FishCustard

Never understood why some schools insist on having the surname capitalised in SIMS...

Same here! It's the only place on site with AC, so we're very popular today!

Yup, have done this. Best to use a high output LED torch.

Agreed. If a user is a regular, standard user, and your file permissions on things like shared folders are set correctly, there's no risk. The only reason I'd get rid of Cortana is that it might confuse some staff who would wonder why their computers are talking to them. I'm going to see how it goes before doing that if necessary.

Create a shortcut with the following target explorer.exe shell:MyComputerFolder There's a whole list of special folders here: https://ss64.com/nt/shell.html

I don't understand why they'd have a problem with encrypted USB drives (obviously a secure upload area would make more sense, but that would require... *gasp* ingenuity!). Send drives, send password/key separately, put them together the other end.

Is it bad that I might actually use this...

Now to train all the staff to use it to prevent our server getting full of pointless 10 minute 300 MB MOV files....

100% legit. I have purchased from them, many times.

Hahaha. Time flies when combining fish, custard and, er... time travel.

If they're not x86_64 (and therefore cannot run Windows) I won't be buying one! I have a Macbook so that I can get the best of both worlds. Sure I could hack macOS onto a regular laptop, but I also like the build quality of the Macbooks - that won't be nearly enough to keep me buying them if they're macOS only though. Then again, I doubt Apple would care as people like me aren't their core demographic. I also wholly agree about x86 though - it hasn't really kept up. It's also something of an oddball in terms of architecture - it became popular almost by accident rather than because it was technically superior. If Apple's offering is ARM based, and Windows 10 ARM can run on that - cool, I'm all for it.

I had them cleaning keyboards (under supervision to prevent idiocy) at my last job.

Could try using psexec to run procmon.exe, see what comes up?

Two-part epoxy - Glue a connector to the chain & remote?

Yeah, try the procmon route - it'll create a file that you can retrieve via the admin share (\\unc\c$).

Anything interesting in the event log? If not - Process Monitor and a boot trace should tell you what's going on: https://www.msigeek.com/6231/how-to-enable-system-boot-time-logging-using-process-monitor-tool

This is a perfect use case for the Selenium browser automation kit - https://www.seleniumhq.org/ There are loads of example scripts on the web for this sort of thing - Selenium WebDriver how to find broken links, https://www.guru99.com/find-broken-links-selenium-webdriver.html Most of them are Java - there are also Python bindings for Selenium (Selenium with Python — Selenium Python Bindings 2 documentation) if you prefer (like I do! )

Yup, this'd be my recommendation too. You can use a Chromebit (note not a Chromecast) if you don't have any half-dead Chromebooks.

Can confirm, much cackling was heard in summer 2013.

Nothing wrong with that at all. I use MDT to deploy an image like you do, then GPO/PowerShell scripts/SCCM deploys everything else. Could look into that to further automate things.

Absolutely - no access until their official start date, unless the Head explicitly approves. How I've always done it.

Hahaha same here.

But then you won't be fashionable! Last season's ones might look very slightly different!

Hmm, fair enough if SIMS auth is that bad. No lockout so people can just try as many credentials as they want against the server as fast as they can? Okay, they'd need to be on the network to do so but still.... eeehhhh! The whole (not) locking of PCs when people walk away is a separate issue that opens up a whole load more security holes.

Agreed, which is why I recommended generating passwords for the users. Although as you say, the attack surface here is limited.