Rob_D

As I said, Cloudbox is being set up and we've not had any handover yet, so I don't have any direct control over the sync settings.

To be fair we're in the middle of Moving over to CloudBox, so things are a bit messy right now. But I don't think the teams themselves are appearing for the students, they've just found a way to go in and inspect their group memberships.

Where do you guys (or your schools) stand on students being able to see their next year's classes before start of term? I've just been forwarded a guide that's apparently circulating through the student body about how to log into M365 (why do they need a guide for this?) where they can see their class team membership for September. I like the engagement. But I know "the school" (SLT/HT) is going to get into a tizzy about this and I'm going to have to find a way to block students from seeing this (without stopping them logging into M365 because then they won't be able to do homework), because heaven forbid the little darlings (and I guess their parents) know who's teaching them next year. Thanks.

happy birthday, man!

Our BGInfo command is: \\server\share\BGInfo.exe \\server\share\Desktop_Staff.bgi /timer:0 /silent /nolicprompt But we run this from a VBS called from the Shell Startup folder. I've always had better results calling BGInfo as late as possible during login. Edit: Also, worth making sure your end users have read permission on the share.

That's the same impression I got. If you've got on-site SIMS/FMS (and possibly a pre 2021 contract) then you have a perpetual license to use the software.

This is what we've done. I've got a calendar note to check in with finance in 5 years time to check they're happy with the server being deleted.

Are these wires carrying audio from a remote source? Power to the speakers? Low voltage signaling from a relay switch? It might be worth looking at voltage detectors as a starting point.

You need money for moves? We just get told which offices everyone is moving to this year and it's all done by us and the site team. We're working through 50 new PCs going into classrooms, and then the classroom PCs will go into offices (because the new dells don't have DVD drives and the teachers use DVDs more than the admin staff).

I'd agree with you for a full enterprise scale deployment, but for a small 1-2 AP small office/home style installation like the OP is talking about, they're pretty similar. The instant-on APs might be slightly more expensive (like £10-15 more on an approx. £100 AP. on amazon), but I found the instant-on UI easier and quicker to set up a small 1 AP, 2 SSID installation than Unifi.

I've got Aruba instant-on at home and it's been great. Unifi would also be good for everything you want, but it's a bit more setup.

I think they'll just continue not adding or removing newer features and program compatibility. Even years ago, LTSC took a bunch of faffing to get working with all the features users expect. We've got win11 on some older machines, but given the lack of official support and the constant threat of "no security updates for out of spec devices" I wouldn't consider it any more of a long term solution than using LTSC or just sticking with windows 10 and relying on 3rd party security (which I wouldn't want to do).

If you do go linux, I'd be really interested in hearing how it turns out. I imagine selling SLT on the idea is going be a big hurdle though.

Windows 11. We've already got around 2/3 of our estate across already, and hope to have most of the rest upgraded by the end of the summer. It's probably been one of the easiest OS upgrades we've done. Moving away from windows sounds like a lot of work.

For me, Mistborn took a couple of chapters to get into, but once it got going the original trilogy was great. I've not read beyond book 3, but I heard future "trilogies" weren't as good. Read the latest Palladuim Wars book at the moment.

Out last day is next Tuesday. Never understood why we always seem to end mid-week but hey... Looking forward some brief quite before all the building works start.

If it were me, I'd pull the drives, leave them with the company, and replace them with clean ones (just to be safe). It seems an odd arrangement, to take some PCs over the summer, repeatedly dismantle and rebuild them, and then give them back presumably just to be disposed of. I imagine most of us would see not having the cost of disposal as a benefit of donating machines to projects like this.

As far as I'm aware, its for the collection of regional/national attendance data.

Weird question, but you'd only need to get the kettle lead and the actual PSU Pat tested, right? You wouldn't PAT a motherboard anymore than you'd need to get a USB peripheral tested. And testing the whole computer seems redundant as it's going to be taken apart and rebuilt, potentially with a different combination of components. Or would you need to PAT test each time it was built? (I'm probably way overthinking this) When it comes to "installations" I'd assume one would go for pre-fat-imaged drives (it seems to be what youtubers like J2C and LTT do to get their builds up and running quickly) as you're probably not going to be able to connect them to the internet very easily to download updates and stuff (which is also a consideration when it comes to games). Are the company PCs you're thinking of getting using off the shelf parts? Dismantling and rebuilding an HP Prodesks can be pretty awkward and the insides are full of sharp edges. If you're building half a dozen PCs a week, you're going to go through a lot of thermal paste. With regards to potential games, what age of children are you thinking of aiming at? And did you have any games in mind? When I was looking for stuff for our "E-Sports club" it was really hard to find games that were multiplayer over local lan, didn't require an internet connection, and were suitable for 12-14YO kids. When you're looking at spaces, don't forget you'll need a fair bit of power to run half a dozen PCs.

I've always had very mixed results trying to double duty GPO and BGinfo. Using BGI to set the image has been much more reliable for me. I'm assuming the GPO is dropping the image somewhere and BGI accessing/editing the image. This means the both the system account that the GPO is being processed under and the user account that BGI is probably running in both need write access to where'ever the background image is being saved to. Which can all be very tricky when temp folders are involved. Just have BGI pull the wallpaper image from a network share the user has read access to. It's way easier.

Running BG info using a shortcut in the Shell:startup folder works for us. And has since the XP days.

Ultimately, that's probably the best solution. But, I can see plenty of reasons the school might want to consider their approach carefully. On the one side, I can the school feeling uncomfortable accessing (or having been seen to have accessed) a drive with such personal information as bank statements. If it were me, I'd definitely want SLT there while I'm doing the deleting to witness I didn't touch anything else and maybe even go so far as to screen record the process. You might even want to go so far as having the ex-staff member present while the data is deleted, or deletion done by a 3rd party arbitrator. On the other, simply deleted files can be easily recovered by the user, and given the termination sounds pretty acrimonious and the data sounds like it contains student PII, the school might not trust the user not to try recovering it.

I don't know. What with the size of modern GPUs, we see a resurgence in those massive cases.

[EDIT] Sorry, didn't realise you were replying to o Davon (although I did wonder why your neighbors are watching your TV through the window).

Doesn't it somewhat depend on how readable the output PDF is. I wouldn't put it past SIMS to render it as a whole page image, making any sort of content capture more difficult.