jsnetman

I'm 50 this year and just passed my first MS cert and thoroughly enjoyed it, it's not really that expensive, £30 for the book and £88 for the test and you get a 15% off voucher. But to answer the post I have to agree that experience far outweighs the paper quals, it has been known for people to do these certs simply on memory and will be exposed if employed only on the basis of those certs. They are very handy to have on your CV though.

We got round the asking for computer name problem by using a modified version of sysprep called mysysprep2. http://tsaysoft.com/mysysprep2/

Our image deployment only uses one partition so I guess thats why we have them going here. You still need the updated bios though.

Whatever the good and bad of Microsoft operataing systems, we have to admit that MS is in most schools, I have already found I have been forced to windows 7 because certain functions were failing on XP SP3, offline files was one. Whether this is a policy by MS to force businesses/education to go to an upgrade is debatable or whether it was my lack of troubleshooting the problem. We are now all win 7 and server 2008r2 and I can honestly say our support calls have reduced dramatically, it just works and is very stable. There are many hurdles and of course the cost of doing so, but over the next few years everyone will have to upgrade.

Yes there are, but in that country and many countries that sort of thing goes on, but you don't have to parcipitate

Thailand is the place to go, I know its got the stigma of prostitution and all that but it's a beautiful country and the people look after you, very little crime there and very cheap.

Offline files works like a dream on win 7 compared to Xp. You have to ensure that the user areas are enabled for offline caching, and without any tinkering with offline files setteings in computer or user group policy should work automatically.

I think print managenet is more to do than who prints what. It is about controlling what they print, when they print, from where they print and limits their weekly or monthly print allowance. Papercut covers all that and for a reasonable cost, within I would say 2 months recoups its cost. By the way I don't work for them, I just found they do the job for a very reasonable cost, just like all other solutions from down under.

Papercut here and it is easy to setup and use, looked at pcounter and others years ago and they looked so outdated compared to papercut, I have not seen the latest pcounter software so I might be off the mark there

The medical will just be a formality unless you have some underlying problem which you don't or have not specified, which you indicate you have not. I would not be too concerned. Alternatively you should contact the new employer and express your concerns.

Nailed the 70-680 today, for anyone studying towards it the questions are very similar to what you get on the MS practice exams that come with the MS press book.

I think the point here is that there is no 64 bit driver for the c1100's, or there was not when I last looked about 6 months ago

I have about 12 c100's here and tried every which way to get them to work off server 2008r2 and win 7 32 bit clients. Eventually stuck them back on a server 2003r2 server and work, well i say work. I spent ages getting them to work on that setup. I tried adding the drivers to server 2008r2 but it was a no go. We are now phasing them out as the cartridges acost approx £240 to replace you can get a decent HP with cartridges for £320 although low capacity

This one threw me for about 5 mins, no display of synchronization, it does it without user interaction I think modelled on MS transparent offline caching. To see if a file is synced and offline it should have a green icon at the bottom of the display window and says something like file is cached and available offline.

Just had exactly the same problem here, bios update worked from the stone website www.stonecomputers.com - /ftp/Laptops/MR052 Bios/

When we went win 7 we or I decided to not replace the virtual CD server, we had loads of old cd titles that would only work from a cd/virtual. I did not tell anyone and waited for the outcry, but it never came (backup plan was daemon tools). On a network you build up loads of apps some are only used for one term and forgotten about but still remain on the system. Take your opportunity to weed out these unused apps/old cd titles. Most software nowadays do not require the software to run from cd only

I had problems with client machines not downloading drivers, it was a combination of not picking the right drivers to start with and went to using the universal print driver for all our HP printers. But even then some needed the postscript driver and others needed the PCL driver. We also have about 8 HP 2600's (no print processor) which will not work shared from a 2008r2 server so they remain on a 2003 box and oddly work alright with the old driver, we also had to inject the said driver into the image as it would also not download from the 2003 box. Lots of tweaking with point and print restrictions and the other settings for printers in group policy finally solved all the problems.

There are lots of things to be tweaked and setup when going to win 7. I had a nightmare with printers and nearly decided to roll back to XP, I did'nt and hung in and am very happy I did. 7 on laptops that staff use back and forth from the school network work seamless. The workstations are very stable and perform well. Lots of tweaking of software also needed, I would hang in there for a little while longer. Often just taking a rest from a problem and then tackling it from a different direction often works for me.

We provide two printer drivers per colour printer. One is defaulted to greyscale only and using papercut deny any colour jobs. Pupils and staff get it as their default printer. If a pupil requires colour they have to browse to the colour printer via web printing and because of permissions set on the asp page are prompted for username and password (decided by the dept in question). Also for pupils no more than 4 pages can be printed at one time and they are restricted via a weekly allowance of £5 for all printing. Restricting printing for staff would be a no here, but I would love to implement it.

You should not need to create users folders, if you specify their user home folder when creating a user it should do it automatically if your permissions are set right. DSADD as mentioned or a utility from MS called addusers.exe will do the job easily and at no cost.

OK DSE regulation does not apply to children (I guess because thay are not supposed to be at computers for long periods) but would fall under the act of 1974 stating that a safe enviroment for all activities should be provided, a pupil sitting at a computer for more than 1 hour would fall under that act.

I agree you don't need MS certs to run a vanilla network, those certs come in handy when applying for jobs mainly and not all that possess them have the relevant experience. Wish I had one though

There is a technical myth which says school children are not covered. The HSE regulation states anyone using computer equipment for more than one hour. most pupils lessons are 1 hour so everyone mostly assumes they don't need risk assessment. But we are seeing double lessons, we will soon be having a sports diploma course which is block booked for 2 days (they write up their assignments using computers) so pupils will and have already been using computers for more than one hour.

If it does not apply to children why when one of our pupils got the tip of their finger chopped of in technology was there a full investigation by HSE, and it happened recently. HSE covers all people in puplic institutions and work places.

Yes it does, although there is no mention anywhere in HSE regulations about schools and young people the regulations are generic covering all people young or old in any establishment. I have had this argument many times with my senior managers, they claiming that pupils don't spend more than 1 hour in front of a computer in any one period, my argument being they could be spending 5 hours and sometimes more each day at a computer. However they still buy non adjustable chairs, they are cheaper and last longer. I gave up eventually.