SYNACK

Scarlett...

Cloning is a tool, what makes it good or evil is the intent of the people involved.

I'd look at imaging on a Windows 7 install them installing Windows 8 on top of it in a separate partition - Even if you have to pull the HD to do it. This should add the EFI aware bootloader to the system, you can then edit the bootloader with BDC edit to clear out the Windows 8 entry and then kill the W8 partition and expand the W7 one. You may then be able to do a raw image of this onto pulled hard drives or via WIMS in WinPE4. Actually I'm lying - personally - I have been pushing W8 for a while now but this workaround or at least WinPE4 with BCD edit and images may work. The above is just a test to see if it can work with the W8 bootloader handing off to the ancient OS. Had to do the same with a server once, would not boot of IDE so I left a CD in it that chain loaded the IDE drives to get the system running - a dirty hack but it kept the system running in a way it was never intended to for a whole year until we finally got the budget to replace it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744321(v=WS.10).aspx http://superuser.com/questions/460762/how-can-i-repair-the-windows-8-efi-bootloader

Oh there is still an OS, at least a local presentation layer which is a browser feature creeping its way into being a full - dirty word alert - Operating System but Google will never admit this as it is key to keeping their BS 'cloud' intact. Unfourtunatly the honest are probably going to be punished for not being 'all cloud all the time' but the browser has been trying to be a bastardized OS for about a decade now and is starting to manage it. Amusingly the chromebooks struggle more with some web content than their Windows and Linux counterparts despite a hardware advantage in some cases so work that one out. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/chromebook-central/eaD4RJexUW4/fLkC5Nbq87gJ Nothing is new it just has a better marketing budget, probably at the expense of engineering -> "lazy engineers never did anything but cost the company money and make the product that provides all of our incomes' - Marketing Department.

Just like the paper microscope Stanford Bioengineer Develops a 50-cent Paper Microscope - Slashdot and the paper solar cell MIT Unveils First Solar Cells Printed On Paper - Slashdot Arthur C Clark was right about technology indistinguishable from magic, at least to primitive cultures. Imbuing magical properties to ordinary objects and the like. Of course the above is probably shape memory metal actuators along with micro-controller and a few relays along with some impressive origami but why spoil the magic

Just blowing on the embers of the NZ forum... Have finally had one school SNUP'ed after however may years and the electricians did a great job of making the cable they were allowed to put in reliable and tidy. Unfortunately we have ended up loosing cabled access to a lot of the rooms as the MoE's focus is now solely wireless and the companies they chose to implement are inflexible thanks to the ever changing rulings. The switches - Allied Telyson - which everyone stopped buying in 1997 are far more uppity than the hp gear we had before and actually make the network less reliable than before. The stuff they were authorized to do was very nice but I dispute the use of the term 'upgrade'. We have actually told SNUP (Schools Network Upgrade Project - or - Stealing Networks from Unsuspecting Primaries) where to go in one school as they wanted to rip out half of our wired infrastructure and replace an enterprise level core switch with a Small Business one. Their sole effort now is wireless and ripping copper out of walls. It is unfortunate but even in their golden age SNUP seemed to completely disregard the actual definition of the word 'upgrade'. @dharre49

Have you considered the NIC Drivers, I had a server where the Intel Drivers were as flakey as anything till upgrading to the latest ones that allowed segregation to VMs and they were still slow. Are you able to look at upgrading your hosts to Server 2012 R2 as this supports link aggregation without involving dodgey vendor drivers. I know I had a similar issue back on server 2008 with drivers and hyper-v that was only supported by taking the vendor supplied cack out of the loop - that was the latest HP teaming software that reportedly had issues unless installed in the correct order, it had issues even when using the order they suggested.

Everyone knows I hate Macs but for audio they can have their advantages and that is solely down to the drivers. The audio stack on a mac is more highly optimised as the hardware is known and so timing which is very important, more important than quality in many cases is better. You can get around this by using quality sound card with manufacturer ASIO drivers for the card which makes them behave much better. You can also get around this with some systems by using ASIO4ALL - Universal ASIO Driver but it is more hassle for those not looking deeply at the problem. Long story short a PC can be as good or better but requires a little more work than a much more expensive mac system.

You young people and your assumptions, I had the displeasure of being paid to support MacOS and Windows 98, of course I was just starting High school It has been too long that the IT community has been allowed to sit idle and the world has suffered for it, let us hope that corporate and school IT will finally be pried away from the OS as a white ware appliance model and actually keep pace.

I'm sure they use imaging and such along with ongoing support so it is highly likely that they are under a hug volume liscence anyway. It is just the usual shortsightedness that seems to accompany big installations and government.

Nice - hopefully with all the AI they are shoehorning in Cortana will be a bit more useful than Siri but time will tell.

does it have some kind of funky encryption or partitioning? gparted live cd may give you a bit more information quickly

You may not be able to use them anyway: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows-8/113432-windows-8-modern-apps-metro-mandatory-profiles-no-go-area.html but you can specify a custom start screen with an XML in GPO for users Customize Windows 8.1 Start Screens by Using Group Policy Customising Windows 8.1 Start Screen Layout with Group Policy

Yay, there is a major bug in the print spooler of Windows8.1 that has not yet been fixed. It goes into an asynchronis wait loop while checking the status of the printers and never comes out of it seemingly. This has bitten me rather majorly at one particular site with a tree killing fetish and 8.1 laptops. Oddly 8.1 desktops seem fine. They have fixed it in Windows 7 with this hotfix even though it was not evident in any Windows 7 machines, probably as they took way longer to boot. A network printer is displayed incorrectly as offline on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 I am guessing that it is more difficult in Windows 8.1 because more things are done in parallel and also fast start-up does not actually terminate all the services but rather seems to suspend them making the problem persist across reboot. As a mitigation I have adjusted the GPO permissions on the print spooler service to allow teachers to restart it which solves the issue temporarily and have also added a GPO logon script that will restart the print spooler on logon to any Windows 8 or above machine. Hopefully this will surfice till various printer drivers make their drivers more thread safe and/or MS finds away around this particular squiffyness. Hopefully they fix it shortly, maybe even in 8.11 but I have not been able to get a hold of that yet to test. The problem has been hitting a few people for a while seemingly: Win 8 and 8.1 client showing shared printer server as offline Shared printer shows offline on a Windows 8 laptop although the - Microsoft Community Network printer shows offline on Windows 8 - Microsoft Community Oddly it does not seem to affect the other site I am using it on with Minolta and HP printers as opposed to the Ricoh ones at the problem site but there are probably other factors also. If anyone has any other suggestions short of going backwards to a slower OS please do share

As long as you copy the settings xmls and copy paste in the nessisaries like mac addresses and such you should be alright.

Thank god for that, it was past due to go a long time ago.

I think he is talking about the size of each memory chip on the module so a 128GB chip would be made up of 8 16GB chips or 16 8GB chips on a single module board.

A bunch of that stuff was around in base 8.1 if you had been paying attention but 8.11 looks good, if they can sort out manageability of metro apps then it will be way better.

You can push to groups too but that increases the workload and none of the steps are really that evident in the non-existent documentation from Apple, they like to keep everything a secret it seems.

That looks like a Nexus 7, I am surprised it is still keeping track of the persons finger, neither of the two I had managed that trick reliably. - stupid vBulitin, my message is not too short -.

Yes but using a code it is locked to the account where as the new token method can be revoked and reassigned as far as I can remember.

That's what they suggest, it is a nightmare but may work better especially if you need specific apps on specific gear.

Or don't know which of the massive amounts of tweaks actually worked. I used Configurator to supervise it and then profile manager MDM with a lot of time and frustration that eventually seemed to work. I am hoping that it replicates out reliably to all the iPads when I finally get a hold of all of them.

Doubles as a park bench?

Starting deployment with OSX server and seem to have made it work silently but how well it persists is another story. I am hopeful but it is early days. You can apparently convert the code based licences to token ones but I am not certain. @seawolf may be able to provide a more informative answer.