KevinB

Speaker from 1992 to 2000. Lord, I feel old today. RIP Betty, you were a strong Speaker.

Just adding another voice to the "Don't do it!" chorus. We had some of this sort of desk 10 years or so ago and experienced nothing but trouble. Vandalism was too easy (yank on a cable and you can't work now because it'll take IT an hour to get there, disassemble the thing to fit a new $damaged_item anf put it all back together again), build quality wasn't great, so things became damaged easily through wear and tear, and they became rubbish bins every day. Standard classroom with laptops/Chromebooks is the way if they want dual use. We have that in several rooms and it's far less hassle.

We use the extension for our Chromebooks, and if you're onsite there's something called Secret Knock that needs configuring so that it's not double-filtering and causing speed issues. https://kb.smoothwall.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015978080.

I know you want to avoid 3rd party tools, but PSExec is designed for just this sort of thing, is simple to use and most importantly is free: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/psexec

Pretty much the same here as @Boredguy says. When staff moaned a bit about accessing students' folders we talked to them about privacy and pointed out that if students were using an exercise book and hadn't turned it in on time, staff wouldn't expect to go to the student's home and rummage around in their bedroom for it. Once we showed them how students could share a particular folder to them the staff were happy enough with that.

We're with Cunninghams since that's what our catering contractors use. We find their support to be variable. Some people are very helpful, others less so. They are certainly better than they were say 5 years ago.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that the DfE devices embedded keys were only Home versions, an a MAK key or KMS is needed for any other versions. I can't remember where I read this so I may be dreaming, but try a Home image and if that activates then there's your reason.

I'm pretty new to Intune myself, but I'm finding that it's better to have separate Configuration Profiles for Users and for Devices, and to only bundle together settings that belong together so e.g Edge settings, Internet settings, Printing settings etc, pretty much the same as you would do for Group Policy on an on prem AD network.

We managed to get a Galaxy Tab reset by sending it to Samsung with proof of ownership. Maybe try the manufacturer of your tablet to see if they can do the same?

I'm 55, and I don't know if it does much but I take a multivitamin each day - Wellman 50+.

We block internet connectivity for exam users using Impero rather than GP. They are all in a "No internet" AD group that's a member of the "Internet Banned" Impero group.

We've had ours set to 19C for years, with an alarm if it goes above 25. Before we had monitoring we found out the hard way what happens when air con fails. The servers (9 tower style ones, this was pre-virtualisation) all started to temp-throttle then shut down. Cue a visit to the server room only to be hit by tropical temperatures (45C!) in the room and walls which were hot to the touch.

I've successfully in-place upgraded plenty of servers from 2012R2 and 2016 to 2019 with no issues except with an SQL server and an Exchange server, both of which failed dismally. Thank heavens for VM snapshts!

+1 for TSOHost. Really easy to use and is free for .sch.uk.

Check your firewall settings and the amount of logging it's doing. A couple of weeks ago we were being hit badly by an NTP DDoS attack, and there was so much logging going on that it was grinding the box to a halt with the exact symptoms you describe: Slowing down, halting for a few minutes, picking up again and then dying and needing to be restarted. We had to turn some of the logging off which allowed it to cope with the amount of incoming connection attempts again. Only a temporary measure to get over the attack, but it did get us up and running again.