halbaradkenafin

Impero and Powershell are the two big ones for me. There are probably others that I use occasionally but I use those two almost daily.

Have a look at this then: AiLiveComplete! / Wiki / Summary I managed to dig up the link from my bookmarks, it's basically a standalone version of AppInventor that you can run in house. There is also a topic somewhere on here with the details to run the emulator from an application rather than command line and I'd assume they work fine together.

We tried AppInventor for a few weeks and found that it could be a bit slow at times when there was a full class using it. I did a bit of research and there are a few people out there who have developed stand alone versions that you can set up on a VM or spare server that are based on the same code and you can create your own accounts etc. I didn't try as we dropped it and went with something else for the course they were doing. I'd be surprised if most of the kids don't already have google accounts due to Youtube, though whether they use that depends on if the teacher wants to have them using personal accounts in school.

Powershell in a Month of Lunches is one I've seen recommended almost every time someone asks this question on Reddit. I started it and it's very good and seems perfect for a beginner. Also worth looking at PowerShell if you're looking for advice or help on scripts.

Tried this about a year ago and dropped off it due to too much work going on after a month or so. Going to pick it up again, probably starting at the gym while it's cold and then back to running in the park (handily right next to the gym and me), eventual goal is Great North Run next year, hopefully this year if I'm able to boost my fitness enough.

Had some fun with my Hubsan over the weekend in the house, need to get myself a few extra batteries for when I get a chance to fly it outside.

How about a USB VGA adapter? Then just plug it into the wall port or whatever normal method you use to connect a PC to it. Only other way I can think would be to use a separate wifi dongle in the Surface and connect that to the projector, might need some tinkering with routing to ensure the traffic goes out that adapter rather than the normal wifi but it should be possible.

This is the usual problem that I've seen with it. It can also take a little while for SCCM to update it's reporting on them after running this, I'd give it 30 mins or so to be sure.

A login script which opens the file based on something like: \\path\to\file\here\%USERNAME%.pdf (assuming it's named like that) Not sure the exact command you'd use to call it but shouldn't be too difficult to find with a quick google search.

Group Policy is probably the better way to do it: Blog of an IT Admin.: Group Policy - Changing Default Search Provider in IE 7, 8 and 9

Should be reasonably easy to set up squid proxy on a Pi and plug in a USB WiFi dongle to broadcast and act as a AP (there are plenty of guides out there on how to do that).

Took longer than expected for that to be mentioned. If you haven't seen it (and I haven't thankfully), don't watch it or go looking for it. I think the family guy reaction video to it is enough to let you know how bad it is.

Luckily my EE contract runs out in a few months and I was considering shopping around anyway, need more data on my plan for the longer commutes I'm doing now.

Do you map drives with a login script or with GPOs? We're currently using GPOs and don't have this, it just shows the drive letter and then any remaining paths that they'd see normally such as N:\Documents or N:\Pictures.

Seconding this, using it here and it's very good. It's also Free which is a nice bonus.

Impero here too, had a lot of positive feedback from teachers about how much easier it is to use than RM Tutor and the main users (ICT) didn't even need training other than for some little things they wanted to do. We also find it very useful for things like ensuring all the updates get done when rebuilding a few PCs, they get pushed out by SCCM but its useful to be able to manually push the process along to ensure they're up to date as soon as possible.

That's going to be my next upgrade. Normal cable testers are great but that's even better.

Port tester tool like this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/RJ11-Ethernet-Network-Cable-Tester/dp/B004N5J7UC Should be able to plug one end into what you think is the main network cable and then use the other end at your patch panels and work your way along till you get a signal. Pretty simple job but very tedious if you've got lots of ports. Failing that I'd do a bit of checking in the ceiling (if you've got a false ceiling anyway) for stray ports that were installed for whatever reason and were taken over for this.

Definitely got en-GB and Powershell 4.

The only improvement I'm really looking to make is accepting two dates but that's going to require some more reworking of a GUI script I have and I've spent a lot of time on it already and want to leave it alone for a bit before looking at it again (though I've got a good idea how to make the changes I want). I've not had any problems with Get-WinEvent in Powershell 4 and I'm reasonably certain I'm set at en-GB. Might have to double check that to be sure.

That's similar to what I used at my last place but we're not using login scripts here so I wanted something that wouldn't noticeably impact the users. If you're using login scripts then your method is probably better, especially if you also map drives etc using it and use some string concatenation to dump any errors to the log file as well.

We had an incident of some damage to a PC and wanted to track down who had used that PC. A bit of manual digging through the Event Log gave me the name but I decided that this seems like a good time for Powershell to do it's thing for when this happens in the future. An hour or two with the command line and a bunch of tabs open to various articles and I had the following script. I figured I'd share it since it's the sort of thing that's likely to come up in our line of work: param ( [string]$ComputerName = $(Read-Host "Enter Computer Name to check"), [string]$StartDate = (Get-Date -UFormat "%d/%m/%Y") ) $Date = Get-Date $StartDate $EventLog = Get-WinEvent -FilterHashTable @{logname='security';id=4648;StartTime=$Date;EndTime=($Date.AddDays(1))} -ComputerName $ComputerName $EventLogXML = @() foreach ($Event in $EventLog) { $EventLogXML += [xml]$Event.ToXML() } foreach ($XMLEntry in $EventLogXML) { foreach ($Property in $XMLEntry.Event.EventData.Data) { if ($Property.Name -eq "TargetUserName" -and $Property.'#text' -ne ($ComputerName + "$")) { Write-Host $Property.'#text' } } } It currently just looks at the date specified and gives you a list of any accounts which have logged in to that machine. I'm planning on expanding it to accept a start and end date to give a bit more scope for searching but I need to adjust the script management GUI I created to handle multiple date entries first. Any suggestions for improvements are welcome.

Hirens works fine for Windows 7, not sure about Windows 8 as I haven't needed to do that yet.

Save yourself a bunch of time and get Spiceworks. It's great tool for helpdesk/ticket system and can be configured to use SSO so staff don't even need to sign in and can just log tickets. It's got a bunch of other useful tools including a network monitoring section and a huge (and very helpful) community. I've been using it for a few years now at two different jobs and everyone that's used it at both really likes it.

It's been a few months since I used Frog but I think there is a setting in the Toolkit under Admin and then Server Settings for it. I've never used FrogOS though so not sure exactly how accurate that is, but assuming you can get into the Toolkit that will be the place to look. Or give the guys at their support desk a call, they are always very helpful and can either do it for you or point you in the right direction.