Ephelyon

Can you (briefly) unrestrict Task Manager for students, log in as one and see whether chrome.exe is running once they've logged on but before trying to run Chrome itself? If it is, it's the same issue a number of people are having and we can script up a way to kill it off post-logon.

Agree with all of the above. It might also be useful to let someone give you a "technical appraisal" that identifies current strengths (to then go on the CV) and current areas for development (which could then be provided for). It also allows you to put "private/guided study" on your CV for the present time, perhaps referencing this site and other resources.

Be mindful that the ideal solution isn't always what we thought it would be. It's also worth noting that the greater skillset you can offer for a volunteering role, the better. Looking around, there are various contract roles available in that area along with a few agencies recruiting for centralised IT support for schools. You could look at sending your credentials to people like Class Technology Solutions (based in Horsham).

If you'd like any assistance or coaching with server maintenance, I'm at your disposal via PM or Skype.

wmic cpu get addresswidth Whack this in a batch file to get an instant answer per machine: @wmic /node:"%1" cpu get addresswidth | find "64" > nul && echo 64-bit OS supported on %1 || echo 64-bit OS unsupported on %1 Save that as e.g. Check64.bat and run it from the command line with the target computer name as a parameter, e.g.: Check64 SUITE-01 You'll need to be a logged on as a domain admin to run that against domain-joined machines (WMI passes your user credentials through unless you specify different ones).

Right, that's it... if we ever meet (and you still owe me that beer), I'm patting you on the head

Need to make sure you're adding it as a computer connection, not a user connection (else it would add for the SYSTEM user only and not be visible to others), but yes, it should be possible.

If you can definitely guarantee that printer deployments should always be location-based, i.e. based on the computer and not the user, what about a startup script?

Good shout, that. Also check that one of your core switches is actually the root of the spanning tree ("show spanning-tree" on ProCurve switches); we had an issue once where County's Avaya IP telephony gateway had somehow decided to be the root, which caused a bit of confusion for the switches...

Again, what happens if you ping one switch from another switch?

What are ping times between switches like? That could help isolate the issue to the network generally or certain nodes specifically.

That's somewhat of a relief, then. We contracted it last year... :/ I currently find, as others have said, that from initial logon I have to kill off chrome.exe in Task Manager before Chrome will launch for me. Think it's a plugin like Hangouts or something.

Does Chrome launch and then disappear? If so, watch out! You might have the Caphaw worm!

Maybe map a drive to the root of the deepest folder in the tree you can get to that accommodates everything, and retry the operation from there?

We noticed things got considerably better if the printers were installed after the desktop has been presented, so we're now using Group Policy INI Files Preferences (for OU targeting) combined with a logon script to deploy printers. That has the added advantage of a shortcut to the same script in the Start Menu, so if it does still fail for some reason, people can use "Redeploy Printers" to restore them without logging off and on in 99% of cases.

Something similar to that has been discussed, but the issue of vicarious liability then comes up and becomes a huge minefield...

Is this in grammes?

It does.

I have AVG Free on my Android smartphone.

I've provided virtual servers to play with and a copy of an MCITP book, along with guidance on setting up a domain environment for the first time via Skype... but @AntJayC has done all the real work himself!

Royalties please!

@Garacesh, if you're using SmoothWall, can you whitelist those sites (not just unblock) and also make them authentication exceptions? That should fix the problem of authentication being required (we're using the same method to support e.g. automatic activation of SureLock on Android tablets).

True, but sometimes it helps to work in phases.

Could this be useful? Language packs - Microsoft Windows

'Nuff said =]