MrEprise

If Staff are required to work anywhere (and a number of Schools seem to be going this way) then you need to be able to manage them from anywhere. Imagine a call from a Teacher: "Such and such piece of software is missing from my laptop" and then you shoudl be able to package the application up and send it out to that or other laptops without having to get the Teacher to connect within the School to get the software installed.

Eh, I'll sort of agree in as much as some Zoostorm PC towers we bought at my last school weren't built well, corners cut with cheaper components, etc... However, all the 2nd & 3rd-gen i3 desktops we have in my current school are Zoostorm and are perfectly fine having lasted almost 15 years without any major failures. This however might have a lot to do with where they source their cases from and what PSUs end up in the cases.

I spotted something during the POST while setting up one of the 100e 2nd-gen laptops we got during the pandemic, something of which didn't inspire confidence in their ability to do things legally. I'll attach a picture and see if anyone spots what I saw.

I've noticed Lenovo moving more and more towards soldered-in RAM with no upgrade route if you've bought Windows-based devices with not enough RAM (much like Apple) whereas the likes of Dell & HP still have devices with at least 1 slot, something else to factor in.

I've found it now, thanks to both. Only thing is I can't set a number lower than 100, so I guess @DavR you might have slightly differing licensing to what we have.

Where do you go to change the number of versions? I've looked through what seem rather convoluted menus (i.e. a mix of old and new settings panels which doesn't help much), and I can't find how to do this for one particular user (in this case, the Head!) whose OneDrive is about 99.8% full.

While this is a valid thought, I've a fairly extensive post history, have to administer 5 class sets of Chromebooks + a few others but I too have no idea how to turn WiFi on and off through means of a keyboard shortcut.

Thanks. I wasn't sure as I'd previously used Smoothwall in a previous School and don't recall groups called that. What threw me off with the current one is that 'Restricted-High' & 'Restricted-Moderate' have "System group" as the comment.

I've got a quick question (hopefully). Our Smoothwall appliance has a set of groups and filter lists called 'Restricted-High' & 'Restricted-Moderate'. Are these default groups/lists and can I turn them off if they are? They are a constant headache and I want to sort our filter lists out properly but these seem to do most of the filtering.

They've been saying this for a while, allegedly. I've not seen anything of it yet though.

Doesn't bode well for ours. One of the other schools in the Trust also got a load recently, they've now had several back with smashed screens which makes you wonder why? EDIT: Just went and had a look at one, the lid seems rather thin and flexible if I'm honest with no spacing between it and the LCD. Just poking it slightly caused the LCD to flex. Not good.

Check under 'Account settings' --> 'Profile' in the Google Admin console and check to make sure 'Organization type' is set to 'Primary/Secondary Education'. We were getting lots of security challenges and ours was set to 'Higher Education' and only because our Tenant was originally set up by a former Headteacher.

VMware certainly are/were the best but not necessarily the original in virtualisation. VMware commenced their operations in February 1998 and brought their first Virtualisation product (VMware Workstation) out in May 1999, whereas Connectix Virtual PC (on which Hyper-V is based) was originally created back in June 1997, though admittedly on Mac first before eventually being ported across to PC in 2001. Mind you, VMware were probably the first to bring Virtualisation to the x86 platform.

At my last School, we used to use Nexus Open Systems (https://www.nexusos.co.uk/) which is based in Exeter. They were pretty good at what they offer.

Yes, that would make sense as when I was initially testing it with the trial, I didn't run into that issue. Mind you, looking at the article, they don't make it simple or is it just the way they've written the article making it seem like a faff?

We've recently taken on a new Music Teacher who requested 10 desktops PCs to use for teaching Ableton Live Intro on. We used to use iMacs in the dept., but these were rather old and tired and new guy decided to go the PC route based on a setup he had in his last school. Due to my budget having been sucked dry by the MAT, the only thing I could provide him with were desktops with an i3-2120 in them for the meantime until I can get something better. These do have 8GB RAM and a 120GB SSD so they do at least meet other system requirements. Given the CPU above, I'm limited to version 11. I'm also having to use 11.2 as 11.3 seems to hang on startup and I can't find a reason why. The biggest issue I've got at the moment is that Students cannot save for some reason (the program is definitely authorised on each computer) and they also get a message on startup asking for an administrator to authorise making changes to the device. For anyone running this successfully on Windows, what did you do to make this work?

If for some reason not, I've got both 64-bit English US & International versions from the VLSC (or whatever it's called now.)

We have 64 of them in the process of being set up. We've had Mediatek ASUS Chromebooks from before that we've not been entirely happy with performance wise, I really hope these are better.

Fixed it some more.

There are 3 other reg keys that can be added which purport to bypass CPU, TPM & Secure Boot checks. In my experience, only the first 2 of the 3 bypasses work and we have just 1 computer which doesn't support Secure Boot and alas cannot be upgraded to Windows 11, nor can it feature update either! We have loads of PCs (with off-the-shelf Gigabyte motherboards) without TPMs but do support Secure Boot so I've found these can upgrade mostly fine.

A former colleague from one of the other Trust schools ran into this issue and yes he also had to install Pro Education in order for it to "step-up" and activate as Education, but I don't recall him having to activate Pro Education on any machine beforehand. I think it just needs to exist on a machine for Intune to convert the edition to Education and Activate.

This looks similar to the power leads from Xboxes as those don't have an earth hole either.

That might have been true with your batches, but our batch of HPs shared a single BIOS password with HPs that went to other schools. Imagine my surprise when purchasing a motherboard replacement for one from eBay (where a Student decided they didn't want to do the whole home learning thing and poured coffee over the keyboard) where the seller listed it as having a BIOS password set and I thought "I bet I know what that is". Sure enough, it turned out to be set to the same password as set on all our HPs (both 250 G7 & 255 G7 models.)

Here's the issue with 4:3 monitors (and the main reason we're starting to get rid of ours too,) is that we still have many that work just fine but it doesn't matter how new the computer you connect it to is, the first comment from users when they sit down in front of a 4:3 display is usually "this computer's really old" or a variation of which also includes the question of "can I have a new computer?" I had a comment from a supply teacher a while back when she was teaching in one of our main ICT suites (where the computers aren't actually particularly old) and she decided to tell me that our computers were ancient compared to the computers at where they were much newer. Difference being, was that they had suites where the monitors were 16:9 and that was enough for the computers to be considered newer than ours!

One of the Primaries I used to support (and very briefly covered support for recently) all do exactly the same and it seems to work fine for them. The only thing I wish I'd introduced was USB Port Replicators as they seem to go through a lot of the various audio/video cables which get damaged from the constant removal/reinsertion of along with some of the ports on the laptops, whereas USB cables/ports seem to hold up better.