Fazza

My advice for anyone who has a cambium network, download what you need to download ASAP in case it disappears at a later date.

I believe it was on the 10th of September 2026 that the UK arm of the company said they intended to file for Administration so not looking good if you have devices under warranty. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2026/09/wireless-uk-broadband-company-cambium-networks-falls-into-administration.html#google_vignette

We use Plan-IT, MISCO and Panacea for a lot of sundries, consumables, cables, power adapters, laptop screens, USB keyboards, USB mice, Ethernet Leads, HDMI cables etc as well as the normal big box items like Laptops etc.

Apparently qres.exe might be your answer. Save it on a network share and use a Group Policy to run a logon scrips that references qres.exe to set the resolution/refresh rate. https://sourceforge.net/projects/qres/

We try and buy AMD simply due to Driver support. In our experience, once an Intel device goes end of life they change the driver from their normal one to a more basic WHQL one that automatically gets installed when Windows Updates is installed and causes issues connecting to projectors/screens. AMD on the other hand has never done that so we've been fine with them for a number of years now.

Microsoft have their own script so I have downloaded that from Microsoft and using that one instead 😎

I have an air-gapped VM with just publisher on and sadly the scripts (batch file and PowerShell) do not work and there's no log file to tell me why!

Ooh! That looks interesting. I no longer have Publisher on my PC though as I re-imaged it a few months back so it's gone forever on my PC 😢 I was hoping something like this would come along as I have an air-gapped VM with just Publisher installed on it for exactly this sort of thing so I will give it a go..

The major issue that is staring us all in the face is that once it's gone, it's gone and there's nothing that opens up a .pub file 100% (trust me, I've tried) they always come out a bit funny. You'd think Microsoft would write a reader for .pub files that has one button that says 'Save as PDF' rather then just prevent hundreds, thousands (maybe millions) of Publisher files on all the computers in the world from ceasing to be of any use.

We put it in Trust Wide newsletter multiple times over the last 18 months and removed it from our builds so any computer getting a rebuild since would not have it installed. We quoted what Microsoft said about it and told them to save any important Publisher files as PDFs. To date, we have only had a handful of people querying it and we have put LibreOffice as an install option in our SCCM/MECM Software Centre else they can give PowerPoint a go for future documents.

You can customise it to what you like, that's just how one person has configured it.

I've had to rebuild the BCD on my Desktop PC before and was expecting it to take ages to do it but as soon as you press Enter after entering the command it's done - it literally takes longer to boot to a Windows Installation than it does to run the rebuild itself!

More often than not, that's what happens at our Secondary Academy. Once even that didn't happen - we were asked to move the laptop trolley from one building to another, so we did. When the Teacher opened up the trolley, there was not a single laptop in it!! We searched the room/area it came from and could not find a single laptop as someone somewhere had used the set and not bothered putting them back when they were finished with them.

Looks like you may be too late to apply for this job!!

Hikvision random boxes here too and we spend over £1,000 to meat the manufacturers requirements for the last couple of NVRs we got 🤷‍♂️

You can send your child to any school/academy you like! If the School you have sent your child is unsafe, then move them to a better school. How may of the worlds press/paparazzi/nut jobs have you got wanting to get near your child that requires the Police to provide specialised Protection Officers? Security is the answer.

Our CCTV system is nowhere near as fancy as yours and we don't have near as many cameras as you but our CCTV company said the same thing so we too had to buy a similarly spec'd PC (several in fact as everyone 'needs' access to CCTV apparently! In this case the MSP was just following manufacturer orders/specs.

We've been using 2-Power batteries for donkeys years now and never had a problem with them. Great value for money and so much cheaper than OEM ones. They do good laptop power supplies too.

Did you buy them from a reseller or did you get them from the same place you get your refurbished laptops from as I'm convinced they dont store them at the correct temperature which is why they are defective?

2-Power batteries are quite reasonably priced so give them a try - we've been using them for years and companies like Duracell actually rebrand 2-Power laptop batteries ones to their own.

True, I have a USB keyboard in the cupboard that randomly types random letters as soon as you plug it in! Always worthwhile changing over the keyboard and mouse on systems with strange problems.

We use Mutiny from mutiny.com it's simple and easy to use/configure and has saved our bacon so many times as we've either been able to resolve issues before they become one (like dangerously low disk space on the C : drive) or spotting issues as they happen before our Academies got around to reporting it to us like we can see if an Academy has likely had a power cut or their internet connection has gone down. When people say you need to "be more proactive" Mutiny is the only system I've ever used that has made us be more proactive as you can see when a server/device is starting to get low on disk space or when it's using up all its allocated CPU cores or RAM and you can do something about it.

I believe that when Server 2008 came along IPv6 was a mandatory component and if you had it unticked/turned off then you were running "an unsupported configuration" as "Doing so can lead to seemingly random service failures, authentication problems, and erratic network behavior" as a lot of background services use it for communication.

Do you have a coffee with Sorin on Sunday mornings?!

This is the video I used to modify mine: