jthompson

I presume that one of the main reasons for having a young driver programme in the first place is to identify and promote drivers through lower formulae such that when they end up your F1 team(s) you're confident enough in their ability that you can commit to them, and not be half in/out unsure of their ability. With the exception of Verstappen, Red Bull seem unable to commit to any of their drivers. Their young driver programme seems to be training drivers for their competitors more than anything. Yuki Tsunoda has fared best, arguably, in that he's been in that seat for several years, but I get the sense that RBR have only done so reluctantly (because Honda?).

On the one hand, this reeks of a team thrashing about and being powered by internal power struggles as much as anything else. On the other hand, the degree to which this demonstrates a commitment to not doubling down on a mistake is almost admirable. At this point, I don't know why they don't just rotate their non-title-contender drivers during a season as a matter of course, and run the team more like a grand tour cycling team, where domestiques are rotated about to support the effort of a single GC rider.

Obviously, I'm going to want to write a response that hilariously makes it look like I'm an AI bot. So, I copied your post into duck.ai and it gave me this: All fine I suppose, but I wanted to see if it could seem more EduGeek-like. I asked it to sound a little more "British and irreverent": I'm just surprised it didn't chuck in a joke about bad teeth.

I take your point: it all makes sense, particularly thinking through the reality of what "it suddenly isn't stable on this model any more" would actually mean in a school day. I guess my preference for the more recent OS is that if we're running that as broadly as possible, then we're more easily able to keep all of the app deployments, tweaks and various end user support idiosyncrasies current. There may also be some inherant security advantages, even if the hardware is below spec (idk). That comes from sticking with Win 7 way too long in the past, and having to reinvent a tonne of stuff to make a jump to Win 10.

Isn't the wording though "supported operating system" or "supported software"? I don't recall a question about "supported hardware", but iirc a list of hardware is being asked for. "Supported operating system" then becomes something that can be argued either way, so I'm just wondering if anyone, after submitting their declarations and list of hardware, has encountered a problem. I'd rather run Win 11 than LTSC 2019, so would only go about deploying LTSC if it were needed for CE accreditation (or obviously if Win 11 were to get broken in some way).

Still hoping that someone can confirm from experience whether or not running Win 11 on pre-8th gen hardware results specifically in a CE accreditation failure.

I think we've got pleeenty of time to come to a decision on this 🙂

Before I achieve the rank of Grand Master, I'm hoping that it'll be renamed to Elite. Or maybe Ace Rimmer. Anyway, something with some Brit sci-fi charm.

I must admit to never having heard of most of those, but in the case of Grindylow that's probably a good thing!

Do you have accounts being managed by an exam officer at all? If so, check that the email address for the affected user matches up with what the EO has in their dashboard. Also, trying this stuff in a private browsing window is always a good idea, in case of wonky browser cookies/cache, etc.

Maybe someone who suffered a nasty accident/injury, with some surgery after the fact? A blurring of the lines between surgery and injury.

Further to the responses above, I think it's also sensible to add the built-in domain Administrator account (i.e. DOMAIN\Administrator) and local built-in Adminstrator to the following Group Policy options: Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / User Rights Assignment / Deny access to this computer from the network Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / User Rights Assignment / Deny log on as a batch job Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / User Rights Assignment / Deny log on as a service Windows Settings / Security Settings / Local Policies / User Rights Assignment / Deny log on through Terminal Services

KeePassXC here (Windows, Mac and KeePassDX on Android), with some key break-glass stuff on paper in a sealed envelope in the safe. The only downside is lack of decent browser integration, which I don't mind too much tbh.

We've never found that we've need to do anything extra to get Win11 to install on our older hardware. If we point it at MDT, it works and keeps itself up to date (thus far), so it doesn't appear that we have to actively bypass or hack anything to get it running. The CE thing is interesting, since I interpret their wording on running a supported OS as being an OS that's still within its product lifecycle (e.g. you're not running Server 2008 still) and has the most recently published updates installed (i.e. you're not holding back updates for too long). Can anyone confirm that CE will fail specifically because an otherwise supported and up to date OS is running on older hardware? Asking for a friend.

Yep, designed for education and it shows. It's almost as if the people behind it looked at schools and thought "Hmm. All the users move about the place every hour to do different things. The computers need to have almost instant startup and sign-in, be shared devices first and foremost and have unobtrusive, bullet-proof, hands-free updates". Windows has a distinctly different disposition to that (assumption of a single, all-day-each-day user who can work around massive, work-blocking updates).

It was a similar situation with Windows 10, although nobody seemed to worry about that in the same way. Has anyone failed Cyber Essentials for running Windows 10 on a 4th gen (i.e. below Win 10 stated requirements)? (serious question).

If they were forced to sell it, presumably the plan would be to release a completely different Google-account-orientated Chromium-based browser as soon as possible.

I'm assuming that nobody would (could?) buy it, rather it would be spun off into a separate company underneath Alphabet. Hopefully Chrome OS and Chrome browser are sufficiently distinct codebases now that this doesn't throw up the possibility of ChromeOS ending up bought and enshittified.

FYI, once you've got Canva set up for your school, you can get the Affinity suite (alternatives for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) for free, too. https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/affinity-canva-free-for-schools/

Report parameters such as effective date can be passed as an XML file. If you can work out a way to programmatically adjust the XML file before then running the report, you're golden. I've done it using python in the past, but would probably look to use PowerShell for updating a date value in an XML file. You'll first need to generate a paramters XML file from your report, which you can then use thereafter as the basis for generating new ones. You can obtain it by running commandreporter with the /PARAMDEF option. For example: "C:\Program Files (x86)\SIMS\SIMS .net\CommandReporter.exe" /SERVERNAME:blah /DATABASENAME:sims /TRUSTED /REPORT:"My Report" /PARAMDEF /OUTPUT="parameters.orig.xml"

Sometimes the margins are so fine aren't they, between a technology being shrugged off or becoming an unavoidable de-facto standard? All that Skype needed was a global outbreak of a novel respiratory virus in about 2004 rather than 2020, and it would've been golden! Oh, wait. There was one?! Maybe Skype was just too s**t.

I don't have a list, but there'll obviosuly be some URLs that need to be allowed in order for machines to communicate with and donload from the Windows Update online services. Whether that's different from what WSUS would've required anyway, I've no idea. This is a list of URLs needed for a WSUS server, so maybe that's a decent place to start? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2008-R2-and-2008/cc708605(v=ws.10)?redirectedfrom=MSDN#to-configure-your-firewall

That's how I have my server WUFB GPO set (with the only difference being that I have the target version as not configured, rather than configured as "none"). Do test it against a 2019 server, though (spin up a temp 2019 server if you want). Certainly none of mine have ever attempted to upgrade themselves. Another option might be to set "Computer Configuration → Policies → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Windows Update → Specify source service for specific classes of Windows Updates" such that feature updates are sourced from WSUS rather than Windows Update. I don't think you'll need to, but hey.

I don't specify any target version in the server GPOs. I leave it as Not configured and they're fine. They won't upgrade to the next version (i.e. a Server 2019 won't attempt to upgrade to Server 2022, etc.). That's been the case for the last year, at least, and I've never had any of them attempt their own in-place upgrade. All the in-place upgrades have been manual by me. You'll want to test your GPO,though, obvs. Looking a bit more online, there's also this article - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/manage-feature-updates-group-policy#disable-the-windows-server-2025-feature-update - which suggests leaving "Which Windows product version would you like to receive feature updates for?" blank and setting "Target Version for Feature Updates" to "hold". The version numbers in your WMI filters look fine. Server 2022 is always going to be version 10.0.20348.xxxx, likewise for the others. The numbers look more specific than for Win10/11, but the % wildcards are the thing. Win11 23H2 is 10.0.22631.xxxx and 24H2 is 10.0.26100.xxxx.

WUFB works for servers in terms of the actual updating, GPO options, etc., but the reporting side of things (aka "Windows Update for Businsess reports") only shows client systems, not servers. To monitor/report your servers' updates, you'd have to work out some other way. Our inventory system (GLPI) collects OS details which includes the OS build number, so we can determine the status of the monthly cumulative updates from that. For instance, the build number for Server 2022 with the most recent CU applied (Feb 2025) is 20348.3207, whereas the previous month's build was 20348.3091. Another option is Azure Update Manager for your on-prem servers, using Azure Arc to get them to appear in Azure. That used to be free for on-prem servers, but now isn't. In terms of Win10 and keeping it from updateing to 11, set up some WMI filters in Group Policy and have a Win10 WUFB GPO scoped to the Win10 WMI filter, and a Win11 WUFB GPO scoped to the Win11 WMI filter. The key option in the GPO(s) is going to be "Computer Configuration → Policies → Administrative Templates → Windows Components → Windows Update → Windows Update for Business → Select the target Feature Update version". Set that accordingly in your Win10 and Win11 WUFB GPOs and you should be golden. For the WMI filters, use: Windows 10 Namespace: root\CIMv2 Query: select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where ((Version like "10.0.1%") and (ProductType="1")) Windows 11 Namespace: root\CIMv2 Query: select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where ((Version like "10.0.2%") and (ProductType="1"))