jmak

[emoji1785][emoji2961] My OH shares your view. Fortunately they leave for work an hour before I get up [emoji4]

I had this with a family member's Lenovo Chromebook. MB replaced under warranty. Failed again out of warranty.

Just fixed mine by the same method. Downloaded the Controlvault software from the Dell website and ran it without uninstalling anything. Rebooted and logged in with fingerprint [emoji116] It comes in an msi so I might look at deploying with group policy. We don't run Defender, but it might be antivirus definitions. That's the only thing that changed between when a system was working and when it stopped.

What with a bunch of clients reporting a malware attack that was actually the antivirus not trusting its own updates and Microsoft Defender borking biometric logins, this security stuff can be a bit of a PITA!

There's no such thing as a good price for an emergency fill up. The two options I found were: 1) Buy regularly from a local firm - they'll usually fit you in if you forget to order and need some in a hurry at whatever their going rate is. Anyone else will charge a premium for quick delivery. 2) Plan ahead and buy via Boilerjuice. They have buyer weekend where the more people in a locality order, the lower the price gets, or order weeks in advance and then one of the suppliers will just fit you in next time they're in your area and will therefore charge a lower price. Current prices on Boilerjuice for 1000l for my address: Delivery in two weeks: £600 Delivery on Wednesday: £850 My local company would probably be between 5% and 10% more than the lowest price, but I'd have a good chance of delivery tomorrow at the same price. Other hints: Always fill the tank in July or August - top up the minimum you need ay any other time. I regularly needed more in February and bought enough to see me through to spring and then tired up again to get through to summer when I did the annual fill up. Never buy just before Christmas - there's always a mad panic and a price peak. Keep an eye out for political unrest in oil producing regions - if you wake up and someone's invaded Iran, order some oil before the markets wake up.

Mine is a Broadcom device. Driver is running fine - I've tried reinstalling the driver and it made no difference.

Just worked it out [emoji2357] My house and pretty much every house built into the early 20th century originally had a fireplace in every habitable room. Mostly the chimneys are still in place, even when the fireplace is looking gone. Perfect for repurposing to bring heated/cooled air in to the rooms from a distribution point in the loft.

I know you were asking @Dos_Box but my machine is 3 years old, we have it on 5440s (one year old) and a 7450 (three months old). Mine has worked since new, was in sleep mode this morning and worked until GPUpdate ran.

Moving on from my recommendation for an ASHP [emoji16] I would recommend a system boiler rather than a combi. You'll have more options and be able to get better hot water flow as per previous answers. It also gives you an emergency backup option as you can fit an electric immersion heater in the hot water tank - if you end up with a cheap overnight electricity rate it can even be relatively inexpensive water heating and if you run out of oil(!), you'll at least be able to have a warm shower. I'd also get rid of those storage tanks in the loft. You'll at least want to replace them - even if they have a secure lid on now, you've no idea what might have crawled in and died in the past. I also don't like the idea of drinking (brushing teeth counts for me) water that's been stored for an unknown period of time. If you want more than mains pressure for your shower, let your plumber know - it's a different design. Check the state of your oil tank - ours was leaking when we moved in and we had to replace it. Before you do that, check the rules on where you're allowed to put it - restrictions on minimum distance from house, boundary, windows, plants, fence... Install a remote monitoring tool for your tank so that you don't run out. Learn to bleed the oil line so that when you've ignored the warning you about your oil running low you don't need to call someone out to help.

Office Open XML format is correct - .docx etc I haven't had any issues with that not applying though.

Nowt. No security events as the finger isn't detected. No firmware changes. Fingerprint reader is on in bios. We've tried uninstalling and reinstalling the driver. It looks like something interacting with a group policy as it stopped working when gpupdate ran this morning - but the group policy hasn't changed. We can login with PIN, so Windows Hello is enabled and working. It offers fingerprint as a login option, but didn't detect the finger at all, so no error to log. If it didn't recognize the fingerprint, it would revert to PIN login - that's not happening.

Weird one: we run a fleet of several hundred Dell Latitudes and the fingerprint readers have stopped working this morning. It looks like it doesn't detect the presence of the finger at all. People who hadn't turned their PC off last night could use it when they first switched on. It looks like GP update could be involved - although we've made no changes to the policy overnight. When GP update runs, it stops working. We do have a policy to explicitly enable Windows Hello, including "Allow users to log on using biometrics". This is happening on devices which have had no OS, software or firmware updates.

[emoji1787][emoji1787][emoji1787] ...

We're using it on shared Windows devices. It was our urgent fix to "print nightmare [emoji769]" in 2021 and it's stuck because it was easy and reliable. On Windows, you get a unique URL. When you open it there's a link to download and install the client. We deployed that and put a shortcut on the public desktop to allow users to refresh printers if they disappear for any reason. Other than that, the printers appear in the list of installed printers and users can just print. It seems like the process for Chromebooks isn't wildly different: https://www.papercut.com/help/manuals/mobility-print/setting-up-cloud-print-for-mobility-print/setting-up-cloud-print-on-clients/configure-chrome-app-in-gsuite/ It doesn't give loads of control, but in our experience, it just works.

I'm really happy with our air to water system, but I wish I'd (been advised to) look at air to air. I've seen an install in an early 20th century solid walled house. Heat up was much quicker than our ASHP and drying the air a bit would be great - we have to manage condensation dampness. I reckon I could have worked out something acceptable for routing ducts. I have a family member living in a central London flat and I'm definitely encouraging them to look at it. Probably outside unit is quieter and people won't immediately spot it's one of these new fangled heat pumps. More importantly, I can imagine city summers becoming oppressively hot and the cooling could be a massive benefit.

If you have mainstream devices, the vendors often have software to monitor and update drivers. Dell has Dell Command Update and Dell Support Assist. You can sign up as org admin for TechDirect and if you register devices you can monitor status. I had a trial of Manage Engine and it does manage driver updates (only extensively tested on Dell). I found it was a few days behind the Dell notifications - I guess that's the time taken to test and package them.

Loads of variables: Loft insulation - cheap, buy as much as you can Windows - if you're replacing anyway, incremental cost is worth it. Upgrading will take many years to recover cost. Solid walls - if your children inherit your house and continue living in it, they might benefit. It takes decades to recover the cost. Cavity walls - much shorter payback than solid walls and less disruptive, but still quite expensive. I'm still slightly dubious about insulating walls on buildings that weren't designed for it. Dew points and ventilation need to be very carefully considered. Heating system replacement - if you have an "efficient" fossil fuelled system, spend money on insulation. If you're replacing your system anyway, go for a heat pump (ASHP, GSHP, air-to-air). Running costs won't be any higher if the system is well designed - and should be cheaper than oil. If you have modern radiators and plumbing, they probably will only need minimal upgrades, even without additional insulation. If they're old and awful like ours were, the incremental cost is minor. If you're considering CO2 output, replacing the heating system wins. For our solid walled house, we were advised the best we could do would be to improve heat loss by 30%. But that was by a surveyor who didn't look in the loft to find out that we had a decent amount of insulation already. By replacing oil fired with ASHP, we cut energy use by a factor of 4 (SCoP of 4.1 over two years), so that's 75% reduction straight away. On current grid mix (I went with a conservative 40% renewables) that works out as an 85% reduction in CO2 output for our heating system compared to the existing (broken at the time) installation. Or put another way, carrying out all of the recommended improvements would still use 2.8 times as much energy as the system we installed with no additional insulation and produce 4.7 times as much CO2. The cost is very specific to the property, but in our case (Victorian house with high surface area to floor space ratio) the cost of the wall insulation would have been twice what we spent on an ASHP and replacing all the plumbing and radiators, before taking account of the 50% grant. Most annoying thing is our house might become unmortgageable due to EPC rating, despite having similar running costs to a house built earlier this century and using three times as much energy/producing six times as much CO2 Edit: You need to factor in how much extra a heat pump installation would cost compared to a straight swap, but the £7.5k grant should help a lot with that.

This is a good starting point for cyber security: https://www.isc2.org/landing/1mcc Entry level course and exam are free currently, but there is a membership fee once you pass. It's a good starting point for their other courses once you've identified your gaps.

I'd slightly disagree here: Heat demand for the house is the same whatever the heat source. So surely it makes sense from an efficiency point of view to produce your heat.... efficiently. The only advantage of insulating first is if it would allow you to have a smaller (cheaper) ASHP. I'd assume that if there's oil fired heating in a rural area, then there's no mains gas. Looking at the state of the plumbing, you're looking at replacing pipework and radiators anyway and probably the oil tank. Get comparison quotes - I think you'll find an ASHP looks competitive. Running cost comparisons are different from gas fired too. We definitely spend less on electricity than we used to on oil and we have solid walls with no insulation.

Until we had it replaced with a sealed system and ASHP, that's what was in our loft. Without seeing the pipe runs, I can't be certain this would be true for this installation system, but.... That tank also fed the cold taps other than the kitchen sink, which was the only drinking water supply in the house. So that's what you brush your teeth with [emoji16][emoji1785]

I used to take that approach, but now I just patch all the things. There's a risk to my approach, but I think the balance has moved so that the risk from being successfully attacked outweighs the risk of deploying a patch that breaks something. We also have a policy supported by management that we're working towards Cyber Essentials which requires patches within 14 days. I won't get sacked for following that policy. We do have machines that are in a group exempt from that, but we monitor those. The owners know that it's their responsibility to find a time to install patches otherwise we come knocking and will remove network access if patches aren't installed.

Given the number of zero days vulnerabilities and other critical updates, surely you want bios updated asap? With either GPO or Intune policies you can control WUfB to only restart out off hours - that should prevent the risk of students messing with the power mid update.

On the scheme of 50 iPads, the Mac mini isn't a massive cost, but what is the proposed use? You don't need it to manage the iPads nowadays.

Conditional Access policies. Control the devices which are able to access your organisation's data and remotely wipe your data from devices. I'd argue it's irresponsible of M$ to offer a package to schools which doesn't offer that facility. But they don't, so you should pay for it as it's your data at risk.

We're buying Dell latitudes and recently we've been getting 5 years onsite and warranty. We've added accidental damage cover at a very reasonable price too.