FishCustard

Indeed. And many of us have it explicitly in our job descriptions to advise SLT on technology, and ensure that the school's/organisation's use of technology follows best practices. Blindly implementing something technical that is far better done with policy meant that we wouldn't be doing our jobs.

It's the same Win32 programs, it's just the sales model that's different (and continuous updates).

I would ask to see the risk assessment the insurance company undertook for returning the PCs, and judge based on that. I agree that water damage isn't necessarily terminal.

Agreed. The idea you're being asked to implement is stupid.

When I worked in Secondary, we had giant clocks at the front of every exam room and asked students to remove wristwatches in the same manner as they had to hand in phones. I don't see the problem with that really.

Try swapping the PSU for one from a different brand and see what happens.

I believe the ones I encountered were Zoostorm Deltas as well...

Yes, I have. It's almost certainly caused by el cheap-o PSUs. What can happen is that while plugged in the capacitors in the bridge rectifier of the PSU can remain charged (even if the PC itself is off), leading to the PSU DC supply rails remaining energised. On cheapy ones, the over-current protection can trigger erroneously if the PC is turned on when the rails are energised (thus cutting the power). In one case this was down to the manufacturer reusing the OCP for the 12V rail for the 5V rail, stepping it down accordingly - the resulting circuit was (a) too sensitive, and (b) didn't discharge the capacitors quickly enough. You should be able to speed up the capacitor discharge by shorting the live and neutral pins of the connector on the back of the PC with something (be careful - if you end up in the circuit you can get a nasty jolt). TL;DR - cheapy PSUs, try swapping them out.

I would recommend getting some demonstration boards in from various suppliers for teachers to try out - it may well be that they will change their tune once they get hands-on with some other boards. Perhaps the IIYAMA ones really are problematic - I have no idea - or perhaps they just need to be eased into the change. Either way, a variety of demo units should help.

I've done a few "what-if" exercises to plan for the worst-case scenarios, but nothing formal. I was planning to contact all suppliers and ask them about their readiness, but I might wait to see if the current parliamentary shenanigans look like they'll have an impact...

@synaesthesia - check your switches for CRC errors. We had a new network that was flooded with them, turns out the DACs they'd used were too long - for some reason our switches couldn't cope with anything above 3m.

Generally okay for the first day back, although we had people moaning that they've been promoted (e.g. LSA -> TA) and want their staff cards reprinted. Our response of "sorry, we don't have enough spare cards to re-print for people who already have working ones, can you ask us next week once the order has been delivered?" didn't go down very well with some people. To quote one, "but it's important, I want it done today!".

Yeah, that's probably it. I wonder whether there are technical barriers to doing so (e.g. massive amount of development time needed), or if it was just a cost-saving exercise!

Hmmm interesting. I assumed that the phone just emulated whatever the card did.

You are right, but it seems that the banks cannot distinguish between a phone-pay transaction and a regular contactless one, and therefore are treating them all as the low-security variant. It makes sense from an infosec point of view - the best route forward would be to find a way to separate phone-pay from contactless cards.

While I'll never say no to additional (reasonable!) fraud prevention measures, I can't deny that this is going to be very annoying.

It does? Huh I never noticed that / it didn't have it when I used it before. Will give it a go!

Just have one monolithic window rather than loads of little ones - pleeeease?

This is the way I intend to drag things - the "PCs as furniture" bit is already done, as is issuing classroom cameras.

Sorry, I wasn't clear - my surprise is that so many devices are being sold with Windows 10 S mode as standard. I thought it was a bit of a flop and a non-entity.

I think this is the most surprising part of this whole saga - then again it doesn't really matter any more which "mode" you get as you can switch to "full-fat" Windows easily.

You could also create different templates at the various sizes people want, as long as it's not too many (e.g. A3, A4, A5?).

Is it "Vss.WaitForBackupDocsToBeFlushed", because I'm getting that too - currently trying to figure out why it's suddenly started failing.

What is the end-product here - a template for users to fill in to keep signage consistent (great idea if so!) Have you tried importing a SVG image into Publisher and checking if it retains its scalability?

Hmm, having departmental offices or workrooms makes sense. My concern with that sort of route is what about teaching support staff who don't "belong" to a particular department - they may well need out-of-class PC time too, to say nothing of a place to have a cup of tea! Anyway, shutting up before I spend my remaining days as something you'd find in a pond... *ribbit*