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Hello, We've had this issue for at least three years, but never found the root cause so I'm seeing if anyone happens to have a magic wand lying around. Basically sometime in June, usually earlier rather than later, we will find that our two secondary DCs start hitting 100% CPU and everyone on those servers struggles to login at the start of lessons. 15 minutes into the lesson and everything will generally settle down until the next lesson. This might go on for a few days, despite rebooting all DCs, then disappear again. We only ever get this in June time, possibly into July, then when kids come back in September it is never a problem. It usually affects our PC-based language exams, so we moved their user accounts onto the FRDC which isn't usually affected, but the problem only started today this year. I can't think of any date-based / season-based reason for this? I had a theory at one point that it was Art using loads of large PSDs in whichever module they teach at this time of the year, but I've discounted that. Any suggestions, however daft they sound, welcomed! Peter

Friends of my technician did this last weekend. Well on track, completed first two, driving down (M6?). Huge accident, road closed and massive diversion. By the time they arrived, they had I think 2 hours left to do the last peak. Most gave up, but 2 of the fittest decided to RUN it - they succeeded and arrived back with minutes to spare, and promptly collapsed in a heap - mad!

We don't use this option for shutting down PCs (we use PSShutdown on a schedule at the moment) but I just want to check you are understanding the schedule correctly. If you have just ticked 16:30 in the schedule, then this is the only timeslot the schedule will be active for - which if you've fine-tuned it will be a 5 minute timeslot. It isn't a scheduled task which occurs once at 16:30. I suspect you don't have your PCs set to shutdown after 5 minutes idle time? I'll assume for the purposes of this post that you have them set to 10 minutes. Therefore between 16:30 and 16:35, you're policy is saying 'if anything has been inactive for more than 10 minutes, shut it down'. But as the inactivity timer only starts running at 16:30, it is impossible for anything to have been idle for 10 minutes by the time you get to 16:35. The schedule then switches off at 16:35 and nothing has happened. You would need to have your schedule active from 16:30 to at least 16:40, but more likely 07:00 or some suitable time in the morning; then any PC which has been idle for 10 minutes at any stage overnight will shutdown. Is this how you've understood it? Peter

Admin > Power Management (within the 'Admin Tools' section)

Slightly upside down here - IT Techs wear office smart (shirt, trousers, shoes). I'm NM but also in charge of AV and our theatre, so I have 'Technician' polo shirts with school logo for when I'm running public events - but I wear them daily unless I'm meeting suppliers etc. Smart trousers and shoes except for main rigging/derigging days for the big school shows. Anything goes in the holidays. - - - Updated - - - Slightly upside down here - IT Techs wear office smart (shirt, trousers, shoes). I'm NM but also in charge of AV and our theatre, so I have 'Technician' polo shirts with school logo for when I'm running public events - but I wear them daily unless I'm meeting suppliers etc. Smart trousers and shoes except for main rigging/derigging days for the big school shows. Anything goes in the holidays.

Russ, Did you solve this - I installed VirtualBox on my PC last week to start making an image to deploy for programming, and Impero started playing up at that time but I hadn't realised why; I deployed it to my Technician yesterday and he immediately started moaning! I've disabled the VirtualBox network adapter which has fixed it, but just wondered if there's another way? Peter

D'oh, no sooner do I post this than I find the answer. Chapter9.Advanced topics It's chapter 9.19. Locking down the VirtualBox manager GUI that contains the settings, not chapter 8.26. VBoxManage getextradata/setextradata. Peter [Edit: It also helps if I refresh this thread after I've posted, in order to see your response, before I re-post.... ]

Hi, Just wondering how you found all those setextradata parameters out? I've read the manual online and in Help, but I can't find anywhere that it tells you each of the parameters you can use? Google isn't giving me much either, other than a few examples. Peter

Morning all, Spent a couple of days playing with this here. SmartInk was moaning about the Powerpoint addin not being found, and trying to enable the addin in Powerpoint failed with either a DotNet error, or trying to find libUsageTracking.dll To cut a long story short, after two days of testing, we have discovered we didn't have the "Visual Studio tools for Office Runtime" pre-requisite installed on our PCs. If you downloaded the smartesi2013xxxadmin.zip from the IT Administrators download area of Smarttech.com, it SHOULD be in the /Support folder (vstor40_x86.exe) but the version I downloaded (v11.3 in September 2013) didn't have; if you download the 11.4 download now, it does have the files there. You can run them with /q to silently deploy, and you don't need to redeploy Smartboard afterwards. Once that is installed, the Powerpoint addin lets staff users enable it if it isn't already; this prompts them to install the SmartInk VSTO (which is in the location below) which it lets them do with staff permissions. I'm about to read the link above about enabling com addins by GPO to see if that will sort out the final step, but I don't have a problem showing the affected staff how to do it manually. Peter

Whilst there are 6 unlicensed VHF frequencies that can be used for Radio Mics, I believe you can usually only fit four in without intermodulation (ie without affecting each others' signal). The 6 are 173.800, 174.000, 174.200, 174.400, 174.600 and 175.000 but I can't remember which four I used to use. The unlicensed frequency band for UHF (called Band F or colloquially Channel 70) is 863-865mhz. I regularly use four Audio Technica 3000 series radio mics in this band on channels 863.375, 863.875, 864.125 and 864.625. You can then buy a Shared UHF license (£175 for 2 years as given above) which allows you to use any of the 11 specific Band U (Channel 38) frequencies between 606-614mhz. This doesn't guarantee non-interference as any other local group can buy the same license. Or you can buy a co-ordinated UHF license which guarantees you sole access to the specific frequencies in the band you apply for - we use 8 frequencies in Band C (Channel 30). Between my Church and our school theatre, we use 23 Audio Technica 3000 series radio mics. 4 on Band F (Ch70), 11 on Band U (Ch38) and 8 on Band C (Ch30). We share each others mics for the larger events as I'm technician for both venues. Peter

Any chance that member of staff could copy you into the emails, then you know you've a file to go and find and upload?

Just thinking about this a bit further. Currently if I search for a full name ("Peter Howarth") it very often only returns one result. When selecting people manually, if the name on the list I've been given matches with one result only, I take that as being the correct person and use it. I have been wrong once, as James somebody should have been Jamie but it happened to match another student called James, but that's not my problem if I'm given inaccurate names. Therefore the bulk of your 'complex matching criteria' is already written - just pass each name in the list through your existing search code; if one result is returned, use it. If more than one is returned, but there is a form given and it matches, use that. Then you just have those with multiple or non-matches to deal with; probably the easiest method is to populate the search box with each unmatched name in turn and ask us to select the right student (even if we have to delete part of the name to find that Samantha is only Sam, then have a 'Next' button to populate the next name, and repeat. Only change needed to your existing GUI and programming is a Next/Back button which is disabled or hidden by default. Then just a new bit of code which enables the next/back buttons and sets searchBox.text = list[x]. Peter

An air compressor with dual monitors - cool, where do I get one?! ;-)

Have now - notification arrived after I left last night. Great addition, thanks! Now for the other functionality here....? :-) Peter

Have a look on your FRDC at c:\Program Files\RM\Connect\CommsRM.Networks.Comms.ServiceHost.Viewer.exe - that might give you an idea whether a sub-service is failing, and if so give you an idea what to look at? Peter

I've just found a bigger SmartID brochure on the net than the paper copy I have - PCounter does indeed work with Smart ID and our mifare staff badges so that's ok. Peter

Thanks - do you use the Smart iD printing, or something like PCounter as Steve discusses below? Thanks Steve - we're currently with PCounter who I know use BioStore, so you've actually hit the nail on the head here. Do PCounter etc require BioStore, or do they work with other providers such as Smart iD? Peter

@john - any feedback on NRS? I know you always used to like it? Peter

Does anyone use the SmartID product (that comes with Nationwide's cashless system) for integrating with other technologies, in particular MFD copiers? If so, who do you use and for what, please? We're currently discussing replacing or upgrading our Cunninghams system, but need to ensure that when our copier lease is up next year we can use the same cashless fingerprints on the new copiers. (Current copiers don't have fingerprint as kids are all push-print, but we will be pull-print for kids next year) Cunninghams is currently on Biostore v1, so there's discussion to be had about upgrading to v2/v3 or switching to new supplier. NRS is top of my leaderboard at the moment, and [can't find Peter Willsher's username!] has demoed to us. Peter

We're an outstanding academy, but we are still supported by a trust. A local school is in special measures and has been helped by us and their local college for 12 months, including our deputy acting as their head for that period. I believe they are becoming academy this/next year. I do know they have just laid off a percentage of their staff, but I don't know if this is anything to do with Academy status or not. Their IT team are still all there and not going anywhere to my knowledge. I speak regularly with the NM there.

Nope, still Credit Card.

Had one exam student doing probably the same IT exam this week (the 10 hour one?) and had various Access crashes over the course of the exam. A profile-reset fixed it in the end for us. Peter

Also, do check if your exam team are members of the Exam Officer Association - there's discounts on the software if they are. Peter

I had an email conversation with the developer last year - certainly good responses from him in that regard. I didn't get any further with looking at it, though I guess I now have about 5 days to do so before the exams start on Monday.... :| Peter

Ooh, where'd you pop up from - never realised you were on Edugeek! :-)