woody

Mmmm, could be your HD then. Have you tried booting off the vista disk and doing a repair?

I dont' think the initial subject should have been under general chat to begin with.

I may order the DVD on my next order then.

We got th 4 cds as well. I think ramesys must be trying to avoid compat problems in many schools there they won't have dvd drives. You could always ring them back up and ask for a DVD? If you've payed for one set, I don't think they will complain at sending you a dvd since they burn all their own nowadays.

Thanks mattx. You gave me a new lead, so I logged on as local administrator, renamed the local profile for my domain account, then logged off and back in to get it to re-create the profile again. The logon took a few seconds as expected, but then none of the GPs were applied, and I got a message in the taskbar saying it could not create the profile properly and I was using a temporary profile. So I logged off and on again - this time all GPs applied, but still the message about using a temp profile. Restarted PC - still same problem. So I logged in as local administrator, went to my renamed profile, and put it back to the original name. Then restored it from a previous version - few days before - then logged out. This time when I logged in, it went straight in - all setttings as sghould be and GPs applied. So mixed results really. I'm happy I am back to a working state with fast logon, but not happy that I don't know what caused initial problem, or why I could not simply re-create a new local profile after renaming the current one. Unanswered questions that I really don't have the time to investigate. Maybe one day the answer will become clear and I will return to this post......

Right, after lots of messing about logging on and off, I have established that I can log on as a different network user with no delays. I told a lie before when I said that the mapped drives appeared in my computer:- they do not appear, although my documents are available. And I have located this entry into the system log: I can ping the domain controller which is also the logon server and I have had no complaints from anyone not being able to log on. I can also log on perfectly from another PC on the domain (although on XP) so I must presume that their isn't a problem with the DNS server. Wish I had another vista PC to try that with my logon details.

I'm sorry :oops: I keep forgetting that a lot of schools in England have their half term this week. We in cumbria have to be different I was thinking callumtuckey was asking this in school time and thus was up to mischief. That's why I suggested to ask Gatt. I take it all back Callum, I presume you want to know how to do this for your PC at home?

So I've been running vista on my work PC for a few weeks now and overall, I've been really pleased. However, I started the PC this morning as usual, and it booted up quite fast as it normally does. Entered my password for the domain to log on. Vista thought about it for a while, then the screen faded to black, and only a white mouse pointer remained. About 8 mins later, and finally my desktop appeared. I seem to be on the network fine with all my documents, shares etc. available, and group policy seems to have run ok. I have checked my network connection settings to make sure DNS is all configured correctly. Changed IP address just in case I had a conflict (we use static IPs here) Bearing in mind that this is the first time I had had this problem, and I have not changed / installed anything since yesterday. I did check the system log but I can't see errors pertaining to this. There were a few the other day but these have not re-appeared today. Anybody else experienced problems logging on to a domain?

Welcome Nathan

Why don't you ask Gatt?

I am with f2s.net Moved about 4 months ago from tiscali. Had one problem after another with tiscali and got nowhere. They moved me to LLU without asking, the LLU never worked, and just rub salt into the wound, I had to wait about two weeks before I could be realeased from tiscali LLU to join f2s. (no mac codes for LLU) I still got members of the indian call centre ringing me asking if my problems had been solved even when I had cancelled my contract!!! V. Pleased with F2s. I am on the 14.99 package with 5gb cap. You get charge £1 per GB if you go over. I time my downloads from news servers between 1am and 6am when it's uncapped.

Welcome Neil. Glad to have you with us. A teacher with a sense of humour eh? Isn't that like, dangerous or something?

I rang up Ramesys today because we have ordered 30 vista licenses and 30 office 07 licenses. Not that I will be upgrading 30 of the school PCS to vista, about 25 of these licenses are actually for XP (Ramesys told me the latest os license covers all previous versions). But it will be nice to have a few spare vista licenses for testing. The first key Ramesys gave me didn't work - when I tried to validate, it told me it had already been used! I rang them up and they told me they were aware of the problem, and that they were trying to sort out the problem with microsoft. A few days later, they sent me a different key by email. I used this one to activate and that was fine. So when I rang today, I asked them to explain how the licensing works - ie do I use the same key for the number of licenses I have bought. The first resonce that worried me was - "Erm is that the key that starts with '22'?" Actually, the key I had started with '26' but it got me thinking that this key is doing the rounds with more than one school. So if what has been mentioned on here is true, and that is an MAK key, then the 250 licenses are soon going to be up!

I am dual booting XP and vista on this very machine. I have installed vista on another HD though rather than partitioning the one with XP on. Much safer and clean. If you install Vista on a PC that already has XP on it (whether on a different partition or HD) vista recognises the older OS and offers you the option to boot into 'Previous version of windows' automatically. If however like me, you installed vista first, THEN XP later, XP messes up the the boot options and you can't even see your Vista operating system as an option. If this happens, boot up off the Vista DVD and ask it to repair boot-up problems. You can then boot into vista and sort out the boot menu from there. I think what I am trying to say is that you have to configure any boot options from within Vista, not from XP. The most easiest way to do this is to download and install Vista Boot Pro onto your vista installation. Works a treat!

OK, an update on our problem (solved!). First of all, thanks NAV for posting here. I'm sure if you stick around when people ask questions like mine you will be an invaluable source of info on interactive education products / software. Firstly, our handsets including the receiver were stored in the case so couldn't have been responsible for draining the batteries. I did ring IA to ask about what we should do with the battery problem. I had to leave a message for the relevent person, but they didn't get back to me. This was before the Christmas period. I was too busy to chase it up. Then out of the blue in January, I got a call from someone at IE, they said they would send out a complete new set of handsets / receiver etc. (we have the 32 +teacher set) I was amazed to say the least! But sure enough, they arrived as promised. We have put all the batteries in them and tested them. We will just have to wait and see how long the batteries last now! So all in all, yes IE could have been a little quicker in responding to my problem but they did get back to me and I can't complain when they have completely replaced our set with a new one. In fact, my opinion of them has changed dramatically! All I can say is well done!

We are using it - the Attendance Officer loves it!!! I agree it is impersonal but then it does make those parents who have no legitimate reason to keep their child off think twice if they know they will have to explain themselves every time.

Did a quick search on google and came up with this link - interesting and maybe you could send a message to find out more: Matthew Dingley's Information System

Buy headphones for the PCs. We buy stacks of cheap ones from CPC, that way it doesn't matter too much if the odd one gets damaged, they can be handed out and collected at the end of lessons. So you don't get too much noise at lunch time, or during lessons for that matter!

That answers that then!

I am looking forward to my new dell server arriving shortly. My plan is to promote it into the AD, transfer control of group policy over and away we go. But after getting hold of LNM (thanks Dox_Box) I am wondering whether to give it a go. Currently our setup works smoothly so I really need to know if there is anything REALLY worth it in LNM. The bulk user creation does sound good, but is that enough for me to give it a go? Does it take away any of the current control I have on the server in Group policy manager etc?? Any comments would be welcome.

I have tested AVG Free with vista - didn't seem to have any problems.

Woohoo. Fantstic, thanks for that Kiran. It worked. I would hope there will be an option to contol that in group policy. Wonder if you need R2 to get it? We are getting a new server with windows 2003 R2 anyway so will have a look then.

I have vista up and running on the domain and i seems to be applying group policies rather well as far as I can see. But I have a few scripts that run at logon to map network drives. The drives are not mapping at logn so I presume the scripts aren't running, unless vista doesn't understand vbs! Any ideas on thi one? Any log I can check to see what parts f group policy are running? Can't see anyting in the system log - tells me group policies were applied succesfully.

Well I was updating a brand new AMD 64 3800+ X2 pc so it can't be down to PC speed / age. Like was mentioned earlier, I think maybe a proxy is slowing it down at some point, but obviously not altogether other wise nothing would download!!! Plus 66 updates! Most of which are Security Critical. I wonder if Vista will need such regular security updates? Mmmmm.

Yeah, it could well be a proxy. Will investigate further.