profile folders (set up with exactly the same root folder permissions) there's no mention of CREATOR OWNER, just the user with Full Control. Is it something weird folder redirection does and seeing as everything is working OK nothing to worry about? Users will be copying files from their old home areas to the new one so need to make sure the files will work when they get copied.