jsnetman

If it's just one laptop install the x64 driver on the laptop instead of the server and point the x64 print driver on the laptop to the shared printer should work (maybe) or at least give it a go.

An application server is where all your applications reside and don't require a local install on the clients (they run from the server) or they require a client/server setup. You could also class your deplyoment share where all yor MSI's are residing and pushed out via AD or another solution.

I like hyper V and have experimented with server VM's and think it is the way to go. But I'm an old dog and prefer my main server roles on physical hardware. Ok for the odd print server or application server I think this is fine at the moment. I had a couple of server roles on VM's running and decided to team the 4 nics on each physical server, hyper V did not like this and MS say they don't support it yet in Hyper V. So i'm waiting for maybe a few more months before I put all my eggs into one basket/server.

Here for pupils on MAN (winxp) profiles 6 seconds and for win7 12 seconds. You can reduce your logon times by getting rid of the setting up desktop applet that appears in the top left corner at logon. The thing causing this is the stubpath entries in the registry (you can delete them, I was a bit hesitant and tried it on one machine first). But of course it also depends on your network we are gigabyte to desktop. I would say that anything over 30 seconds is unacceptable, and anyone using roaming profiles in a school environment is not doing it right, because people are moving frequently between machines roaming is a bad idea. I also tried roaming on staff laptops and they just get screwed up with all the teachers put in their profile, now I use local profiles for laptops.

Regshot is another one.....

In the answer file that you use to start the image process it does not matter what language settings you set, because if you don't specify a domain name username and password for the deployment it will always ask for language settings. If you set the language settings to GB and specify domain name username and password it will start win pe with the gb settings. I have read somewher that this is by design. For the actual image deployment setting the language settings in the imageunattend.xml file works.

Here we have a HP colour laser for each computing area. We create two printer drivers for each printer for instance A1_Colour and A1_Mono, we disable printing in coulur on the A1_mono and deploy that to each user as the default. The staff also get the A1_Colour deployed but the pupils have to gain access to the colour driver via a web page, you can set this up via web/internet printing via the print server. We password protect each colour printer for pupil access and the password for each colour driver is maintained via each department using a change password script. We also have PapercutNG to audit and provide print credits for pupils and restrict how many pages they can print at once, we also disable printing directly from a web page. One more advantage of having all HP printers is the all in one Universal Printer Driver specially with server 2008 64 and windows 7 32 bit clients, one driver does all printers 64 bit and 32. We aslo have a Reprographics dept with a colour copier on the network with an accountancy module and we encourage staff to send large jobs to that via the network.

Since summer last year I have been getting intermittent problems with xp sp3 on wireless with offline files enabled, tried everything and to no avail. Took the drastic route and installed win7 on laptops and problem solved. Not sure if it is something in sp3 on xp causing this but slt took my advice to move onto 7.

Business teacher said to me "you know those hessian boards at the back of the row of computers in the computer room, can you move them" I'm thinking on my a*se here sipping a cup of coffee, these boards are heavy I reply: Well they are there for health and safety purposes so the kids don't trip on the wires or remove network leads and so on.. Teacher: "We are having a parents evening and we need some display boards moved 3 flights of stairs and it's not my job to move them" Now I'm getting mad Me: Well it's not my job either, I'm here to look after the network and computers, have you asked the caretakers ? Later I see my techie moving the boards, I gave him a verbal about what a soft sh*te he was.

I would definately keep your existing domain. I had trouble with win 7 on the network until I discoivered it did not like a particular switch, something to do with spanning tree. Just build your 2008r2 server in your existing domain and eventually retire or demote or use your old 2003 servers as print servers or something like that. I would expect if there was anything wrong with the existing domain it probably would not let you complete the domain prep or forest prep that you have to do in order to get the 2008 servers going. you can always use a new gpo for the win7 or vista clients, I personally have xp and win 7 in the same OU but have win7 in a sub OU with GP loopback in merge mode.

This is the way we do it here.

Ok I will post my imageunattend below, if the prompt for machine is in the wrong place it fails. Also I tried Mysysprep with the unattend.xml on the c: drive and I could not get it to work but got it to work when I attached the xml file to the image in WDS. Schhol Name School User %Please input a computer name% true domain.local ******** administrator domain.local en-gb en-gb en-gb en-gb ***** true YwBoAHMAMQBQAGEAcwBzAHcAbwByAGQA false temp temp School Name School User ****** true domain.local true 1 sysrebuild false 1 delete tmp account net user temp /delete true false Work 3 GMT Standard Time true 16 1024 768 \\srv2\REMINST\drivers domain.local ****** administrator

You can if you use MySysprep which is a rewrite of sysprep, something that microsoft could'nt do or did'nt want to do. http://tsaysoft.com/mysysprep2/ I am rolling out my win 7 machines with this and it asks for computer name like it did in XP sysprep.

I have exchange 2003 and we lately installed office 2007 which included outlook. I have not done any configuration and when staff/pupils open outlook it automatically configures the account.

If you have 14 sites mastering WDS and MDT or WAIK will definately be the way to go . The whole point of these tools is that you can deploy one image to any site by tweaking the imageunattend.xml answer file and specifying the drivers and software needed for each site. I suppose it could all be done from a laptop as well as long as your not going to rebuild a lot of machines at any one time. at the moment you are preparing and sysprepping an image for each site which could all be done from one image.

Backup Assist is a good one and really cheap and does exactly what its supposed to do, £139.

We had a bit of trouble at first with this, they always inform us when an upgrade is taking place but I would have to hunt people down by telephone for them to make the necessary updated SIMS folder available, but at the end of the day the updated files where already on the admin network as these get updated by the LEA, so we just copy the S: drive from one of the admin machines and copy it to the curriculum server. Messy I know but it works. I suppose I could find an easier or automatic way of doing it. I am in favour of the one network approach but either the school or the LEA want to keep them seperate at the moment.

If your LEA hosts the SIMS database all you need to do is setup a shared drive on one of the curriculum servers and map it from curriculum machines as say the S: drive and thern alter the connect.ini appropriately. We have done this type of setup here.

You need a basic adult education teaching certificate and you also need to have passed ECDL. Look at your local colleges for adult ed teaching qualifications. In my day it was called the 7306 and I went on to do the certificate in education, but you don't need it.

Use the same as xp gpo settings and modify the ones that apply to Win 7, you can have xp machines in the same gpo as win 7. And for different user settings or machine settings use loopback processing.

Will try that tomorrow

so presently one of my nics has an IP, are you saying I should remove this before doing the team. And the re-enter it on the virtual nic ?

Never done it before but we are getting a bottleneck on one of our servers, we have 4 broadcom NetXtreme II per server and thought about teaming them. I have a very basic questions on how to do. Do all the nics need an IP address and subnet before I team, or because its creating a virtual NIC I just need the one IP address on one NIC ?

Ok yes, if you don't specify an account name, domain and password it will always prompt for language input, I think that is by design but not sure on that and as you are only deploying one or 2 images it doesnt really matter. When we do mass deployment its normally after school or in holiday periods, we input the acount details into the answer file as mentioned and it does not ask for language settings and goes straight to deploying the image. You must remember to remove the account password after you have mass deployed or you will end up with the pupils pressing F12 and deploying images automatically

Are you talking about the imageunattend answer file or the WDS pre environment awnserfile?