Norphy

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with Microsoft's Windows on ARM implementation, their x86 emulation layer is acceptable from what I hear and x64 is in preview. The difference, however, is that Apple control the entire stack with the Mac, starting from the design of the CPU upwards whereas Microsoft have to rely on third parties for their CPUs. It's telling that the Windows on ARM preview works better in virtualisation on an M1 based Mac than it does on real Windows hardware otherwise. ARM on the Mac has worked because the CPU is good enough to compete with or is better than what was there before. That isn't so with the Windows market. Realistically the only viable ARM CPU manufacturer is Qualcomm and they are so far behind Apple with their CPUs it isn't funny. This is what is hamstringing Windows on ARM, not Microsoft's coding. While there are other ARM CPU manufacturers, I don't see them in anything resembling a high end device either: Samsung don't seem especially interested outside of a bit of tarting about with Exynos, Mediatek CPUs perform worse than Qualcomm and while Huawei could be a viable competitor (god knows, they have the resources), their current dispute and sanctions with the US government count them out entirely. If someone steps up to the plate with a high performance ARM CPU good enough for a flagship device, I think we could see WoA taking off but until then? Nah. At the risk of being frogged, I think a large part of the issue is that school leadership teams are primarily teachers, who often aren't trained in management or in the fields that they're looking after. I suspect that if schools brought in management expertise from outside of the education sector for more of their high roles, the running of schools would probably improve.

The overall interface hasn’t changed that much since Vista, broadly speaking things are in the same place they’ve ever been. Yes, they’ve messed about with the start menu and the occasional setting has moved about by one you get past that, it’s still Windows. Frankly, you could drop an XP user from 2001 in front of a Windows 10/11 computer and they’d still be able to use it to a basic extent, things haven’t changed that much. I put it in a VM yesterday, it was nice to see that transitions on windows are back! The drop shadows, rounded corners and centralised taskbar make it look very Mac-like on first glance

But this is the point mavhc made earlier: don’t confuse what’s required for new computers with what it’ll actually run on. I don’t think that it will refuse to install on an older laptop without a webcam but to get Windows certification, a new non-desktop will need a webcam.

OK, I didn't realise that. When I last looked they were just covering the continental US. Although £89/mo! Wow! They're also "targeting" mid to late 2021, which means that it's not here yet and may not be in the timeframe they're giving.

Not sure if serious, but if so, not available here yet I've run a quick speedtest on my phones, the latency on o2 <40ms and on EE it's 55ms. Not as good as a wired connection obviously (11ms on Virgin Media) but anything below 150ms is usually acceptable for voice and video calls.

It would be nice to get a response from Smoothwall about this. There are clearly a lot of dissatisfied customers here and at least two people who have categorically stated that they're moving to an alternative solution because support times are so slow. People shouldn't have to be contacting their account managers or the damned CEO of the company just to get some support. It would be nice to think that we're not peeing in the wind here. As I said before, once you get an engineer, they're generally very good (Alex Kahn is the one who usually gets me and I've always been happy with his help) but actually getting a response to a simple ticket shouldn't take weeks. Is @tom_newton still working for them?

James.

I usually get shouted out of the room when I say this but approach compatibles with caution, especially with Aruba kit. I've had cases where compatible transceivers stop working after a firmware update on a switch.

I’m going to download both and stick them on a VM tomorrow. Am curious to see what’s what.

Outside of tethering my computer to my phone when my broadband connection died a few times, I haven't done this much at home. When I did, it was with a 4G signal and for using Teams and Office etc, it worked fine. I've also tethered my iPad to my phone on more than one occasion for my son to watch Netflix or Disney+ on long car journeys and while that eats my data at a horrific rate, it works well enough for that as well. One of my schools used a 5G connection with Vodafone for a long time, as it was a new build and we couldn't get a fibre in for $reasons. It's not an experience that I'd want to repeat but to the device's credit, I'm absolutely certain it would work perfectly well for a few people doing normal internet type stuff. It was getting > 200mbps down and > 50mbps up and could handle Teams conversations for ~20/30 teachers at once.

Pranny

While that's not bad advice in general, I don't think anyone here has so far, have they?

I reckon it's probably more to do with the "Designed for Windows" certification, or whatever they're calling it these days. They want to have hardware at a certain level so that you can be guaranteed a minimum experience level. The amount of crummy cameras I've seen on laptops since the pandemic started is incredible and I'm sure everyone here has seen the same. At least if they specify "Full HD resolution, AWB, 30fps" or something like that to get the certification, you can expect a half decent camera.

Babylon

Wreck.

I can’t see them ditching ConfigMgr any time soon and I’d be majorly surprised if other endpoint management systems such as Kace, Altiris and ZENworks stop working. Microsoft still get most of their money from corporate customers and they wouldn’t want to risk annoying them by stopping support for their favourite tools.

No, it's more likely to be a move to improve security and to be able to say "Hey, look, W11 devices are encrypted by default". If there's a TPM, having Bitlocker and whole-disk encryption is made a lot easier as the encryption key is stored on there, rather than having to use a USB key or type in a password to turn the machine on.

I've seen similar with Hikvision cameras we have on our network. I suspect they have an internal firewall but I've never pressed the issue enough to investigate further.

IT error... grrr. Data entry error, more like.

Give that technician a promotion!

Cheaper, maybe, but if the switch dies it won’t get replaced under warranty because it’s been opened and had non standard parts fitted. Plus there’d be the whole argument of whether it was the non standard fans that caused the failure and so on. On a switch that could be worth £1500 or more, it’s not worth the aggro IMO.

Can I say it in Foreign? Moi s'il vous plait! No? Me please!

Might just be bad compression artefacts but that looks photoshopped to me.

UE-V is part of the Windows license if you have Software Assurance, which you have OVS-ES or EES, you'll have. AAD P1 licenses aren't much, but it adds up if you're having to buy them for all staff and students. I'm happy to use cloud services where they're useful or where they save me time and/or effort. Example, Exchange and SharePoint. I'm not so convinced that ESR is a better solution when all of your computers are on the same network and everyone has to pull their settings down from the internet each time they log on to a new computer.

I suspect that's an IBM Model M or one of its equally annoyingly noisy derivatives. Very highly prized mechanical keyboard.