liveman2

Is it infecting an entire machine or just profiles, are are the profiles linked in any way i.e. Staff or Students? Also is it the same couple of people?

You could use applocker. This could prevent unspecified applications from running, although you would need to create a whitelist. It's also not guaranteed to protect against every single kind of virus. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-GB/library/hh831440.aspx

I second this product! Paid - but really good product!

Very interesting... What are you running on the desktops?

The "Cards against humanity" game. It's a card game and it's awesome! Guaranteed to be a winner at uni!

Has anyone here ever considered migrating a school/put a case together to migrate away from the Microsoft world? even say to setup a lab with Macs or running Linux? Just quite interested to hear if anyone ever has and what were the results? Specifically as the IT curriculum has recently changed. I have always personally been a massive fan of the Microsoft bandwagon, however I can imagine that learning linux when I was younger could have been handy.

I have created a tool for sending encrypted messages using gnupg. I just want to see of anyone would like to use this tool, it's very easy to use once setup and requires just a little time to get going. You can create an encrypted attachment in seconds, and open one you have received. Pre-Requisites - GNUPG - Windows 7+ (not tested on other versions, but could work) Setup - Deploy GNUPG to machines (this could just be teacher machines, or staff and student too) - Register public keys created for use with GNUPG (copy them to a local folder on the HDD and use a batch file to register them) - Manually register the users private key and put the password into the program manually. This is one-time as it will be saved. Would anyone find this of use?

Could you just place the shortcuts on the users desktop and bypass the start menu ?

As far as this goes it requires a personal email for each user and must be re-authenticated once a year. I'm not sure that it's meant for mass-deployment in an organisation. You could get around this by deploying it and asking them just to each sign up. In this case a first-use guide would probably come in handy.

These are pretty cool posters.

I am not sure, it definitely makes the annoying annimation dissapear though.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon] "EnableFirstLogonAnimation"=dword:00000000

You can also do this via Group Policy. Windows 7: How to Show a Custom Text Message Before Logon through Group Policy Preferences - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki

No problems here using Safari, OSX.

You can also get one that sounds when the charger is removed: A.L.A.R.M. - A Laptop A/C Removal Monitor v1.01 IMO this is a better solution as no additional USB is required.

Lenovo X1 Carbon: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon i7 8GB RAM 240GB SSD Win 8 Pro Ultrabook Laptop | eBay These are pretty lightweight.

I had a family member who was having issues recently with Outlook and iCloud. I figured that rather then keep having the issues i'd use the imap protocol instead and uninstalled the plugin. In relation to contacts I know that there is a setting in iTunes for contact syncing that is able to sync with Outlook. So it should work like this: iCloud > iPhone > Sync Service (iTunes Connector) > Outlook then the user could also make a change on Outlook, and when they sync with iTunes it would sync with their phone. This is how I understand it to work. Check: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH12317?locale=en_US

Update seems pretty stable since I installed it. Also upgraded to Office 2016 which is super speedy.

It actually depends on the requirements. I agree that my first choice is not third party software but however if you can't achieve what you need with the built-in tools, this is a good third party alternative.

Classic Shell is still worth a look if you want more customisation. It's freeware and has some configurable options. Classic Shell • View topic - Apply start menu settings and customizations to All Users

NetSupport Notify - Multi platform alerting solution - This tool could work. Not free but includes 50 PC Trial for 30 days.

Warning... This update takes time. I just downloaded over a fibre connection and installed on an i7 Haswell, SSD, 16GB of RAM. Took at least a few hours. After the first restart the system was slow and crashy so I had to force a cold boot. After that, it works fine. I noticed that the built-in Mail app is significantly improved with support for S/Mime certs and also the option to turn off the awful conversation view.

True it still has its downsides and ocasionally we did have a few problems. It was mostly about making the users feel that they had partial control and IT would just facilitate their needs. I found that backup solutions such as Crashplan Enterprise are quite good for recovering from Ransomware... but again... depends on Budget, Time & Resources etc.

Glad to hear this went well, just my 2 cents. When I worked at a University, we had a script that would give a user local admin access to any PC on the network. Maybe this is something that could be considered. The idea was that if a user requires something specific they could install etc on their own workstation and access would be removed after a specified time automatically. This also meant that they never needed network admin access.

Windows 10 Pro Here - It just found and downloaded it.