gshaw

I know the feeling, 365 SP feels so overpowering for what it needs to do... all it needs to provide is a simple file upload and management system i.e. drag and drop along with easy links to email etc. What you see out the box is a corporate Sharepoint intranet, the whole thing seems made for the Team Sites than personal storage. It's not a VLE either so seems to sit awkwardly with my other systems. MS imo need to simplify the UI or bring in the Metro look somehow so it matches the consumer services. While they're at it increase the storage limits as well. It seems like there's a move to monetize 365 via the development and storage upgrades needed to get a decent looking end product, could backfire if Google then plays on ease of use and setup...

Just a follow up from my previous post, the pen colour on annotate mode works fin for me. Did have a ropey moment today showing staff the new activity builder when the program slowed right down when trying to open a file then had some gremlins making the activity work

You need to have SMART Ink loading at startup - check your admin deployment settings (if you've used the MST creation tool) I think on ours it does remember the colour of the pen when annotating, will check later on (have you installed SP1?)

Thanks, will give this a shot on one of our busted ones... got nothing to lose! Did you figure this out just by taking the board apart and seeing what you could do with it or is there a website \ YouTube vid somewhere you followed?

Now our wireless laptops are being used in anger and I've had a chance to hammer the APs a bit I've noticed every now and again some of them won't log in first time. Out of a batch of 15 all booted up at once it's usually 2-3 of them, get the standard "logged you in with a mandatory profile error" and I can notice the wireless LED on login not flashing in the same way it does when the logon process works correctly. Also as I've got verbose messages on I can tell machine policy isn't applied. If I reboot the login works fine. APs are Ruckus 7363 dual radio, laptops are getting on a bit (Stone MR052s) so only b/g wireless chips (Intel) I'm wondering if it's just a mix of wireless in Windows generally being a bit shaky, older wireless chips and the profiles doing it and it's just something to live with or if there's any further tweaks I can do (I remember something about service dependency from a few years back but think that was for XP and 7 was meant to behave itself better?)

Chrome for us as well, works much better with Moodle than IE and generally quicker. Would set it as the default browser but we need IE for certain online IT exams so it gets a stay of execution... for now. Also watch out for the DNS pre-caching feature, tries to be clever but ends up slowing the browser right down (takes ages to do the lookup for page loads etc)

Doesn't matter as I have the equaliser off and it uses the dock connector for direct data link. None of my stuff is originally from CD anyway so not losing out there although granted the top end audio guys do say CD is the only way for perfect quality.

I wouldn't have an iPhone as my main phone if you paid me but I have found a use for one in the car. I bought a 3G on the cheap a few years back and after much jailbreaking and UI tweaking have it running TomTom whilst hooked up to an Alpine iDA-X305S HU... gives me the holy grail of TomTom through all 4 speakers but only cuts in occasionally for directions whilst I have control of MP3s via the iPhone control on the HU. Audio quality is top notch being Alpine and satnav is top notch with TomTom. I can't find any other solution on the market that combines the best of both worlds (normal satnavs aren't much use for me as I like amped speakers these days and I usually can't hear a portable TomTom over the music )

Yup, a couple of things to watch out for... 1) read the documentation very closely, things go wonky if you don't have the Office Visual Studio components installed 2) there's bugs in the initial release of SMART Ink that you must install SP1 for 3) you need to run Office once as administrator to allow the add-in to install Also make sure when installing SMART Notebook that the Tablet PC components get installed otherwise Ink doesn't work right either, this is particularly important when doing an admin install with MSTs. Get that lot right and 11 does have some nice new features and Ink is OK. Load times are poor but acceptable on our newer i3 boxes so I'll persevere with the new version (too late to go back now anyway!)

Yup I've had a few manufacturers offering me those, politely declined every time... Intel or Crucial that's all I'll accept in my builds

Thanks for that @timbo343, when you say the 4 have been repaired is that something extra apart from relaying the board? If so who did the repair, was it Steljes? Sounds like your boards are initial batches as well, SMART clearly had some quality control issues on those boards but wouldn't admit it which was very disappointing imo.

Quick qu with WOL... if you turn off the plug socket then back on can the PC still be woken via the magic packet? It's always failed for me in this situation and have a feeling I read somewhere that power needs to stay on after the shutdown although might be wrong? People do have a habit of unplugging things, especially in classrooms.

Give me the SSDs... I'll find a home for them Failing that maybe try and somehow sell the SSDs then use the money back for HDDs. The servers would make good VM hosts but the SSDs would be wasted without VDI to hammer them.

MagicInfo is a pain to get your head around but does the trick once you figure it out, makes life easy to have it all built into the screen as well

200 plugins sounds like... a lot What are some of the plugin names? Will help to know if they're standard ones available from the community or custom code hacks that will need specific support from whoever wrote them

SCCM usually but depends on the software and whether it's a clean install or upgrade. One thing SCCM does really badly is preventing users from opening programs that are being upgraded, got caught by this when trying to move from Office 2007 to 2010 as users were shutting machines down half way through the upgrade! Not sure if it's been fixed in 2012 but SCCM really needs two key features for software deployment... a) better notification messages that can be customised per advertisement with instructions for users e.g. "don't touch anything!" b) a way to lock the workstation while critical software deployments are in progress so the user can't abort the installation by shutting down the PC If anyone has solved either of the above I'd be interested to know how

@timbo343 can you do me a favour and check the serial number on one of the boards that you've fixed with this method? If it doesn't have R2 in the number you might have just found the fix I've been looking for to sort out a batch of duff boards we've got that are basically scrap as the whole right side of the board is all over the place. Never heard of the 80 point orient either, need to check that one out, thanks for the info! In comparison our 580s which must be about 8 years old now work fine but it's the early 680s that are the problem, the issue was fixed in the R2 boards but ours were out of warranty before we found the issue

Just set up a new demo account for 365 on Plan A3 and from initial setup my first thoughts \ questions... as a user from the welcome screen what's the quickest way to access "My Site" aka cloud based My Documents storage? can the start screen be customised? Oddly on a generic plan P1 demo I set up it had the Word, Excel etc icons on the front screen but this one looks different and only has a link to the Team Site (which has some weird access denied error at the moment) when accessing from home can the login page https://portal.microsoftonline.com be co-branded? if using ADFS how does the login process look from a user's home machine? I managed to eventually get the My Files area open in Windows Explorer (you need https://*.sharepointonline.com in your Local Intranet zone or it fails when clicking from the interface)... with a bit of clever coding I reckon this could be worked into a Moodle plugin but needs someone with more coding know-how than me Impressions of 365 are that it's a much bigger product than Live@Edu but I think usability suffers for it, seems a bit like overkill in places when compared to the rapidly maturing SkyDrive platform (although I understand the reasons behind the change to a more managed system)

Realtek NICs are a pain, I'd say chuck an Intel Pro\1000 PCI card in there and be done with it

Does that happen on a domain though? Did it on first setup on a local install but not had it on a network yet. Was using IE Metro the other day, found the on screen keyboard easy to use so that side of things working well.

I use a utility called SetRes with a VBScript that also sets the resolution for certain custom locations that have widescreens etc

Have had similar frustrations when speccing up machines here as even the smaller OEM builders were charging a premium for the SSD drives compared to what I can buy them for on eBuyer or any other consumer site for £10-20 \ unit less. We put Crucial M4 SSDs into some of our older laptops as the HDDs were painfully slow. Even on IDE mode it still knocks a minute and bit off the boot \ logon times and makes them lightning fast opening programs.

Synchronous policy processing GPO?

5406zl for us, lovely bit of kit

I know that feeling! Was rather pleased with ours as it ran through SCCM and set up the machines to either Smartboard or workstation spec then sat there ready to go with no manual input required