MrEprise

I kind of hate people calling them the Ecoboom but only because I own a Focus with one! It gets regular services and I make sure only the recommended oil (Castrol Magnatec 5w20 or I think Duckhams also has a similar oil) gets used as anything else can also issues including causing the timing belt to degrade.

Our Kyocera copiers phone home without using any third-party software & probably also directly via HTTPS as I don't recall seeing any software installed anywhere, but then ours come directly from Kyocera (though originally from Annodata before the Kyocera takeover.)

I don't ever recommend running Redex through a modern car. I stupidly did it on my old 2002 Vauxhall Astra 1.6 8v and before long, cylinders 2 & 3 started filling up with oil. Yes on some cars, Redex will eat away at some of the rubber seals in the engine. In my case, it was the valve seals that perished!

Out of curiosity, what happens if the key combo of Shift-Ctrl-Win-B is pressed? This restarts DWM and sometimes clears odd display issues like this.

I've noticed Microsoft seems to do a lot of A/B releasing of updates - some devices are up-to-date, some not quite no matter what you do.

We have Kyocera devices as the mo but they're up for renewal soon. They've actually been quite good and we rarely see the engineers. I'll be sorry to see the back of these as they've been a load off my mind & our MAT are likely to go with the absolute cheapest they can get their hands on (Canon probably which I don't rate particularly high on reliability; at my last School, I saw the engineer so often, I thought he was living there!)

Huh, I never realised you could find out by looking in Advanced Policies. Thanks for that.

I was about to reply to the contrary but I've just encountered a bug that is really infuriating me at the moment. A teacher has applied a policy to one of the ICT Suites (I think it's a screen lock but I'm not entirely sure) and try as I might, I can't remove the policy no matter what I do short of removing all those PCs from the group. This is what really annoys me about it, it doesn't tell me anywhere who applied the policy or what the policy applied is, even if you hover over the active policy icon for each computer. What seems like basic and required functionality, still not present in the software after all these years. There's also a bug in the Inventory feature where is still can't differentiate between all the memory banks of a computer and while it'll list how many banks there are, they'll usually all show up as something dumb like BANK2 or BANK4 instead of listing each bank it detects.

I found many of the early versions of on-prem Impero frustrating to configure and use but the more recent versions, despite still having occasional little niggling issues, do work a lot better. The only thing I dislike with Impero is that you have to ask them before you are allowed to update to a newer version rather than just letting us update as and when we feel it's needed.

Or don't print anything at all. After all, aren't we supposed to be paperless environments these days?

Probably one of the 'Universal Printer Driver 2' options as that'll likely give you what you need I'd have thought, or the V4 Printer Driver which might do also.

Likewise. I really like them but I've encountered a number of people who like to tell me in no uncertain terms, how they really don't like Ubiquiti gear and would strongly recommend other brands. I even had a 2 guys in doing a pen test and one of them commented that despite how impressed they were regarding how up-to-date our switch gear was and that it was all locked away in cabinets, still had to squeeze in his displeasure of the UniFi switches and how terrible they are at doing VLANs. I beg to differ however and I find setting up VLANs on these switches so much easier than the competition. Unfortunately, someone else set them up so I don't actually know what our spanning tree setup is on these. Think I might go look... EDIT: Had a look and ours are set to RSTP with the default priority of 32768 set on all switches. I'd also be interested if anyone else has different. EDIT 2: Nope, I tell a lie. We've 2 Aggregation switches, the first of which the priority is set to 8192 and the second is set to 12288.

I'd be curious whether Microsoft actually puts in some level of detection at boot that stops the Kernel loading if it doesn't detect POPCNT or whether it'll just do the detection during Windows Setup. For example, Windows 8 required PAE, NX & SSE2 before it'd boot, or so Microsoft said as it turned out if you loaded the image using DISM, it bypassed the Setup checks for those and booted up regardless. Windows 10 for example also required extensions not present in old Core Solo and Core Duo CPUs but again, this was a check in Setup and applying the image to the computer using DISM showed that it'd still boot up okay afterwards. However, I'm not suggesting anyone do this in a production environment so it's all irrelevant anyway.

I've actually tried this - out of curiosity of course - that as long as the PC has at least 4GB RAM (with some Core 2 desktops being able to take more than that if you have more than 2 slots, the rare 2GB DDR2 modules or a DDR3-era board) and an SSD, then it's actually quite usable for a general office PC and you can also watch YouTube videos in 720p (or 1080p if you pair the system with a discrete GPU.) I've even tried W11 on an i3-2120 and an i3-3240 and these seem just as fast as Windows 10 is on these systems again as long as you have the minimum 4GB RAM and an SSD. The general rule of thumb is that if you can get W10 working on those systems with relative ease, then W11 will work also. I know Microsoft have given warnings that they could pull older drivers out of newer builds at any time, but if you install an older build and then find a way to upgrade from an ISO, the existing drivers generally carry over anyway.

Alternate title: "Copy Cat"

Since Microsoft seem to be requiring customers to have a M365 tenant to access what was on the VLSC surely doesn't bode well with organisations who are mostly Google or at least ones that don't want an M365 subscription. I can't see any good reason for them to take the functionality away from something that seemed to work perfectly well but that seems to be Microsoft's goal these days.

Scale.

Mini PC with WDS/MDT and IP helper to point PXE to it? Why does going Serverless mean you can't have some sort of computer to do all of these little things. My take on "going Serverless" to me means getting rid of all the full blown power-hungry Servers rather than getting rid of it all.

Funnily enough, I've been asked the same question for our Students here, as we have many who try and circumvent the security to play games and our Safeguarding person wants something that reminds them of the AUP, that only allows them access if they click accept (with it recording somewhere that they've clicked that button.) Other than turning on the AUP setting in Group Policy, I've no real idea of any other way of doing this other than sitting here writing scripts which I've not much time for and would rather have a ready made up solution.

While looking up Camp David on Google Maps, I happened across this... ...methinks they need to be fining the Signmaker.

I had a PC fairly recently where it was doing much of the same, fine outside of Windows but would soon freeze once in Windows. Turned out that the CPU had blown part of its circuitry (due to a bent pin in the socket - it was working fine for ages but I suspect vibrations may have caused it to move) and the PC was fine if it ran on a single core which it generally does outside of any major OS, but as soon as it tried to engage the other 3 (i.e. in Windows) it'd freeze. As a test I set the BIOS to only allow the use of a single core and once in Windows, it ran fine albeit a considerable bit slower than normal which is to be expected.

Herein lies the issue of course. The developers have realised that the free version does all that the majority of users need it to do, and they're not getting any money for it! I've found a couple of other utilities I've used in the past where a free version existed and did all I needed it to, now doesn't exist in a free version for obvious reasons. EDIT: Spelling.

I did radius on UniFi very early on. Very little was documented about it which made it a challenge, but I managed to find a blog which told me how to set the 'Called Station ID' which was the stumbling block for me. Our current setup is UniFi, and we do radius here as well. If anyone would like to know, our 'Called Station ID' for our setup is ..-..-..-..-..-..:SSID (replace 'SSID' with the actual SSID name) and that seems to be working for us. I imagine it'd work with any setup but it's UniFi that now passes this to radius as MAC_Address:SSID which is not what it used to do (or at least not based on how I had to set it up before.)

This was the main reason I didn't like UniFlow when we had it in my last place. It meant you had to call out an engineer whenever you needed to do certain configuration changes and depending on your support contract, could sometimes mean a call-out fee each and every time. With PaperCut, the wording they use is more in layman's terms and easier to understand which leads to being able to make similar configuration changes without needing an engineer to walk you through it.

The free features* in EaseUS Partition Master will let you move and resize, and I've done this myself on a couple of VMs in the past. *Meaning you can only do one change at a time rather than queueing all the changes at once.