Norphy

Salamander. So much time saved.

Depends on the union. Unison charge fees based on your wage. NEU seem to go by your job role. It's cheaper for me to be in the NEU than it is to be in Unison.

Like FN-GM, I've used *vnc variants in the past and for what they are, they work OK. If you're set on VNC, I'd suggest using UltraVNC rather than Tight or Real. With UltraVNC, you can use AD credentials to authentication against it, rather than a static password.

When I started in Edu, I was in Unison but along the way I got increasingly disillusioned with their politics and it always seems to me that Unison are more interested in promoting Unison than they are looking after their members. I joined ATL which got borged into the NEU. I’ve not had to engage any of their services yet and hopefully I won’t need to. Since the merger, they seem to have lost their focus on support staff somewhat and when I first contacted the rep at my school to introduce myself there was something of a “woah, you’re not a teacher” vibe but all that said, my current rep seems good and i have been invited to various Skype conferences in regards to IT support issues. They do have an IT group in them which is nice.

That's a good point. You ain't gonna get what you want if you don't ask for it.

I have nothing against changing to a new UI when there are actually improvements (for example, although this is still controversial I think the ribbon is the best thing to have ever happened to Office) but when a change is such a retrograde in functionality (see Windows 8/8.1 start menu), why shouldn't people try and go back to what's better? The Windows 10 start menu is just about acceptable but it still isn't good. The one that came with Windows 7 is still the best, in my opinion.

That’s not Windows XP, that’s Windows 2000! XP was the first with the split start menu, which then broke out like that when you hovered above All Programs

You can package installers and upload them to Intune so as long as the Impero installer can be installed silently, you're golden.

I can't hand on heart say that I disagree with any of that. As mentioned in another post, I've just come back from Scotland and in the small part that I was in, wearing masks was pretty much engrained up there. Come back to London and it's a different story. I don't want to go back into work, not at the moment. Putting up some Perspex screens around our desks doesn't even begin to address the issues that I have with going back, namely that there are about to be upwards of 900 snot nosed plague carriers returning to a cramped Victorian era building where you barely have enough room to breathe at the best of times. Working in a cramped office with up to nine other people, up three flights of stairs and only one entrance and exit into the office doesn't help either and the thought of returning to that while people are still dying from this and while parts of country are going in and out of lockdown is concerning to put it mildly. The other issue that I have is that I've been working in schools for coming on 18 years and I've always been aware that I get colds more often than a lot of people. It's got worse since I started this job and I suspect that's because of the conditions I've just described above. If someone does get infected with this virus, I think it would spread like wildfire.

The start menu has been hideously broken since Windows 8 came onto the market (some world say earlier but I liked the start menu in Win7). Windows 10 improved it a little over 8/8.1 but it’s still a huge dumpster fire, in my opinion. One of the Windows 10 betas had a really nice one but then they replaced it with the current abomination. It’s hard to imagine it being any worse than it is at the moment but Microsoft frequently find a way...

At work a Dell KM717 keyboard and a Logitech MX Master mouse. Not cheap but considering those are the bits of your computer which you actually touch, worth the money in my opinion

Cool, Quake 2 was my favourite of all the Quake games. I think that was pretty much the only ID game of that period that wasn’t a glorified tech demo...

Which is great if: A) you’re on a computer which can run PowerShell B) has a copy of the script handy C) you actually have the ability to develop that sort of thing in house. That thing just looks like a slightly prettier version of the LAPS UI, only developed in PowerShell. It still has pretty much all of the disadvantages of the LAPS UI. For the sake of £50 and ten minutes to install it, I have got a piece of software which can be accessed from any device on network (phones and tablets included) and which is supported by a friendly person at the company who wrote it. Frankly, even at the current price of £140, I find that to be good value.

I have a 1.6l mk4 Golf SE that’s old enough to vote. It’s still going but it’s starting to get very expensive and somewhat rattly. It’s my third Golf and my fourth car. I like them but I don’t know if I’d get another one, I’m a bit reluctant because I expect I’ll keep its replacement for at least ten years. My kid is 4 right now and it’s ok but he’s already tall for his age and the idea of him at 14 in the back of something that size doesn’t appeal. My ideal mid life crisis car would be a Scirocco, I like the 3rd gen one a lot. Shame they discontinued it.

For me, it’s hard to say. I don’t like going to BETT but I recognise its usefulness if you have something you need to look for. My own attendance last time was pretty last minute; I wasn’t originally planning to go but then decided to because I wanted to talk to firewall/filtering vendors. I expect that under normal circumstances I probably would have gone, albeit reluctantly but I may not have.

The trouble with visors is, they're not a replacement for a mask. They need to be used in conjunction with a mask otherwise there is a massive gap in underneath your face where droplets can escape. Having hearing difficulties myself and struggling to hear people behind Perspex screens, I'm more than sympathetic to your mum's plight but encouraging people to swap masks for visors isn't the way.

Ultimately, that’s how SIMS started as well. It started off being developed by teachers at a school in Luton. A teacher who I used to work with was part of the original team who started development on it. It’s why Bedfordshire schools has (or may still have, I don’t know) special licensing terms and pricing for SIMS. The sixth form college I used to work for sort of had its own MIS which the colleges IT director developed in Access, which ended up being a front end to a SQL database and to Correro. I’m still getting flashbacks about it, I’m sure @Roberto is as well.

What OS are the VMs going to run? You don’t need Windows 10 Enterprise if all you’re going to do is run Linux or another non-Windows OS in a VM, any free hypervisor including ESXi or the free version of HyperV Server will do the trick Regarding storage RAID is not a backup. RAID is about resiliency and uptime: should a disk fail, it won’t kill your service. Yes, you could restore from backup if a non-RAID disk failed but your service would be down from the time that the disk failed until you restored that backup. That could be a long time and you would lose any new data generated since the last backup run. Go SSD if you can afford it, especially if you’re running databases. There’s also no reason why you couldn’t get both and run some kind of storage tiering SAS vs SATA: there are features on SAS which aren’t in SATA but at the level we’re talking about, I don’t think they’re that important. The main advantage of SAS is its throughput, especially with SSDs but that might not come into part of your services aren’t heavy on the storage. SAS drives are usually enterprise level as well; they would have been certified for server workloads and have warranties to match. SATA drives, not so much. Amount of storage? I’d say at least 2TB. That’d cover your 400gb of data, the OS overhead and give you a bit of room to expand. One big RAID volume vs one for OS and one for data? I think that will depend entirety on the disks you end up choosing.

Those who use LAPS might find this useful: https://int64software.com/overlaps/ It's an HTTP interface for LAPS. If you need to get a local admin password for a PC and don't have the LAPS UI handy, you can use this software to retrieve it instead. I've installed the demo version and it looks pretty nifty. It's only £50 at the moment but the price is going up on the 10th so get it quickly if you think you'll find it useful!

I think the thing that's annoying me most about them is that I'm having to make sure I shave more often. I'm pretty lazy about shaving (can't blame that on lockdown, to be fair) and when I've let my facial fuzz grow out a bit, the mask starts to get very itchy. Like you, not using this as an excuse not to wear one, just saying why I find them annoying.

The website doesn't have a wage either.

What's the wage likely to be? "DOE" doesn't really tell me if it's worth my time considering this or not.

I went into the big Sainsbury's in Sydenham over the weekend. The vast majority of people were wearing masks but a distressing amount of people weren't wearing them properly. I'd say between 1/6 to 1/5 people in the shop didn't have their noses covered or had masks on over their chins instead of their faces. You may as well not bother putting them on if you're going to do that. If you're gonna wear 'em, wear 'em properly people.

For our lock screens, I took a slightly different approach. Like @DJ-1701, I have a PowerShell script which appends system information onto a graphic. I have several high-res versions of that graphic in different screen aspect ratios (4:3, 5:4, 16:9, 16:10, 3:2) which covers most of the screens we've got. When the script runs, it detects the resolution of the primary screen, works out the aspect ratio, shrinks the wallpaper with the appropriate aspect ratio down to the screen size and appends the system's information to it. It then saves the results in a folder on the PC's local hard drive. There is a scheduled task that runs this script. It gets run on startup, when a user logs on and when a user locks their PC. That scheduled task is pushed out by a GPP, as are the base wallpapers. I've set the "Force a specific default lock screen and logon image" GPO to the file that the script generates. It works well.

Good point, well made...