Stuart_C

So for some reason, on most of my machines the "Check Spelling as you type" is unticked. I'm reasonably confident that this is security based as 1: It's set correctly for me, 2: If I disable my user security and log in as a student it's ticked OK. The kicker is that I'm not sure where it's disabled... UC/Policies/Admin Templates/MS Office word 2007/Word Options/Proofing/Check Spelling as you type is set to enabled. This is VISTA or above but the problem is on my XP clients and Win 7 Clients and this setting doesn't appear to be "enabling" in on my 7 clients anyway. Anyone got any ideas?

Bit of a tircky one this. We've got a bit of a computer issue here, in that we've got a lot of computers but don't seem to be making best use of them. One area I was looking at is our Language Lab which is a full class set of comptuers but exclusivly for use by the language department (Which is odd in itself as I could have sworn that when we isntalled that it was meant to be bookable by any member of staff, but I digress). Now it's technically a teaching room so for some lessons it's timetabled. That ammount to about 8 periods of 39. Now if I look at the timetable they've got on the door it says that it's actually booked for 18. That I can live with if they've reserved it for some classes as it would leave 21 lessons free for general use which would be a help. When our Director of Studies asked the Head of languages about it they said it was only free for 3 periods a week. Combine this with the fact that I've been down there and seen it empty on a number of occasions causes me some issues. I don't really want to say "you are making that up". but by the same token I'd like some more justificatiuon of where they got that figure from but it's not my responsbility to chase them over this, neither do I have the power too. We need to get the best out of our resources but I fear that they are just saying that it is "in use" for every lesson that there is a language class in case they need to use it rather than it being actually used. I wouldn't have a problem with them having first refusal so they could have it when they wanted it but to say it's always in use I'm not convinced. Having said that I could be wrong and it is in use all the time (not convinced though).

I've received two letters now from the Domain Renewal Group and I was wondering if anyone else has had any letters from them. Both letters have been with regard to our two .org domains saying that they are due to expire and would we like to send them money to renew our domain with them. Now obviously I'm thinking "no" my domains are happily registered where they are and I'm quite happy about it. But I just find their strategy a bit offensive, sending me an already filled in payment form. They clearly seem to be trying it on hoping someone will take them up, personally I'm inclied to not use them becuase of their strategy and complain about them on the internet It does also strike me that if it went to some non-IT manager they could easilly get scammed in.

I've got he latest version of UltraVnc and I can't get the ctl alt delete to work. It works OK as long as I don't need to do that! Help?

Yap that seems to be the case. When I added the Microsoft.poweoptions it worked fine. Cheers.

I'm just trialing smoothwall's Spam filter and I had a question. What score's are you setting for Spam? and if you are using it, quarantine? The numbers are a little random and with no experience I'm a little unsure about how agressive to be.

130 views and no ideas?

Part of the problem is that I don't think anyone's (at SMT level) considered the cost of maintaining our PC's as part of long term plan. Tending more towards the knee jerk reaction of throwing money at stuff when people complain a lot. Given that the Bursur (my Line Manager) likes planned and budgeted expenditure I've got to do something about raising the issue. Not sure how it's going to go down but at least I'll have done my job of highlighting the issue and if more investment is needed on PC's then that is something they can look at in relation to the global budgets.

1 Pupil to 5 PC's!?!?

Cheers for all that guy and gals. I know it's a rare thing to say but I think that we are getting to the point where we have too many computers. People are just wanting more because they want their own mini suite in a classroom (not something I agree with as I don't think it works and there are never Enough machines so they end up splitting classes which they shouldn't be doing anyway). I just need some numbers to back up my idea to halt computer expansion and look to consoladate what we have into better facilities.

No not THAT number, what's the ratio of PC's to pupil's in your school? I would like the ratio of machines that the studdents can actually use so obviously not the one's in people's office's or teacher laptops and the like. I'd prefer answers from indy schools to be more relevant to me but I'll take any statistics. For reference I reckon that we are about 1:2.2 which I think is quite high but I need some other numebrs to back that statement up. Cheers.

"You can't please any of the people most of the time". People don't see the problem in terms of the school, they see it in terms of their own litte worlds, thus every problem to them is an emergency but in the grand scheme of things might not be or might be superceeded by something else. I would stick to your guns. Get everything logged. If you don't you will forget things and make mistakes. It can be hard but if peole log things you then have a written record, if there's more than 1 of you then someone else may pick up the job. But the most important reason is that it lets you evaluate the workload and decide on priorites and time scales. You might lets 2 or 3 minor jobs build up in an area before looking at them together.

There is a GP setting which you can use to delete local profiles older than x days. Needs vista or above and is in ComputerCOnfig/System/User Profiles

Got a bit of a random question. Anyone experience any issues getting onto google at about 4:20-5:20 today? The reason I ask is that about 4:20 today I lost my internet conection, or so I thought. As google is my home page and it's also the site I tend to ping for diagnostics the fact that I couldn't get a response on any machine made me think my internet was broken. Proxy looked OK and I rebooted it as a precaution, I even tried a ping test from the firewall but despite being able to do DNS I couldn't ping google. By random chance I hapened to try a differnet search engine, bing, and that worked. I could also get to Microsoft.com, AQA's website and my local council but not google, some other sites and more importantly... Edugeek!!! Then suddenly it was OK. I had phoned my ISP and they seemed to think everything was OK. I'm guessing it's some kind of issue beyond my site but it was really random what I could and couldn't get to. It didn't help that I'd fixed and DNS glitch (I believe) about two hours earlier (though the more I thought about it the more I realised DNS was working fine, I just couldn't get to some sites). We've got a BT leased line if that helps and I wonder if it was some monkey in the exchange (someone else has been having trouble with their BT line).

So I've got a group polict on my main users OU that disable the control panel (admin templates ==> Control Panel ==> Prohibit access tothe control pannel). Then on my teachers sub-OU I've got another GP that say's disable that setting and I've then configured teh "show only specificed control panel items" and I've allowed access to the power settings. In XP this works a treat, the students get nothing and the teachers get the control pannel with the power settings. On win7 the students get no control planel and the teachers get... the control panel but no icons. Any idea's how to get the power icon available?

I export the new users into a CSV then open in Excel. I've already got the formula's set up to use dsadd, cacls and md to create the user, create their home drive and set the security on it. takes bout 30 minutes to create the users as I often need to do a little bit of editing (normally with Chineses pupils).

I've got the AV on my SWG-708 but It's not turned on. Why? Well I suppose I never really thoguht about it. I've got McAfee on all the PC's so it just seemed a bit like putting extra work on the box for very little reward. The "why complicate things" attitude.

Could you put the Curric machines into an OU? For example I have a "School Computers" OU then subcontainers for each department and a seperate "Other" OU?

Souldn't giving them a leaving date get rid of them? (please note that I've not really dealt with the curriculum assignment stuff though I believe I've got 4 days of exciting T6 training to look forward to later this year)

Update modify's the settings you have and merges them with the settings you set. Replace, well replaces what's there with what you specify.

Our Household manager became quite good at getting whiteboard marker off of interactive whiteboards during the first couple of years we had them. People have learnt now though! Still I have seen one teaher has a sign stuck to the edge of their board which says "I am not a normal whiteboard, do not write on me"

Thanks for the help. I think that it might be due to the fact that my original graphics package is rubbish. I've been using PhotoShopElements and it all looks OK.

Vik, I'm using MS Digital Image Suite 10 (don't ask) as I said it looks fine on the PC but not when imported into SIMS. And no it's doesn't look OK when I export it unfortunately. Im Importing them one at a time for the purposes of this test. There are not that many that I can't do it all manually.

So I've got a bit of an issue getting decent photo's into SIMS. They have all been taken on various cameras by various people and need a bit of TLC before they can go into SIMS. The problem I'm having is that as soon as I edit a picture, save it and improt it I loose a lot of the quality. For example I have a jpeg that is 950K and 2304 x 3456 px. If I put this in the image looks OK however has a black border as the aspect ratio is not correct for SIMS. If I crop the picture so that it's 2304x3072 (the same ration as 480x640) then save it, even without compressing the jpg so the file size is still quite large the Image in SIMS goes pixelated. If I resize it to 480x640 and improt it it looks pixelated. In both cases I can view the image in my graphics package and zoom in quite a long way before I have any loss of quality so I think it's something odd to do with the improt process into SIMS. Any advice?

Vik (been away or just having a blitz by the way?) Unfortunatley the problem is doing it before the start date. I new we could get the timetables on the start date. Problem exasperated by my "crazy" idea to set the pupils start date to the date they turn up to school not the inset days. Bit of a pain printing timetables if you can't set the future date's forward. Thanks for th pointers though as an incidental comment someone else posted gave me something to look at and I think I've just sussed out how to edit the timetables unter reports ==> timetables ==> Student Timetables so that they print out correclty. Which would have saved a load of panic. We could get that to work but couldn't get the timetables to look correct and display all the information properly.