MrEprise

Actually, it can't be removed from Server 2003 either - our Staff TS has Server 2003, i've disabled IE ESC for both users and admins and some staff still see the above page, even if they have a homepage set.

A little while back, our Technology teaching assistant brought in her Macbook with a similar problem - wanted to reinstall MacOS, put disc 1 in, a few whirrs and clicks, then nothing. Wouldn't boot, but wouldn't give her back the disc no matter what she and another tech teacher (who loves Macs and never stops going on about them - I swear they're breeding down there...) tried. So she drops it into us hoping that we will be able to sort it for her. So I thought i'd give it a go having never touched a Mac previously (hey, it's just another computer, right?) After trying pretty much everything I found on the net to no avail, I was about to take the macbook apart when for some reason I decided to (just for the hell of it) hold down the eject key on the keyboard while powering on which lo and behold after about 10 minutes (yes, I kept it pressed for that long) the DVD decided to suddenly pop out! Who'd have thought, eh?

Have you actually tried removing the DVD drive to see whether the laptop will power on fine without it - usually when I change/add something to a computer and it fails to start up after, I'll unplug the device i've recently added rather than assume it's something else and start swapping out other components. In this case, it could simply be a bad connection or even an incompatibility between the drive and the motherboard - in fact, since you've mentioned that you've swapped out the motherboard, i'd say that the motherboard simply does not like something about that DVD drive.

I'm going to ask what I think is a bit of a cheeky question here; Are they black? Or even silver? If yes? Then I'll gladly have them - would like some black or silver ones to match some cases i've got. If they're white/beige, then I would have to pass as it's beige ones i'm trying to replace.

Air Show?

Yes. I've only done this to my own account so doing it to 2000 students (or roughly 1400 in our case which is still too many) sounds like too much hard work. Unfortunately I can't comment on start menus as we haven't tested it that far ahead yet, although our students use locally stored start menus pulled down via robocopy at present. I'd like to go back to redirected start menus but we previously found that windows would freeze when 100s of kids opened their start menus to open programs, logoff, etc...

I found that in order for folder redirections to work in a Windows 7/WS2003 setup, for each redirected folder, the ownership is required to be set to the user whose folders belong to (if this makes sense.) If the ownership is set to an administrator account (or rather any other account) then 7 will fail to redirect the folders. Apparently this has something to do with the way 7 handles folder permissions as opposed to the way XP does.

Nooooooooooooooooooo! Don't you dare go with Orange. I'm (or rather my parents are as I still live at home) with Orange - its a bit like using 56k all day, every day. Basically, until about 5 months ago we were fairly satisfied with their service (can't say happy since they've never been able/bothered to provide the speeds that a) we paid for and b) our line was able to support) but when they sent a letter through to tell us that we had been going over our fair use monthly limit regularly over the past 3 months (i'm a bit wary about this, since we don't use it that often or download very much) and that they would be capping our connection until further notice. 3 months pass... (although during those three months it really was like using a 56k dialup connection, so it didn't pass that quickly) ...and we get another letter from orange telling us that our usage has improved and they would remove the cap within 7 days. I can tell you right now, we're still waiting! On a good day, it might reach 1-2Mb/s but most of the time seems more like 512k (ought to point out that we are paying for an up to 8Mb service and was getting 6.5Mb/s before this palava.) Although I did sit down with my Dad and look at alternatives (we even picked one that we could go with) he has been reluctant to change and alas we are still with them. Even though he moaned that he was paying for something we weren't properly getting, he's now switched off on the issue which annoys me as we are still paying for a service that Orange are not really delivering. Thing is, unless you're having problems with Sky, i'd recommend that you should probably stay with them unless you're absolutely sure that you don't want to pay that £5 extra (which is something even i'd do considering what little we're getting, but on the other hand is a bit of a cheek) then i'd stay clear from Orange. Whew, I feel much better now.

You could always try Songbird; Songbird - Open Source Music Player Supposed to look and feel functionally similar to iTunes (although this was ages ago, it may have changed a bit since then,) yet is supposedly better. Haven't tried it myself, although I have heard good things about it, especially from those who like the interface to iTunes but hate it for some reason or another.

Sounds very like the problems we've recently been having - I've at least managed to sort out our GPO issues now although our replication setup is improving (DNS is still a pain though). Not sure if you're still open to suggestions but the following Microsoft KB article may (or may not) fix the problem with Group Policies not applying - found out that our Computer Policies weren't applying on startup, and without those, the User Policies wouldn't apply either so it was reverting to cached policies (as in your case). The article is here: Group Policy application fails on a computer that is running Windows 2000, Windows XP Service Pack 1, or Windows XP Service Pack 2 What this registry fix does is extend the amount of time Windows waits at startup for the Network card to kick in before processing Group Policy since as you may have guessed, our PCs were processing Group Policy before the PC's onboard LAN had initialised, therefore assuming that the previous cached Group Policies were the ones that were the most current and the ones to use. Previous to this, we were getting up to 20-25 students a day coming in to tell us that they couldn't access the internet - I changed out our Smoothwall Express box with another with a different IP - however, since I've been rolling out this fix, I rarely see 1-5 student with internet problems. I'm not saying this will fix your GPO problems (still believe there is a good chance though) but if it did, it may also help to relieve some of the other problems you're having. Something to mull over anyway.

Thought it was about time I joined this group and said hello. Hello! I am currently doing - and have been for the past year and a bit - the job fooby used to do here at Teignmouth Community College.

Have to admit that Michael Hayden is our account manager too, and he has been fairly good with some issues we've had with Impero. In fact most of our 4+ year old PC builds and a handful of servers came from A2Z and we haven't had any problems there either. However, i'm starting to think that he is A2Z's only account manager...

Bummer. So useful when Ghost fails on its SID change, and since I never learnt how to use Sysprep, NewSID is always a good fallback. Suppose I should start reading up about Sysprep...

I'll admit now that i'm being a bit hard on Scomis since they also suggested running the client update as administrator (which as I said above fails every once in a blue moon as admin, but perhaps thinking about it, could have something to do with VirusScan, as this has caused a handful of SIMS issues within the past year or so), however they are still as stumped as we are. If we (or Scomis) do find a fix, I'll be sure to post it on here - unless someone beats me to it.

Luckily, we've not had that problem since our Staff do know that if they clicked Cancel, they would never be able to do their registers. Especially since if they did, they also know it wouldn't get sorted for a while (we're usually quite busy the morning after a SIMS upgrade, sorting out other failed client updates.) Something which is frustrating about when SIMS does its client update (which it seems to do fine as far as we know,) on our 2 exams PCs, when our exams people login, it does the update which appears to run okay, but for some reason something doesn't update properly since when they login to SIMS then open Exams Organiser, it comes up with an "Automation Error" message which forces the program to close, which means we have to go up and reinstall SIMS for them every single time we do an upgrade. Both SCOMIS and Capita weren't much help, both suggesting that it might be a permissions issue - maybe simsperm doesn't quite give limited users the required permissions for Exams Organiser which I might believe if it wasn't for the fact that even when logged in as Administrator (for the client update as well as opening Exams Org) it still occasionally happens. Other than that, while we don't have too much of a issue with auto client updates, I can certainly see why many others might be experiencing problems with it.

Here you go. Used to have hours of fun playing this years ago. 1keen.zip

[sarcasm] So do tell then, what extra features do you get in Adobe Reader Pro that you don't get in the free version? [/sarcasm] Surely you must mean Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Education Version since I couldn't find a paid for version of the Reader (not that I imagine there would be one.)

I did notice on his school's website during a slideshow, a picture popped up showing what I assume is more than one, but that was after I wrote a complete novel* on how to do it on a local machine. *I had been writing some documentation earlier in the day, which is the reason why I wrote so much and why it sounds like i'm assuming the OP doesn't know very much (which of course is likely not the case at all.)

However, should this fail, there are 2 other ways I can think of; 1. Edit the local machine group policy using gpedit.msc Goto Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings, right-click on Software Restriction Policies and click New Software Restriction Policies. Expand this folder and right-click Additional Rules then New Path Rule. Under Path, type InkBall.exe and set the Security Level to Disallowed. Restart the PC then you will find that InkBall will no longer be able to work. The only drawback is then if your students are smart enough to know to go back into gpedit to disable the policy, which can be prevented if you limit access to mmc.exe (see no.2 below) Another issue with changing the local group policy is that anything you modify gets applied to every local user account on the PC, so use with caution. 2. Use the Security tab in the file's properties to limit access to certain user accounts. First ensure that you have a very well password protected Administrator account that students do not have access to. Using this account, right-click on InkBall.exe -> select Properties -> then select the Security tab. On this tab, remove all accounts listed under "Group or user names" then add the previously mentioned administrator account to this list. Ensure that the Allow tick box is checked for Full Control of the file for the administrator account and either add the account the students use and set everything to Deny (if the students use a particular account) or leave just the admin account on its own as this usually sets Deny permissions to all other accounts anyway. This should also stop the kids from running InkBall (if that's what you really want!) As I mentioned above, you could use no.2 to limit access to mmc.exe (which the Group Policy Editor uses) to just the administrator account, then use gpedit to limit access to the file but while that would work, is probably too long winded and a waste of time when no.2 would work just as well. I hope this helps you. EDIT: Probably should mention that if you are using these tablets on a Windows Domain, you can use the Group Policy configuration tools which are usually available on the Domain Controller in order to set the Software Restriction Policy for whichever account(s) that your students use. If you get stuck with this, there are plenty of websites available which can assist you, especially this one.

I believe Conficker inserts scheduled tasks much like this - we ended up with similar tasks of most of our PCs when we became infected (VirusScan 8.0i which we had installed stops updating after Feb09 - nice of County to let us know...) I can't confirm that it's Conficker (i'd assume most malware/spyware/viruses leave something like this) but it does seem very similar.

Not to mention that they are considerably more expensive than traditional thin clients.

I too agree with the comment about David Wiseman - in the old days, we used to use the utility provided by microsoft but because we bulk add once a year, we ended up forgetting how to do it, what the utility was called, etc... Since then we started using AD Infinitum, which was okay but no way we were going to pay for it (not my decision I might add) so we ended up using the trial on one of our DCs the first time then next time on another DC for another x days and so on until it got silly (on a negative point, it never really worked properly with our setup.) Zoom in to fairly recently - I decided that I had had enough of this and tried to find a free alternative (something we seem to have not been able to find before) and lo and behold within the first 5 google hits was his Account Management Spreadsheet. 10 Minutes later, and i'd managed to set up and create all required user accounts with no issues. To say the least, I was very impressed.

Have you tried updating the drivers for the board? One of our ACTIVBoards developed a problem very much like this where the mouse cursor was nowhere near where the pen tip was being placed, tried re-calibrating, tried different pens, tried another PC (which happened to have the same driver installed), then as soon as I updated the driver - Problem Solved! If by some chance you already have the latest installed - may be worth trying to get a slightly older release of the drivers.

It probably might, but the lack of a Northbridge (and a lack of many other chips it might seem) I just have this feeling it might not somehow...

Thing is, we don't have particularly heavy or bulky PCs, so this has not yet been a problem for us although I do agree it can be awkward.