PiqueABoo

Never underestimate stupidity. Logon takes you into desktop, with Server manager, but it is essentially the same Metro pain, just without lots of consumer Apps.

There's an MS blog somewhere that talks about a SkyDrive for Desktop in the works, which adds it into Explorer on Vista and Win7.

Centrally hosted as opposed to your own Exchange might be a sticky point (that's been overlooked in most responses). If time is short and account syncing, integrated passwords aren't that essential you can copy mailboxes to live@edu without OLsync etc. via a Staged Migration where you create the users in live@edu via a CSV, then use the ECP to migrate them via a similar CSV. But you need that Exchange 2007 system to be nicely configured for Outlook Anywhere (RCP/HTTP) with a cert from a recognised CA and you need an account that's got Full Access to all your source Exchange 2007 mailboxes. ["recognised" roughly means any CA that MS have in the Windows cert store by default or via their root cert updates] Disclaimer: There is a live@edu Service Update in progress that promises a new improved migration dashboard that might turn up sometime (ETAs for updates are not very predicatable). There is no reason to think the new features will break what has been possible to date, but until I've used it...

Or powershell Having done it via DOS command line for the last two Windows releases I struggled a bit with the GUI DC (new forest) making.. a lot of warnings to ignore that I didn't immediately know you could just ignore re. DNS when you've ticked the AD DNS etc. Did previous Server Mangler have the Tools pull-down menu? Only that pretty much saves you from having to go near the Metro start menu. [Doesn't save me from thinking it's all a bit of a UI mess though] At a glance quite a bit of Win8 CP group policy to play with and Preferences haven't vanished (well you never know).. there's even GPP for IE 10 & 11 Active Directory Administrative Center.. will that be Centre when we get proper English? Powershell via a browser (PSWA) Microsoft Online Backup Service (takes you to Connect beta page) in Windows Backup

For Server GUI install I can confirm it doesn't. When you logon you get the Desktop and of course Server Manager with a few new bells & whistles and a dash of TPB (touch-pixel-bloat) , otherwise the UI is much the same as the client version - just without any Metro Apps on the Metro start menu. Some interesting new roles/features to explore .. or at least I think they're new! Data Deduplication for instance.

I'll be using that space to pin an icon either with "Start" written on it or a curiously close resemblance to the Win7 start button if I have to make significant use this OS on a desktop/laptop (what I was essentially trying to do last night)

Suits me Akshully haven't they promised some intermediate server version, 1/2 way between core and full GUI and said that's what we should use?

No .Net 3.5 although it volunteered to download and install that 'feature' for me.. and actually managed to do it after a few tries saying the net was broken despite IE thinking otherwise... sadly my very own start menu-like app I was getting that for so I could nail it to the desktop taskbar in lieu of a start menu doesn't like Windows 8 (shell32 interop or LNK format changes or something I can't be asked to go debug). With a mouse in one hand flipping back and forth to metro via a Windows key, r-clicking and then clicking All Apps to get to a useful start menu doesn't work for me either, and no end of psuedo-erudite-spin-waffle from MS about how Exciting It Is[tm] will make me happy about being forced to work with two very different interfaces on PC/Laptop. Oh.. so there is a Windows key alternative.. for me it's throw your mouse pointer *below* (off screen) the left hand corner then left-click, so you might be out of luck with a stylus.

If I had that option I wouldn't take it - far better if the link provider controls the kit at both end i.e. when the link is broken there can be no argument about whose fault it is and who gets to fix it.

You might not have public folders (installing that is optional), but I think that's the easiest way to get what you want.

I'm on GDs apparently reasonable side e.g. what subnet goes on that little LAN and how does that get routed to your school, or will they have to NAT that bit and how does that fit with what happens with the main LAN and so on and so forth - it isn't necessarily straight-forward. I guess you can get links without managed routers, but I haven't ever been near a commercial link in this country where I could play with the router that one way or another the org has paid for. "Carnage" springs to mind. Doing what customers want isn't often a winning strategy, figuring out what they really want and suggesting a solution with some finesse is usually much better.

Some AD ubergeekery that *might* be relevant and has explained a Very Great & Perplexing Mystery[tm] for me in the past: If you find a normal user where the AD Inherit permissions tick box is clear then look at the adminCount attribute on the user object. If that's 1, then that will usually explain why the tick box is clear and you must set that attribute to 0, otherwise any tick you put in the Inherit permissions box will be automagically cleared again. If you want to find users where adminCount =1, make an ADUC custom query where the advanced tab LDAP query is: (objectcategory=person)(samaccountname=*)(admincount=1) ** eliminate the space this forum puts in the word "admincount" ** Don't do this to Admin accounts without Googling, in fact Google first regardless. Here's some relevant MS info about AdminSDHolder, protected groups and SDPROP to get you started. In my world this has *always* been about Orphaned AdminSDHolder Objects i.e. someone temporarily put user accounts in a privileged group for some reason or other.

Where to start? As some from the umm.. "dark side" (Computer Engineering) I think I'm missing DOS & serial ports. Reason: You could get a minute amount of x86 assembly to send data out of a serial port and if the other end of that is something shiny that does pixels then you've covered a lot of fundamental territory at a nearly direct level, which might be a good thing to do *before* diving into the relatively abstract-from-computer high-level stuff. I'm not a teacher though so that might be *very bad*, but I do think some stuff needs to be learnt before you throw high-level programming at folk. On "graphical": Sprogette played with Scratch a lot until I gave her Kodu which was from her perspective, a lot more fun because of the 3D etc. The problem with that is Scratch is clearly closer to real programming languages than Kodu.

Was about to say this is something I've done in the dim distant past with a teensy Linux running off a floppy on something like a 486 with a few NICs. Have forgotten everything I knew about iptables syntax, but it will work.

Firefox merely being the most recent in a very long line of PITA file assocation grabbing apps. One of the more useful things about GPPs I hadn't noticed but someone posted here a while ago is that you can use them to set (or reset) specific file associations for users.

(Yes) Win32_PhysicalMemory::Capacity tells you about the size of each memory module, so you loop through them all and add it up. Or perhaps report them independently if you want to know what is in there without taking the lid off and looking.

Are you sure this isn't just the standard drive capacity thing i.e. to a drive vendor a GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes, NOT 1,073,741,824 bytes? Oh hang on.. all the above examples are using logical disks. To get physical drive sizes: "Select * from Win32_DiskDrive"

Variation on the XP theme and equally irksome. I doubt they need 4.5, that's a choice. Considering the vast amount of money we were told in some report a year or so ago (1/2 *billion* over 5 years wasn't it?) that they make in that secondary public sector role, you'd have thought they might be able to fund keeping a couple of versions working for a while i.e. legacy and latest.. there are lots and lots of examples of other software vendors, including of course Microsoft who do that.

Forget whether this is just XP: WMI CPU queries can mess up on some multi-core systems e.g. for a dual you sometimes see one that's OK and the other will be a Pentium III or something, but there is a KB with a patch. Also don't recall why I did this, it might have been the previous issue, but in something I wrote years and years ago I used WMI for getting nearly all the inventory data I wanted except for the CPU name which I got from the entry for the first logical processor here: HKLM\HARDWARE\DESCRIPTION\System\CentralProcessor\0\ProcessorNameString

Slight tangent but many years ago GPMC arrrived and it came with some scripts: One will export full AD config (users, groups, memberships, OU structure, AD permissions, GPOs inc GPPs) to an XML file plus sysvol-like folders for the GPOs, and another will import all of that into a fresh DC. Still works on 2008 R2.

Line 1593? That's a lot of lines for a script and what's it there for on a CC4?

I'll likely get the one-step removed gist of what they're doing at that school by-and-by, but I don't have and I'm not likely to get hold of details - it's a brave new world where the work that county puts into these kind of things cost schools money. I know the reason that school are getting external help is essentially because they know ICT is supposed to change and kids must not get bored doing office type apps, but haven't got a clue how or the time to get one themselves. I think the reason they don't know is because AFAICT you can do anything provided it's the right kind of anything.. something that hasn't been well-defined by the DfE.. it's all going to take shape in a collaborative 'open source' way, or fairies will leave notes about it under your pillow, or something. Finger on the pulse GD might be some help at this point.

This probably isn't helpful but the difficulty is that ICT is a perhaps justifiably dirty acronym now tainted by association with stuff the DfE apparently wants disappeared (use a kiddy spreadsheet, use a kiddy word processor, use a kiddy database, use a this, use a that). I think the idea is to have kids understanding some of the principles technology is based on... the basic science... a bit of binary (geddit?)... what an algorithm is etc. Or something like that. T'other 1/2 is a KS2 teacher and recently told me her school is buying in to a new teaching 'framework' put together by county I[C]T curriculum folk so I'll likely know more soon. Bottom line: I'm no expert, but right now I think you need to be careful what you spend money on in this area because it could turn out to be depreciated.

Naah.. it's not Capita's place to arrogantly (there is no better word) shrink Microsoft's life-cycle, if anything they should be supporting XP until say summer 2014 to give the terminally stupid/poor a chance to sort themselves out. PS: How much tax-payers money do they earn from SIMS? [Rhetorical]

Whatever works. For thread posterity I've just found the (retired) KB for what I described: How To Renew or Create New Certificate Signing Request While Another Certificate Is Currently Installed