Fazza

Take a look at Open Audit: https://www.open-audit.org/downloads.php

They're exactly from that era! The AMD Athlon 2000+ that the OP mentions that he has is the AMD equivalent of the Intel Pentium 4 and that's where the majority of my IDE drives came from, some (but not many) are older but most are from the exact era the AMD Athlon 2000+ was released in.

I would rather use a fully tested mechanical IDE drive than an SSD as the OS you'll be installing wont have TRIM so potentially the SSD may wear out and fail before an old mechanical one! I've got loads of 2.5" IDE drives I salvaged from a job lot of laptops I purchased years ago and I use them in old P2 laptops that are still going strong!

Have you tried using the USB one for fault-finding purposes, if the issue goes away then it's something to do with the onboard NIC? If the issue doesn't go away on the computer(s) you're having issues with then it's something else causing the issue.

Are you able to try a different NIC? I've seen SCCM play up like this on some old Dells one of our Schools had and we had to initially PXE boot from the built-in NIC and then when Windows PE had loaded (and you get to choose which Image you want to deploy) was then connected a USB NIC and moved the Ethernet cable from the built-in one to the USB one. Only gotcha we had was making sure the USB NIC driver was included in the boot wim file.

There are lots of different convertors out there - look on Amazon and eBay for a vast selection so if you happen to have any old (small) mSATA drives knocking around, for a few quid you can buy an adaptor to put them in that converts it to an IDE drive for example: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Docooler-mSATA-44pin-Adapter-Converter/dp/B07L89R2HK/ref=sr_1_3?c=ts&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.iULBWFmu-IzkC5aOEfyZXhjN845py1AH2SHYmHr4tjFhG5ejOPuAvZqBszUAO8-Bol6PSezX7a5v5OSzwljZUpcQu_u-tJkcjtmNXdvneUqy0ai5QVx-UxV4m2gvvN_0AY2mWOH-3q9VxALvqsp-TMX4M5Cz8PbFuN07_AyB9-4TT0YfGgLpiJI4SxYa5cLk0FworsIBa1_vlQb29vBmWSrDwyDug_SrfXRmoUZkgCysgg0Af1STHCTLelwvLtVKIydHsfUHrgublUeGMup18Dg7LPkILfCkgrQaYMya7-U.zVXFgUMS-t4uOyIXQKO6SV9TQ2UfMk-FEkGjRWCrHwA&dib_tag=se&keywords=Internal+Solid+State+Drives&qid=1751366781&refinements=p_n_feature_two_browse-bin%3A13941332031&s=computers&sr=1-3&ts_id=430505031 As the above example is a 2.5" IDE 'caddy' you would also need a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor as well. I think you can also get micro/SD card to IDE adaptors to - depends on if you have anything lying around or not. Personally I like the click/clunk of an old mechanical drive so I'd buy a working one off of eBay - after installing the OS and all the drivers, get Norton/Symantec Ghost from the Internet Archive and back up the disk just in case.

Correct! https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/The-BBC-Micro-in-Education/

20:1 contention ratio on a typical Virgin Media Business Broadband account but 1:1 on a £2,500 leased line. Also a 1:1 leased line should have the same upload speed as the download which is not necessarily the case with non leased lines.

You need to get one and test if installing the original version of Windows gets licenced via the Key in the BIOS/EUFI and then get the drivers installed etc. and see how much time it is going to take to get the students to return the laptops to you, test them and reinstall Windows etc. Then you need to get ready for them asking where Microsoft Office, Adobe Suite and any other piece of software they assumed would be on there are as they had access to it at the School/Academy and then whey it develops a hardware fault in the coming weeks how will you deal with that? We avoid selling any computers for these reasons.

A continuity test with a multimeter is in order to see for sure what it does.

Looks like a homemade Y splitter phono cable to me.

Surely you mean "Always shutdown unless we ask you not to." So many problems are caused by our Teachers never shutting down their laptops, one shutdown and power on later and their problems go away.

This is the future right here!!

Whenever I've had issues live migrating a VM I've got around it by using Replication. I replicate the VM to the new Hypervisor and then perform a failover and then get rid of the Replication and jobs a goodun!

Erm, don't you need DPM 2025 to be able to back up Server 2025? We still have some Server 2016 servers so can't use DPM 2025 just yet as it doesn't support it so we're waiting to upgrade/migrate those servers in the summer holidays to Server 2025 and at that point we'll have to upgrade to DPM 2025.

Definitely looking like it's worth a watch!

100% this! Who on here has read 100% of all of their companies/academies/schools/trusts policies and can remember them all? As far as I'm concerned they're there to discipline people when they get it wrong. Training, training, training is the answer and I've yet to hear of any of our Teachers being offered training. In fact in our AI policy (that we had nothing to do with) it states the Network Manager would provide training - this was news to him and no such training has taken place or has been arranged!!

We don't comment on the salaries in this sub-forum ("Rule 14: Wage levels of displayed jobs may not be discussed in the forum. If the wage seems inappropriate to you then simply do not respond to the listing") it's unlikely the poster has any control over the (however crazy you think it may be) salary. The thread you're looking for is this one:

That's probably what they've read somewhere and mistakenly think the DfE standards and OFSTED standards are the same thing!

It's a lie. OFSTED have no such requirement.

I don't recall ever watching any of the Mission Impossible films before, but I saw The Final Reconning the other week at the Cinema and despite the 'key' to the source code of The Entity being an actual key, I quite enjoyed it!

International English is English (UK) so why it just doesnt say that I dont know as it does say it when during the actual install!

DFS shares wont show up in Computer Management / Shares though as they are not shared via the computer but via the domain using the Distributed Files System and the only way to see them is via the DFS Management app and you will need to know the Namespace server(s) to view them.

\\server\share$ will show up in Computer Management > Shares \\Domain\share$ implies it's DFS so you will need to open up DFS Management and add your DFS servers to the Namespaces section to find it.

This time next year, you'd be a millionaire!! The only issue we ever resolved was not having to hunt for the faulty keyboard - what used to happen was a Teacher would (finally) report a faulty keyboard on Computer 12 but by the time we'd walked to the computer suite a student had unplugged the faulty keyboard and swapped it with another one so we had to play 'hunt the faulty keyboard' now we buy PCs with a lockable rear cover so there is no access to the rear ports etc. so they can't unplug anything.