flyinghaggis

Cheers for the reply's guys. I've tried it with SP2 but it's still not connecting before logon for some reason. Not sure if it's because of the intel software still retaining some setting or it there's an option i need to tick to tell it to somewhere. I'll give the intel pre-logon another go and see if this works any better. Don't you just hate it when you thnk something's going to be really easy to get working and turns into a total nightmare! Also how many clients do you thing it's safe to run from 1 54Mb wifi point. We were hoping that one would be enough for a lab of 20 laptops but I'm not so sure about how well it'll handle it. Certainly looking at the numbers (54mb/20 laptops = 2.7Mb each!) it doesn't look promising :? Has anyone else used wireless for an entire lab and how many access points did you end up using

Hi People, I'm using a laptop that's got an intel 2200 centrino wireless card and It's got the latest version on the software on it running windows xp sp1. The problem i've got at the moment is that the intel software controlling the wireless does't connect until a user logs on. This means that no user can logon unless they've used the laptop whilst it's been connected to the network via ethernet previosly and their logon credentials have been cached! Has anyone else encountered the same problem? I think installing SP2 might solve the problem as i've been told it offers native support for WPA encryption and it should autostart on PC bootup. I don't want to use the Windows to control the wireless settings as it only appears lets me use WEP encryption which is a waste of time. Can anyone confirm if WPA works ok with sp2 or suggest a way of working around the problem with the Intel Software? TIA 8)

Agreed. Would be great if we could bring some "pressure" on software vendors to provide their software in MSI format to could be easily customised and deployed.

I think that main problem is that most of the people coding software don't have much knowledge of how their software is going to be used in a locked down network environment where users have very limited access and don't stick to recommended standards because it saves them time writing the app. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be a problem limited to only educational software companies (though they tend to be some of the worst offenders). There's been couple of times when companies have actually asked us which permissions/keys needed to be changed to get their software running as a non-admin user 8O Thankfully the situations slowly getting better as schools move towards XP and having users without full admin priveledges becomes the norm. It would be lovely to see more companies thinking about providing MSI packages for their products though as it saves us months of man-hours each year. Also keeps the teachers happy as it means they can have their software days after they get it delivered instead of weeks.

We testing this on ISA 2004 just now. Seems to work really well. Lets you easily specify which users/groups can get access to which type's of file downloads.

We've had problems with their software aswell. A lot of which plugs into the Granada Toolkit software aswell. Looks like they've just taken something from windows 3.11 and recompied it, badly, to get it working under XP. We're still stuck in the situation where two of Granada's programs don't work at all as they try to copy files into C:\windows\ and fail to let you load/save documents if they can't do it. Goes without saying that opening up read/write access for all users to C:\windows\ or granting them power user access like Granada suggest isnt an option! Spoke to their support 2 years ago and they promised us they were going to rewrite/patch it. Still Waiting........ Sorry excuse for a software company IMO

Another vote for Robocopy 8) Used it last time we had to do this and it's brilliant. Much faster than using NTBackup which would have been our next option.

Every 3rd section of data written to the disk would be corrupt so even if you manage to recover some of the files they're likely to all be full of missing data from the dead drive :? Unless you can somehow recover the data from the dead drive I don't think you'll manage to piece together anything useful.

We've been looking at ways to do this to save power/rollout software and to stop problems with files being skipped when our backup runs (due the users leaving themselves logged on all night with documents open). That and it'll stop people from leaving desktop PC's up for months without ever rebooting them! We've looked at using sysinternals PSShutDown running as a script from the server/locally and also considered deploying a scheduled task to the client workstations (via wininstall) but wondered if anyone else had any suggestions for the best way to go about doing this?

We'll probably have a play with it when it's out later this year to see what extra's it offers but won't consider deploying it anywhere 'in the wild' until the the next server release of Longhorn is out. Likely to be summer 2008 until we go live with it 8O Hadn't given much thought to office 12 but we'll have to decide whether to wait until we move to Vista or to deploy it before then (we're on Office XP at the moment). Also depends on how much the Computing staff moan about having to re-write documentation

This is pretty much the same conclusion I came to. Citrix would only work is it mean't that it saved us time deploying software/OS's and installing devices on local PC's but if we can't move over 75% of our clients onto it then I don't think it'll actually save us time as we'll simply end up installing applications on both terminal servers and windows clients thereby generating more work! I guess it would save us money on PC refurb costs. The thing is the cost of citrix seems to work out pretty much the same as the cost of our PC refurbishment each year (if not more). I think there might mileage in moving some of our departments accross onto native windows terminal servers though. I'm sure there's a place for thin clients on our network though!

Mine's DeathHaggis NB I wouldn't risk challenging Zerohour at Project Gotham 3. He's either cheating or he's been playing it 24/7. Probably the latter though

Cheers for the info guys 8) We've been looking into Citrix but it seems expensive for what it does over and above MS Terminal Server. That and we're not sure if it would be viable to move all of our clients accross to it. Don't really want to end up in a situation where half our clients are Citrix based and half are normal PC's.

Quick couple of questions regarding Citrix Thin client setups:- 1) How well does Citrix cope when it comes to running multimedia applications. Flash-based stuff and movie/sound files? We've tried running these on windows terminal server and noticed that they can be very resource intensive (eg streaming full screen video,etc). Does Citrix work better than native windows terminal server when it comes to things like this? 2) Does Citrix offer any kind of support for local devices that would usually connected directly to client PC's (memory sticks,scanners, camera's,etc)? Any info or links to useful sites would be appreciated