Fazza

Not me! The servers we get from ServerSource tend to come with a 3 or 5 year warranty as standard. When the warranty runs out we continue to use the servers and if something dies, we buy a replacement and fit it ourselves! So much cheaper than extended warranties. Quicker too in some cases as most of our suppliers can delivery stuff next day. We have backups so worst case scenario we can recover from them. All critical servers are replicated (on to un-warrantied servers) so we can fail-over to them if required.

Put a shelf up, place PC on shelf, remove side, drill holes in to the case and use a nut/bolt to secure to shelf, put case side back on and padlock the case. Cheap and Cheerful.

Migration is the proffered way of doing it and you should only upgrade if you have to - i.e. you dont have the room to create a new VM etc. This is especially true for DC's, however we had to do an upgrade (rather than a migration) of one of our DC's as when we did the migration it didnt seem to take all the DHCP settings across, it was as if one setting was hidden from view so we had no choice but to upgrade it.

We get our Dell servers mainly from Server Source - sign up for their 'spam' and you'll see they have quite a few BOGOF offers on servers with the spec you are looking for. Joe is the Sales guy there and does some cracking deals on whatever you are looking for. They can pretty much spec out any Dell server you like from ones costing a couple of thousand to several hundreds of thousands if you have a massive data center to set up! The emails you can sign up for show a small offering of configurations that they have put together. All come with either a 3yr or 5yr onsite warranty.

Configure Outlook to access the inbox. Wait for 15GB so sync and then export to a .PST file.

I dont know about the latest version, but an old version we used was able to be zipped up and extracted to a different computer - i.e. manually install it on one PC, create a self-extracting zip file of the folder and then run that silently via SCCM and create a shortcut to it on the start menu or desktop.

A lot of things I order are free Same Day delivery from Amazon Prime.

It also means that we can see how reliable a particular service is and give advice to our internal customers on if it's acceptable or not and if not get involved by contacting the company involved and try to get to the bottom of what the issue and come up with a resolution to prevent any more calls to them etc. as most end users wont think to do this.

We provide IT Support so for use that means we act as the middle-man for most systems from cashless catering to finance systems - the only exception is SIMS where our Data Department look after all issues (except installation issues).

I replicated your settings yesterday, did a gpupdate /force and nothing changed. Despite this I left the Group Policy alone.... Just before I left work I set a PC imaging from my new 1809 SCCM 'Golden Image' and low and behold! This morning I'm greeted with our Academy crest on the logon screen! Seems to have done the trick - just needed to wait for the GPO to sort itself out!

I wonder what happens if you set a Group Policy to point to a file saved locally - I'm just trying my new 1809 'Golden Image' out so I'll have a look at this tomorrow.

Getting strange now... I re-imaged the PC to Windows 1803 and the lock screen image Group Policy worked. I did an in-place upgrade to 1809 and it still works! Must have done something in 1803 that remained when I did an in-place upgrade to 1809.

Just installed W10 1803 and the GPOs work as the Lock Screen Image changes to the Schools crest. The same PC in the same OU with Windows 10 1809 does not work

I've just been told the lock screen image GPO works fine at one of our Primary Academies so no idea why it's not working here. The next step I guess is to create a new OU, Block Inheritance and then create a new GPO with just that setting in to see if it's something in another Group Policy affecting this setting or not.

We have a group policy that sets the logon screen image to that of the school crest/logo etc. It works fine on Windows 8 but doesnt work on Windows 10 - I was hoping whatever the issue is/was would be resolved in Windows 10 1809 but clearly not! Are there additional settings in Windows 10 I need to configure for this GPO to work or is there a new GPO setting somewhere specifically for Windows 10 that I dont know about?

By default NetSupport DNA performs a Software and a Hardware Inventory every 10 minutes. This seems a bit too frequent to me, but as it is the default setting it must be OK, right? Have you got DNA, if so have you changed this to another figure?

If you're doing it yourself then have a go pulling them back, if you're getting someone it to do it then run new cables as the main cost is labour and not the cable which costs very little.

I'm looking for an Office 365 Personal BF deal - I seem to remember in the past MS were giving away an extra 3 months for the price of 12 so hopefully there will be some sort of offer on Friday

If the DC you rebooted isnt showing up in DNS then not sure what's going on then. Normally a reboot of an affected computer sorts it out as it re-registers with the DNS server.

You may need to reboot the servers for them to automatically update the DNS records on the DNS server. Start with your DNS server and then reboot another one that wasnt working just to confirm this fixes it and then use something like RemoteRebootX to schedule reboots either tonight or over the weekend.

There is significantly less chance of it being fixed/recovered now that it has been opened. You can try contacting a specialist data recovery company but expect to pay £100's for the privilege - some may not even let you send it to them now it's been opened.

As only some of the drives (PSY) were not reconnecting we took a look at the GPO that was pushing them out and these drives were set to 'update' whereas the unaffected drives were set to 'replace' so we changed the disconnected drives from Update to Replace and after a gpupdate /force and a reboot all drives appear to be OK after rebooting a few times as a test.

I upgraded my laptop yesterday and have not had any brightness issues so far - so all is good on that front! Loving how they've made OneDrive easier for users to add their Desktop, Pictures and Documents but a bit odd that it doesn't give you the option for Downloads and Videos as they've deemed them not important! The fact that it's easy for you to get OneDrive to save space on a PC is going to be a big help for those laptops we have with SSDs in them as they are typically smaller than the standard HDDs we have in our laptops so that's another nice new feature. The replacement for the Snipping Tool is also better in the fact that (and I dont know about you guys) but every time I use the snipping tool it always seems to open up just where I want to start snipping! It's replacement has a smaller footprint that appears at the top-center of the screen so is mostly out of the way from anything I want to snip! I am experiencing the mapped drives being disconnected issue - hopefully they'll be releasing a Patch to fix that (you can only hope) but I believe there is a script or something to fix that which I shall look in to in a bit - internally we're calling this the 'Gangnang Affect' as it's affecting our P S and Y drives...

Is this a bug in the version they pulled or the new one they have just released?

Strongly advise them to get in touch with the RNIB as they are best suited to advise on this matter. Any specialist software that may help is very expensive so they need to choose the right one to help them else it may be wasted money.