Fazza

It was noticeably faster on my laptop at home, it seemed a lot snappier than before.

There were quite a few Easter Eggs in a fair few bits of software 'back in the day'.. I think Excel 95, 97 and 2000 all had Easter Eggs that were games and I seem to remember a couple of the built-in Screensavers in 98 and XP had Easter Eggs in them but I can't quite recall what they were.

These ones: I was about to purchase them the other day but then remembered about Prime Days so good job I hung on as it's the lowest price it's been in a year

I've ordered some Amazon work trousers for £16 which is the cheapest they've ever been but that's about it!

Poundland still haven't found a buyer and their credit insurance has just been removed which normally means their suppliers wont give them any credit and if they want to buy things then they have to pay up front. Sadly when this happens, a lot of companies cease trading. https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2026/09/poundland-moves-to-reassure-suppliers-after-credit-insurers-pull-cover/

The food was not out of date. The fridge was not out of date - quite the opposite, it was 100% up to date and it was the latest update that turned the power to the fridge-freezers OFF which is why all their food went manky!! And the DfE want everyone to do firmware updates ever 14 days!! How long until rogue firmware causes networks up and down the country to render schools offline?!

My partners brother ordered some oil ready for the end of the year to see them through winter and on the day it was due to be delivered the order was cancelled and the price was nearly doubled if he wanted to place a new order!!

Wiggling for me is a sign of a dry joint - you dont need to do much more than hold a soldering iron on each soldered pin, wait for the solder to melt and then promptly remove the soldering iron - this will ensure the solder is reflowed and a proper connection is made. Then try wiggling it and if it still happens then you may need to replace the ethernet port, a fairly easy thing to try or certainly something most electronic repair companies can do. Companies that calibrate test equipment should be able to do that for you for well under £100 which is so much cheaper than buying new kit.

I'd have a go at cleaning the ports with some Contact Cleaner and a toothbrush first and then look for dry joints on the ports inside. If there are any dry joints then all you need is a soldering iron to reflow the solder. If it doesn't work and you're looking at replacing it then why not just have a go at repairing it yourself, if it still doesn't work after you've had a go then you're still in the same boat where you will be replacing it but by attempting a repair you might just get lucky and fix it!

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 🤷‍♂️