Cazale

Alt to the above (the ease of this depends on whether you have startup/shutdown scripts already): create an OU, put computers in it. Enable: Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles > Delete User Profiles older than a specified number of days on system restart AND Delete cached copies of roaming profiles power cycle the machines, move them out of the OU, power cycle again. (I wouldn't really recommend adding the above rules to the domain!).

I thought photos and videos were already compressed? (so not much extra compression available), do you see any savings?

How can you be sure your data doesn't leave the EU? (to comply with the Data Protection Directive). Presumably it just goes to a global or US server farm?

What to do with photos and videos? 3 schools, full drives at all of them! Did a windirstat on them and the problem (WSUS excepted) is photos and videos. It seems, certainly since the recent uptake of tablets, that every teacher sees the need to store 10,000,000,000,000 photos every day! I've little doubt 99.999999% of these photos will never be looked at again by another living human being. I'd love nothing more than to stick them all in the cloud (probably Google, as they get it free), but you know... photos of (young - primary aged) kids.. so erm, I ain't uploading anything anywhere unless I'm specifically told to! What do you do to keep media from clogging up your systems? I've been fighting this for too long (as in, trying to make room for ever expanding staff user folders). I was thinking I might just ask the schools to buy a 1tb drive each and just cut and paste the photos/movies directories from the user dirs onto it, then stash it somewhere safe (I bet nobody asks for a single photo! Especially with a new academic year starting). Anyone do anything different?

not really related but a bit of a heads up: when you upload the CSV you get an option to force users to change their password, if you tick it (as I did), it actually forces password changes on your entire domain, not just the updated accounts. That was a real painful lesson for me, as we'd setup some accounts with static passwords for things like iPads and what not (and of course, by default it forces you to use a different password to the last one you used).

Oh, and if you bought it on credit, you might have even more protection, as the credit provider is also liable for anything going wrong (it depends on the credit, and who arranged it - do a search for "Section 75 joint liability"). What this usually means is that the credit provider will chase down the retailer (legally) to provide a remedy. If you paid on a credit card you should definitely contact your CC provider! (although probably still get advice first).

The Sale of Goods act applies for up 6 years, including second-hand items if bought from trade. I would definatly get some advice from the likes of Citizen's Advice

I think "Other Credentials" appears when there is a fingerprint reader on the laptop?

From memory I think it actually tries to connect using the credentials supplied, it doesn't just test the connection (which is what you would expect it to do!). So make sure your username and password are correct, and above all else, make sure the school ID is correct (you need to pay special attention to the instructions, as you need to enter something in font of your school ID depending on which country you are in. i.e. "school-1-" for England. I don't know the rest of the country codes...).

my bet is you'll find most of the junk in c:\windows\installer (hidden folder, type it in run don't navigate). One school i work in must have had an image going back many, many revisions, and seemingly used for different schools, and they were constantly having issues with 80gb drives filling up. I did a windirstat and found nearly 30gb of cached .msi files in this directory (on an 80gb drive!!!). Bonkers. You may want to store them somewhere rather than just deleting them btw (and official Microsoft advice is, as you might expect, that you shouldn't delete anything from inside windir!). In a pinch I copied across the directory to a network share, figuring I'll probably make a new image over summer, and wasn't planning on installing/uninstalling anything on that machine again until then (and if I did need to, I could copy the contents of the folder back again!). But yeah, you probably shouldn't do that

Create a new font. Copy Comic Sans. ROT13 the entire alphabet. Delete Comic Sans. Rename new font "Comic Sans". Sit back and open some popcorn.

Buy a Wii/Playstation/Xbox

Also, currently on sale on the Summer Sale! £6.24 for Gold, £8.74 for everyone else.

"90% of the users only uses the internet and never see the background, so they will never see the AUP either" If most of the AUP covers online behaviour, could you maybe save the AUP as HTML and set it as a global homepage? Or maybe open in a second tab?

What type of file is it? A lot of programs save incremental versions as users are working on it

I think most people might suggest to them that there isn't even a debate to be had (unless there's a very unusual set of circumstances preventing it).

Sorry, but I have to ask; why would you run a 100 computer network and not have them in a domain? (the mind boggles!)

In schools where teachers take laptops home, I've started removing them from the domain completely! Many of the ones that were setup before my time could only get windows update when in school and even then only get Sophos updates in school. The only time I'd ever see them where when people suddenly developed a virus because they hadn't had a Sophos update for >1 year, or when they had brought it into school for the first time in yonks and suddenly the passwords didn't match (a big issue at one school that used Safeguard unlocked by the user's domain password!) So yeah, now I just set them up as standalone laptops, put a custom (non-expiring) laptop domain account into their credentials so they can access shares, put the school wifi password on and stick PC Anywhere on it so I can access it if they have a problem (like I said, at least half of them are never used in school again! Across multiple schools!). Nothing updates through the domain at all. It's definitely reduced the number of laptop support requests I get.

Clients and server, and it is running on a DC without issue. I guess that advice is so the DC doesn't take a performance hit, for a small school with a half-decent server it doesn't really matter, especially as you can schedule updates to run at the end of a day.

I'm the same (2 hours in each), and would definitely use WSUS. You don't need to read around each update, just delay releases slightly (you'll likely hear about any catastrophic updates through tech media such as The Register, or on here, or even in mainstream news these days). It gives you the ability to control when clients update, gives you a central hub for all reports and lets you plan/control when you fix update issues. It's probably even more important when you're time limited tbh. Not sure about 20gb though, ours (small primaries) run at about 150gb for Windows 7, server and a couple of Office versions!

I generally avoid telling people this simply because if someone else (or multiple people) are using 1,6,11 nearby it makes things far worse for everyone. But yes, I would agree, on a school site well away from other businesses and residential housing, you do "gain" an extra channel space using 1,5,9,13. It's worth doing a quick WiFi scan around the site, anything on channels 6 and 11 could cause issues.

The only channels you should be using on 2.4gz are 1,6 or 11. The reason for this is that a 22mhz connection is upto 5 channels wide, so if you connect to channel 6, you are effectively connecting to channels 4 through 8 (6 being in the middle). In theory, if you use 1,6 and 11, you will never overlap into a neighboring signal. Using one in the middle is bad (i.e. channel 4), because you can bleed into two neighboring channels. This can cause all sorts of problems, not least the problem that each WiFi channel is half-duplex, so if you are bleeding into two channel spaces you are causing every other device in that range to enter a wait state. See this graphic for example (from wikipedia):

Thanks for your reply, all subjects tbh, they are wanting to make use of them across the school at the moment.

The only way to do this is to click X on the update window. As someone pointed out above, this is training users to quit out of update dialogues when they appear. It is also counterintuitive, and is the sort of thing we, as IT professionals, should be continually telling people to NOT do!

If you're wanting to monitor web access you could implement a local Squid webcache? You'd need to consider the IO/disk use overhead of logging every request, but it scales quite well (in that, the bigger the school/the more users you have, the better the benefit of having one). There used to be a Microsoft Server that did something similar (ISA server, I think it became Forefront?). Not sure of the status of that now, I haven't used it for years, and it always seemed a little bloaty, in a "trying to be all things to all men" kind of way. Are you wanting to monitor web access, or something else?