Rob_D

Why fix it if it's not broken? If they initially went LTSC for the reasons discussed, and got everything working the way they wanted, why bother switching and having to re-work a bunch of stuff. Also there might be people moving to LTSC now for the extra couple of years support life.

I remember when we had to burn all the speaking/music exams to audio CDs. We used to be sending out loads of USB drives for exams (like 10-15 a year), but doesn't seem to have been so bad the last few years, and we do have a couple of boards (Pearson and AQA I think) that have started using upload portals. And AFAIK all our boards are happy for us to send encrypted/password protected drives. I remember there being a lot of faff with moderators/markers not being able to get onto encrypted drives when we first started using them, and as a result some of the boards got all huffy and said things to the effect of, if the examiner can't open the files then they won't get marked, encrypt at your own risk (but that was many years ago). Possibly you're just unlucky in that the school needs/wants to send a lot of practical work for moderation this year.

What exactly is the point of that?

On my home PC, the software TPM (AMD processor) got disabled somehow after the initial win11 install. Didn't make the blindest bit of difference until the 22h2 update came around (or didn't in my case). The update wouldn't pull down as the PC was reporting as not win11 compatible.

It's not like windows laptops are hugely upgradeable either.

Depends what you want to use it for and what you're used to. Assuming the software/systems you need or want to use work fine on either, I'd say stick with what you're used to (especially for a work device). Or failing that, go for whatever offers the best value.

As in RV or light aircraft? For my own part:Mostly writing (I have 2 scifi books on amazon), and gaming (both computer and tabletop) - I managed to wrangle an invite to a D&D campaign that ran over most of last year and I'm hoping the group gets back together for another campaign in the future. If nothing comes of it, I might co-opt some friends and try my hand at DMing. The D&D thing also got me into painting minis - which is a great "something to do with my hands" while I'm binging netflix. Also a bit of 3d (computer) modeling, although I'm not great at it and mostly just use it to visualise stuff for my writing.

You could tell the Never's part 2 was a different creative lead. I found that, while good, it lacked the charm of the first half. Anyone else watching Silo?

We'd just make sure everything that's physically there is turned on and then ping every computer name in AD. Any that don't respond are deleted.

Started watching Avenue 5 on Sky, which is nothing special but good lighthearted fun.

@PotNoodleTech So do you get the chromebooks back off the students when they leave?

Name aside it looks like a pretty good resource.

Their support has always been good. Reasonable response times, and we always get through to someone who knows what their doing.

We've had good success with smoothwall.

We use domain laptops (Exams have their own set purely because our library laptops keep getting trashed and apparently it's unfair to make someone do an exam on a laptop without an A key) and exams user accounts in the Smoothwall no-internet group and with SRP blocking everything except word, notepad and examwritepad. Accounts have their My Docs emptied at the end of each day, and are re-generated each year. For printing, the invigilators get a print release card that all the exams accounts are assigned to. Although when the network went down and we had to pull something together at the last minute the exam officer was happy with, if examwritepad is open full-screen and needs a password to exit (and they're being watched by invigilators) then we probably don't need to lock down much else.

At home, I only have 1. I did have a visitor wifi, but unless I was around guests would just get told the normal wifi login, so I gave up on it.

This one's been a bit tricky for us. Most staff either don't see it as a bonus or just don't get it. And then it becomes a problem when someone starts decides they like this PowerPoint but only need the first 3 slides. And the poor teacher who's using the original to teach gets to watch their lesson be deleted in real time. The Check out feature seems to work well, but it's another step that most people will forget about.

We've gone for sites for each department, which I do think works well for us now, but there was a lot of set-up and there have been times when I wish we'd just gone for a single "shared area on sharepoint" site with folders. It would have taken way less time as we'd have just duplicated the old shared area up into SharePoint, used a 3rd party mapping tool to make it show up as a drive in My Computer and called it a day (if we did it over a holiday and used the same drive letter, I reckon most staff wouldn't even know we'd done it). As it stands, it's taken about a year to cajole all the different departments across, and we're still doing some tweaking (especially to the drive mappings). What I'd originally wanted to do was give staff access to both onsite and SharePoint areas and just have them spend a year or so moving things as they needed them. But this really doesn't work.

https://blog.knowbe4.com/head-start-effective-methods-how-to-teach-social-engineering-to-an-ai That's very cool and slightly scary.

You should be able to go to the emergency alert settings on your phone and see your full alert history (the same place you go to disable the alerts).

Mine went off (giffgaff/O2) but surprisingly quietly. I didn't hear the beep over the TV, but became aware my pocket was talking after a moment.

I'm the same. And for some reason I learned with my knife and fork the "wrong" way around (fork in right hand and knife in left) - which is why I'm not allowed to lay the table anymore.

We use the following command with MDT app deployment to create non admin local users: Net user someaccount P4s5w0Rd! /Add /fullname:"someaccount" /passwordchg:no /active:yes And then you could use net localgroup to add that account to the local administrator group. Personally, I'd rather use LAPS to secure the local admin accounts than mess around trying to make new accounts (that invariably don't react quite like the built in admin)

We've been watching the new series of The Bay and Redemption on ITV recently, both very good.

To offer the low tech option. We just have a shared HTML page template (was word template, but that didn't play nice with 365 webmail). Staff are told to copy it, put their details in and save it as their signature.