Rob_D

I'm probably going to get rinsed for talking about reality TV, but is anyone else watching Traitors on BBC? I could take or leave the group challenges, but the "social game" part is interesting.

Can you get a USB-C card for the desktop that would allow you to just move the docking station back and forth? Or we've used "USB switches" like this before to share a keyboard and mouse between machines:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B097QQRY65/. Perhaps it could combine with FM-GM's idea.

DM Systems Ltd keep telling me they do car charging now. We've used them a lot for IT support and they've been great in that regard. https://www.dmsystem.co.uk/electrical-services/car-chargepoints

Same as Oaktech, we've got colorviel installed and not had any complaints.

The Epsons we have continue to run the fans for a bit after the bulb turns off as part of their shutdown (maybe 30 seconds on the newer ones, and up to a couple of minutes on the older EBx10/11 ones)

I was going to give Willow a go tonight. Didn't realise it was filmed in Wales, I'll have to look out for locations I recognise.

I tell a lie, we've never used hibernate, but we've definitely got sleep working. I have had the "insomniac" PC problem at home, which was down to a dodgy HID driver (for a razer gamepad in my case).

We set sleep and hibernate on inactivity timeouts through group policy power plans, and use remote shutdown scripts scheduled on a server for overnight/weekend shutdowns (although these days, I see people using group policy to push out scheduled shutdown/reboot tasks to each machine).

Does that allow the locked used to be signed out without needing a password or anything? Do you not get problems with people logging each other off? [Edit] Found what you're talking about here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/0bd0346e-152a-4c3d-ae18-54f09cc9dd98/windows-10-logoff-from-locked-screen?forum=win10itprogeneral (last post). That's pretty cool, but I'd be worried about people logging off each other's locked accounts (especially when we've got students in form rooms with the teacher's locked PC and no teacher).

As far as I can think, the worst that can happen is that the student who walked away without logging off loses their unsaved work when the computer is restarted and I guess some lost learning time/extra time to pick all the keys off the laptop for the incoming student. You could mitigate time waiting for reboot with "switch user", but if you wind up with 3-4 students logged on at the same time it's going to effect performance, and it won't help with people losing work when the system is eventually rebooted/turned off. We use Administrative Unlock to to avoid having to reboot the computer to kick someone off (works fine on win10 and 11 as far as we've seen). https://4sysops.com/archives/restore-administrative-unlock-to-windows-7/

For the staff wireless, we created a BYOD SSID with WPA2/AES-Enterprise security and our own Radius/NPS server as the "Auth Server". Then set up access permissions based on AD group membership on the NPS server. For our visitors wifi, we use captive portal. Captive portal accounts can be set with an expiration date and when you create them there's an option put an email address in and have the details sent to that address, but I've not seen a way to automate this. (We generate passwords for specific visitors (ICT and reception teams have access to create logins). Hopefully this gives you somewhere to start from.

Welcome back!

I'm probably being dense, but what is number matching?

We've not noticed this problem (yet), and use loopback processing to deploy the policy against computers rather than users. It's worth a try.

Group policy wise, I've had the most reliable results using User>Preferences>Control Panel>Printers (we currently have this as a loopback policy to apply to computers). Or if you're up for using startup/login scripts, Con2PRT has always been pretty rock solid although I've not used with Win10.

Do you mean Shadowhunters with Katherine McNamara in, or has someone taken another run at the source material?

It sounds like you're on a managed connection. In which case the "slowness" and especially the purplemash saving thing, could be down to something in the firewall/webfiltering (that I assume is done by LGfL).

Another vote for Bulk Rename Utility. We've used it a bunch when photos come in with the student admin number as the file name and we wan the student's name.

Until the arms break and all the screens fall off. Although TBF they were very old and probably not rated for modern 24" displays.

Softcat have always been pretty good for us.

Some years ago. I had a not entirely bad experience with flip-up i-desks in a village primary school. And they even made good use of the dual functionality. So it is possible to to make it work. Although in a secondary environment it was pretty much the same experience as everyone else and add students (or sometimes distracted teachers) closing the lid without putting the mouse away and the lit chopping through the mouse cable

We've got locally installed support sties, so we just have 2 instances of the support site installed on 2 different virtual servers, each with their own license. It wasn't hard to set up, once we got the settings right for ours it was pretty easy to copy them across to the Maintenance one. The trick is to pick 2 very different colour schemes so people don't get confused about which site they're on.

We use https://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/ for both IT and Maintenance/Facilities support sites. Works well, and does the things you're looking for.

We got https://www.cybersecure365.com/ in to do a "security audit" of our 365 estate, which went really well. And they do full PEN tests (we considered it, but ultimately thought just the 365 stuff was the best value for us).

If you're going for Wifi6 access points, then I'd throw the Aruba Instant-on APs into consideration. When I looked (back in the summer), the Aruba units were coming in slightly cheaper than equivalent specced Unifi ones.