jsnetman

Server 2007? are you sure as I have never heard of this. But I guess your problem is in the switch configurations. If there is a setting to allow multicast set it to on on all switches. Just seen this on a technet post If a namespace is registered with that connection string, the image is available for multicast download. If a namespace is not registered with that connection string (as would be the case if a. you were using a newer WDS Client against an older server or b. the Admin has not enabled multicast for the selected image), the image is not available for multicast download. The client falls back to SMB.

There is a setting or registry edit can't remember as it was a long time ago we had NSS, but if you look on their knowledge base I'm sure it will be there. Think I found the setting it goes in the client32.ini [View] MultiView=1

To me that is a cumbersome way to install, after every rebuild you will have to perform the install again. ABTutor comes with an MSI installer that you simply roll out to the workstations with no effort at all, Netsupport does as well should I say (silent exe install). I have used both netsupport and ABTutor and I can honestly say there is nothing that ABTutor can't do that netsupport can, there might be something but it will probably be insignificant. So ABTutor for me becaause of the cheaper price tag.

I did not need to do that. After you install AIK it puts a program group in your start menu with a command prompt, all the commands are available through that.

I like netsupport too but there licencing model is very expensive. Basically you need to pay for the licence by machine, in our case it was going toi cost about 10k for the whole school based on 400 PC's. AB Tutor you pay for the tutor licence only meaning if you just want one tutor or techie to use it it will cost 140 quid and for that you can view every computer in the school.

ABTutor here works fine on windows 7 32 and 64 bit and it is cheap compared to the rest, and I think does just as much if not more than the others.

Are you running WDS server 2008 R2, if so you can deploy driver packages from the WDS console. If not you can use this Setting up Windows Deployment Services – Injecting drivers into Windows 7 and WIndows 2008R2 - J to do it at image level. I tried it via the xnl file and it did not work for me either.

You can also use a modified version of sysprep called MySysprep http://tsaysoft.com/mysysprep2/ which will prompt for computer name

On xp I have found the original way you are doing it is quicker i.e usiing the default user profile. I presume you are storing the mandatory profile on a server and every logon will pull that man profile down. It could be something in your group policy which is slowing down logon speeds or network issues. On windows 7 funny enough I have found man profiles are quicker than a locally built profile. A lot of slow logon problems can be faulty scripts or batch files in machine or user startup. I have done a lot of experimenting with profiles and the best way to deploy them and currently our logon speeds for xp with local profiles is 6 seconds (10 on man profiles) and for windows 7 on man profiles it is about 12 seconds but of course it depends on network conditions and and machine spec.

We also create 2 shared drivers for each colour printer and set one to only print in greyscale and deploy them to pupils as their default printer per room. If they want colour they need the password from the teacher.

We have many colour printers here, we do not deploy them to pupils because of the cost and the way they can waste ink/paper and so on. Instead we publish them via IIS and password protect the actual connection page for each printer. So each department has there own user and password for their colour printer. Staff get them deployed. Each dept is responsible for the password.

Got PARS on windows 7 here and absolutely no problems, installed via GP/MSI to stations and the PARS upgrades on the S: drive.

I would like to know which colour laser you can get toner for that price, unless it is a typo or you are filling your own cartridges?

Ok apologies eslie and witch, I should not post on a Friday night after the pub.

I did not say that the original post mentioned a universal nic driver, I merely commented that I had never heard of one.

Not all the bios's have that option but yes sometimes it is an option.

In all my years in education I have made it a point especially on forums not to be gender specific, witch you obviously don't. Yes I have struggled with drivers at some point, but I aint never heard of a universal NIC driver.

I tried to help the original post by saying that it may need drivers after an F6 prompt, then the post goes on to ask about drivers for a network card. I have year 10 students who can do that.

He or she it does not matter, if you are a techie of any description asking on a forum where to find a driver surely shows lack of experience. I would expect that kind of post on a gaming website where usually you have non technical people asking how to do things on their PC. I guess I'm in for a bashing here

You should not be installing any operating system if you do not know how to find and install a driver. Sorry for being so blunt.

Sometimes you have to press f6 when windows setup is starting and load the sata drives from floppy or if your lucky USB memory.

We use exmerge for this type of thing on exchange 2003, or you could add the administrator account into all users accounts then you won't be prompted for a password.

Never had any problems with sysprep on our win7 machines and we have some intel drivers injected into the image. What machine are you sysprepping on and is it fully win7 compatible?

I guess you are at a dead end then sorry, even with win 7 32 bit I think you would have driver trouble for that type of setup. This raises some questions I have had here at my school with printer drivers. We have server 2008 64 and win 7 32, I have major headaches with printer drivers to run on them both. I now wish I had gone for win 7 64. But after a few weeks of head scatching most of the drivers are now ok.

Ok point the laptop driver directly at the printer, presuming it's a network printer.