dhoward_westexetc

We set a desktop wallpaper centrally in group policy anyway, which is always there when they are in session. Their efforts in resetting the wallpaper are only visible when you do 'lock computer'. Hopefully our policy change 'Prevent wallpaper change' will end all this! I'll look into BGinfo anyway, is it a freebe?

Just a heads up for you guys, disabling the right-click functionality in Internet Explorer also disables the ability to save pictures from the Internet, which prevents them saving pictures for research for example. However, the 'prevent change of wallpaper' policy does indeed disable the 'Set Desktop Background' function on the IE context menu anyway. So that's our problem fixed!

It's the Prevent Change wallpaper policy that locks it isn't it?

Hmmm, overlooked that one! I've enabled that policy now, but i'll keep the IE7 context menu disabled aswell anyway to be doubly sure.

'Context menu' is an over-used term!! Thanks, you're a genius!!!!!

We want to disable the 'Set as desktop background' menu option for all student user accounts in Internet Explorer 7. This is a right click option. Although we set a desktop wallpaper centrally, students can still access this menu option and abuse it. Is there a setting in Group policy under user configuration which will allow this?

Just out of interest what is the motherboard model of the RM Ones that were trying to be ghosted. We have over 200 RM machines based on the Ascend 2020B board, which includes an Realtek 8169 gigabit network card, all have ghosted fine on version 8.3.

As it turned out it was indeed MP3s that were being blocked, I didn't realise that that site used MP3s! In fact in our case, it was a SWGfL default rule for MP3s that was blocking it. I temporarily disabled the SWGfL rule and it spoke! We are now discussing with the SWGfL about a modification that we can do top allow this site to work while still banning MP3 downloads generally. Thank you for your help, I would never have though of that otherwise!!!

Thanks for this reply. I'm having a complete brain fade moment! Where in Group Policy would you set that whitelist and how did you set it?

Not sure if this is the right place for this! I am going round in circles trying to figure out why the Linguastars web site will not work under a student account. It works fine under any other user account on the same machine, but there seems to be a policy setting that is preventing any sound output from the speech (its a french magazine role play, an animation done as an Adobe Flash Player control). Something else that uses Adobe flash (eg. BBC Iplayer) works fine under the same user account. It is IE7 and Windows XP SP3. Has anyone else experienced the same issues and found a fix for it? Help appreciated..i'm totally lost on this!!!!

I've had the same thing on my Vista Business SP1 Laptop. Log ons on wireless with an existing profile take upwards of 2-3 minutes to complete. Tried turning off the auto tune receive window feature but this made no difference. I keep thinking it is the process of wireless authentication (802.1X) which is slowing the logins up. Have gone back to XP for the time being on my work laptop. That makes the logins much much faster. I'm starting to wonder if it may be better for Vista if the Primary DC was a 2008 Server rather than a 2003 one? Just my thoughts! I'm probably just as confused about this!

AFAIK, but you may have to restart each machine to be sure that the revised policy is picked up properly.

It can be done on Server Group Policy and assigned to any OU. For example, we have a policy for student PCs which disables Offline files, and we assign it to Curriculum desktops and laptops.

That's Offline Files. Just disable that for the relevant groups of machines (Computer Configuration \ Admin Templates \ Network \ Offline Files) The key one is 'Enable or Disable Use of Offline Files Feature' - set to Disabled. Certain others I also disable just to make sure. You may want to enable that for certain machines though (Teacher's laptops for example).

We have the following policies set under User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Desktop: - Remove Properties from the Computer Icon context menu - Remove Properties from the Documents Icon context menu - Remove Properties from the Recycle Bin Icon context menu We also remove the context menu for Windows Explorer. That is the best that I can think of! When a student user clicks 'File' then 'Properties' on our student interface it does nothing.

I have had this issue with laptops I have tested Vista on. A first step I always do now when building Vista laptops is I update the wireless card drivers to the very latest ones available. If an Intel card, I always download from the Intel website. As soon as I do that the wireless connects more consistently.

We're evaluating Vista, but deployment won't be quick with 800+ workstations. Main problem is we have some software that won't work on Vista very well, so we would need to replace as part of the deployment costing. Since as many have said, Windows 7 is in effect Vista R2, it is probably quite OK to do all testing on Vista, then implement on Windows 7 (obviously after testing after release that 7 didn't bring its own niggles). After a tricky start, I have few issues with Vista now. It handles group policy miles better than XP ever did, and networking is vastly improved. Performance on newer (2006 >) hardware with at least 1GB of RAM is not spectacular, but is acceptable.

You also need to run the application 'pushprinterconnections.exe' as a machine/user startup script in the same GPO as the deployed printer is contained in, if your clients are Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003.

I am pretty sure it was the V3 agent, plus another patch for Windows Installer which solved the same issue for installation of office updates (I believe it was KB 927891).

Try this policy setting: Computer Configuration\Policies\System It is the 'verbose vs normal status messages'. Set to Enabled. It may well display too much information, but is worth a try.

I thought the Windows Update Agent was up to version 3 now? I seem to recall it was that V2 agent that caused the infamous svchost 100% CPU problem that brought XP SP2 machines to a grinding halt (and brought our network to its knees in Easter 2007!) I recall spending weeks deploying the new agent to our 800 workstations via batch script before we would allow WSUS to work again! The version for the wuaueng.dll file on each XP client should be V7.xxx The default interval for checking for updates is 22 hours, so if it doesn't find updates immediately you may have to wait until the next day for the client to synchronise with the WSUS server. We had the same problem that this post describes, was resolved by approving then declining that update. We had the issue on new build machines, but that method on the WSUS server fixed it.

I think the RM one ecoquiet PCs are based mainly on laptop-type motherboards. We will have 246 RM One's by September 2008, have been brilliant, I would recommend them even though they are far from cheap. For lighter use PCs thin clients is certainly worth investigating, provided you have a Terminal server with enough memory to handle the simultaneous sessions!

It depends on what OS the new server will be running, whether it is a client OS or a server OS. If it is a server OS then a simple domain could be created, at the very least you will need the following roles: - DHCP - DNS - Active Directory - Print Services The client PCs could get IP addresses using DHCP, the printers using static IP/reservations. The server will need a static IP address. You can buy some reasonable quality gigabit ethernet switches for not too much money. It is worth considering asking a cabling company perhaps to install the network sockets and running the cables to a patch panel next to the main ethernet switch, if your budget can stretch to that. If your laptops need to roam across the school it is also important to consider a reasonable quality wireless system, so that it is reliable and also scalable if you need to expand the wireless network later on.

You can take advantage of the functionality of Server 2008 in terms of cutting down on scripts by using the Remote Server Administration Toolset. You install it on Windows Vista SP1, and you get the new Group Policy Management Console, complete with Policy Preferences. Works extremely well, at least until we can move to Server 2008 proper! We have such a Vista machine, and that is our Policy Management station. We have removed nearly all startup scripts as a result!

Whilst Server 2008 certainly looks exciting and feature-packed we are not quite ready to move to it just yet. We bought a new server with a new license, this was Server 2008 but we used the downgrade rights to install Server 2003, which we standardise on. If there is one thing that will swing it for us with Server 2008, that is Hyper-V. We have two old servers, they do small roles and could easily be amalgamated between our existing servers using Hyper-V virtual machines (so long as we upgrade those physical servers to 16GB of RAM each!) However, we won't be ready probably until next summer at the earliest to make the move, if we do it that is.