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Think it fluctuated a bit. I doubt that DDR2 will drop any more in price though as the trend seems to be DDR3 - then there's DDR4. PC100 and PC133 - that takes me back!!!!

You mean pig out on DDR3 I assume? I don't recall a time when 4 GB of DDR2 (2 x 2GB) was less than £35 myself, unless I missed something?!! But I agree DDR3 is now so insanely cheap (£29 for 8 GB DDR3, 2 x 4 GB), much more so than DDR2 presumably because DDR2 isn't produced in as great volume any more, that I am starting to think about whether we can pig out on DDR3. But I cannot do that really until I can get 64-bit Windows 7 live very shortly, as our DDR3 PCs are already maxed out to the 4 GB limit that Windows 7 32-bit has! Sadly, a lot of our stock is still DDR2-based, though a sizeable proportion of it is due for replacement in the next couple of years as EOL.

Just discovered one board at our site that has this issue, many thanks to those who put together the video and documentation - it will certainly help us as we potentially have up to 51 680 boards to fix!

If the Core 2 PCs would go up to 4 GB RAM then DDR2 RAM is not too expensive, 4 GB is relatively cheap. A Core 2 laptop with 4 GB RAM and Windows 7 64-bit is really quite fast, one such laptop is my work laptop! We tend to upgrade RAM in our PCs during the middle of their lifetime, around 3-4 years old as we run our student desktops now for around 8 years. When RAM started to be really cheap earlier this year I did a blitz, making everything minimum 2 GB RAM, up to either the maximum that the motherboards could support, or what Windows 7 32-bit could support! Shame that some of our older desktop boards could only take 2 GB maximum really, oh well!

I learnt the lesson that a Celeron is not powerful enough. We retired a huge batch of laptops that had Celerons, they were just not up to the job. A Pentium with two cores is just fine, a Pentium 4 HT just about hangs on. The best batch of processors we bought recently were the Wolfdale Pentiums, E5200 or E5400. They were fairly cheap but they are really fast, especially when we upped the RAM to 4 GB.

Oldest desktops are Pentium 4 3GHz with HT, 2GB RAM, Radeon Xpress 200M graphics and 80 GB IDE drives. We have around 110 of those. They probably wouldn't be that slow except for their painful IDE drives! Perfectly usable though. We also have a few Pentium M 1.7 desktops, 2GB RAM and an add-in NVidia G210 GPU, and these are surprisingly sprightly on Windows 7 despite their single core processors! Probably because they are SATA drives. Oldest laptops are Core Duo 1.6GHz, 3 or 4 GB RAM and 945GM graphics. They're out of warranty so I pieced together the best 60 or so and added a decent amount of RAM using what I had spare. These go really quite well on Windows 7! I had also managed to get Win 7 on a laptop with a Pentium M 1.6GHz, 855GM graphics and 1GB RAM. No DirectX, but were OK for word processing. We've all but retired those ones now however as they are almost 9 years old!

I had the same thing. Make a separate GPO just with the proxy settings and add that to the top of the list - worked for me!

I think your point 6 sums up what I have found exactly! I was getting all sorts of random errors, but the main one was the the specified port is invalid one. I'm following your route and using scripts, but I am using a logon script instead with loopback processing. It speeds up the machine startup time a bit, but also ensures that the script fires as late as is possible, maximising the chances of it being successful. I also have a logoff script to delete the queues again at log off, so that print queues removed from the server are not left hanging around for ever and ever.

I have downloaded these and will give these a try. The scripts though work so well so I am loathed to change that now! I think if deployment of printing actually worked then it would negate the need for a workaround like in the OP. I have spent years and years trying to get printer deployment to work both on XP and 7, and only found something reasonably successful with old fashioned scripts that I developed fairly recently. I find I rarely have to re-start the print spooler in use, it only happened when a Color Laserjet 4700 driver starting playing up on our Win 7 machines. However changing to the Universal Print Driver cured that. We use the UPD for almost all our HP printers and have never had an issue with reliability of the driver, it is purely getting the queue deployed in the first place!

Which hotfixes are these @AngryTechnician ? I have not seen anything about those. I have just begun the process of dumping GPP for our printers because reliability is so hopeless, and going back to scripts. We had endless random issues, sometimes specified port is unknown, then next reboot it is fine and so on. I found the same thing as @themightymrp in that printers don't deploy successfully until I delay applying the printer connection by around 15 seconds after the script starts, due to issues with the Print Spooler.

Disabling do not save encrypted pages to disk did not fix it for us On our Windows Components > Internet Explorer > Internet Control Panel > Advanced we have the following: - Do not allow resetting Internet Explorer settings to enabled - Do not save encrypted pages to disk - disabled. - Empty Temporary Internet files when the browser is closed - enabled. I put back the temporary registry preference I set to add the bBrowserIntegration value which put back my workaround.

Had many issues myself with the Intel drivers built into the Windows 7 OS, graphics, blue screening etc. Installing the latest drivers from the Dell/Intel website always cured it for me. It is a graphics refresh problem.

I had the same issue on student accounts (limited), it's when PDFs do not appear in the IE 9 browser for some reason. Happens even with no policies attached! In the end I put in a workaround to deploy the DWORD value bBrowserIntegration, value 0, to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Acrobat Reader\9.0\Originals. It makes it open PDFs in the application itself, which works fine. @IT_Man_Dan - what version of Adobe Reader are you running? We are running 9.5.2. Want to know if this happens on Adobe Reader X? And if anyone finds out the ultimate cause and fix for 9.5.2 - that would be better still!

Be warned - don't use the Empty deleted items function in Outlook 2013. Both my colleague and I did so and it deleted the entire mailbox, including custom folders, contacts, calendar, tasks, the whole lot! Luckily I managed to get the emails back through the Outlook 2010 install on my primary desktop, and so I lost no emails, but lost all my contacts list. Had to start again on a new mailbox because I could not send emails either! Took me ages to get my mailbox sorted after this. We sent feedback to Microsoft, I will stick with Office 2010 myself until they fix the bug. There is a thread here: Outlok 2013 - Empty Deleted Items deletes everything from mailbox?

Yes indeed, I am sure it is because Read & Write is using the Acrobat X plugin set as default. I am fairly sure the latest R&W 10 is compatible with Acrobat/Reader X, whereas R&W 9 is only compatible with Reader 9.

Many thanks again for this. I tried this but sadly it didn't make any difference. I'll ensure to keep Acrobat X and Read&Write 9 separate for the moment until hopefully we can upgrade to Read&Write 10, which I think is Acrobat X compatible.

Thanks Jessica, I will give this a try next week and see whether this does any good. It is great that you are an EduGeek member as well!!!!

Does anyone use Text Help Read&Write 9 here? I have it installed on a couple of test machines that have both Acrobat X (part of CS5.5) and Reader 9. The default thing for PDFAloud to do in this configuration is to use the Acrobat X engine (which it doesn't work with) rather than the Reader 9 engine (which it does work with). Does anyone know of a way to force it to use the Reader 9 engine? Thanks in advance.

This may be a little technical, but I will try my best to explain clearly. When you go to the properties of the Ethernet card, the Advanced tab has a list of properties that you can set to change the behaviour of the network card. My question is - can these properties be changed in the driver file in some way so that the default properties are different from how they normally are when the driver is first installed? I basically want to disable some features of the Realtek PCIe Gigabit Ethernet drivers by default. Thanks if you can help?!!!!

We have a problem with the SMART Notebook Document writer, which some teachers use. I produce a simple Word 2010 document with text, and print to the document writer, it crashes out with an error message "Cannot open the file. If the file is saved from a newer version of SMART Notebook, try saving it as a version 9 document instead". This is on SMART Notebook version 10.6.94.0. If I export the file as an XPS document (the only other file type I can export to from Word and be able to import it into Notebook) and import that into 10.6.94.0, it works fine. So I try a different system with the latest 10.8.634.0 version and produce the same very simple text document, and try and print that to the Notebook Document writer. That crashes on the file xpsfileconverter.exe every time. If I export it to an XPS file and import that into 10.8.634.0, that crashes with the same error. Anyone else come across these errors at all?

I know what you mean, and is why I like the student way of doing it as staff can just dump url files into it. A compromise of sorts is to add an lnk shortcut to the shared favourites to user's own favourites folder, so it appears in their Favourites menu. The only problem is you get a warning pop up when you click on it in IE. Pros and cons for everything it seems!!!!!!

For us: Accessories Internet Macromedia Studio Microsoft Office Programs for All Subjects Specialised Applications Staff also have: Teacher Tools SMART Board Software

For all staff I use Favourites and Links, which is under 'URLs' in Internet Explorer Maintenance. It will then create favourites entries for everyone and add it to their own favourites menu.

For students I plug the path of the Favourites location directly into User Shell Folders using the Registry wizard in Policy Preferences. I then created a custom start menu to add Favourites to it as a menu, then it pops out as menu. I also hide Favourites from Internet explorer, so that there is no access to Add to Favourites. Not that they could add anything anyway because the shared location is read-only on our public drive!!

Do you happen to have the setting 'Move the contents of Documents to the new location set' on your folder redirection settings in Group Policy? I took it off because I was sometimes getting chronically slow logons on applying folder redirection, particularly when moving large documents areas. This just changes the pointer, and on new users with blank home directories it creates nice blank folders.