gshaw

I put the Royale Remixed black theme on any PCs I re-install for people, so much better than the blue As far as goes the Winkey+W combo I just checked in 7 to see if I was imagining things but I was remembering right... using the current Start Menu search I can find files, programs or control panel items all within the same pane... why then in 8 does MS feel the need to split them out? Seems like much of the UI is putting extra barriers in the way of common tasks. I'd love to know if the same team from Windows 7 is doing the UI in 8... feels like a completely different design philosophy and in the process undoing much of the good work done recently.

That's the thing with Metro, it's so high contrast and in-your-face I find it painful to look at. At night the full white screens are awful! With Aero the gradients were as subtle as you want them to be or you can turn it off and use classic window colours. With Win8 it has a lowest common denominator feel to it... something along the lines of "if tablets and phones can't run it we'll restrict desktops to the same" The whole MS gamble is on the user wanting the same OS and look on tablet and PC. It's either going to be genius forward thinking or a huge fail. A lot of which depends on tjr hardware and price point of said hardware... will take a lot to make the sheep move from their iOS devices...

Pretty sure there's meant to be one more before full release, either called Beta or Release Preview and out sometime in June, according to Mr. Google You'd expect it to be able to do basic functions even in a Beta Didn't work like that at all, shut down about 5 times, no effect then randomly does it while I'm working. As for removing the basic control from the front of house it's another irritating "feature" dumbing down the OS for the Apple crowd. If I wanted a dumbed down OS designed for noob users I'd get an iPad / Mac! Very intuitive... Still can't find one thing this OS does better on a desktop than what we already have, you seem to be a big Windows 8 fan so maybe you can find me some lol?

On the interfaces... Android all the way. I can't stand the Metro (Windows 1.0 look), it hurts my eyes with too much contrast and lack of detail in the icons. Everything is square and blocky, at a quick glance all the icons look the same and you have to squint to see what silly little white swish is in the boxes to figure out what they are... meh Actually came on here to put another experience of Windows 8... - tried to install a printer the other day... redesigned UI box seems pointless but it never actually installed anything... stuck at 99% and never completed... back to my Win7 desktop to actually get anything useful done - little box comes up in the corner of the logon screen for updates... OK I'll try clicking it... nothing... OK I'll open Windows Update via Metro search... can't do that... where is Windows Update FFS... oh... hidden in the corner of the Desktop Control Panel... really user friendly... not Why can't you search for Control Panel settings from the Start Screen? If MS is going to force this abortion of a UI on us the least it could do is provide quick access to all the machine's programs and settings This guy talks a lot of sense... XP was my idea: Features removed in Windows 8 The Beta really better up its game as at the moment this OS is a mess imo

Storage space isn't cheap at the moment... certainly not at the levels it was say 12 months ago

We bought E6600s 5 years ago so amazed it's still available. Go for i3 + SSD if you can get it

For heatsink also consider the Be Quiet Dark Rock Advanced or Xigmatek Aegir. Personally I'd go for the Xigmatek, really impressed with mine and installation was a doddle, some of the aftermarket coolers have nightmare fiddly clip mechanisms when installing!

- quality case with good cable routing and airflow - quality branded PSU... can't go wrong with Corsair - branded memory Corsair etc - 560Ti or newer, preferably a factory overclocked edition - i5 2500k with aftermarket cooler - Intel or Crucial M4 SSD - Samsung HDD - any motherboard except ASUS I like the MSI I have in mine, solid and good value. Get a copy of Custom PC mag as their hot lists are pretty much on the money imo.

From how I understand it you buy a System Center License that covers all the product then the quantity you buy is dependant on how many products you run e.g. DPM + SCCM = 2 licenses. Also buy Datacenter Edition, that way you don't have to worry about how many servers (OSE's) you manage with the products... Standard edition has a limit on this.

Used to use them a lot for logon \ startup scripts to merge registry entries, check for \ create files etc. GPP has put paid to a lot of that. Used to use batch for updating our awkward MIS clients but changed over to VBS for that recently as I wanted more variables and clever queries so won't be going back One thing I do still use .BAT for is msiexec commands involving transforms and suchlike. Why worry about typing out a long command when a quick double-click can do it for you

Hyper-V or VMware? We run our ESXi hosts on SD cards as the config is so minimal there's no point spending money and power on hard drives. Can't do a sub 50MB install with Hyper-V (yet) though

Yup used to do all of that, setting the start of material (zero axis iirc?) where you had to have the drill bit *just* touching the surface of the material in 0.1mm steps, choosing correct speeds so the material \ drill bit didn't shatter and so on. Had hours of fun milling aluminium for injection moulding n 6th form where I had to keep squirting the drill bit with white spirit to stop it melting into a gloopy mess during the mill Thinking about it the machines weren't even 233Mhz, they were old Apricot PCs either 120Mhz or 133Mhz but never had a problem with the milling itself. Granted I wouldn't run any other program while it was going but I'd still do the same today even if an i7 was running it as it was more of a distrust of Windows \ other app not crashing than the speed of the box doing the milling.

i3 + SSD unless you need the Quad for something specific (video encoding, high end graphics etc)

More RAM for your vhosts PDUs coming off the UPS Environmental monitoring unit Colour coded cables at the correct length Dymo labeller Cable labels, either those little tag ones or sharpmark wrap around type http://www.sharpmark.com/Cable-labels Double sided velcro for tying up cables 1U Cable management arms

Stone's AV installers are good - just make sure you get their in-house team not contractors (only applies at busy times i.e. summer)

I used to run Denford CNC machines on a 233MHz Pentium with 64MB RAM so the software must've gone horribly wrong somewhere in the last few years for it not to work on a newish machine with Dual Core CPU

The problem I'm finding with SSD drives is PC manufacturers (or their suppliers) Crucial M4 64GB... about £50 on any website e.g. Scan / eBuyer Crucial M4 64GB instead of HDD in a new PC... £75 That's from a well known UK custom build manufacturer, apparently due to supply chain costs. Put that extra over an average order of 50 machines that's more than £1000 extra for no good reason. Can't buy the units with no HDD as installing our own invalidates the warranty... at this point trying to make a case for the upgrade becomes a lot more difficult. As for Dell / HP / Lenovo I dread to wonder the premium they'll add on. Question is why? On a technical level unless you need the local storage space SSDs are the clear choice for desktops but something is keeping HDDs in until the bitter end.

The VNXe is easy to manage but you sacrifice some control as a result (fixed RAID groups etc) On price all depends on what offers are on at the time and your negotiating skills

Windows 7, single image, driver packs... happy techie I'm making this year's image on a VMware virtual machine and once SCCM has done its thing on the capture phase I revert the snapshot I took before starting so I've got the clean image back so I can play with it as and when I need to. Also makes life easy when updating the Windows 7 mandatory profile as that needs a sysprep each time as well.

There's a couple of scripts for controlling pinned items on the Start Menu, also there's a GPO to clear the recent programs list for new users which will give what you want. On the 7 Start Menu it's not so much what's in the Start Menu folder rather the Pinned Items that users see. More info on my blog post... How to… get a perfect Windows 7 managed Start Menu and Taskbar « gshaw0

Out of interest what settings are you using for the Program (user logged on \ not logged on etc)

The only pain with SCCM is that you can't make the advertisement run before the user logs on i.e. like GPO software deployment. Problem then becomes... a) our machines don't sit at a login screen long enough to deploy "when no user is logged on" b) once a user is logged on they might be using Office when the advertisement is about to start In the case of b) the upgrade seems to work OK even if a 2007 program is open (although if the user tries to save the document after a certain point it crashes). SCCM doesn't let you do custom message boxes either so not helpful there either. I did find a little notifier utility from Coretech but it's all hassle that should be built into the product. Don't think 2012 is any better in that respect as far as I know?

Do you want the users to have customised Start Menus? If not then just redirect Start Menus to a read-only location, job done

Just testing our new Ruckus kit and looking to set up a laptop wi-fi GPO... soon realised Microsoft don't want you to use WPA2-PSK Don't like the idea of having the keys stored in logon scripts so it's looking like RADIUS. I prefer not to put it on a DC and luckily enough have a fresh 2008 R2 VM I'd created to migrate DHCP onto so thinking of using that. Was going to put the following roles on it... - DHCP - RADIUS - Certificate Authority Any particular gotchas about putting these on the same VM?

Another +1 for HP, we have a 5406zl at the core and 2600s on the edge... solid, easy to manage and lots of deals on educational pricing (not sure if they still do trade in as well as that can get you a nice sum back on a larger order)