flyinghaggis

Just to resurrect this thread is there anywhere else still selling Windows 7 for under £65? Amazon seems to be the cheapest place for it just now. I also assume if I have a laptop with the 32-bit version of Windows Vista installed I'll still be able to upgrade it to the 64-bit version of Windows 7. I realise it obviously requires a format/full re-install but I take it there's nothing stopping me from doing it?

Hmm, well you can buy the upgrade version of home premium for around £50 if you shop around! Not to mention the fact that it's a full OS upgrade for the first time in over 3 years unlike a certain fruity themed manufacturer who will charge you £100 for every yearly .1 upgrade / service pack.

Agreed, really useful bit of software that does something which should (and used to be!) built into windows. Am I the only one that thinks it's a bit of a rip-off of the old program manager from windows 3.11 though

I've had man-flu all last week and I'm still feeling kind of under the weather However bad swine-flu is it's not a patch on man-flu

We had this happen on nearly all of our Optiplex GX270's. Turned out to be faulty capacitors in the PSU's. We had all of ours swapped under warranty for this problem in fact. I'd try changing the PSU for another one if you can.

Most of the printers on our print server (Windows Server 2008) are setup as generic TCP/IP ports (with a couple as WSD ports). All of the affected HP's are generic TCP/IP though.

Should have probably added it's failed on every network switch (3com/HP) we've plugged it into on our school network. The only time I've managed to get it not to fail for a couple of days was when I connected it to a standalone dumb 4-port netgear hub with only it and a single PC attached. Most clues seem to point to there being somekind of packet/protocol being recieved by the printer, when it's on our main network, that's causing it to fail but it's like trying to find a needle in a IP haystack. Whatever's causing the problem isn't affecting any other printers apart from the P2055's as far as I can see

Still having pain with these printers Turning off some of the protocols seems to improve things but it still often stops responding every couple of days. Noticed there's a new firmware available (20090430 (17 Jun 2009)) for the P2055DN's so I'm going to give this a shot to see if it resolves the problems. Has anyone else tried the firmware update?

Been contemplating buying one aswell. Looking at the specs at the moment it looks like the new model is the much better choice unless you're desperate to play around installing linux on it.

Right, I'm fed up drinking crappy coffee at home after getting used to the real deal at work [M&S Nicaraguan – it’s unbelievably awesome!] At the same time I can't really justify the effort involved in making ‘real’ coffee for just myself when I’m at home. Can anyone recommend me something that's a bit nicer than Nescafe? OR should I just stop being lazy and stick with the real stuff?

In a Word.....NO! We bought GBICS for an HP switch and despite us asking for official HP ones the company in question sent us generic unbranded modules. These fitted OK, looked identical and were the same model #, but the HP switch objected to the fact they weren't 'official' HP modules!!!!!

Aye, planning on putting the NAS on the same network switch (in the same Room) as the Video-editing PCs to cut down on traffic. We'll probably try and see if we can find a Gigabit switch as suggested (or at the very least a gigabit link for the NAS Server).

Cheers for the info. I was tempted to try a standard desktop PC with a SATA RAID 1 (2 Mirrored Disks) configuration but wasn't sure if it would be OK performance-wise for 20 users doing video editing simultaneously. How have you found it? As a side note how does the file serving performance of the FreeNAS server compare with a Windows Server 2008 (plus does it handle AD Intergration/NTFS Permissions OK)?

Do you know if there are any that can also do RAID 5?

We're setting up a video editing lab for 20 computers during the summmer and ideally we'd like them to have access to networked storage of some kind so pupils can work on a video project from any PC in that room. It would also make backing it up and recovering it easier aswell. We don't want to put it on our main file servers because of the size of space required and the fact that it'll affect other more critical facilities (home areas/user profiles/etc) I'm trying to decide on whether to get a dedicated NAS server or just build a PC/Server and fill it with disks. I think that given it will be used for video editing for up to 20 concurrent users it'll need to be relatively quick. It'll also need to be fault tolerant so I'm think RAID 5 is pretty much a given. Don't know if we'll need SAS/SCSI (10k/15k) drives or if we'll get away with SATA ones(7.2k)? We probably don't need a dedicated hi-spec server for the thing so even a modest spec desktop might be OK. Does anyone know if there's such a thing as a RAID controller that will fit in a regular desktop PC using SATA HardDrives? I'm trying to think if there's a cheaper way to do the above rather than spending a fortune on high end NAS servers which will probably be overkill for our needs? Has anyone tried to implement anything like the above?

One thing that caught us out the last time we looked at software restriction policies was that they don't nest together well if you have the software restriction GPO enabled on several policies that all take effect on a particular user. Ie. If you have a whole school all users software restrionion policy and one in a subfolder further down the tree where a PC is then you'll get very unpredictable results when policy is applied and the machine tries to combine both. Don't know if this is something you've got setup in your AD which might be the cause of the weirdness you're noticing? PS I'm not 100% sure SRP's can accept variablenames by the way ? We got all ours blocked on UNC paths and drive letters?

I haven't tried it in anger but I ran one on a mini-switch off our network for a day and it didn't fail so it doesn't appear to be a fault with the device. All of the printers in the last batch of 10 we ordered all seem to have the fault/feature so it's not a hardware fault with one or two of them at any rate and it's unlikely they'd all be physically faulty.

We've done a factory reset of the printer so everything's at it's default settings. We've tried it with manual and DHCP (static reservation in the scope) but the problem occurs with both. It's never actually lost it's IP settings (unlike our P2015s). The only issue is still just that it drops off the network after an indeterminate amount of time requiring a power cycle to fix.

Just to update this thread we've been running some more tests and it turns out it may not be enitirely HP's fault (though their tech support's about as much help as a chocolate teapot). We plugged the printer into a standalone network switch with only it and another PC connected and couldnt replicate the fault. So at the moment it's looking like it's some kind of randomly occuring traffic on our network that's causing the issue We've tried disabling all of the network management protocols on the printer apart from SNMP and the '9100' print services protocol both of which appear to be required. So far the printer's now lasted a week before apparently going offline (this has been mentioned to us by one of our staff but would like to confirm it's happening after witnessing it ourselves!). So the above seems to have improved the situation but we're still kind of in the dark as to the cause of the probem unfortunately. I ended up cancelling the return of the printer until we get a chance to run more tests just to confirm it's a fault with the printer and not something on our network. Given it may not necessarily be a fault with the printer they could potentially charge us for the return of it. At the same time I'm curious to see if they update the firmware or change the onboard NIC after returning it? They've not volunteered any of these solutions as a potential fix over the phone though. It's really frustrating because if it now only happens once a week it's going to be near impossible to diagnose the fault in anything like a workable time frame. That and it's a problem which isn't affecting any other printers apart from the P2055DN's So we've go 10 potentially dodgy printers, past the 30 day return window, and all HP's support can suggest is to reset the BIOS to factory defaults. I'll run some more checks as it looks like there might be some firewall settings on the printer which can limit communication to it for only a fixed number of IP addresses. If the above fails I guess we'll try returning one of the printers to HP to see if they can do anything with it? I'm feeling like I'm stuck in limbo here

I had this exact problem and it was caused by the Sophos IE plug-in web content Scanner. Fixed by stopping the Sophos Service, loading IE (which then worked), going into 'manage add-ons' and disabling the 'Sophos Web Content Scanner'. It's kind of odd because it was working OK before but a recent Sophos update seems to have broken it? I reckon your problem is probably caused by this or another IE plug-in not being compatible with IE8/Windows7

We're still on the hunt for a couple of these if any other resellers have them. Preferably new if possible but we'd also consider refurb kit aswell.

Well just spent 90 minutes trying to explain the problem to some 1st line numpty in an call centre who's flowchart obviously only went as far as doing a factory reset on the printer So basically 2 support calls and over 2 hours later I'm still at the point where I have to call back tomorrow being no further than I was on Friday. Worse still all the printers we've ordered are past their 30 day return policy of our supplier so all I can do now is to try and speak to HP support to find a fix! At the moment it's looking like either a firmware update or replacement of the onboard NICs in the printers are the only options! HP's support makes me want to cry

Could be something to do with the switch settings but we're not using 802.1x (or anything particulartly out of the ordinary) and the printers with the problem have been plugged into a varierty of different models/manufacturers of switch. They all still appear to suffer from the same problem which makes me think it's an issue with the printer rather than the switch. I've logged a call with HP so we'll see what they come back with? So far all they've suggested was to check the firmware's on the latest version (apparently it is!) and do a factory reset of the printer Guess I'll be calling them back on Monday so will update everyone on the situation then..............

Just unboxed a fresh P2055DN printer, configured it with an IP adress, node name and nowt else but even without setting up anyqueues to it (or even sending any jobs) the NIC on it's died after a couple of hours and wont respond to even a ping. Looks like it's something pretty fundamental going wrong with these printers so I'm gonna give HP a call and see what they say. Grrrr

I'd be tempted to send them back but we've opened a new building in our school and have about a dozen of the things now in use Sending them back (and re-configuring replacements) would be a huge job so I'm hoping there's a fix of somekind available. Out of curiousity what version of firmware do you have installed on them? Ours are on :- Firmware Datecode: 20081124 (Jetdirect Firmware Version:V.37.10.SD)